Microsoft may position Hyper-V Live Migration as good enough, but a side-by-side comparison clearly reveals that an imitation is never as good as the original.  VMware vMotion continues to improve and vSphere 5 enjoys many new enhancements, including support for multiple 10GbE interfaces to increase bandwidth for migration traffic — complementing the well-proven ability to migrate up to 8 VMs at a time.

Hyper-V Live Migration, introduced two years ago after much delay, will evidently remain stagnant for quite some time to come.  In fact, the shipping version of Hyper-V can still only accommodate a single migration at a time — whether a source or a destination.  This leads to the somewhat disingenuous claim that Hyper-V supports up to 8 concurrent Live Migrations per [16-node] cluster!

Principled Technologies conducted migration testing in two different scenarios, providing objectivity to correct the inaccurate claims of parity between the platforms. In the first scenario, one host in a cluster is running 10 VMs and is put into maintenance mode.  Comparing elapsed times to evacuate each hypervisor quantifies migration speed without conjecture.  In the second scenario, a single busy VM is moved from one host to another.  The elapsed time is considered, but more important is the performance impact to the application undergoing migration.

Take a look at the results and see for yourself:

Host Evacuation: Entering Maintenance Mode

Under real-world conditions, VMware vMotion is over five times faster than Live Migration.  When Patch Tuesday rolls around and it’s time to update Windows-based hypervisors, be sure to build plenty of margin into the maintenance window to allow for host evacuations.  What’s amazing about this victory is that although vSphere 5 now supports multiple 10GbE NICs for vMotion traffic, this scenario used just a single interface on each host.

Tier-One Application: Degradation Caused by Migration

A busy database VM is expected to deliver continuously; minimally impacting application performance during migration is a crucial requirement when demanding SLAs must be met.  VMware vMotion cranks out 63 percent more orders than Hyper-V during a 4-minute migration window. In fact, vSphere needed just half a minute to move a very busy 4-vCPU SQL Server VM with 16GB RAM.  The charts below make it clear: vSphere empowers IT architects to virtualize with confidence.

Reliability: The Prime Directive

Having the best possible performance is not the only thing that matters — live migration would be of limited use if it caused workloads become unstable or crash.  Therefore, imagine the surprise to learn that Hyper-V VMs fail in a reproducible, albeit unpredictable, way with the dreaded Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) after undergoing Live Migration.  I’m sure this will be eventually resolved through some future Patch Tuesday, but that’s not what consumers of your IT infrastructure want to hear.

Hyper-V: “Missing Something” or “Good Enough”?

Last, but not least, an enthusiastic Hyper-V advocate and long-time VCritical reader once provided this revealing insight:

Thanks to Principled Technologies, we now lay this Microsoft conjecture to rest.

VMware vSphere: The Best Performance and Reliability

The success of a cloud deployment depends entirely on the foundational infrastructure.  Not only does VMware vSphere provide the best performance density per host, it also offers the best operational management capabilities for your cloud.  Don’t fall for the “good enough” trap!

Be sure to download the full report from Principled Technologies.

Related posts:

1. How to see if Quick Migration is right for your workload
2. Let them eat cake!
3. Hyper-V Console Disconnects During Live Migration
4. VMware vSphere 5 outperforms Hyper-V by nearly 20%

• VMware vSphere 5 delivered 18.9% higher aggregate performance than Hyper-V
• Performance among individual VMs was much more consistent with VMware than with Microsoft
• Overall VMware ESXi performance actually improved with higher density, while  Hyper-V declined with just 25% oversubscription

A chart tells the story very nicely:

Let’s take a closer look at these three victories.

Higher Performance

Using virtual machines running the latest Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 and SQL Server 2008 R2, VMware ESXi 5 churned out 18.9% more orders per minute with the DVD Store 2 benchmark, proving once again that superior vSphere technology enables more work to be done on less physical equipment.  Higher density virtualization translates into  fewer servers, network ports, power, space, cooling, and software licenses — reducing costs for your cloud infrastructure.

Fairer Resource Management

With the shift to cloud-based, multi-tenant computing environments, it’s more important than ever to be able to guarantee resources to infrastructure consumers.  The advanced resource management capabilities of VMware ESXi continue to shine — delivering 39.2% better standard deviation among virtual machines.  The erratic performance of Hyper-V workloads translates into an inconsistent experience and missed SLAs in densely-virtualized environments.

Better Scalability

Thanks in part to the full range of advanced memory management technologies in vSphere, VMware ESXi performance actually increased by 11.2% when more VMs were added to a host.  Hyper-V, with apparently sub-optimal scheduling capabilities — and lack of memory page sharing, compression, and hypervisor swap — did not fare as well; performance dropped by 3.3% in a very reasonable oversubscription scenario.

VMware vSphere: The best cloud infrastructure platform

While Microsoft claims that Dynamic Memory, introduced recently in Service Pack 1, has closed the gap between Hyper-V and vSphere, these independent test results tell a very different story.  Although that new feature does allow Hyper-V to power on more VMs than before, infrastructure architects will need to consider the performance impact on workloads in higher-density private clouds built from the unproven and less mature Windows-based hypervisor.

Please download the full report (or summary) and see why VMware vSphere is the best cloud infrastructure platform.

Related posts:

1. The Truth About Hyper-V Memory Overcommit
2. VMware vSphere 4.1 – the best virtualization platform yet
3. VMware vMotion: Over 5 Times Faster Than Hyper-V Live Migration
4. SearchServerMisinformation.com

Bradley Whitt – Gleacher & Company, Inc.

I was curious if you’ve seen, notice any reaction from your customers and prospects to the VMware pricing changes on VSphere? And curious whether you’re seeing more Xen downloads, that type of thing?

David Henshall

We have. We’ve seen an uptick in downloads as well as direct inquiries coming in based upon what they did with their licensing. And we’re not headlong into the server virtualization space. And obviously, we’re doing well with that platform across desktop and networking and now in the cloud platform. But it’s not a focused go-to-market for us. So I’d say probably Microsoft with Hyper-V and System Center has probably seen a much bigger uptick as a result. But we have seen greater interest in XenServer.

Admittedly, Citrix is in a tough spot — they have to choose the path of least resistance, which in their case means de-emphasizing and cutting products and solutions that compete with their biggest partner.  Given this revealing perspective and the open source community shifting to KVM, it’s hard to see a future for XenServer.

Transcript from Seeking Alpha.

Related posts:

1. vSphere Smokes Competitors in InfoWorld Shoot-Out
2. VMware vSphere 4.1 – the best virtualization platform yet
3. Hyper-V deployments suddenly drop to zero
4. Don’t Sysprep Me, Bro!

Next question: Does Microsoft plan to do anything similar to the vTax?

NO, we have no intention of imposing:

• A VM Memory vTax
• A VM Core vTax
• A VM Replication vTax

This is great for vSphere customers, who often license Windows Server Datacenter Edition — per CPU socket — to run an unlimited number of VMs on an ESXi host.  As CPU cores and DIMM capacities continue to increase and Windows pricing remains constant, customers everywhere stand to save considerably on Microsoft licensing by consolidating Windows workloads onto fewer and fewer sockets.

It’s unusual to see a long-term price commitment like this from a strategic* enterprise software provider — especially one that, not long ago, introduced a new premium license for SQL Server weighing in at $55,000 per socket and clearly intended to maximize revenues from virtualized databases.

*Inside joke.  Did you get it?

Related posts:

1. Use Coreinfo to view VM core and socket count
2. Nice writeup on Windows Server licensing
3. Wanna see a million ESX licenses?
4. When does your “free” Hyper-V Server cost $1304?

Now with VMware ESXi 5, it is possible to perform an automated installation to USB storage.  Simply specify usb-storage as part of the install command in an automated install script.  For example:

install --firstdisk=usb-storage --overwritevmfs

For more flexibility in a single script, multiple disk types can be specified; they will be tried in order.  Below is an example install command from a script for HP servers.  If USB flash is not installed, the on-board SAS disks will be used.  If neither are present — such as when installing virtual ESXi systems — generic local storage is the last resort.

install --firstdisk=usb-storage,hpsa,local --overwritevmfs

Perhaps not one of the major new feature of VMware vSphere 5, but handy.

Boot Hyper-V From Flash?

You might not know this, but Microsoft Hyper-V has had the ability to boot from flash as well — announced two years ago, but yet to be acknowledged in an actual production deployment.  Of course, this bleeding-edge configuration option is only supported if installed by OEMs, not end-users.  Anyone considering Hyper-V for virtualization is highly encouraged to give it a try; it’s a great opportunity to learn a lot about Windows registry manipulation and command line tools such as imagex and diskpart.

But seriously, VMware vSphere 5 will be here soon, and you’re going to love it.

Related posts:

1. Create ESXi 4 USB flash drives with Workstation
2. VMware ESXi 4: SD Flash in BL460c G6
3. The VMware ESXi 4 64MB Hypervisor Challenge
4. A very flashy hypervisor: Hyper-V Server R2

The key claim — that Microsoft offers more control over virtual machine memory — is misinformed at best:

Hyper-V Dynamic Memory also has a greater range of configurable options than does VMware memory overcommit. Users can assign limits to problematic VMs with memory-hungry workloads, and if memory contention occurs, users can prioritize specific VMs. A configurable buffer value also identifies how much extra memory is reserved for short-term needs between rebalancing passes.

Readers seeking to find the true differences between these platforms will need to search elsewhere.  A factual comparison reveals that Hyper-V Dynamic Memory offers no advantage over VMware vSphere:  A VMware ESX VM has settings for memory size, limit, reservation, and shares to specify priority.  Not only that, VMware vSphere offers a comprehensive range of memory management technologies: ballooning, page sharing, compression, and host swapping.

What vSphere doesn’t have is a reserve memory buffer setting — this is an artifact of the Dynamic Memory design, accommodating for lag time inherent to the hot-add process.  Interestingly, when running important enterprise applications like SQL Server, Microsoft recommends cranking the buffer down to the lowest possible setting.

VMware vSphere offers the widest range of memory management and configuration capabilities, accommodating even the most demanding workloads.

Related posts:

1. Hyper-V [Not Exactly] Dynamic Memory
2. The Truth About Hyper-V Memory Overcommit
3. VMware vSphere 5 outperforms Hyper-V by nearly 20%
4. Hyper-V Dynamic Memory: Not Quite Ready to Demo!

Case Study:  The Very Expensive Laptop

Imagine you are looking to buy a new laptop, equipped with various accessories and software.  Part of the decision is to select an appropriate office suite to include in the configuration:

There are a number of office suite options: the less capable choice adds $80 to the price, and the one you really need to do your work adds $230 — almost three times the cost.  Outrageous!

Laptop with Professional Suite Costs Three Times More!

That’s the headline anyway.  Obviously, it’s far from true because it only focuses on one component and misses out on the big picture.

From laptops to cars to private clouds — cost comparisons that focus on just one portion of a solution don’t make much sense.

Compare Entire Solutions

The truth is, comparing just one component of a solution is arbitrary and meaningless.  To truly compare two alternatives, one must look at the complete solution.

In the case of our laptop, it turns out that the professional configuration costs about 17 percent more than the one that doesn’t meet all requirements.  A far cry from the three times hyperbole.  Not only that — it has capabilities the cheaper alternative cannot match, a difficult aspect to quantify when performing a pure cost comparison.

Practical Application

Now we’ve seen how cost comparisons can easily be manipulated by focusing on just one aspect of a complete solution.  Are there any real-world examples of an out-of-context cost comparison without regard for the big picture?  Yes…

Allow me to introduce the Microsoft Virtualization Cost Comparison Calculator:

By using the exact same trick to artificially compare the cost of VMware vSphere to a handful of System Center products, the Microsoft Virtualization team has settled on a marketing message: VMware costs N times more than Hyper-V.

Three Times More?  Five Times More?

Would a reasonable person choose to spend over three times more for something if a suitable alternative is available?  No! Just as a vSphere solution is not multiple times the cost of Hyper-V, neither is Hyper-V a suitable replacement for the industry leading virtualization platform.

For a true cost comparison, with line-by-line transparency, check out the VMware Cost Per Application Calculator and see for yourself how the complete solutions compare.

Related posts:

1. IGT Part 1: Mojave Only Need Apply
2. The Truth About Hyper-V Memory Overcommit
3. VMware vSphere 4.1 – the best virtualization platform yet
4. Layers and Layers of FUD

Two different vSwitches are provided in vSphere: Standard and Distributed.  Both offer NIC teaming for load balancing and fault tolerance, intuitive VLAN support, and Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP) for easy lights out datacenter management.  Be sure to check out Jason Boche’s great overview of CDP.

vSphere Distributed Switch — Simple Network Management

The Distributed Switch adds advanced networking features to your virtual infrastructure, such as load-based teaming and private VLANs, and offers centralized port group management — eliminating the need to configure vSwitches and port groups individually on each host.  vSphere administrators can also choose to go with a hybrid model, maintaining a Standard vSwitch on each host — typically for management — and leveraging a Distributed Switch for virtual machine traffic.

Here you can see a Distributed Switch that spans four ESX hosts, utilizing two physical NICs per host :

By connecting these physical NICs to multiple trunk ports, virtual machines benefit from network redundancy and load balancing while making it trivial to create port groups for any VLAN required.  Configurations are instantly propagated across the cluster, boosting efficiency and minimizing human error.

Also shown above is the CDP information for one of the physical NICs, handy for identifying connected physical switch ports — no need to convince a coworker to visit the datacenter and help trace cables!

Hyper-V NIC Teaming Update

It’s been a while since I last wrote about the state of Hyper-V NIC teaming, some readers may be curious to know if anything has changed.  Let’s start our investigation by reviewing the latest official Microsoft support policy:

Since Network Adapter Teaming is only provided by Hardware Vendors, Microsoft does not provide any support for this technology…

Since Microsoft Hyper-V Virtualization is a new technology, we recommend that you thoroughly test your teaming solution in a test environment prior to deploying into Production.

Looks like it’s up to the end user to put this puzzle together.  Fortunately, enthusiastic bloggers have stepped up to provide some of the missing guidance to help decide which combination has the best chance of success.  Hyper-V expert Hans Vredevoort begrudgingly admits:

Now that Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 was published almost a month ago, I have attempted to evaluate the consequences for this lovely combination.

There are just a few main elements to consider before attempting to bring robust private cloud networking capabilities to the Windows hypervisor:

• Windows Server service pack and hotfixes
• Third-party network drivers
• Third-party network teaming drivers
• VLAN requirements, and at what level in the stack to implement

[Math quiz: calculate the number of possible combinations administrators must consider.]

What’s all the fuss?  Just download the latest versions of everything and go.  Not so fast…

Experts Offered No Immunity

Stu Fox, Microsoft virtualization expert and VCritical reader, recently shared his experience with this very issue — encountering an outage after a simple driver update:

Hope for the Future?

It’s hard to say if Microsoft will ever integrate NIC teaming capabilities directly into the Windows platform; the next version is expected sometime next year.  For now Hyper-V users will just have to rely on the upcoming Virtual Machine Manager 2012 release, which will no doubt introduce complexity abstraction to VM networking in an effort to bring it closer to the simplicity vSphere administrators have enjoyed for years.

Is it any wonder Gartner concludes that Hyper-V is under-performing?

Related posts:

1. Yes, NIC teaming is not unsupported
2. The Secret of Ephemeral Port Groups
3. Thanks for all the port groups!
4. Single Pane of Glass — Hyper-V Edition

What’s the difference between ESXi and vSphere?

While that’s an easy one for most VCritical readers to answer, there are newcomers that may benefit from a simple overview.  If you’re here seeking vSphere understanding, welcome!

VMware vSphere Demystified

VMware vSphere is the industry-leading virtualization platform that consists of two primary products: VMware ESXi and vCenter Server.  ESXi is the hypervisor and installs on bare metal hardware.  vCenter Server provides centralized management and allows administrators to configure and monitor ESXi hosts, provision virtual machines, storage, networking, and much more.  The vSphere Client is a Windows application that acts as a single pane of glass to manage either a standalone ESXi host directly or an entire datacenter though vCenter.

VMware ESX vs. ESXi

VMware ESX was introduced a decade ago and will be discontinued with the upcoming major release.  Carrying the torch forward will be ultra-slim VMware ESXi, which has already seen several years of successful production deployments.  Both products are bare-metal hypervisors — they install directly onto a server instead of a traditional general purpose operating system — and have the same capabilities, accommodating any licensed feature from Essentials to Enterprise Plus: vMotion, DRS, HA, FT, and more.

The primary difference is that with ESXi the Red Hat Linux service console is gone, leaving just the hypervisor and critical supporting features.  By eliminating tons of unnecessary Linux components, ESXi footprint is measured in mere megabytes — not gigabytes like competitors.

Microsoft Hyper-V Server vs. VMware ESXi

I always get a kick out of well-meaning folks that try to claim that ESXi should not be compared to Hyper-V on Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1, insisting that it’s much closer to compare with Microsoft Hyper-V Server.  Hyper-V Server, for those less familiar, is a free product that is essentially Windows Server 2008 Core with the Hyper-V role and a snazzy text-based menu that allows you to do a few key things — like run Windows Update.

Make no mistake about it, weighing in at several gigabytes and requiring care and feeding on Patch Tuesdays, Hyper-V Server is anything but a thin, purpose-built hypervisor.  It’s Windows — just not the “Windows you know.”  As Aidan Finn, Microsoft MVP and Hyper-V expert says, “…I would almost never install Server Core…”

Another vSphere Advantage over Microsoft Virtualization

Readers of  VCritical have learned many of the technical advantages that ESX/i has over Hyper-V, but there is another advantage that vSphere holds over Microsoft when it comes to virtual infrastructure:  By releasing both the hypervisor and the advanced management in lockstep, VMware vSphere is a platform that is greater than the sum of its parts.

You might be wondering, how a virtualization platform could introduce new, advanced capabilities if the hypervisor and management products are on different release cycles.  No need to wonder, just witness Microsoft virtualization and see firsthand.  Don’t take my word for it — look at how a real Hyper-V customer sees things:

It’s unbelievable that Microsoft would roll out new features to the virtualization product that are not supported in their virtualization management product… The Hyper-V and SCVMM teams don’t march in lockstep, and what updates they do release are too far apart.

Clearly Hyper-V customers have not been pleased with the manageability delays, but that’s not all…

The Bad News Flows in Two Directions

Later this year Microsoft will release System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012, but the next version of Windows Server and Hyper-V is still merely the subject of speculation.  This leapfrog release cadence creates a situation where VMM 2012 must attempt to overcome limitations with the platform by painting over them, in lieu of elegant solutions integrated with lower layers of infrastructure.

Consider this example:  Instead of introducing a new streamlined hypervisor clustering capability, VMM 2012 attempts to orchestrate the 29 steps currently required to install, configure, and validate a failover cluster for use with virtual machines.  Maybe some administrators will find it an improvement over the existing manual effort, but is it better than the simple drag-and-drop design found in vSphere?

Synchronized vs. Staggered

VMware vSphere is the leading virtualization platform for many reasons.  It’s hard to understand how asynchronous hypervisor and management releases would be acceptable, let alone desirable.  Just another compromise encountered when building a hypervisor on top of  a general purpose operating system.

Related posts:

1. What is VMware ESXi?
2. VMware ESXi 5 Scripted Install to USB Flash
3. If VMware ESXi 4 is so small, why is it so big?
4. VMware ESXi and Hyper-V installation comparison

VMware vSphere still trounces the competition.  Paul Venezia, who drove this multi-vendor effort, considered many aspects of virtualization technology and concluded:

VMware still has advanced capabilities that the others lack. VMware also offers a level of consistency and polish that the other solutions don’t yet match. The rough edges and quirks in Citrix, Microsoft, and Red Hat aren’t showstoppers, but they demonstrate that these alternatives all have hidden costs to go along with their (potentially) lower price tags.

Here is the scorecard, summarizing the various categories tested:

Congratulations to the incredible team behind VMware vSphere – the original and still the best!

Related posts:

1. Disingenuous Cost Comparisons
2. What is Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization?
3. Multiple hypervisors? What about multiple SANs?
4. Citrix Not Focused on Server Virtualization?