Hyper-V Reviewed
Here's one initial
review of Hyper-V, courtesy of one of my favorite all-time bloggers, the irreplacable Mary Jo Foley. It's generally positive in nature. Here's the reviewer's summary:
"Overall, and for what is currently a beta of a 1.0 release, I think Microsoft did a great job with the Hyper-V manager -- console access to the VMs is nice and fast and VM performance is excellent, and the provisioning and setup process is wizard-based and straightforward. I'd currently say that from a polish and maturity standpoint, its management capabilities are definitely better than what is in Citrix XenServer 4.x, and way ahead of what currently exists in Red Hat Enterprise Linux or SuSE Linux Enterprise Server."
Some of the negatives:
"Hyper-V falls somewhat short when compared to the cluster management, automated VM migration/load balancing ("VMotion") and HA capabilities built into ESX Server 3 and VirtualCenter 3...you can only run the Hyper-V manager on another Windows 2008 Server machine, In other words, if you want to remotely manage a Hyper-V box, even a stripped-down "Core Install" Hyper-V machine, you will need a Windows 2008 box with the full blown Windows 2008 stack installed...The installation process is a bit kludgy and not well scripted like VMWare's tools currently are."
Despite its shortcomings (which are inevitable with a 1.0 product), the reviewer thinks it sends a clear message to VMware.
"Even though Hyper-V is still pre-1.0 code, I think Microsoft has done a bang-up job with its hypervisor...While VMWare's ESX is still superior on a number of fronts, including its aforementioned VMotion technology and its more powerful cluster management tools, Microsoft has certainly sent a major warning shot across its bow and the bows of the respective Linux vendors, as well."
His conclusion? "Hyper-V may be Server 2008's "killer app" that the analysts have been looking for all this time."
We'll have our own review of Hyper-V in our launch issue of the magazine, coming at the end of March. It's written by Chris Wolf, perhaps the most-qualified person on the planet to do this. Chris, a Burton Group analyst, is a columnist for the magazine. He's been following virtualization since the early days, and co-authored one of the seminal virtualization books. He knows the market inside and out, and has been playing with Hyper-V for months now. It's a fantastic review, and you won't want to miss it.
Go here to sign up for a free subscription.
Posted by Keith Ward on 02/15/2008 at 12:48 PM