VMware or Hyper-V for Developers

Question

I'm looking to replace a couple of machines in the office with a more powerful multi-processor machine running either VMware or Microsoft's Hyper-V with a view to hosting a mix of Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008 and Linux operating systems. The machines are used mainly for testing ASP.Net or Perl web sites. I don't need advanced features like live migration of running systems but it would be useful to be able to restore a machine to a known state. Performance is not really a big issue either unless one is noticeable faster than the other.

My question is: Should I play safe and go with VMware or is Hyper-V mature enough to be a candidate?

Answer 1

Hyper-V works quite well and even supports Linux VM's. The main advantage is that if you are already running Windows server 2008 it comes along for free whereas you have to pay for VMWare separately. I think that VM ware provides better system management tools, but that isn't really a big benefit in this particular case.

I personally have used Hyper-V for development, i.e. running a vista machine for testing on top of a server 2008 box.

Answer 2

VMware did recently release a free version of ESXi recently.

VMware has a few advantages:
1. VMware virtual machines are portable across different types of hardware. IIRC, Hyper-V uses the drivers from the Host OS.
2. VMware virtual machines are portable across different VMware products (although you may need to use their converter tool to go from some hosted virtual machines to ESX or ESXi).
3. The VMware platforms have been in use much longer, and are quite mature products and generally better-known for troubleshooting.

With VMware, you could develop and test a virtual machine on your local system using VMware Workstation, Fusion, Server, or Player, and then deploy it to a production server later. With Hyper-V, I believe you would have to build the virtual machine on the target box for best results. If performance isn't really that big of an issue, then VMware Server may be the best option, for it can run most .vmx machines directly and is generally a bit easier to manage; if performance becomes critical, you still have the ESX or ESXi upgrade option that you can use those same virtual machines with.

This entry talks about how Virtual Server machines will not run on Hyper-V:
http://blogs.technet.com/jhoward/archive/2008/02/28/are-vhds-compatible-between-hyper-v-and-virtual-server-and-virtual-pc.aspx

Answer 3

My problem with Hyper-V is that it kills performance on some things on the host OS, especially A/V stuff. Whenever I would be playing music on the host OS and do something that hits the disk hard (like compiling), the music would begin skipping. Similarly, playing streaming video, you'd have to wait until it was completely downloaded before it would play without skipping.

I've since switched back to VMware and couldn't be happier.

Answer 4

I like vmware. One nice feature is that it runs on multiple host OS's, so you can move your guest OS onto a linux server or a windows desktop as you like.

Answer 5

A quick note regarding Windows Vista as a host for VMware Server, it doesn't work as well with Vista as the host OS compared to Windows XP as the host. The system pretty much locks up while VMware server 'boots' a virtual machine. After that has taken place, it isn't too bad to use. VMware Server 2.0 should fix these issues with Vista as the host OS. (I was using Vista Business RTM)

Also of note: VMware forbids any type of benchmarking to be posted on the internet unless if they authorize the data (i.e. you will not see any benchmarks that show VMware as slower than Tech X) The rumor mill states that you can see better performance with Hyper-V, xVM (Sun's enterprise version of VirtualBox) and Xen. However these things you would have to look into yourself as you won't really find anything via Google.