Hyper-V Reviews

It makes it easier to deploy services. All services tend to migrate onto the server house without having problems now. It is hardware independent.

We find the most valuable feature is just hosting the VM. The replication I do with other software.

It might make it easier to move VMs across Hotmail hosts. This application process may make it a little bit easier.

I have not had problems with the stability of the solution. 

I am using the free version of the solution. There are some limited features, and it is not too scalable. But, I am sure the full version is much better for scaling.

We have plans to migrate to the full version in the future, as we have a greater need for usage.

I never had the need to contact technical support.

It was a straightforward setup. The deployment basically took two days. We prepared the hosts, migrated to the new hosts, turned off the old hardware and then we had one machine with all of the servers running. Previously we had five machines running the infrastructure, and now we have one.

Hyper-V is free in my case, and by purchasing Windows servers 2019, Hyper-V is already included. It provides the same operating systems for competitors that charge a lot more for the same results.

I use the free version of Hyper-V.

VMware has a comparable solution, but their price is too expensive for my needs. 

The reason we use this solution is because we can do a lot more with rate configurations, and large span networks. It's a lot easier doing that versus with some of the KVM based hypervisors.

We use it for testing new software. We especially use it for software updates because half of the time we're running an accounting program. It updates, and then breaks something else. This way we can run a couple of different VM's with a setup similar to what we use on all of the desktops. So, that way, you can test it without actually causing downtime.

Some of the things we run have to have a very specific Linux bistro, and you can't get it
all in Hyper-V.

I find the ease of use the most valuable asset of the solution.

An improvement I suggest is having more guest operating systems.

It is a very stable product.

We previously used a Linux KVM based hypervisor called Proxmox.

The pricing isn't too bad, because you can do the bare metal hyper-visor, and it is pretty fair. Other competitors are more expensive.

Make sure to do your research before you choose a solution. Be sure it fits your needs. 

Our primary use of this solution is for production of our office business needs.

It needs to improve the handling of the amount of storage available. We currently have around 400 users. 

We have 400 users of this solution, and use three staff members for deployment and maintenance.

We previously used a regular Windows 2012 server before using Hyper-V. 

I do not have any comments about pricing or licensing of the product.

We use this product primarily for virtualization.

We can perform maintenance on equipment during the day because we can live migrate all of the machines from server A to server B, and then work on server A. This saves us a lot of time. It used to require working after hours for us to do this.

I think the management tools have room for improvement.

I find that this solution is very stable.

It is very scalable. We used four staff members for deployment, and that was sufficient for our needs.

We infrequently have a need for technical support help. 

The initial setup was very straightforward for our organization. Once we understood it in the lab, it took maybe two weeks to completely understand it and document it. Then, we could send it out to our global branches.

We are a not-for-profit, so I do not see any ROI for us.

Microsoft should have not required a data center license for the new feature of Storage Spaces Direct. There is a new feature that comes with Hyper-V called "Storage Spaces Direct"  What that storage does, it allows you to use the storage in host A and use the storage in host B, and make them work together like they're one shared storage array. The computers don't know that they're putting data on server A or B. To them, it looks like one big pool of disks. Before, we used to have to buy a separate storage array, external to the servers, and tie the servers to that array. But this new feature that comes with Hyper-V let's us use the storage inside the servers, it saves money. But Microsoft tacked on a higher price for their software to use that feature, and that was just terrible. We would be using that feature more if it did not demand a data center license.

We do also use VMware vSphere. But, we use Hyper-V more. Some people have different desires. Some people want a Lexus, and other people are happy with a Honda. Both are great cars, but one is a lot more expensive.

I would like to see deduplication and compression in a future roll-out of the product.

My primary use case is for virtualization of all solutions from physical servers into other solutions for ease of management. 

With the virtualization  what we could achieve was maximum utilization of our resources. Previously we used to like have ten, fifteen physical service each one was utilized for a certain percentage and uh, not everything was utilized. I mean one service was maybe 20% utilization one was 90% utilization. So, there was no balance of utilization. With virtualization we can balance. In addition, we can be accurate at the with the solution or Hyper-V, this gives us a close decision I can move motion machines live from one physical machine to another.

I am able to give end users better performance and better response time and better availability.

The the only challenge for us was moving existing physical machines to virtual machines. The time taken was to migrate the physical machine to the virtual machine took about two months.

With each update, the security of this solution just gets better and better. It is very stable.

We have 250 employees and current users at any given point of time using this solution. One infrastructure has an ARCo database. Another has a Si database. The applications have a site exchange between them.

We have two employees who maintain deployment and management of the solution. One handles the database, and the other handles the application. We plan to scale to more users in the future.

The time taken for integration was to migrate the physical machine to the virtual machine. We had to do this one by one.

The set up was very straightforward, you just follow the procedure, the documentation, and it is a breeze.

We chose this solution because of the pricing and the simplicity of the product.

I think that Hyper-V stands in the same ranking as VMware or Oracle in terms of solutions for similar needs.

If you want to use a solution that does the job that is required, to the best of its ability, then Hyper-V is a great solution.

We run the majority of our production servers from our Hyper-V 2012 R2 Cluster. 

• It was our first step into virtualization around five years ago. 
• It allows for quick deployment of servers and workloads.

• Live motioning of VMs, which I consider to be a standard function. 
• When upgrading clusters from Windows Server 2012 to 2012 R2, we were able to live motion VMs from one cluster to another.

I would love to see other options for connecting VMs to large data storage. 

We have our cluster connected to a Dell EMC VNX (SAN). The Hyper-V nodes are on Cisco UCS blades, and everything is interconnected via fiber. I attempted to use a virtual Fibre Channel connection to present a SAN volume to a VM but was not able to make that work.

It works very well. Its performance, stability, and redundancy are all very dependable.

Providing development and test environments for risk management applications. A variety of standard images were created and could be applied as needed.

Hyper-V provided freedom to spin up development and test environments. As projects were created, an environment could be created and applied.

Reasonably easy to use. Snapshots could be prepared and deployed as a developer needed them. As well, environments could be disabled or removed.

It needs additional administration and monitoring capabilities. Status and availability became an issue and need. 

We had deployed multiple Hyper-V clusters for various projects and even have the confidence to run it for highly critical production loads.

Hyper-V has become a real matured virtualization platform with Windows Server 2012 R2. The organization that I work for was having a virtualization environment on Windows Server 2008 R2. Since it was not optimally used due to the limitations with Hyper-V with Windows Server 2008 R2, we evaluated the possibility to get an environment on Windows Server 2012 R2. We had more than 30 racks with the majority of them running on physical machines. By the end of 2014, the number of server racks came down to 10 and we could confidently run majority of the workloads on Hyper-V. The organization has realized the benefits on smaller data center space, power, cooling, etc. apart from the benefit that the virtualization layer brings in. 

• Live migration
• P2V
• VM replica
• Snapshots
• VM export and import
• Dynamic memory, etc.

The advanced features, like Network Virtualization, have yet to be tested out, but I feel that they will be a game changer.

SCVMM needs to be more user-friendly. Without SCVMM, automating is not easy to use and we look forward to the upcoming versions of SCVMM becoming simpler and more admin friendly.

This is the primary hypervisor in my organization. It runs our most critical workloads and supports all our branch offices.

It comes with all the features and goodies inside the box, so you do not have to purchase anything else. 

The Failover Clustering feature allows us to be able to make our most critical workload highly available. We did not have to pay extra money for it.

In Windows Servers 2016, there is Storage Spaces Direct. Although, it seems as if many of the local organizations where I live prefer to go for traditional SAN setups, I find Storage Spaces Direct to be very attractive, neat, and stable. We did not need to hire a separate storage expert to manage our storage as it was easy to manage and setup (many articles online). We did not have to invest a dollar more than what we paid for the server software. 

I think Microsoft has answered most of the concerns of users with the release of Server 2016. 

Now, they can hot add NICs to the VMs. However, there is still not the ability to hot add virtual processors to running VMs. 

It has helped to keep the cost of IT spending low when compared to the cost of VMware.

Once we bought the datacenter version of the server, we did away with worrying about the cost of licensing our VMs separately.

Just to be able to efficiently utilize our power hardware. Gone are the days of one pizza box for a two-core CPU. You've got dozens of cores in one box, and you can't use them all if you just run one thing on one server, so you've got to virtualize it.

The simplicity and intuitiveness of the platform. It was a very simple adaptation, if you have any experience in virtualization.

There is a hard limitation of 20 gigs per file with Dropbox, so you've got to overcome that by chunking the zip files into something smaller and manageable. But that's going to depend on the bandwidth. You can have an adverse effect as well, if somebody is just using a real small data pipe. Then, they could choke you with Dropbox. They've got to calculate it out.

I didn't give it a 10 out of 10 because sometimes remotely managing it isn't as simple as it could be. Basically, it just involves having to log directly into a box rather than doing something via remote command.

And there's also still a little bit of a learning curve, and as I'm learning additional things with some of the maintenance stuff - then scripting that and automating it - then I won't have to deal with it anymore.

In a way, it's still easier, in my mind, in comparison to when you do have to dig in deep on a VMware box.

Not as of yet. But what's being done is completely unsupported by Dropbox. The way that they view it is just "a file is a file." That's it. So, you synchronize files that are the actual backups - and it's just a file. But using them for a backup solution, they don't support anything other than it being a client application for a user; not as a service or anything else.

Not really, except for when they push out enough data that it requires additional dependencies that they didn't know about. Broke it on a Linux server, but that was just one time.

It's the luck of the draw. It's been as low as a three and as high as an eight out of 10.

VMware - the cost. Because Hyper-V is free, and you get a lot of the solutions that you've got to pay tens of thousands of dollars for with VMware. It's free under Microsoft. And they've really polished it in the past two years. It's pretty good.

It's very simple.

I was dropped into it, so I inherited a mostly completed environment, and then I finished it.

They had problems with the VMware running on their servers because they were using unsupported. It was before Dell released firmware for the controllers for the servers to stop complaining. Even though the drives were working fine, the controller was throwing a bunch of errors.

Plus, that version of VMware, at that time, didn't support TRIM, so then it had problems reclaiming space and stuff like that. Then it had to go over to Windows, which under Hyper-V supported TRIM. Now, VMware does support it, so it wouldn't be an issue, but it's already converted over. It's rock solid.

Don't knock Hyper-V until you actually try it.

I get a lot of people from the tech community, saying things like, "Hahaha, you're on Hyper-V?" And I reply, "Yeah. At first, I opposed it, but it's grown on me and I love it." I still run VMware at home, just because I already have it running on in my lab, but if I were to rebuild, I'd do it under Hyper-V. Why not?

You get more features for free.

You've got to actually really try it for a good six months to a year, and then it grows on you. It's like, "Wow! You can do all that?" Yeah. And more.

Hyper-V's gotten a lot better since 2012 and 2012 R2, and now the 2016 is light years again.