Footprint comparison between vmware esxi and microsoft hyper v3

In turn, a smaller footprint allows you to reduce the overall attack surface. A virtual representation of the processing and memory resources of a physical machine running ESXi is known as a host. Two or more ESXi-can be grouped into a cluster. You can dynamically add or remove the machines running ESXi from a cluster, and partition the processing and memory resources from hosts and clusters into a hierarchy of resource pools.

VMware vCenter Server allows for centralized management of your virtual infrastructure. You can control your hosts and VMs from a single console, which enhances visibility and helps with error prevention. With this functionality, you receive an in-depth insight into the configuration of the key components of your environment. Overall, you can run hundreds of workloads, thus reducing the effort required for managing physical environment of the same scale by more than two times.

Additionally, the vCenter Server is now running VMware's own Photon OS, meaning that there is no need to bother with any third-party patches or upgrades. Some of the key features of vCenter Server include:. The list of vCenter Server features can go on and on.

Overall, its key benefit is that it allows for centralized and proactive management of your entire infrastructure, helping you meet the ever-growing demands of your business. Its mission is to let you virtualize and aggregate the resources of the underlying physical hardware, and provide pools of virtual resources to your datacenter. ESXi, the hypervisor, is the virtualization layer that runs directly on physical servers.

Its core function is to abstract the resources of the host, such as CPU, memory, and storage capacities, into multiple VMs.

Hyper-V provides the opportunity to install Microsoft Integration Services, which helps in performing various tasks and solving reoccurring issues. Moreover, you can easily edit and manage the created packages in the Business Intelligence Development Studio BIDS with the help of its user-friendly interface.

This feature enables the upgrading of a catalog database, which stores and monitors all database packages in the system. Upgrading the catalogue database is necessary for avoiding any issues which might occur if the version in use is older than that of SQL Server.

Snapshot technology allows you to capture a point-in-time copy of a VM and all the data that it contains. If the VM fails or a disaster strikes the production site, the VM can be recovered to the original state with the help of the saved snapshot.

Snapshots in VMware and Hyper-V not only work differently, but also have different names. Administrators working in Hyper-V or VMware environment should be aware of how snapshot technology works so as to improve memory space management. The feature of change tracking lets you identify block-level changes that have occurred in the system. It is based on incremental backup technology, meaning that the initial backup of the VM is full, whereas in all consequent backups only the new data is backed up.

CBT speeds up the backup process considerably and provides maximum efficiency. Note that if you had been running a VM on Windows Server R2 or earlier versions, and later moved it to the host server with Windows Server , you should upgrade the VM to the latest version before backing it up.

This can be done in the Hyper-V Manager. Both VMware and Hyper-V apply a variety of memory-management techniques. Some of the techniques used by VMware to achieve a high level of RAM optimization are presented below:. As you can see, VMware provides a wide variety of memory management techniques. However, Hyper-V provides only one tool, called Dynamic Memory, which functions in the same way as the VMware Oversubscription feature. Dynamic Memory allows you to set up a specific amount of memory, memory priority, and other memory optimization settings on the basis of which Hyper-V then defines how much memory should be allocated to a particular VM.

The administrator has more freedom when operating with Dynamic Memory in Hyper-V than with VMware memory management techniques. Workload migration has long become a necessity when operating in a virtual environment. Both VMware and Hyper-V have introduced their own tools which enable the migration of production workloads across the infrastructure.

VMware vMotion is a part of VMware vSphere which enables the seamless migration of workloads between servers in almost real time. Also, with the VMware vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler, you can schedule migrations to occur at a specific time, which allows you to automate workload migrations.

Hyper-V Live Migration is the migration tool designed for transferring a running VM or an application between physical hosts, without causing the system downtime. However, the implementation of Live Migration is much more complex than that of vMotion. Before performing the workload migration, you need to set up Microsoft Failover Clustering on all physical hosts that will participate in the process and adjust network settings so as to ensure the seamless data transfer.

You can read the full list of the supported OSes in the guest operating system installation guide. As for Hyper-V, the number of supported guest OSes is limited.

Scalability of the virtual infrastructure should always be considered by organizations when choosing a hypervisor. Therefore, when choosing between Hyper-V and VMware, consider your business needs and priorities, physical resources of your infrastructure, and the available budget. A virtual environment can be rather fragile. Thus, it needs to be securely protected against any malicious attacks or viruses. Both Hyper-V and VMware ensure security for your virtual environment with the help of various services and tools.

VMware vSphere 6. Moreover, data protection is guaranteed even during the workload migration. In this case, the feature of Encrypted vMotion is enabled, which allows you to protect data when it is moved between physical servers and even across a hybrid cloud environment. Guarded Fabric is a data-protection technique that lets you build a safe environment for VMs.

The latest additions to the data protection system of Hyper-V are Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection ATP , which allows to detect to cyber-attacks and respond to threats in advance with the help of machine learning, and Windows Defender Exploit Guard EG , which protects against ransomware attacks and reduces the attack surface of critical applications.

It is worth noting that vSphere 6. Hyper-V and VMware provide an opportunity to use a free version of their virtualization platforms. This way you can see how the product works and what kind of benefits it provides. When taking a look at Hyper-V versus VMware, each have their strengths and potential considerations when considering using one or the other as the hypervisor platform of choice in the enterprise datacenter. In this post, we will take make an objective comparison of Hyper-V vs.

VMware and compare the different features and capabilities of each platform. VMware vSphere is a term that encompasses the core virtualization solutions that help manage, monitor, and configure a virtual data center.

The central core of vSphere is the hypervisor itself. Expanding out from the core ESXi hypervisor, vSphere is comprised of an entire suite of products that produce a premiere enterprise data center virtualization product.

VMware includes a whole array of additional products that add functionality to the core VMware vSphere product. Hyper-V is an enterprise data center hypervisor platform released by Microsoft starting with Windows Server Hyper-V is a type 1 hypervisor that runs as an installed role in the Windows Server platform.

Hyper-V can run as a standalone server or as a part of a cluster running on top of Windows Failover Cluster services with shared storage. Microsoft continues to evolve the Hyper-V platform with each iteration of the Windows Server platform.

A modified version of the Hyper-V hypervisor is what powers the backend of the Azure Infrastructure-as-a-Service platform. Hyper-V and VMware are both extremely powerful hypervisors on which you can run your enterprise data center production workloads.

Each have various characteristics that make them unique. Each of these characteristics serve the basis on which many make the decision to go with one hypervisor or another for running their enterprise data centers. Hyper-V is a Type 1 hypervisor. Since Hyper-V is installed as a role inside of Windows Server, many have concluded this would be a Type 2 hypervisor, however, Microsoft performs some pretty slick engineering here in that after the Hyper-V role is enabled, Hyper-V is actually instantiated first, and the host operating system actually runs on top of Hyper-V.

These are logical units of isolation where the OS is executed. Partitions do not have direct access to the physical processor but have a virtual view of the CPU instead. Hyper-V handles interrupts to the processor and redirects these to the respective partition it needs to go. Hyper-V requires a processor that includes hardware assisted virtualization.

Although Hyper-V can be ran on a standalone server, for resiliency and high-availability, Hyper-V is run on multiple servers that are part of a Windows Failover Cluster.

The virtual machines running in Hyper-V clusters are ran as a cluster resource, enabling high-availability. Running Hyper-V hosts in a Windows Failover Cluster with some type of shared storage enables features such as Live Migration where VM compute and memory can be transferred between Hyper-V hosts in the cluster. Microsoft has also done a lot of work in the area of the Windows Failover Cluster.

This allows structuring Windows Failover Clustering in more strategic ways to satisfy business needs. A high-level overview of Hyper-V architecture Image courtesy of Microsoft. However, it is designed and purpose-built to run virtual machines. ESXi is a software that you install on a bare-metal server that serves as a Type 1 hypervisor. The ESXI software stack creates a layer of abstraction that virtualizes the physical server hardware.

This allows virtual machines to use the physical server hardware resources totally unaware of the other VMs running on the system. ESXi is so small that it can run entirely in memory. The VMkernel is the primary workhorse of ESXi that is responsible for the scheduling of all resources in the system with the virtual resources being requested.

The VMkernel creates a layer of abstraction needed for the virtual machines to use the resources on the system like they would on a physical machine and do this in a way that is isolated from the other virtual machines running on the VMware ESXi host. Additionally, there is a virtual network stack that is responsible for creating virtual switches which allows the virtual machines to interact with and communicate with the physical network.

As described the User World is the software layer that allows user interaction and other user related processes. The Direct Console User Interface DCUI is the low-level interface that allows administrators to perform configuration and management tasks and is accessible through the console of the server. These two management agents are responsible for helping to send commands to the hypervisor from management tools such as the vSphere Client or vCenter Server.

A high-level look at the ESXi hypervisor. With virtualization, the whole point of the capabilities that are afforded by the hypervisor is to run guest operating systems. The latest documentation from Microsoft regarding the Windows Server Hyper-V guest operating systems that are supported include a wide mix of native Windows operating systems and most of the standard Linux operating systems. VMware provides a much more diverse set of supported guest operating systems that can be run with their latest VMware vSphere 6.

VMware supports all the latest releases of both the Windows Server operating system and the Windows client operating systems, but also multiple variants of Linux, including cloud variants such as Amazon Linux 2.

Both Microsoft and VMware are working hard with each release to make each subsequent version perform even better. It is not easy to make direct comparisons between Hyper-V and VMware in terms of performance however, both hypervisors have performance enhancing technologies that can help to boost the performance of guest operating systems. They have added ReFS compression and deduplication support and two node clusters. VMware has the definite advantage here of the more mature and widely adopted platform for running a software-defined storage solution.

Both platforms will perform well if you have the right person who knows the tricks of each hypervisor and the performance best practices associated with both.

Hyper-V and VMware have very different memory management techniques and configuration at the disposal for administrators administering both hypervisors. The main technique that Hyper-V uses with managing memory that can is a subject of debate and discussion in every release of Hyper-V is dynamic memory management.

Dynamic memory is a technique that Hyper-V uses to dynamically add more RAM to a virtual machine running in the Hyper-V infrastructure and also actually reclaim unused memory when the memory is not being used by the VM.

The dynamic memory component of Hyper-V contains the following configuration settings that can be tweaked:. Configuring dynamic memory on a Hyper-V virtual machine. Using the dynamic memory settings, Hyper-V virtual machines memory can be added or released from the virtual machine back to the Hyper-V host. There is a limitation with Hyper-V dynamic memory that needs to be noted.

Dynamic memory cannot be used with virtual NUMA. The VMkernel allocates a certain amount of physical RAM for itself and the rest is used for virtual machines. Virtual and physical memory space is divided into blocks called pages.

When the physical memory is full, the data for virtual pages that do not exist in the physical memory are stored on disk. Hyper-V makes use of two key storage technologies when it comes to running Hyper-V virtual machines. Back in Windows Server R2 a feature was introduced called Cluster Shared Volumes CSVs that allowed Hyper-V virtual machines to be accessed by multiple hosts and greatly simplified how storage was provisioned in the Hyper-V environment.

This allows having multiple connections for resiliency purposes. CSVs are certainly the way to go to ensure simplicity, resiliency, and overall best practice configuration in Hyper-V clusters for accessing storage to provision virtual machines. ReFS has some major upgrades in Windows Server that will no doubt take its adoption in the Hyper-V world to the next level. The solution is easily scalable and provides great performance.

When coupled with ReFS, Storage Spaces Direct is a great platform that provides performance, efficiency, and resiliency. There is an important consideration to note. Microsoft has not really clarified or changed this direction at the time of this writing, so it appears for now, this is still the guidance with Windows Server Hyper-V provides great networking capabilities with the Hyper-V virtual switch.

There are three types of Hyper-V virtual switch:. The different types of Hyper-V virtual switches allow connecting Hyper-V virtual machines to the external physical network as well as isolating virtual machine traffic for purposes like guest clustering and so forth. New with Windows Server , Hyper-V has introduced encrypted subnets with the software-defined networking capabilities found in the latest offering from Microsoft. Entire subnets can have traffic encrypted. VMware has a rock-solid storage platform that has been an integral part of the VMware vSphere solution since day one.