Below is the final post of my three-part series on Hyper-V. You'll recall in <a href="http://egroup.jasonmangone.com/a-look-at-hyper-v-2012-part-i" target="_blank">Part I</a>, I evaluated the install process, hardware considerations, networking and virtual switches. <a href="http://egroup.jasonmangone.com/a-look-at-hyper-v-2012-part-ii">Part II</a> featured a deeper dive into failover clustering, clustered shared volumes and storage.

Here, I comment on the performance and management features followed by the highly anticipated conclusion - Hyper-V or vSphere? Read on!

<strong>Performance</strong>
Without having any kind of head-to-head comparison or test to benchmark the two, the performance on our Hyper-V host seemed to be very good, and on par with what we're accustomed to seeing with ESXi. One area that we saw discussed a lot on the forums, and mentioned a few times by customers, was the increased overhead of having the hypervisor install in a “not-really-baremetal” model, as is the case in Hyper-V 2012. If you installed 2012 in the full GUI mode, it will use more memory than in the Core deployment, and if you're trying to squeeze out every bit of memory from your hardware possible, we suggest going the Core route.

That aside, Microsoft has referenced several times that the performance of certain software deployments, namely RDS and Citirx XenApp, is greater on Hyper-V 2012 than the other hypervisors. We are not able to verify the results, but would understand if it was true, as it's a safe assumption that Microsoft would best know how to enhance performance of a Microsoft product (RDS, which XA also uses).

<span style="color: #ff0000;">Feature Parity (Need lots of research here)</span>

If you were to believe the marketing folks, Hyper-V and vSphere 5.1 would have feature parity - that is to say, every feature available in vSphere 5.1 is also available in Hyper-V 2012. In our experience, this is not the case, though it is pretty darn close.

One of the “features” that our customers find very valuable and use frequently, is the ability to “hot-grow” a virtual disk (VHD/VHDX in Hyper-Vs case, a VMDK in Vmware/ESXi's), and then extend it in the guest operating system. This is something that you still cannot do in Hyper-V 2012. In order to grow a virtual disk, you must shut the VM down (incurring downtime), set the size desired, and then boot it back up. In ESXi, you simply edit the VM while it's running, and the storage is immediately available to the guest.

This was one that had us scratching our heads, as one would think if VMware could do this, Microsoft certainly could, at least for their own operating systems.

While it's not something that would stop us from deploying or recommending Hyper-V to customers that fit its use case, it's definitely something that we hope to see in the very near term, as it's as close to a “must-have” feature as a non-must-have feature can get.

<strong>Management</strong>
For those looking at Hyper-V 2012 but not the System Center 2012 suite, you will find that you must use multiple management interfaces to be able to manage your virtual workloads. This includes using Hyper-V manager to directly manage the VMs, access their consoles, edit their settings, etc. as well as using the Failover Clustering interface to manage the Clustered Shared Volumes, migrate virtual machines from node to node, and perform certain maintenance tasks.

In this model, Hyper-V is less expensive, nearly equal in feature set, but a little bit of a challenge to manage. Now, if you purchase System Center 2012 (which in the 2012 version no longer comes as one off products, but rather the entire suite), you gain access to the Virtual Machine Manager, which is much closer in comparison to VMware's vCenter server.

Some customers choose to spring for System Center, as the other products in the suite have tremendous value above and beyond the benefits of simplified virtual workload management via VMM, and this provides a huge bang of the buck. Others have deployed Hyper-V 2012 as a way to reduce their overall costs, and decide to stick with the multiple management interfaces. Either way works, though we strongly suggest evaluating System Center before eliminating it from consideration (and again, not just for VMM).

<strong>Conclusion</strong>
Hyper-V 2012 makes strong competition in the current hypervisor market. Its price point allows it to successfully compete on price, and its growing feature set and capabilities allow it to put up a heck of a fight in its usefulness and utility for customers - proving its value beyond just coming in at a low price point.

The Datacenter Edition of Server 2012 includes the ability to host as many Windows Server VMs as the hardware can handle for no additional cost, meaning you only buy one license for your host (assuming 2 physical processors), and no longer need to pay for a Server OS license each time you spin up a new VM.

Combine that with the ability to Live Migrate (vMotion for the VMware administrators), Storage Live Migrate (svMotion for VMware Administrators), Live Migrate without shared storage (known as “Shared Nothing Live Migration”), Replication/DR capabilities via Hyper-V Replica technology, and automation through the use of PowerShell and System Center, and you've got something that should be here to stay and compete for a long time.

Customers will benefit from Microsoft stepping up and proving to be stiff competition for VMware, as is almost always the case when you have two highly competitive companies going head to head in the open marketplace. Not only does this have the potential to drive down prices, it should help keep the pace of feature innovation high, as any stagnation from one vendor could lead to lost opportunities in our fast-pace and ever changing technology industry.

While we're impressed with Hyper-V in Server 2012, I would not place it ahead of vSphere/ESXi in a head to head comparison.

What do you think? Would you agree or disagree? Let me know in the comments below.