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

Under the supervision of VMware vCenter Server, ESX 4 thin provisioning is safe and reliable even for production workloads thanks to advanced storage accounting and built-in monitoring.  And even if the worst does happen — an unexpectedly full datastore — recovery is simple.

Now that you are convinced that VMware vSphere thin provisioning has a place in your data center, you may be wondering about performance tradeoffs.

It turns out that thin disks perform just about as well as thick disks.

New Performance Results

In this brand-new VMware vStorage Thin Provisioning performance study, VMware performance engineers compare thick and thin disk performance.  This must-read document covers several important topics, such as:

• I/O-intensive benchmarking with a 16-node ESX cluster
• File copy benchmarking with 2 ESX hosts
• Fragmentation impact
• Thin provisioning affect on co-located thick disks

Now, go forth and provision… thinly.

Related posts:

1. Responsible Thin Provisioning in VMware vSphere
2. Finding thin-provisioned virtual disks with PowerShell
3. Easy recovery from a full VMware ESX datastore
4. VMware Update Manager Performance and Practices

The VMware Performance Team has repeatedly demonstrated how vSphere is the superior platform for your production workloads.  Check out the latest article on the VROOM! blog for all the details.

By running substantially more virtual machines per hypervisor host, VMware provides the lowest cost per application — even less expensive than so-called “free” virtualization solutions.

You might be tempted to compare this tremendous success with first-generation offerings from other virtualization vendors, such as Citrix WLB or SCVMM PRO Tips.  Coincidentally, both of those other solutions are not integrated –the resource balancing is performed by an external system that is monitoring virtual machine performance.  DRS is part of VMware vCenter and purpose-built for the virtual environment.

Note: the version of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 that supports live migration is not slated to be available until late December 2009.  That means Microsoft virtualization environments cannot yet even attempt to accomplish what VMware does today.  And by today, I mean June 2006.

Meet the Engineer

In this video you can hear one of the main engineers behind VMware DRS:

Related posts:

1. PRO Tips: pros only, please
2. SCVMM/PRO Complexity: High
3. Don’t know much about resource pools
4. Say it ain’t so, PRO!