Some months ago I wrote a lot of post about Hyper-V vs VMware vSphere. At this time I compared Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Release Candidate with VMware vSphere 5.0. Since then a lot has changed Microsoft released the final version of Windows Server 2012 and VMware showed vSphere 5.1. I don’t have time to update every post I made but this should cover an overview about the numbers in both versions. This is mostly only about scale and a lot of customers will not hit any limit in both products, but still I think it is interesting to see how they compare.
There are a lot of other important arguments to use one or the other product, but I won’t cover this in this blog post. The data is from the Microsoft paper: Competitive_Advantages_of_Windows_Server_2012_Hyper-V_over_VMware_vSphere_5.1.pdf. In this PDF you can find more information about the advantages of Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V.
Scale
| System | Resource | Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V | VMware vSphere Hypervisor 5.1 | VMware vSphere 5.1 Enterprise Plus | ||
| Host | Logical Processors | 320 | 160 | 160 | ||
| Physical Memory | 4 TB | 32 GB | 2 TB | |||
| Virtual CPUs per Host | 2048 | 2048 | 2048 | |||
| VM | Virtual CPUs per VM | 64 | 8 | 64 | ||
| Memory per VM | 1 TB | 32 GB | 1 TB | |||
| Maximum Virtual Disk | 64 TB | 2 TB | 2 TB | |||
| Active VMs per Host | 1024 | 512 | 512 | |||
| Cluster | Maximum Nodes | 64 | N/A | 32 | ||
| Maximum VMs | 8000 | N/A | 3000 | |||
Storage
| Capability | Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V | VMware vSphere Hypervisor 5.1 | VMware vSphere 5.1 Enterprise Plus |
| Virtual Fiber Channel | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| 3rd Party Multipathing (MPIO) | Yes | No | Yes (VAMP) |
| Native 4-KB Disk Support | Yes | No | No |
| Maximum Virtual Disk Size | 64TB VHDX | 2TB VMDK | 2TB VMDK |
| Maximum Pass Through Disk Size | 265TB+ | 64TB | 64TB |
| Offloaded Data Transfer | Yes | No | Yes (VAAI) |
| Storage Encryption | Yes | No | No |
Networking
| Capability | Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V | VMware vSphere Hypervisor 5.1 | VMware vSphere 5.1 Enterprise Plus |
| Extensible Switch | Yes | No | Replaceable |
| Available Partner Extensions | 4 | No | 2 |
| PVLAN Support | Yes | No | Yes |
| ARP/ND Spoofing Protection | Yes | No | vCNS/Partner |
| DHCP Snooping Protection | Yes | No | vCNS/Partner |
| Virtual Port ACLs | Yes | No | vCNS/Partner |
| Trunk Mode to Virtual Machines | Yes | No | No |
| Port Monitoring | Yes | Per Port Group | Yes |
| Port Mirroring | Yes | Per Port Group | Yes |
| Dynamic Virtual Machine Queue | Yes | NetQueue | NetQueue |
| IPsec Task Offload | Yes | No | No |
| SR-IOV | Yes | Yes (No Live Migration support) | Yes (No Live Migration support) |
| Network Virtualization | Yes | No | VXLAN |
| Quality of Service | Yes | No | Yes |
| Data Center Bridging (DCB) | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Virtual Machine Live Migration | Yes | No | Yes |
| 1GigE Simultaneous Live Migrations | Unlimited | N/A | 4 |
| 10GigE Simultaneous Live Migrations | Unlimited | N/A | 8 |
| Live Storage Migration | Yes | No | Yes |
| Shared-Nothing Live Migration | Yes | No | Yes |
High Availability & Resiliency
| Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V | VMware vSphere Hypervisor 5.1 | VMware vSphere 5.1 Enterprise Plus | |
| Nodes per Cluster | 64 | N/A | 32 |
| VMs per Cluster | 8000 | N/A | 3000 |
| Max Size Guest Cluster (iSCSI) | 64 Nodes | 0 | 16 |
| Max Size Guest Cluster (Fiber) | 64 Nodes | 5 | 5 |
| Max Size Guest Cluster (File Based) | 64 Nodes | 0 | 0 |
| Guest Clustering with Live Migration Support | Yes | N/A | No |
| Guest Clustering with Dynamic Memory Support | Yes | No | No |
| Incremental Backups | Yes | No | Yes |
| VM Replication | Yes | No | Yes |
| NIC Teaming | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Integrated High Availability | Yes | No | Yes |
| Guest OS Application Monitoring | Yes | N/A | No |
| Cluster-Aware Updating | Yes | N/A | Yes |
| Failover Prioritization | Yes | N/A | Yes |
| Affinity & Anti-Affinity Rules | Yes | N/A | Yes |
| Free? | Yes | Yes | No |
Hi Thomas,
i can’t download the pdf file from the link. :-(
The table 2 says “Yes” for ESX5.1 supporting virtual fibre channel, however, i am not able to find any reference to virtual fibrechannel in any of the website for vmware. can you please provide me a link.