Microsoft marketing has recently released a Competitive Advantages document which focuses against VMware. Microsoft promises to have the hypervisor which exceeds VMware capabilities. But is Microsoft really in front of VMware now? I think that it is not convincing to compare a product that is not released yet with one that has been on the market for one year now. Who knows what VMware will release in the future, maybe even before the final release of Windows Server 2012. Nevertheless, let's have a closer look at the document.
Features
There is no doubt that Microsoft has done a great job. They have a distributed switch called extensible switch and they have migration features which allows to migrate machines without shared storage. But are there any features VMware does not provide? I could not find anything. In my opinion, Microsoft has caught up, but they are not ahead.
Trunk Mode to Virtual Machines
With Hyper-V traffic can be directed to a virtual machine. Microsoft alleges that VMware does not provide such features. But this is wrong. Using VMware you can create trunk port groups and add VLAN tags inside your virtual machines:
320 vs. 160 logical processors
Hyper-V supports twice as many logical processors as the recent version of ESXi. Sounds great from a marketing perspective, but how about the real world? Is there any server vendor which provides such a big server? HPs largest server, the ProLiant DL980 G7 for example supports 8 processors with up to 10 cores. The IBM x3950 X5 has the same limit. This is even the half of VMware configuration maximum. So the answer is, yes - Hyper-V does scale higher then ESXi. But will you encounter this limit in the real world? Not at the moment.
Cluster Size
Hyper-V allows clusters with up to 64 hosts. VMware limits to 32 hosts. But does this really limit the design? In fact, there is no disadvantage if you just create two 32 host clusters with VMware.
I think Microsoft is ahead in some aspects, but lacks in the third party vendor support - I suspect this will change heavily in MS's favor soon.
Ahead of VMware here:
1. Powershell - Microsoft owns it and VMware depends heavily upon it.
2. Windows Server 2012 brings Power Work Flow to the table for heavy duty automation of tasks.
3. Commands - Powershell now has tons of new commands available
Some of the new features -
•Workflows that run long-running activities (in sequence or in parallel) to perform complex, larger management tasks, such as multimachine application provisioning. Using the Windows Workflow Foundation at the command line, Windows PowerShell workflows are repeatable, parallelizable, interruptible, and recoverable.
•Robust sessions that automatically recover from network failures and interruptions and allow you to disconnect from the session, shut down the computer, and reconnect from a different computer without interrupting the task.
•Scheduled jobs that run regularly or in response to an event to deliver standardized "lights-out" operations.
•Commands that can be executed with a delegated set of credentials so users with limited permissions can run critical jobs.
4. MS has been partnering with key Linux players and Amazon silently (beware VMware)
5. Have you been to Microsoft's AZURE site recently? You will probably be surprised to see "Clouds for Sale" with the pricing... MS is ALL IN THE CLOUD and has been for sometime - no real noise until recently (chest thumping started).
Ok, VMware who?