VMware and Hyper-V: Head to Head

By: Christopher Whitfield

Principal Consultant at Paranet Solutions

Session Objectives

• Gain a better understanding of the differences, and similarities, between Hyper-V and vSphere

• Gain a better understanding of some strengths and weaknesses for these products

• Learn the some of the key components to determining which hypervisor is right for you

The Hypervisor Landscape What is a ‘hypervisor’?

• A hypervisor, also called virtual machine monitor (VMM), is one of many virtualization techniques which allows multiple operating systems, termed guests, to run concurrently on a host computer, a feature called hardware virtualization.

Hypervisor types

• Type 1 (bare metal)

• Runs directly on host hardware to control the hardware resources and to monitor the guest OS which runs one level above the hypervisor

• Type 2 (hosted)

• Runs within a conventional OS environment and therefore run in the second software level above the OS with the guest OS running at a third level

Options, options, options

• VMware

• Microsoft

• Citrix

• Novell

• Red Hat

• Virtual Computer

• Many more

Top Server Virtualization Vendors

• VMware – ESX continues to be the number 1 virtualization platform with

total licenses increasing 19% year over year – VMware Server continues to be the number 2 virtualization

platform despite declining 9% year over year

• Microsoft – Hyper-V continued its ascent, capturing the third highest market

share by growing 215% year over year – Virtual Server 2005, with the fourth largest share, continued its

depreciation with year-over-year licenses declining 29%

• Citrix – XenServer showed impressive year-over-year growth of 290%

Data based on the IDC 4Q09 Market Report released in April 2010

Architecture: OS

Hardware CPU Video Card

NIC RAM Storage

Kernel (Ring 0)

NTOS

HAL

Win32k.sys

DD DD

DD DD

User (Ring 3)

Application Application Application

Architecture: Hyper-V

Hardware CPU Video Card

NIC RAM Storage

Hv (Ring -1)

Kernel (Ring 0)

NTOS

HAL

Win32k.sys

DD DD

DD DD

User (Ring 3)

Application Application

Root

NTOS

HAL

Win32k.sys

DD DD

DD DD

Application Application

Child

Architecture: VMware

Hardware CPU Video Card

NIC RAM Storage

Kernel (Ring 0)

User (Ring 3)

NTOS

HAL

Win32k.sys

DD DD

DD DD

Application Application

NTOS

HAL

Win32k.sys

DD DD

DD DD

Application Application

Hv (Ring -1)

Child Child

OS DD DD

ProcessA ProcessA

Key Hypervisor Traits

High Availability (HA)

• Fan-out failover

• Per VM run priority

• Scalable to at least 8 nodes

Live Migration (LM)

• Move guests between physical nodes

Memory Management

• Hardware assisted memory virtualization

Networking

• NIC teaming and load balancing

• Unicast isolation

• 802.1Q VLAN trunking

Storage

• Supports local, iSCSI, and fiber channel storage

• Officially supported by data protection software

Security

• Directory service integration

• Role-based access controls

• Management traffic secured

• Logging and auditing of administrative actions

• Ability to fully isolate individual VMs *

Compute

• Supports minimum vCPU to pCPU ratio of 1:1

Paravirtualization

• Virtualized guest OS drivers for all required operating systems

Management

• Client and/or web based management

• SNMP trap monitoring capability

• Integration with existing enterprise management solutions

• Management fault tolerance

General

Give And Take

Hyper-V

• Dynamic Memory (R2 SP1)

• Support for DAS over SATA, eSATA, PATA, SAS, SCSI, USB, and Firewire

• Has boot to VHD capability

• ‘Hot Add’ for disks

VMware

• Memory Overcommit

• Transparent Page Sharing

• Support for NFS

• Small footprint on disk

• ‘Hot Add’ for CPU, Memory, and Storage *

• Distributed switch capabilities **

• Direct I/O **

Paravirtualization

•Asianux 3.0 (x32, x64)

•Ubuntu 8.04 – 10.04 (x32, x64)

•CentOS 4 – 5 (x32, x64)

•SUSE Linux Ent 9 – 11 (x32, x64)

•Debian GNU/Linux 4 – 5 (x32, x64)

•FreeBSD 6 – 8 (x32, x64)

•Oracle Ent Linux 4 – 5 (x32, x64)

•Red Hat Ent Linux 3 – 6 (x32, x64)

•Solaris 8 – 9 (x32)

•Solaris 10 (x64)

•Windows Server 2000 – 2008R2 (x32, x64)

•Windows 2000 – 7 (x32, x64)

•Netware 5 – 6.5 (x32)

VMware

•Red Hat Ent Linux 5 (x32, x64)

•SUSE Linux Ent 10 sp3 – 11 (x32, x64)

•Windows 2000 sp4 (x32)

•Windows XP sp2 – 7 (x32, x64)

•Windows Server 2003 sp2 (x32, x64)

•Windows Server 2003 R2 sp2 (x32, x64)

•Windows Server 2008 (x32, x64)

•Windows Server 2008 R2 (x32, x64)

Hyper-V

Show Me Some Numbers

Throughput Improvement

• 53%

• 75%

Average OPM • 13,798

• 15,737

Average CPU • 51%

• 83%

Average Watts

• 4,057

• 3,869

ROI • 10.3 Months

• 9.9 Months

vSphere 4 Advanced

Hyper-V 2008 R2

vSphere 4 Advanced

Hyper-V 2008 R2

vSphere 4 Advanced

Hyper-V 2008 R2

vSphere 4 Advanced

Hyper-V 2008 R2

vSphere 4 Advanced

Hyper-V 2008 R2

How Do I Choose?

• Know Thyself!

– In other words, break your project down as shown below

Some ‘Side’ Benefits/Considerations

VMware

• System Center Competition

• VMware View

• VMware ACE

• ThinApp

• Lab Manager

Microsoft

• System Center Integration

• Native VDI

• ‘Lab’ Management Capabilities

• Self-Service Web Interface

• MED-V/App-V

SCVMM 2012 Features

• SCVMM 2012 will have two main roles: Service Management (lifecycle management of virtual machines and applications inside them) and Fabric Management (configuration management of computing, networking and storage)

• Communication with the storage layer will happen through SMI-S (Storage Management Initiative Specification) providers. SCVMM 2010 will be able to provision LUNs at the cluster level

• Capability to create logical networks (abstracting IP subnetting, VLANs, and DNS domains) for private cloud computing

• Capability to define and assign IP pools to logical networks, as well as MAC address pools to host groups

• Capability to copy a VM template from SAN to SAN on provisioning • Support for Citrix NetScaler as load balancer to create Virtual

Private Addresses (VIPs) and assign them to services

References

• http://blogs.msdn.com/b/tvoellm/archive/2009/08/05/what-s-new-in-windows-server-2008-r2-hyper-v-performance-and-scale.aspx

• http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/datacenter/?p=1820 • http://www.principledtechnologies.com/clients/reports/Dell/35DL385ont

o5PEM610.pdf • http://www.principledtechnologies.com/clients/reports/Dell/35DL385ont

o5PEM610-vSphere.pdf • http://www.tanejagroup.com/uploads/FreeSampleReport.pdf • http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere-hypervisor/compare.html • http://www.vmware.com/vmwarestore/vsphere_purchaseoptions.html • http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere4/r41/vsp_41_config_max.pdf • http://www.microsoft.com/hyper-v-server/en/us/default.aspx • http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/en/us/default.aspx • http://www.virtualcomputer.com/nxtop • http://www.vyatta.com/

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