Tech-Ed-2010-Vir204-Comparing-Hyper-V-and-VMware

This presentation is a good intro to the major differences between Hyper-V and VMware. That being said, the materials were more polished that the presenter. Microsoft has a long history of annihilating competitors, and can enter almost any market and immediately become a dominant player. Yet in this presentation, Jason Fulenchek seemed quite tentative, and reluctant to go toe to toe with VMware. This is quite different from some presentations last year and much less go-for-the-throat than some others. In fact, I was sitting next to a VMware rep who was texting jibes back and forth with the other VMware folks in the audience. Microsoft’s case against VMware can be very strong, but you could not see it very clearly in this presentation. Parenthetically, it was made more technically in Armstrong’s “Hyper-V and Dynamic Memory” presentation.

This is a 200-level presentation, so the presentation materials were quite polished, and seemed based on ones from technical marketing or sales engineering. The price for this was not much time spent at a very high level.

The strategy seems to have been to emphasize the wide and broad nature of Microsoft’s platform environments, naturally looking to contrast this with VMware’s much more confined view of platforms.

Part One: Details, Details

Main benefits: familiarity, cost, ease of implementation, and consistency. Important also is the system monitoring capability for VMs: integrated, and offering intra-VM monitoring and optimization, with similar monitoring capabilities for applications and services as well. I would add the large ecosystem of community for MS products in general and superior documentation.

Unified Management. Much time went into this. Points made were the emphasis by users on applications, not VMs, an emphasis said to be more effectively made through Microsoft’s approach. Most interesting here was the availability of “in-guest management and monitoring”, allowing you to integrate virtualization into existing processes, reducing start-up and operating costs. MS VM Manager 2008 R2 is completely integrated into System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2. This allows VMs to be monitored and managed just like other machines, and also allows superior monitoring of applications, processes, and services.

At this point he launched into a detailed, list-based comparison of vSphere (various editions) and Hyper-V in terms of features and costs. This was interesting in principle, and worth reviewing at one’s leisure, but unsuitable for a presentation. This is not to say that there’s no value here; it’s just that you have to look and listen pretty hard to get a clean handle on what the key differences are. The presentation, for an IT pro crowd, would have made more sense if it had focused with more depth on a few key themes.

Part Two: Roger Johnson from Crutchfield Corp.

This began with a video explaining the benefits of MS virtualization for Crutchfield Corporation, a consumer electronics retailer. They had started out as a VMware deployment, but grew displeased with the perceived high cost, and reconsidered. Eventually they switched to Hyper-V and related management technologies, saving about half a million dollars by doing so. Their corporate datacenter now runs as 77% virtualized (not bad), with 5 virtual hosts and an average VM density of 45:1, including all dev and test environments. Johnson described substantial savings versus VMware, on the scale of 3:1.

Part Three: Duking It Out

To the extent the gloves come off, it does not happen until 50 minutes into the presentation. In a slide titled “Responding to FUD”, Fulenchek invests ten (10) minutes in busting some myths.

1. Software footprint is not synonymous with security. The admittedly small footprint of ESXi does not equate with invulnerability, and does not mean fewer patches. Fulencheck invites people to compare the security track records of ESX and Windows Server 2008. He invites the audience to compare, but does not do this himself.
2. Numerous technical cavils are put forth against Windows. Fulencheck argues that solutions for these issues are all included within Windows itself. After all, companies willing to run Exchange, SQL, AD, CRM systems on Windows should be willing to consolidate dev and test machines on it. “Think about it. That’s all I’m asking” he concluded.
3. Hyper-V is just a role for Server 2008. Fulenchek argues this is a strength, not a weakness.
4. Some argue that VMware drivers are “harder”. How? Harder than what? In what way?
5. There are some things in vCenter which cannot be done in MS VM Manager. Fulencheck says the point of VM Manager is not to replace vCenter but to allow management of VMs within a Windows network, so these observations are off the point.
6. Memory management, often touted by VMware, relies on overcommitment. With Windows 2008 Server R2, Microsoft will be offering comparable memory management resources, and ones which rely on understanding the internals of VMs. Armstrong talks about this.

Fulencheck followed this with some demos, which were reasonably successful, and showed the impressive resources available for managing VMs, in particularly (for me), being able to manage apps running on particular servers from within Systems Center Operations Manager 2007. This can be contrasted with the “black-box” (as another MS presenter described it) approach used by VMware in VM management. Other features he touched on seemed less revolutionary: “storage migration” which parallels storage VMotion, and volume re-sizes which can be done without needing storage VMotion at all.

So there is definitely a case to be made that Microsoft’s approach to virtualization is quite competitive with VMware, not least because anyone with Server 2008 already has everything needed to try this out. However despite the strength of this case, the presentation lacked force. More focus on these key points of comparison would have made this more effective. So would having done more with the Crutchfield material, which was presented and then hardly utilized at all. Oddly, the strongest case for Microsoft against VMware was made in other presentations.