why use ESXi free over Hyper-V Server?

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SpoonMaN-EQ

Limp Gawd
Joined
Dec 31, 2002
Messages
372
Hello everyone,

I am wondering, why someone would use ESXi free over Hyper-v Server R2?

from what I've read of the spec's hyper-v seems to be worlds ahead of ESXi in terms of pCPU (socket and core totals), memory and also RemoteFX support. and from my experence hardware support has been far superior.

can we please skip the "M$ kills puppys" with this? I really would like honest answers.

-Thanks
 
I rather like that answer, but does this outway being able to do much more before having to pay for it?
 
Hyper-V certainly isn't free, you need to buy a copy of Windows Server 2008 R2 and then license each OS install on it, unless you're running Enterprise or Datacenter edition.

ESXi + Linux (distro dependent) = no licensing costs
 
Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 is certainly free and has less limitations than the new ESXi (8GB total? lol)

Really depends on what kind of VMs you want to run really. If you're going to be running windows in VMs then hyper-v has a huge advantage, but it's support for other OSs is a bit lacking other than redhat/centos linux, ESXi seems to support more OSs but due to the above RAM limit on the new version chances are you want to find a copy of the old one.

As far as being more "light weight" even a full GUI Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V role installed (vs the GUIless Hyper-V Server 2008 R2) is only like 300MB which from what I've seen isn't that much more than ESXi. ESXi doesn't even tout lower memory usage as one of its advantages over Hyper-V, only less disk space, which these days is frankly lol.

I run a windows based lab at home on 2 boxes so Hyper-V is very nice for my usage but feels a bit restrictive for trying to add linux hosts since the 3.1 linux additions only work with redhat/centos and have a lot more features than the 2.0 additions that work with more versions. I'd never dream to switch to ESXi though since I hate using old versions and the new version is incredibly gimped. If you're trying to run a predominantly windows lab off a technet sub then you probably want Hyper-V (either standalone or as a role)
 
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-Dragon- said:
Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 is certainly free and has less limitations than the new ESXi (8GB total? lol)

Really depends on what kind of VMs you want to run really. If you're going to be running windows in VMs then hyper-v has a huge advantage, but it's support for other OSs is a bit lacking other than redhat/centos linux, ESXi seems to support more OSs but due to the above RAM limit on the new version chances are you want to find a copy of the old one.

As far as being more "light weight" even a full GUI Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V role installed (vs the GUIless Hyper-V Server 2008 R2) is only like 300MB which from what I've seen isn't that much more than ESXi. ESXi doesn't even tout lower memory usage as one of its advantages over Hyper-V, only less disk space, which these days is frankly lol.

I run a windows based lab at home on 2 boxes so Hyper-V is very nice for my usage but feels a bit restrictive for trying to add linux hosts since the 3.1 linux additions only work with redhat/centos and have a lot more features than the 2.0 additions that work with more versions. I'd never dream to switch to ESXi though since I hate using old versions and the new version is incredibly gimped.
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ESXi will not have the 8GB limit, that changed yesterday.
 
Ah well I don't exactly actively follow them since when I was setting stuff up I saw the 8GB limit and really couldn't have beeen less interested.
 
I am very aware of the things hyper-v brings to the table, and aside from Linux support (which is rather poor but improving in hyper-v) I really do not see the advantage.

with the addition of RemoteFX and memory over allocation in SP1 I feel they are finally in the same league.
 
Scvmm is certainly not free, the Hyper-V manager tools in the RSAT package are very basic but work great and it can be used with scvmm if you wanted to. Can the free ESXi be used with the VMware solution?
 
You don't need VMM to manage Hyper-V Server, just a copy of windows 7 pro/ultimate/enterprise and Server Manager and I wouldn't exactly call them TOO basic since they're the exact same tools you use to manage the Hyper-V role on a normal server install.
 
You need to license ESXi to use it with full blown vCenter, but you can certainly manage all of it's functionality with just the free vCenter client.

I'm not aware of a way to do that with Hyper-V Server R2, unless microsoft has a free client that you can use to manage it. SCVMM must be licensed or you can use the full blown Server 2008 R2 and manage everything through the local Hyper-V Manager. Does Microsoft have something like the free vCenter client? Or I guess the local Hyper-V Manager provides that functionality?

Edit: just checked, guess you can do a connect to another computer with the Hyper-V Manager, I'll have to give that a whirl and see how the barebones Hyper-V install compares.
 
It works exactly like a local Hyper-V install via the remote install, I've tried both and they're practically identical, I just have a Ceton tuner that I want to be able to serve out remotely and that requires write access to device manager to enable bridging support and DM doesn't support remote write access in any fashion.
 
I've had trouble getting the free CLI version of Hyper-V running in a home environment without a domain, so ESX and XenServer are more attractive on that front.
 
I actually use Hyper-V in my home install because of the better hardware support. It gets the job done for very basic setups.

The reason I avoid it in a business environment is that clustering requires a domain to start up. It makes it difficult to setup a completely virtual environment. The advanced features on Hyper-V just aren't that good when compared to Xen and ESX(i). I've also never had updates of ESX or Xen cause the guests to blue screen. My all-time favorite was MS blaming a driver they wrote for causing the guests to crash. The solution was to disable their driver. My experiences have also been that you can get more VMs per physical host using ESXi than Hyper-V on the same hardware.
 
ESXi free because Hyper-V support for Linux guests just suck rocks. If all your guests are MS-based then Hyper-V is probably a better choice.
 
ESXi can offer ~way~ better consolidation rates, and has significantly more powerful and advanced memory / cpu overcommitment features, especially on current-gen procs.
 
why not just play around with one for a few weeks then go to a different one? best way to learn.
 
PigLover said:
ESXi free because Hyper-V support for Linux guests just suck rocks. If all your guests are MS-based then Hyper-V is probably a better choice.
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This if you live in a mixed environment there is no substitution for ESXi
 
lopoetve said:
ESXi can offer ~way~ better consolidation rates, and has significantly more powerful and advanced memory / cpu overcommitment features, especially on current-gen procs.
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I would like to know more about this. aside from the linux support this is the first real advantage that anyone has mentioned.

remember eveyone I only wanted to compare the free versions.

but it sounds like this weekend is going to be busy for me with trying out some ESXi.
 
Hi

Microsofts HyperV does not have a memory overcommit function like ESXi does.

What this means is that if your host has for example 4GB of RAM and you setup three virtual machines each with 2GB each you will only be able to start two of them up on the HyperV host where as you will be able to start all three on the ESXi one.

The guest OS will only consume the memory that it needs so there will be some that is unused that can be shared between VMs. VMware has been doing this for a long time but Microsoft hasnt yet. Its not magic though and if you try to overcommit with memory hungry apps such as SQL server it will slow down alot as it starts to balloon.

Bit old but good.
http://www.vcritical.com/2010/01/the-truth-about-hyper-v-memory-overcommit/

I use free ESXi at home and am very happy with it as its running VMs with 8GB of provisioned memory on a host that currenly only has 5GB of physical RAM.

At the free end of the spectrum they appear very similar in abilities with the exception of the memory overcommit. As far as i know the CPU metrics are no different though so nothing to worry about there.

cheers

Simon
 
sorry but that is no longer true, as of the release of SP1 it now has full memory overcommit support.
 
SpoonMaN-EQ said:
sorry but that is no longer true, as of the release of SP1 it now has full memory overcommit support.
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No it doesn't. It has "Dynamic Memory" which is not overcommit. No TPS. No real overcommit. No memory compression. Not to mention the Dynamic Memory feature is only supported on certain Windows OS.
 
and now i see the key differance in them, VMWare will let a VM allocate more memory than the host has, hyper-v will not. also they took a different route with compression.

MS is still playing catch up in that way it seems. Thanks Junkie.
 
And to be honest, MS is years behind. SP1 just finally added like Live Migration, HA failover, etc. VMware is well beyond that...that's the reason you don't see Hyper-V in many production deployments. It's just not there. No resource balancing...no real intelligence... It's what I'd call a basic hypervisor.
 
ESXi definitely has better SMP support, whether or not that matters to you greatly depends on the kind of hardware you're going to run the host on and the kind of VMs you're running as to whether they need the extra CPU power or not. Personally there's no way I'd virtualize something like a folding or encoding machine I'd put that on its own dedicated hardware, but someone else might in which case that would actually matter.

ESXi probably also has a lot better dynamic memory support as well, as HV only supports windows clients and from what little about ESXi I read it sounds like it's a bit more proactive about freeing up unused VM memory, I'm not 100% sure though.

I seem to recall reading some MS blog about how their #1 priority for Hyper-V was performance over density but I can't seem to find it offhand nor can I find any recent performance benchmarks between Hyper-V 2008 R2 SP1 vs ESXi 5, so it's a definite case of YMMV there...

Did find an interesting piece of MS propaganda, err blog, and as a technet subscriber and Hyper-V user I was quite excited about the Sneak Peek at Windows Server “8” Hyper-V especially "Greater than 16 virtual processors within a Hyper-V VM" and about wet myself when I saw "Hyper-V Replica".
 
Thuleman said:
edit: meh, decided to stay out of this
Click to expand...

Eh, you changed what you had written, I was just bringing up the management options for Hyper-V vs ESXi. You don't need full blown vCenter to use the vCenter client.
 
SpoonMaN-EQ said:
and now i see the key differance in them, VMWare will let a VM allocate more memory than the host has, hyper-v will not. also they took a different route with compression.

MS is still playing catch up in that way it seems. Thanks Junkie.
Click to expand...

Even more than that though...

ESX has multiple ways of using memory.
If you have similar machines (and even if they're somewhat different), transparent page sharing will let you share memory space between them, reducing utilization
If you don't, ESX can compress the memory space, especially lightly/unused bits, to free up memory (on the fly, invisible to the guest)
VMware tools can scavenge memory that is lightly used by using a balloon driver to force the guest to give up memory (visable to the guest)
ESX can also swap memory space to disk if it's really lightly used, totally transparent to the guest.

Most of those are still on the drawing board for Hyper-V. I seriously run a couple of test hosts at over 300% memory commitment, and the view environment that lives on there (semi-production) is fully usable. I do have fast disks though.

And, with modern procs, the scheduler issues for overcommiting cpus / multiple vcpus is pretty much a non-issue now too. :)
 
lopoetve said:
Even more than that though...

ESX has multiple ways of using memory.
If you have similar machines (and even if they're somewhat different), transparent page sharing will let you share memory space between them, reducing utilization
If you don't, ESX can compress the memory space, especially lightly/unused bits, to free up memory (on the fly, invisible to the guest)
VMware tools can scavenge memory that is lightly used by using a balloon driver to force the guest to give up memory (visable to the guest)
ESX can also swap memory space to disk if it's really lightly used, totally transparent to the guest.

Most of those are still on the drawing board for Hyper-V. I seriously run a couple of test hosts at over 300% memory commitment, and the view environment that lives on there (semi-production) is fully usable. I do have fast disks though.

And, with modern procs, the scheduler issues for overcommiting cpus / multiple vcpus is pretty much a non-issue now too. :)
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Yes, all the memory management things work great to over commit memory. I use it all the time here in our QA lab. The problem with this is that with the new licensing for ESXi for v5 is that it makes actually overcommiting memory constantly in a production environment not really worth it. Since, if I am reading everything right, you would have to eventually buy the licenses to license that over committed memory if you just have enough licenses for the physical memory you have in the box.
 
AceXsmurF said:
Yes, all the memory management things work great to over commit memory. I use it all the time here in our QA lab. The problem with this is that with the new licensing for ESXi for v5 is that it makes actually overcommiting memory constantly in a production environment not really worth it. Since, if I am reading everything right, you would have to eventually buy the licenses to license that over committed memory if you just have enough licenses for the physical memory you have in the box.
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afaik, the yearly average of the memory which is in-use is counted.
so you technically can overcommit
 
ND40oz said:
You don't need full blown vCenter to use the vCenter client.
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Just as you don't need SCVMM to manage Hyper-V remotely, as has already been pointed out.

lopoetve said:
[stuff on ESX memory overcommitment]
Click to expand...
Of course, the practice of over committing memory will bring down the house in the event all the memory is actually requested/needed by the VMs.

I have sat through numerous 3rd party vendor presentations as well as just general "best practices" type of talks where pretty much everyone preached to not get into the habit of overcommitment memory on production systems, especially considering the overall low cost of memory these days and instead size hardware to allow to plenty of physical memory.

I don't have any insight into "mission critical" setups but I would be curious to find out whether the whole overcommitment is one of those features that exist, everyone is quick to agree that it is very cool, till people think about what it really means and choose to not actually use it.

That's not a H-V vs. ESX comment but more a generic type of observation.
 
People over commit memory every day. It's how we get our 50:1 consolidation ratios. vSphere does it VERY well and doesn't impact performance in any noticeable way unless things get very, very constrained. I see software vendors say not to do all sorts of things...like vMotion, DRS, memory over commit. They don't understand the technology.

What are the odds that every VM in your environment will suddenly want all their RAM? It doesn't happen. If some do suddenly spike up that's what DRS is for..balance it out across the cluster. We over provision everywhere in data center infrastructure. Memory is no different. If you build for theoretical peak you'll way overspend.
 
True enough (in the sense that it'll get slow as shit if it needs all that RAM at once) but it'll keep going and struggle by. It's not best practice, but the hosts can handle it, and we're talking about free versions for labs and the like where you don't always have the luxury of maintaining a 75% max (or appropriate for your environment) utilization.

Would I use it in production (actual used memory overcommitting)? Not directly, especially not at 300%, but it's nice to know you have it if you lose a host or two and have to run in "limp" mode for a bit, or if you're spinning up new hosts / replacing them, especially if you just need it in a pinch. And for test / dev, or labs? Hells yeah, have at it - makes the hosts a lot more usable :) Especially for non-critical bits.

Now, overcommit in general? Yes, definitely. Most VMs aren't using all that memory, and only parts of it are active, so it doesn't show as used. You want (for production) 75% actual utilization (not allocated) for most hosts, assuming a multi-host environment/cluster. I wouldn't recommend pushing past that for actual, truly utilized memory, but it can be done.
 
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Thuleman said:
Just as you don't need SCVMM to manage Hyper-V remotely, as has already been pointed out.
Click to expand...

Yes, you can use the Hyper-V manager, it doesn't exactly compare to vcenter client. ESXi or full blown vCenter, you use the exact same client.
 
NetJunkie said:
And to be honest, MS is years behind. SP1 just finally added like Live Migration, HA failover, etc. VMware is well beyond that...that's the reason you don't see Hyper-V in many production deployments. It's just not there. No resource balancing...no real intelligence... It's what I'd call a basic hypervisor.
Click to expand...

Agreed with everything but the line "you don't see Hyper-V in many production deployments". That isn't the case in my experience, certainly in the UK and Europe. This is as much to do with licensing as anything else .e.g. corporation / Governments already have negotiated their MS licensing deals making Hyper-V essentially free. Its above basic imho but certainly not premier league!
 
For me, that nice thing with vSphere is that if your system is on the HCL, you drop in the vSphere ISO and you're good to go, all your hardware will work and you don't need third-party drivers to do things like NIC bonding/teaming or MPIO.

Also (and at this point it isn't free) the fact that you can run ESXi in a production environment and pay a small amount to have it supported is, IMO, a big advantage over Hyper-V and Microsoft in general (sorry, but not a fan of the way they will sell you Windows and Exchange but offer no reasonably priced support options).
 
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