New to VM.. Hyper-V or ESXi?

redrage

Limp Gawd
Joined
Sep 23, 2012
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just starting to get into VMs and such.. my only real experience is VirtualBox.. but i'm looking to get into it more for playing and learning more windows server type stuff.

I'm trying to decide if i should use ESXI or MS Hyper-V.

I'm leaning to MS only because I really need to learn more about microsoft server products for work. But for some reason MS's licensing confuses me. There is a guy in the FS forums who has some Server licenses hes selling so my question is...

If i Get a MS'12 Datacenter license install with the Hyper-V role. I can use unlimited VM's from what i can tell, but can I use the same license to install on to the VM's?

So i install 2012 R2 DC on the host. Create 4 VMs and install the same license on those 4 VMs? That way i can play around with AD, IIS, exchange (hopefully),etc...
 
It is good to learn both. In my experience, Hyper-V is used for convenience virtualization whereas VMware vSphere/ESXi is used for enterprise virtualization. Having the Windows baggage tied to your hypervisor is a pain in and of itself to manage.

You are correct with your licensing question - Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter allows you to run unlimited VMs under Hyper-V on that host. Once you install the OS on the VMs they should automatically activate, but if not you just use the same key.
 
very cool thank you! yeah i looked at ESXi on you tube and stuff.. it looks pretty straight forward but i'm sure there are some 'gotchas' in there.
 
I run about 15 VMs at work. When I began to look into virtualization about six (?) years ago, I experimented with both Hyper-V and ESXi. Tried ESXi for a couple of months and really liked it. But eventually settled on Hyper-V since we already had a Windows domain infrastructure and aside from a few linux LAMP servers, are Windows-centric. It seemed that it was going to be much less expensive with Microsoft as well (we get good pricing through them).

If you have the datacenter license, yes, you will use the same media (or ISO file of the media) to install VMs and use the same activation key. At least, that's how it has worked for us.
 
I run about 15 VMs at work. When I began to look into virtualization about six (?) years ago, I experimented with both Hyper-V and ESXi. Tried ESXi for a couple of months and really liked it. But eventually settled on Hyper-V since we already had a Windows domain infrastructure and aside from a few linux LAMP servers, are Windows-centric. It seemed that it was going to be much less expensive with Microsoft as well (we get good pricing through them).

If you have the datacenter license, yes, you will use the same media (or ISO file of the media) to install VMs and use the same activation key. At least, that's how it has worked for us.

very good. I'm going to try that cause like I said i really need to bone up on Microsoft server.. need a promotion ;-)
 
I did a bunch of research on ESXi vs Hyper-V recently as we were getting ready to replace our VM host servers.

Hyper-V Windows VMs will have higher performance vs VMWare according to some reviews I looked at.

Hyper-V is also a lot cheaper since it is "free".

The only real downside I saw was that when the server running Hyper-V needs to reboot due to updates, it of course takes all the VMs down during the reboot.

Now if you have HA set up, that shouldn't be a problem as it will just auto fail over to the another server without interrupting the users.

I wanted to try Hyper-V, but they made me stick with VMWare since it is what the corp standard is.
 
Read my "Hyper-V vs VMware" thread in this section for a comprehensive and unbiased look at the two products. Hell, it should be stickied. *ahem* NetJunkie *ahem* :)
 
Both are decent hypervisors that need the big kahuna licenses to do advanced stuff. Hyper-V needs SCCM, vSphere needs vCenter Server, each comes with a price tag.

Learn both. I have clients that use both, although we're moving people to VMware as we upgrade them.
 
I did a bunch of research on ESXi vs Hyper-V recently as we were getting ready to replace our VM host servers.

Hyper-V Windows VMs will have higher performance vs VMWare according to some reviews I looked at.

Hyper-V is also a lot cheaper since it is "free".

The only real downside I saw was that when the server running Hyper-V needs to reboot due to updates, it of course takes all the VMs down during the reboot.

Now if you have HA set up, that shouldn't be a problem as it will just auto fail over to the another server without interrupting the users.

I wanted to try Hyper-V, but they made me stick with VMWare since it is what the corp standard is.


because you never have to put an esxi host in maintenance mode and do updates either right? :)
 
nice. wish we had that luxury. we always have to be making sure our servers are on latest firmwares, etc etc.

Same here. That server is the only exception. It is at a location and simply running a pfsense firewall and Linux VM. Not really used for much, but I am pretty sure if it is rebooted it won't come back up. :p
 
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