Hyper-V More Stable, Just as Mature as VMware vSphere?

I just read a fascinating article on the Microsoft Virtualization blog from a special guest poster responding to the recent InformationWeek article that cited 9 reasons Hyper-V is not ready for the Enterprise.

The author worked extra hard to refute all 9 points — but I do admit being somewhat distracted by the gratuitous use of VMWare throughout.  Evidently, proofreading — unlike immeasurable technology and services discounts — is not one of the benefits extended to guest posters these days, which is a shame.

The Microsoft Virtualization MVP tries to use most of the pages from the playbook, such as memory overcommit FUD:

Relying on a host to overcommit memory to support failover hosts is potentially dangerous and incorrect oversubscription leads to all VMs suffering from performance.

Have you ever had a VM suffer from performance?  I have, and believe me — it’s not pleasant.

But here is a familiar line:

… I would never over commit my VM hosts in production.

Where have we heard that before?   I almost forgot to mention that this guest poster is none other than Chris Steffen — the star of that now-infamous CIO Magazine article who once called VMotion a “gimmick” and said:

I don’t know what kind of environment other than QA or development, or in a staging environment you’d want to do [live migration], but it’s not going to be in any production environment I’m responsible for; it’s not going to be any environment dependent on any kind of SLA or performance requirements. The justification for the inherent risk just isn’t there.

But what does Mr. Steffen say now that Hyper-V has Live Migration?  About what you’d expect — and more:

Also keep in mind that using the System Center suite, the Microsoft solution can Live Migrate VMs to other hosts due to situations that VMware servers cannot even monitor, such as CPU Power, Power Supply Failures, and Fibre Channel congestion.

There are a number of other gems in this convincing piece.  Did you know:

• Hyper-V is more stable than and at least as secure as VMWare [sic]
• vSphere is just as new as Hyper-V

Yep, there is a full-day supply of Kool-Aid in that guest post.

Nice work, Microsoft Virtualization team.  I’m not so sure this sort of thing helps your cause — please keep it up.

Related posts:

1. The Truth About Hyper-V Memory Overcommit
2. On Quick Storage Migration in R2
3. Hello Dynamic Memory?
4. How to see if Quick Migration is right for your workload
5. InformationWeek: Hyper-V Not For Enterprise