Hyper-V vs. vSphere: Understanding the Differences

Side by Side: vSphere™ and Hyper-V™
March 21, 2012

About the Speakers
Scott Lowe
•18 years experience in the IT industry
•Prolific author of thousands of articles and 3 books
•Top virtualization blogger
•Founder and Managing Consultant, The 1610 Group

Follow me on Twitter @otherscottlowe

Jonathan Reeve
• SolarWinds, Senior Director of Product Management
• Previously ran product management at Hyper9™
• Multiple successful start-ups in the IT space

Side by Side: vSphere™ and Hyper-V™ - Slide 2 -

Agenda
 Why Should You Learn About Hyper-V™?
 Hypervisor Types and Footprints
 Kernel Variances
 A Similarity: CPU Scheduling Controls
 vSphere Memory Handling
 Hyper-V™ Dynamic Memory
 Product Storage Options
 vSphere™ Storage Capabilities
 Networking
 Workload migrations

Why Should You Learn About Hyper-V?
 You may not always be working with Vmware®
 With Windows® 8, Microsoft® will release a new
version of Hyper-V with new features
 For many organizations, Hyper-V has proven to
be “good enough” for their needs
 For those with existing Microsoft infrastructures,
Hyper-V may be the best fit


Hypervisor Types and Footprints
 Common misunderstanding
 Both vSphere and Hyper-V are Type 1 hypervisors
 vSphere has a much smaller footprint than Hyper-V
 vSphere: 144 MB
 Hyper-V: Minimum of 10 GB

 Hyper-V requires a full (or
core) Windows Server
installation
 Hyper-V also requires the use
of a “root partition” for
operations
 General purpose Windows =
greater hardware compatibility


Kernel Variances
 vSphere
 Monolithic kernel
 vSphere’s architecture revolves
around a more monolithic core
which includes many shared drivers
as well as the virtualization stack
 Hyper-V
 Microkernelized
 Lends flexibility and security to the hypervisor model by
isolating the virtual machines from one another with little shared
code, such as drivers
 More synthetic drivers are used, which can boost overall
service performance


High Level Overview
 Operating system support
 vSphere enjoys far broader operating system support
 Licensing limitations
 vSphere imposes stricter hardware-based licensing
limits
 Hyper-V provided significant Windows licensing
benefits
 Scalability
 vSphere scales fay beyond Hyper-V
 vSphere vCPU per VM: 32
 Hyper-V vCPU per VM: 4


A Similarity: CPU Scheduling Controls
 vSphere
 Shares. If a VM has a share value that is half
of another, it’s entitled to only half the CPU
resources.
 Reservation. A guarantee that a virtual
machine will receive at least some level of
resourcing.
 Limit. Limits the ability of the virtual machine to
consume unlimited resources.
 vSphere has a powerful CPU scheduling
mechanism in place that ensures that virtual
machines receive attention from the system.
VMware has produced a white paper that goes
into great technical depth for how this
scheduling is achieved.


A Similarity: CPU Scheduling Controls
 Hyper-V
 Virtual machine reserve (percentage). Allows the reservation
of a portion of the server’s total processing resources for this
virtual machine.
 Virtual machine limit (percentage). Limit how much of a host’s
processing resources can be consumed by a single virtual
machine.
 Relative weight. allows the weighting of this virtual machine
against others.


Automated Resource Scheduling
 vSphere
 Distributed Resource Scheduler
 Aggregates cluster resources into a single resource pool
 Provides both initial placement services and continuous optimization
 Enables affinity rules to ensure that workload placement meets
business and availability rules
 Supports clusters of up to 32 hosts and 1,280 virtual machines
 Hyper-V
» Resource placement
• Current VMM provides initial placement services only
» One-off service only
• VMM 2012 will provide Dynamic Optimization
» Will provide cluster-level workload balancing for VMs


vSphere Memory Handling
 VMware Oversubscription/Overcommit. Allows
administrators to assign more aggregate RAM to virtual
machines than is actually physically available in the
server.
 Transparent Page Sharing. This is basically a deduplication method
applied to RAM rather than storage.
 Guest Ballooning. A method by which virtual machines can borrow
memory from one another.

 Memory compression. A technique
that is
used to prevent the hypervisor from
needing to swap memory pages to disk
when RAM becomes limited.


Hyper-V Dynamic Memory
 Dynamic Memory relies
primarily on a process
similar to vSphere’s Guest
Ballooning feature.
 To prevent a virtual
machine from having RAM
reduced to dangerous
levels, Hyper-V provides a
(default) buffer of 20% of
unused memory.


Product Storage Options

Technology Description vSphere Hyper-V

DAS Directly attached storage  

NAS Network attached storage  --

FC Fibre Channel  

iSCSI Internet SCSI  

FCoE Fibre Channel over Ethernet  --


Supported Storage Features

Technology Description vSphere Hyper-V
Allows administrators to allocate the space
Thin they believe they may ultimately need for a
Provisioning service without actually having to dedicate  
the space right now

Link base virtual hard drive images to one
Linked Images another so that there is less repetition of -- --
data


VMFS vs. VHD
 Both VMware and Microsoft provide clustering
mechanisms
 VHD relies on MS CSV
 Much more complicated than vSphere’s clustering
 Both MS and VMware provide
direct access to storage
 vSphere: Raw Device
Mapping (RDM)
 Hyper-V: Pass-through disks


vSphere Storage Capabilities
 Centralized management of datastores. A
single location in which all data stores can be
managed in order to provide more visibility into
the environment.
 Storage Management Initiative Specification
(SMI-S) support. Standardized monitoring of
storage.
 Caching. Improves performance.
 Storage DRS. A way to automatically place VMs
to load balance Storage IO demands.


Power Management
 VMware Distributed Power Management (DPM).
Combine workloads onto fewer physical machines, which
also reduces the amount of electricity consumed in
aggregate.
 DPM automates the process of
energy conservation, leaving the
administrator free to focus
elsewhere
 Hyper-V does not have automated
power management capabilities

© iStockphoto.com


vSphere Network Features
 vSphere
 TCP Segmentation Offload. The TCP/IP stack can submit
frames of up to 64 KB to the NIC -- the NIC then repackages
these frames into sizes that fit inside the network’s maximum
transmission unit (MTU) size.
 NetQueue. Enables the system to process multiple network
receive requests simultaneously across multiple CPUs.
 iSCSI. iSCSI traffic results in a “double hit” from a CPU
overhead perspective.
 Distributed Virtual Switch. A virtual device that spans multiple
vSphere hosts.


Hyper-V Network Features
 Chimney (TCP offload). Offloads to the NIC significant
portions of the CPU workload normally associated with
TCP/IP functionality
 Large Send Offload (LSO). Provides Hyper-V hosts with
the ability to submit larger frames – in
this case up to 256KB in size – to the
network adapter for further processing
 Virtual Machine Queue (VMQ). Creates
multiple virtual network queues for each
virtual machine. Network packets
destined for these virtual machines are
then sent directly to the VM, reducing
some overhead


Workload Migration
 vSphere
 vMotion is one of VMware’s claims
to fame and for good reason
 Zero downtime migrations
 Multiple network adapter use
 Metro vMotion
 Hyper-V
 Live Migration in shipping version
is “vMotion™ Lite”
 Requires Microsoft Failover Clustering
 More complex environment


Storage Migration
 vSphere
 Storage vMotion is another of
VMware’s claims to fame
 Zero downtime migrations
 Thick to thin
 Raw Device Mapping disk (RDM) to VMDK
 Across protocols Hyper-V
 Quick Storage Migration in shipping version is not as
robust
 Not fully transparent to end user
 Requires short period of downtime


Availability
 vSphere
 VMware High Availability
 Monitors virtual machines to detect operating system and
hardware failures and moves workloads to other hosts
 VMware Fault Tolerance
 Continuous protection for mission critical workloads by
running a shadow copy of a protected VM

 Hyper-V
 Much more complex
 Relies on MSCS


High Level Features
VMware HyperV
Feature Standard Enterprise Ent. Plus Standard Ent. DC

Max host processors 160 160 160 4 8 64

Max virtual SMP (guest) 8 8 32 4 4 4

Max host RAM (GB) 2048 2048 2048 32 2048 2048

Max RAM per VM 255 255 255 64 64 64

Failover nodes 32 32 32 16 16

Memory overcommit/dynamic mem.      

Transparent page sharing   

Live workload migration    

Live storage migration  

Max guests per host 512 512 512 384 384 384

Distributed Resource Scheduler  

Distributed switch 

Virtual instance rights (Windows) 0 0 0 1 4 No limit

Hypervisor licensing model per proc per proc per proc per host per host per proc


A cost comparison scenario
 Impossible to do 1:1 comparison for every scenario
 Pricing Assumptions


A cost comparison scenario
 Environmental assumptions
» This example will assume a need for 150 virtual machines
» Consolidation ratio: 15 to 1 = 10 hosts


Registration Survey Response #1

*Based on 330 responses to the registration survey to this webinar

Registration Survey Response #2

*Based on 330 responses to the registration survey to this webinar

The Future of Hyper-V
 Hyper-V 3.0 will bring a lot to the table
 Fast provisioning of virtual machines.
 V2V conversion of VMware-based virtual machines
to Hyper-V.
 Conversion of physical servers to virtual ones (P2V).
 Template-based virtual machine creation.
 Automatic placement of new virtual machines to aid
in load balancing.
 Centralized management of multiple Hyper-V hosts.


Summary
 VMware remains significantly in front of
Microsoft on a feature-by-feature basis
 For mission critical needs, vSphere is still
the obvious choice
 Microsoft ‘s Hyper-V does, in fact, provide
a good enough solution for many
 Hyper-V 3.0 will bring a lot more to the
table and give VMware a true challnges


The SolarWinds Story
 Easy to find
» www.solarwinds.com
» Partner websites, and Internet Search

 Easy to buy
» Downloadable from the website for evaluation and purchase
» Affordable price points

 Easy to install
» Products can be downloaded, installed, and configured in less than 1
hour
» No Professional Services needed for deployment

 Easy to use
» Windows-based products
» Intuitive user interfaces and graphical tools


Hyper-V vs. vSphere: Understanding the Differences

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