Avoid unnecessary risk and overhead by choosing a robust and production-proven hypervisor as the foundation for your virtualized datacenter. Selecting the right hypervisor is the first step towards success in building a virtual infrastructure.
Not all hypervisors are equal. Learn more about how VMware vSphere Hypervisor is - and will continue to be - the industry's most robust and production-proven hypervisor and why VMware is the best choice for building a virtual infrastructure.
- Comparing Hypervisors
- Hyper-V and Xen Architectures: Too Much Code
- Achieve Scalable Performance
- Virtualization-Aware Networking and Security Solutions
- Industry Recognition
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Comparing VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V
VMware vSphere—the industry’s first x86 “bare-metal” hypervisor—is the most reliable and robust hypervisor. Launched in 2001 and now in its fifth generation, VMware has been production-proven in tens of thousands of customer deployments all over the world.
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.
" VMware is the clear and obvious leader in virtualization products. We tried both the Microsoft and Oracle virtualization products and found them lacking in features and performance compared to the VMware product."
— David Greer, Director of Information Services, HelioVolt Corporation
So while others try to catch up to VMware in the areas highlighted below, upcoming VMware releases will take vSphere to the next level of enterprise-class hypervisors—further extending VMware's lead and ensuring that VMware customers obtain unparalleled levels of performance and reliability.
| Hypervisor Attributes | VMware vSphere 5.1 | Windows Server 2012 with Hyper-V (beta) | Citrix XenServer 6
|
|---|---|---|---|
| Small Disk Footprint |
>5GB with Server Core installation ~10GB with full Windows Server installation |
>1GB |
|
| OS Independence |
Relies on Windows 2012 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, swap to disk/SSD |
Only uses ballooning, requires special drivers—no Linux, no NUMA. |
Only uses ballooning. |
| Advanced CPU Management |
Tuned to support Intel SMT hyper-threading; Supports 3D graphics accelerators |
No reliable performance advantage when using hyper-threading |
No reliable performance advantage when using hyper-threading |
| Advanced Storage Management |
VMware vStorage VMFS |
Lacks an integrated cluster file system |
Lacks an integrated cluster file system, storage features support very few arrays |
| Virtual Security Technology |
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 |
| Simplified Patching |
No unrelated patching; Image-based patching with rollback capabilities provide clean and simple host patching |
Subject to unrelated patching; Complex patching architecture requires additional effort and complexity |
Subject to unrelated patching; Requires manual updates |
