Cost-Conscious Readers Favor Hyper-V

In preparation for my cover piece in the upcoming June-July issue on Microsoft's virtualization strategies with Hyper-V and System Center, we ran an admittedly non-scientific reader survey to find out what Microsoft customers thought about these two technologies, which have reached a point of maturity where they are becoming legitimate contenders with VMware's vSphere Hypervisor (which is free, and based on ESXi) and vCenter.

In order to ferret out the truth, I posed the following question: "Would you be willing to sacrifice some functionality in order to save money by using a Hyper-V solution instead of a VMware solution?" This question was sparked by an off-the-cuff comment made to me a couple of months ago by a Microsoft customer who had committed entirely to Hyper-V. When I asked him why he had made that commitment, he replied, "Because it's cheaper."

Twenty-two Microsoft customers responded to my survey question. Among them, 43 percent said they would be willing to sacrifice some functionality in order to save money by using Hyper-V as opposed to a VMware solution. Thirty-one percent (16 responses) said they would not be willing to make that trade-off, while 13 percent (17 responses) reported that they were not sure.

As I mentioned before, this small response rate produces non-scientific results that could be misleading, but I believe that if we expanded our survey audience, the overall findings would be similar.

There are obvious cost and convenience issues here, because Hyper-V is free with Windows Server 2008 R2, (which can be found in many VMware shops), and it is fully compatible with System Center (which is on an upward value swing with the favorably previewed System Center 2012 on the horizon). Still, no sane user is going to stand up a bunch of inferior hypervisors just to save a little time and money.

Question: Would you be willing to sacrifice functionality in order to save money by going with Hyper-V?

Posted by Bruce Hoard on 06/14/2011 at 12:48 PM