Hyper-V is great for the right scenarios. Remains basic, but does the job and is easy to use.
Rating: 7 out of 10
IncentivizedUse Cases and Deployment Scope
Hyper-V comes with specific Microsoft licenses to our organization so we use it as a "freebie" which makes it more desirable in some cases than any other virtualization solution simply because we don't need to pay hefty Enterprise-grade licenses. We do use Hyper-V in a rather simplistic way - host servers and guest VMs on each one. However, for this purpose alone we are pretty satisfied with what we get. In a previous company, I was a part of the efforts for automated provisioning of VMs in Hyper-V and even though it required A LOT of reading semi-internal documentation and some in-depth posts, we got it running in a pretty stable state.
Pros
- Easy to use GUI - very easy for someone with sufficient Windows experience - not necessarily a system administrator.
- Provisioning VMs with different OSes - we mostly rely on different flavors of Windows Server, but having a few *nix distributions was not that difficult.
- Managing virtual networks - we usually have 1 or 2 VLANs for our business purposes, but we are happy with the outcomes.
Cons
- Hyper-V is very slow to adapt to trends in infrastructure and its features are very basic when compared to the offerings from VMWare and some other companies.
- For instance, VMWare has implemented a built-in Kubernetes cluster provisioning feature (that comes with a specific license that costs extra of course).
- Hyper-V's infrastructure monitoring is very basic and altering is non-existent. It's up to the system administrators to either create or install separate monitoring & alerting solutions.
- Hyper-V cannot handle some virtualization needs all that well - my example is with VM backups and snapshots. Both of these are supposed to fulfill specific needs, but there are a number of gotchas in each of those cases (easily corruptible VHD files, gradually growing in size snapshots) that an administrator needs to address occasionally - administration overhead where you would not expect it.
Likelihood to Recommend
Hyper-V is an OK virtualization hypervisor when used on a Windows workstation or when you have a license for it as a freebie (and no budget and/or knowledge for one of VMWare's solutions). You can do a lot of virtualization tasks manually without problems. Long-term management and more complicated use cases will be challenging and need to be considered. Finally, Hyper-V is not that well suited to be a part of hybrid cloud infrastructure - most of the tooling is proprietary to Microsoft so it's very rare that someone or some system is able to manage Hyper-V hosts using SDKs and APIs.
BT
Borislav Traykov
DevOps Team Leader in Engineering at Cognyte (Information Technology & Services, 1001-5000 employees)
Vetted Review
3 years of experience