I like Microsoft.  I’ve been a Windows guy for years. I’ve even defended Vista when other Microsofties like Paul Thurott hated it.  With that all said, I still believe Microsoft is behind the game when it comes to virtualization and cloud computing. They have made improvments to Hyper-V but VMware is probably a decade ahead of the competition. Given thier ridiculous licensing scheme, vSphere is still worth the price of admission for any serious private cloud hosting.

Microsoft had launched this ad shortly before VMWorld:

So VMware is still in the past eh?  Even Xen is ahead of Hyper-V as far as feature sets go.  Don’t get me wrong, Hyper-V is a good solution for SMBs to start virtualizing, it still has a long way before playing in the big boy IT enterprise world.  So far I’ve only heard of one big company moving to Hyper-V and that’s Target Corporation.  Not sure how well that’ going for them but good luck.

Maybe its just me but the architecture of Hyper-V doesn’t give me the “warm and fuzzies”.  I don’t like the idea of the parent partition being the one that controls hardware access and compatability. You compromise the parent partition, you can compromise the entire host and the VMs that run on it.  VMware learned from that and finally killed the service console in ESX by making ESXi the only hypervisor choice for vSphere 5.   While Hyper-V uses a bare-metal hypervisor, it is still dependant on a Windows parent partition that you can’t get rid of.

Calling VMware limited compared to what Hyper-V does is not a good idea.  VMware had invented virtualization for commodity x86 servers where there was no demand for it and continues to be the market leader.  VMware allows you to migrate apps to vCloud hosts and you have a choice of what vCloud host you want.  Even with the unpopular vRAM licensing requirements, vSphere will still be the number one choice for virtualzation platforms in datacenters across the country.

Edit: I want to clarify something:  I know the service console in ESX isn’t like the parent partition on Hyper-V.  However, if you compromise the service console, you can gain access to the host and possibly the VMs that are running. That’s why VMware got rid of it and it’s no longer supported.  While the standalone versions of Hyper-V have a lesser attack surface than a regular Windows Server install, it still has the equivalent of a service console.  Now, I know Microsoft can make a small kernel as demonstrated with WinMin and I know the hypervisor of Hyper-V itself is small.  Microsoft has the potential to go toe-to-toe with VMware, I just wish they would take it seriously.