VMware vSphere Hypervisor™ (ESXi)

Comparing VMware vSphere Hypervisor and Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V

VMware vSphere Hypervisor— is based on the most reliable, robust and secure hypervisor architecture in the market, VMware ESXi. VMware ESXi is the only hypervisor architecture purpose built for virtualization that does not depend on a general purpose operating system, making it the most dependable and secure hypervisor in the industry. Tens of thousands of VMware customer all over the world rely on VMware ESXi to run the production environments.

VMware vSphere Hypervisor is a simple, entry-level solution designed to allow users to experience the benefits of VMware’s market leading virtualization platform at no cost. VMware vSphere Hypervisor delivers the core functionalities of VMware ESXi enabling customers to virtualize the resources of a host and run virtual machines in a matter of minutes.

VMware ESXi is the most innovative and advanced hypervisor architecture in the market. 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.

Hypervisor Attributes	VMware ESXi 5.0	Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 with Hyper-V	Citrix XenServer 5.6 FP1
Small Disk Footprint	144 MB disk footprint (VMware vSphere Hypervisor)	>3GB with Server Core installation ~10GB with full Windows Server installation	>1GB
OS Independence	No reliance on general purpose operating system (VMware vSphere Hypervisor)	Relies on Windows 2008 in Parent Partition	Relies on Linux in Dom0 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	Only uses ballooning. No ability to de-duplicate or compress pages.	Only uses ballooning.No ability to de-duplicate or compress pages. Does not adjust memory allocation based on VM usage.
Advanced Storage Management	VMware vStorage VMFS, Storage vMotion, Storage DRS	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 32-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, Requires inflexible SR-IOV
Virtual Security Technology	VMware VMsafe™ Enables hypervisor level security introspection	Nothing comparable	Nothing comparable
Flexible Resource Allocation	Hot add VM vCPUs and memory, VMFS volume grow, hot extend virtual disks, hot add virtual disks	Nothing comparable	Nothing comparable
Custom image creation and management	VMware Image Builder allows administrators to create custom ESXi images for different types of deployment, such as ISO-based installation, PXE-based installation, and Auto Deploy.	Nothing comparable	Nothing comparable
Auto Deploy	vSphere Auto Deploy enables faster provisioning of multiple hosts. New hosts are automatically provisioned based on rules defined by user.	Requires in-depth setup in Systems Center Configuration Manager	Nothing comparable
Management Interface Firewall	ESXi Firewall is a service-oriented and stateless firewall that protects the ESXi 5.0 management interface. Configured using the vSphere Client or at the command line with esxcli interfaces.	Nothing comparable	Nothing comparable
Enhanced Virtual Hardware	32-way virtual SMP, 1TB virtual machine RAM, Non hardware accelerated 3D graphics, USB 3.0 device support, Unified Extended Firmware Interface (UEFI).	4-way virtual SMP only, 64 GB RAM per virtual machine	8-way virtual SMP only, 32 GB RAM per virtual machine

Note:  some of the ESXi features included are not available with vSphere Hypervisor