Virtual cluster help, ESX or Hyper-V

[Teecee]

So I am about to convert to a single Poweredge 2950 with Vsphere to a cluster of three Poweredge 2950s. I will be running around 20-25 VMs. All of these VMs are not being used a bunch but will add load as time goes on. Atleast 1/3 of the VMs are ubuntu installs.

So here is the big question. I have the budget to buy the extra vsphere licenses and vcenter but it costs around $15k. But I have heard that hyper-v has come a long way and costs A TON less.

Now I am a huge fan of ESX/Vsphere but it is a very $ purchase. I was wondering if anyone has had any experience with both of these products in a production environment. Three server cluster with iSCSI SAN.

 

[oDii]

I think Hyper-V would only be an option for purely Windows workloads. You'd then have the advantage of it not only being cheaper, but as well as a reduction of licensing costs of your guests (if you bought either 2008 Enterprise or Datacenter). Microsoft will tell you otherwise but any integration tools for Linux guests on Hyper-V are rubbish at best, completely broken at worst.

Keep in mind that your comparison is a bit unfair however - Hyper-V was really designed to compete with ESX 3.5, not vSphere. Microsoft's answer (correct or not...) to ESX4 is coming with Server 2008 R2.

 

[Thuleman]

VMware licensing costs will only come down if and when someone else develops a product which performs comparably in all aspects. VMware costs more, but you save a lot of time. Hyper-V costs less, but you will spend a lot of time. In a 20-25 VM environment you will likely not see any real performance difference between the two solutions so it comes purely down to your needs and demands when it comes to ease of operation.

VMware is miles ahead in terms of setup, monitoring, and administration unless you consider MS System Center (which is $$$) in which case VMware is only a mile ahead.

As far as integration tools go, download Hyper-V, install it, and test how well the integration tools work in your environment.

I am running a 3 server PowerEdge 2950 cluster myself, and I am running VMware, but if I had to spend $15k on it, I probably wouldn't (I was eligible for academic pricing and VMAP), and I'd just go back to Hyper-V as I don't need most functionality that sets vSphere apart from Hyper-V.

 

[geiger]

I'm another 3 host 2950 user. We're at about 30 VMs atm with tons of room for growth. The only suggestion I'd make is to invest in the intel NICs for vm traffic and demote the broadcom onboard stuff to VMkernel traffic.