We had a mini discussion last night on chat. There was debate about which is best.
So,
– Which is best for dev and test ?
– Which is best for production ?
– Which is cheapest ?
– Is virtual box any good ?
I use hyper-v on Windows 8 with 32 GB. Got 3 versions of SharePoint running most of the time and its awesome. I still remember the horror days of Virtual Pc. Microsoft have come a long way.
I am using both 🙂
Haven’t decided yet which I like more:
VMWare
I use it mostly for my dev machines because
+ Snapshots: Creating multiple snapshots and branch snapshots is a winner for me
+ Graphics performance and automatic resolution adjustment: If you do things with JQuery, Animation etc. doing that over RDP sucks. VMWare feels just like your host machine.
+ Networking: NAT just works (most of the time ;-))
– Space: My VMWare machines take up soo much space, so that I have to move around VMs all of the time as I “only” have 500GB SSD. Espcially when you have many snapshots and took them while the machine was running…
– Memory: to adjust memory, i.e. to rund more machines at the same time, you always have to shut down the machine.
Hyper-V
I use that mostly for test labs to simluate target environments, because
++ Dynamic Memory: That is absolutely awesome! Just setup you machines to use dynamic memory and Hyper-V adjusts it to the needs. So I can easily run DC, SQL, TFS, Build, SP2013 simultaniously on 5 servers with my W520 32GBRAM
++ Differencing Disks: I absolutely love that one too!
1. Build up a template image and install all the stuff you need on all machines, updates etc.
2. Sysprep the image and make it readonly and put it on a SSD
3. Create as many new machines with only a differencing disk to the template
This works even great when running multiple machines which use the same base image at the same time. But as said, place the image on an SSD, otherwise the I/Os will kill you.
Still, maybe that is also possible in VMWare. Haven’t tried….
— Graphics: As Vlad said, that sucks using Hyper-Manager or RDP. Performance and resolution adjustment is just annoying. Using something like Remote Desktop Manager eases the pain only little
– Networking: That took me quite some time to set up everything. especially giving the machiens also internet access though both the LAN and the WLAN adapter…Also when you experience problems with dropping connections when you run Windows Update in the Hyper-V machine, you need to disable some flow control setting in the hosts network adapter (that took me some time to find out…)
CHeck that one out here http://blog.monitis.com/index.php/2011/07/03/30-ways-to-improve-hyper-v-virtualization/
All in all I currently tend a little more to Hyper-v I would say. Unfortunately you cannot have both on one host 🙁
So that’s why I need two killer laptops 🙂
