Avoid unnecessary risk and overhead by choosing a robust and production-proven hypervisor as the foundation for your virtualized datacenter. Selecting the right hypervisor is the first step towards success in building a virtual infrastructure.
Not all hypervisors are equal. Learn more about how VMware vSphere Hypervisor is - and will continue to be - the industry's most robust and production-proven hypervisor and why VMware is the best choice for building a virtual infrastructure.
- Comparing Hypervisors
- Hyper-V and Xen Architectures: Too Much Code
- Achieve Scalable Performance
- Why File Systems Matter
- An Ecosystem of Virtualization Security Solutions
- Industry Recognition
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Comparing VMware vSphere Hypervisor and Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V
" VMware is the clear and obvious leader in virtualization products. We tried both the Microsoft and Oracle virtualization products and found them lacking in features and performance compared to the VMware product."
— David Greer, Director of Information Services, HelioVolt Corporation
VMware vSphere Hypervisor—the industry’s first x86 “bare-metal” hypervisor—is the most reliable and robust hypervisor. Launched in 2001 and now in its fourth generation, VMware has been production-proven in tens of thousands of customer deployments all over the world.
Other hypervisors are less mature, unproven in a wide cross-section of production datacenters, and lacking core capabilities needed to deliver the reliability, scalability, and performance that customers require.
So while others try to catch up to VMware in the areas highlighted below, upcoming VMware releases will take vSphere Hypervisor to the next level of enterprise-class hypervisors—further extending VMware's lead and ensuring that VMware customers obtain unparalleled levels of performance and reliability.
| Hypervisor Attributes | VMware vSphere Hypervisor 5.0 | Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 with Hyper-V | Citrix XenServer 5.6 FP1
|
|---|---|---|---|
| Small Disk Footprint |
(VMware vSphere Hypervisor)
|
>3GB with Server Core installation ~10GB with full Windows Server installation |
>1GB |
| OS Independence |
(VMware vSphere Hypervisor)
|
Relies on Windows 2008 in Parent Partition |
Relies on Linux in Dom0 management Partition |
| Hardened Drivers |
Optimized with hardware vendors |
Generic Windows drivers |
Generic Linux Drivers |
| Advanced Memory Management |
Ability to reclaim unused memory, de-duplicate memory pages, compress memory pages |
Only uses balloning. No ability to de-duplicate or compress pages. |
Only uses balloning.No ability to de-duplicate or compress pages. Does not adjust memory allocation based on VM usage. |
| Advanced Storage Management |
Lacks an integrated cluster file system, no live storage migration |
Lacks an integrated cluster file system, no live storage migration, storage features support very few arrays |
|
| High I/O Scalability |
Direct driver model |
I/O bottleneck in parent OS |
I/O bottleneck in Dom0 management OS |
| Host Resource Management |
Network traffic shaping, per-VM resource shares, set quality of service priorities for storage and network I/O |
Lacks similar capabilities |
Lacks similar capabilities |
| Performance Enhancements |
AMD RVI, Intel EPT large memory pages, universal 32-way vSMP, VMI paravirtualization, VMDirectPath I/O, PV guest SCSI driver |
Large memory pages, 4-way vSMP on Windows 2008 and Windows 7 VMs only |
No large memory pages, no paravirt guest SCSI device, Requires inflexible SR-IOV |
| Virtual Security Technology |
Enables hypervisor level security introspection
|
Nothing comparable |
Nothing comparable |
| Flexible Resource Allocation |
Hot add VM vCPUs and memory, VMFS volume grow, hot extend virtual disks, hot add virtual disks |
Nothing comparable |
Nothing comparable |
| Custom image creation and management |
VMware Image Builder allows administrators to create custom ESXi images for different types of deployment, such as ISO-based installation, PXE-based installation, and Auto Deploy. |
Nothing comparable |
Nothing comparable |
| Auto Deploy |
vSphere Auto Deploy enables faster provisioning of multiple hosts. New hosts are automatically provisioned based on rules defined by user. |
Requires in-depth setup in Systems Center Configuration Manager |
Nothing comparable |
| Management Interface Firewall |
ESXi Firewall is a service-oriented and stateless firewall that protects the ESXi 5.0 management interface. Configured using the vSphere Client or at the command line with esxcli interfaces. |
Nothing comparable |
Nothing comparable |
| Enhanced Virtual Hardware |
32-way virtual SMP, 1TB virtual machine RAM, Non hardware accelerated 3D graphics, USB 3.0 device support, Unified Extended Firmware Interface (UEFI). |
4-way virtual SMP only, 64 GB RAM per virtual machine |
8-way virtual SMP only, 32 GB RAM per virtual machine |
