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 ESXi and VMware ESX 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 ESXi/ESX 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 ESXi/ESX—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 ESXi/ESX 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 ESXi/ESX 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 ESXi/ESX 4.1 | Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V | Citrix XenServer 5.6 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Small Disk Footprint |  >2GB with Server Core installation ~10GB with full Windows Server installation |
1.8GB |
|
| OS Independence | Relies on Windows 2008 in Parent Partition |
Relies on Linux in Dom 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 |
No ability to reclaim unused physical memory, de-duplicate or compress pages |
Recently added basic overcommit, but does not adjust memory allocation based on VM usage; no deduplication or compression of pages |
| 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 8-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, no direct I/O device support |
| Virtual Security Technology | Nothing comparable |
Nothing comparable |
|
| Flexible Resource Allocation | Hot add VM vCPUs and memory, VMFS volume grow, hot extend virtual disks, hot add virtual disks |
Only hot add virtual disks |
Nothing comparable |
