Oooh, the virtualization wars are reaching a new level, and with this new video from Microsoft we have reached a new level of marketing misdirection with some future capabilities included.
The video focuses on 10 items that VMware says they have over Hyper-V…that are being refuted by the marketing and tech guy in the video.
Right away the viewer is presented with the first (of many) misdirection(s). There is a claim that Hyper-V supports live migration (compared to VMware vMotion), but you need to listen closely, it is in Windows Server 2008 R2, which hasn’t been released yet. They even say that, but it is quite subtle and could easily be missed. To do this kind of feature, a clustered filesystem is needed, which they talk about in the video…but it also is not released yet. This is just marketing for future enhancements, it isn’t a fact fighting battle, it is more of a tweedle beetle battle.
Two items are are ‘announced’ within the first 90 seconds. Ignore the techno error of Windows presenting the same LUN – Windows isn’t doing this, the SAN is doing so.
There is more, but I don’t want to ruin your viewing pleasure. So check it out, giggle where you need to, learn something new where you can.
One item in Microsoft’s favor is hardware support – only requirement is Hyper-V requires Intel-VT or AMD-V, otherwise, whatever Windows Server 2008 supports works out of the box. No issues on whether you can use straight SATA disks or this random RAID controller from the corner computer store. If it has a Windows driver…you can virtualize.
There is definitely a lot of spin in that video. While not as much of a flaming turd as Microsoft Virtual Server, it’s still not ready for prime time by any stretch of the imagination.
The big thing for me, is Hyper-V really only supports one linux distro (Suse I think). If you’re trying to run FreeBSD or anything else in a VM, you’re going to have no end of problems. My TACACS server running FreeBSD 7.0 worked fine if you look past the clock issues, until I attempted to reboot. I had to wait until the next maintenance window before I could kill that VM because it was “shutting down” for weeks.
If you only run windows, and you don’t want to spend any money use Hyper-V. If you want a real virtualization platform, you’re going to want VMware.