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.
those of you the know me will know my default position on this..!
taking a more balanced view I think the key benefit of VMware is the all-up tooling. if you like the simple life then VMware is the way to go. the tooling exists for hyper-v it’s just called “system center” 😉
for me the convenience of having w2012 as a host (which runs all my desktop stuff without issues) and then guest VMs that are just “there” trumps all. it maximises my resources and provides me with maximum flexibility especially in unusual scenarios (at home I use iscsi passthrough disks for uber performance) or when I want to do itpro things actually on a hyper-v host.
I hear lots of folks whine about how hard it is to get server (2008 or 2012) working well as a regular desktop (with office, wireless, audio, etc.) but they tend to be devs who aren’t in the business of doing itpro things like desktop setup or they’re using hardware that isn’t from one of the big enterprise vendors so they’re struggling with oem or consumer drivers and support.
for me virtualbox isn’t in the running and don’t even get me started about folks running things on fruit technologies. demons the lot of them!
I would say one thing that Virtual box does have is speed and ease to setup. I would say Hyper-V is next in terms of ease and then VMware. Just the other day I created 3 DCs (512MB Ram), 1 2010 App Server (1024MB RAM), 1 2010 WFE Server (1024MB RAM) and 1 SQL 2008 R2 box (2048MB RAM). This was within Virtual Box and although I only really created this to play about with people picker in a multiple domain environment it worked quite well. No doubt if I was to have put the environment under some real load then it would have ground to a halt very quickly indeed. Another pro is it is a very small download and installation process with Virtual box. I do love the fact that Hyper-V comes as a feature of Windows 8 though 🙂
Thanks to Mark for posting this and Vlad and Matthias (so far) for responding. This is perfect timing.
I tried VirtualBox briefly and had too many issues. I don’t even remember what they were now, but for me the product was not stable.
I know many who have used VMware, and so I began using the free version a year or so ago. That has worked well for me, but my desktop machine is maxed at 16GB memory, and my VMs are soooo sluggish.
I’ve been considering nuking my main home machine and installing Hyper-V on there. Reading the comments, I do like what has been said about the dynamic memory management. On the negative side, I’d miss copy/paste, higher resolution, and I really do not want to have to waste time mucking about with networking issues. …I believe I need to do a little more research (and find more time!)
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 🙂
I am really a Hyper-V fan, however I can’t deny that VMware is very good as well. My favorite is Hyper-V for sure, especially since now it works on Windows 8 as well so I don’t have to spend hours to find the wireless driver on a Server OS.
However, even if I am a Hyper-V fan, I can tell you two things that VMware has, and Hyper-V doesn’t. And man, I would love those features.
1. COPY PASTE . VMware had it for sooo long. don’t have to RDP to your VM to copy paste stuff.
2. RESOLUTION. VMware has this nice resolutions, and you can go full screen! Like an RDP but directly from the console. Hyper-V is still in 800×600 or close to that.
