vTeardown

Can Mythbusters themselves be busted? Is something like that even possible?

I think it was always theoretically possible, like time travel or the yeti, but I don’t think there has even been documented proof before – until now.  As Stu has written on vinternals – and there is no sense in me trying to recreate the details here, he’s written an excellent article – a Microsoft technical case study, internally written and available on TechNet, summarizes the experience a Microsoft IT department had when deploying Hyper-V.  It is surprising that the Microsoft paper ever saw the light of day, as it essentially lays out a strong case for why, contrary to Microsoft’s ubiquitous marketing claims, Hyper-V 1) is not equivalent to a VMware solution and 2) is not ready for use in a production datacenter – at any cost – for any workload.  Is Hyper-V the new Corvair? The Microsoft case study actually validates a number of the lab findings we have made available on Why Choose VMware and “un-validates” much of Microsoft’s own virtualization marketing and myth-busting rhetoric.

The external validation is nice, we just never thought it would come from Microsoft

I do have to say that it is nice to have some external validation of what we’ve found to be true in our lab analyses and of what many of our customers have told us regarding Hyper-V.  At times we feel like we may be buried under a tidal wave of Microsoft marketing spend. (They do have a cool robot though!) We just never thought that Microsoft itself would be our ally in refuting Microsoft’s marketing rhetoric and in getting to a more accurate, fact-based comparison of currently available products.  Thanks guys!  Myth-busters-busted.

The low consolidation ratios make Hyper-V even more expensive than we had thought

And one more thing, as this paper relates to our Cost Per Application calculator, and our findings that due to ESX’s ability to drive a higher consolidation of workloads on a single host, VI3 is actually less expensive than Microsoft’s Hyper-V offering – with only 1-2 additional virtual machines per host.  Microsoft’s paper states that when using Hyper-V in production, on a server with 8-12 processors and 32 GB of RAM, they were able to run only 5-6 virtual machines.  In our calculator, we had assumed Microsoft Hyper-V could support a pretty standard 1-1.5 machines per core, or 12 virtual machines on that type of server.  Well, we gave Hyper-V too much credit.  With such limited consolidation on Hyper-V hosts, Hyper-V is way more expensive than even our top of the line VMware VI3 Enterprise edition than we had originally calculated.  And VI3 is a proven solution with a lot more functionality.   Perhaps we should rerun the numbers? Perhaps it doesn’t matter?

One last thing

Sorry, one additional item, before all you conspiracy theorists out there start speculating.  We did not infiltrate Microsoft’s IT department and brainwash or bribe someone to write and publish this paper…so I hope we can put an end to that theory right now. Although I did hear that Oliver Stone is now working on a screenplay.