For me, being a n00b in the Hyper-V area (not trusting Microsoft in the first place), is there anything better than the WHQL to ensure stability?
How do I find the best hardware for my Hyper-V machine?
I wouldn’t want to invest in a system just to find that my hypervisor crashes once in a while. (same goes for ESX, but they have recommended systems and control over their own driver updates.

If I buy two identical machines, but install them with a months difference, I could get different versions of drivers, causing issues on one, but not the other.
How would I know which one is the right one?

Just looking at the Broadcom drivers for Windows Server 2008R2 shows that they release driver updates reasonably regularly (monthly it would appear) so it’s not like you’re waiting long.

I’m sure there are positives and negatives to both approaches, and as usual the truth is a casualty.

I don’t think we’ll agree on this the outcome but the discussion has been… interesting. And I’m glad to provide some amusement even if I did try to make the point in another comment that I work on both sides of the divide… and that this VMware vs. Microsoft nonsense is not helpful for customers (or partners)!

With your post, you basically enforced the superiority of the VMware driver model.

http://bit.ly/aHawrH

http://bit.ly/aHsUQx

I will not argue that drivers are a problem at times, but when researching problems with drivers or firmware within my Hyper-V environment, I usually find potential solutions from a VMware site or blogger. Thanks for blazing the trail.
As far as the markets of Hyper-V, their job it create interest in the product. I am sure you have worked with enough “technical” sales reps to know that their representation of the product is approximately accurate. To imply that VMware does not share in this common tactic is a bit naive.

*Virtualization* championship

Here are rules:
Number of servers – 1 point for server, 5 points max
Hyper-V – 10 points
Hyper-V R2 – 10 points
System Center – 5 points
High Availability – 3 points
Web server – 5 points

100 hosts vSphere project with High Availability and Site Disaster Recovery will lose 18 to 25 to Hyper-V project with 2 low-end hosts and 5-6 VMs.

What is it? It’s not just a usual marketing bullshit, it’s highly purified and concentrated bullshit.

1) Cases for big companies are not always big cases.
2) It is no strange at all that after 2 years of very aggressive marketing including lies Microsoft has some cases.

It wouldn’t be news for you that most such decisions are made by top-management for political reasons or under influence of professional sales and there was no technical comparisons, no technical experts were asked etc.

I said what I heard, nothing more.

After all Hyper-V, especially R2, is not THAT bad solution, but it seriously lacks a lot of features that vSphere has. As Eric said problem with drivers and patches are not THAT bad with Hyper-V, but it exists! We’re engineers, so let all the marketing bullshit be thrown away.

Actually it is not Hyper-V we discuss 90% of time in such conversations, but Microsoft marketing statements about it.

1. The slide showing those driver crash statistics includes the desktop versions of Windows where bad drivers or flaky hardware are much more common.

2. The %age is useless anyway. What you care about is frequency. Let’s say I have a server OS that crashes ten times in a year, with seven of them related to driver problems, now somebody wants me to run a server OS that crashes 100 times a year, with 70 of them due to driver problems. Both have the same percentage of crashes related to drivers, but I know which one I’d want!

Frankly, I’d beamazed if crashes due to device drivers wasn’t the case for the majority of crashes in any x86 OS, that’s where you get closest to the hardware and where errors are almost invariably unrecoverable for the OS.