#1 Hyper-V V’s VMWare ESXi – Let the comparison begin…

Hi, I’ve been spending a fair bit of time talking to customers recently about Hyper-V and Datacentre Virtualisation (or Datacenter Virtualization for any US readers :) ). What I’m finding is that folks have been fed a story that leads them to believe that VMware are far ahead in the Server virtualisation market and that Hyper-V is a ‘toy’ in comparison. Now I would expect this from VMWare, we are a very serious competitor for them after all, but it seems that hardware vendors and some SI’s who a customer may respect aren’t giving a balanced view either. I don’t know why this is, it may be that they actually believe that VMWAre offers a better solution for the clients I’ve spoken to, or it may be that commercial considerations (VMware costs a *lot* more than Hyper-V lets face it and they make margin on VMWare when they probably don’t make margin on Hyper-V) or simple lack of knowledge and experience come into play.

You may even have been pointed the some pretty damming evidence such as this on VMWare’s public web site:

So, I’m going to try and make the time to write a series of articles that debunk all the myths I can find around the ‘net and in the VMWare pages, and answer some of the straight questions I get asked by customers. At the end my goal is a level playing field that will allow you to make a fair comparison. Of course the best way to compare is to *try*, and I’ve not known us loose many (if any) Proof of Concept’s with Hyper-V.

So that’s it for an introduction to this series. The next post will introduce you to provide links and information on Case Studies for Hyper-V, then we’ll go deeper looking at Hyper-V, it’s history, the versions, what’s today and what’s in R2, and then we’ll follow that with a detailed post on the Hyper-V architecture.