vTeardown

I believe I am one of the few people who actually shelled out $1,650 for Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V, Enterprise Edition when it first was released last year. How do I know this? When I tried to use the Essentials Enterprise license that was provided, Workflow Studio, one of the applications included in the suite, would not install due to a licensing error.  I contacted Citrix Support back in September, 2009 and they had no idea what caused the problem. The sole license that was provided was supposed to work on all the included applications. So what was I to do after numerous unsuccessful calls to their licensing support reps? Broadcast my issue via twitter! I actually received a quicker response from the Citrix Engineers who monitored their twitter feeds. To cut a long story short, I finally got in touch with a Citrix Product Manager who escalated my issue and declared it a licensing bug. To this day, I’m not sure if the issue has been fixed as my ticket was mysteriously closed as of January 26, 2010 with no reason attached. This whole ordeal made me wonder if there were other customers experiencing the same problem? Am I the only one who noticed this bug? I know it’s just software and all software programs have bugs, but how did a critical license issue like this stay unnoticed for months after its release? Citrix shipped an unusable product, yet no one, not even Citrix engineers themselves, seemed to notice it. The only logical conclusion: Few customers, if any, actually purchased this so-called “essential” application.

A look at Citrix’s own Support Forums gives a clue about the popularity of Essentials for Hyper-V. Back in November,2009, this is what it looked like:

The numbers highlighted are the actual number of posts—a total of six posts. Maybe it was the holiday season. Well, let’s take a look at it today, almost four months later:

A 100 percent increase in postings! Ok, this post was meant to poke a little fun at Citrix, but in all seriousness, how many of you out there are actually using Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V? If you’re a Hyper-V administrator, don’t you already have tons of management applications to deal with?  Having another application to manage your back-end storage would just add to the complexity. If Essentials was so essential wouldn’t Microsoft be talking about how much customers need this product?

Stay tuned for an in-depth look into some of the technical reasons why administrators should think twice before implementing Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V.

vSphere over Hyper-V: create 8 vCPU VMs for any of the 55 vSphere supported OSs. Hyper-V supports only up to 4 vCPUs and then only for Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7

vSphere currently supports 55 guest operating systems – maximum flexibility for deploying applications in a virtual environment

On the guest operating system support side, VMware ESX supports far more guest operating systems than any other bare-metal virtualization platform. In fact, VMware supports 55 different OSs ranging from Windows, OS/2, Solaris, and even NetWare (yes, a lot of people still use NetWare!) Visit the online VMware Compatibility Guide and you’ll see that ESX4 supports over 460 versions of those 55 OSs:

vSphere VMs scale up to 8 vCPUs and 255 GB of RAM – maximum scalability to take advantage of today’s hardware

What’s even more exciting is that for each one of those 460 versions of the 55 supported guest operating systems, ESX enables up to 8 virtual CPUs. Be it Windows or Linux, any ESX4 VM can be configured to have 8 vCPUs along with 255GB of RAM—the exception being Windows XP and Vista, which has an OS limitation of 2 vCPUs even when running natively on physical (Hyper-V on the other hand only supports up to 64GB of VM RAM). With this support, maximum throughput achievable from a single VM is much higher in ESX4 than in previous versions.

ESX4 even allows one to configure vCPUs in odd numbers such as 3, 5, or 7 if one chooses. This ability allows application workloads to be configured with the most flexibility:

Hyper-V limits choice, treats Linux VMs as second-class citizens and doesn’t scale to the full potential of today’s hardware

In contrast, Microsoft Hyper-V has a much smaller guest OS support list along with very limited vSMP support. Take a close look at their guest operating system support list and you’ll notice Windows 2008 and Windows 7 VMs are limited to only 1, 2, or 4 vCPUs. In addition, Hyper-V Linux VMs are hindered by only 1vCPU. Don’t even try running SAP on a Linux VM under Hyper-V because it’s NOT supported! SAP does not even plan to evaluate this type of combination for their applications. On the other hand, ESX has supported SAP in both Windows and Linux VMs since 2007.

In addition to Linux, legacy systems, even Windows legacy systems, are also treated as second-class citizens. Where’s the 4 vCPU support for Windows 2003? Or how about 2 vCPU support in Windows 2000? Can’t do it on Hyper-V!  Could Microsoft be limiting support for legacy Windows systems to “encourage” upgrades to newer OSs? Hmm – VMware does not have that type of conflict of interest. ESX4 does a better job at running Windows OSs than Microsoft by supporting practically every Windows version since 3.1 and even MS DOS 6.22! Alright, I know we don’t support Windows ME (Mistake Edition), but then again, who’s willing to admit that they’re running the worst OS of all time?

The Bottom Line

Virtualization should not be used as a vehicle to influence a customer’s choice of guest operating systems or when they should do an operating system upgrade. VMware strives to support guest operating systems as consistently and equally as possible. On the other hand, Microsoft’s preferential treatment of Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7 pressures companies to deploy these OSs in order to get the full benefits of Hyper-V. If a guest OS doesn’t generate any revenue for Microsoft, it most likely won’t show up on their guest support list. Do you think Solaris will ever make the list?

With the introduction of 6 core CPUs and with 8 cores just right around the corner, customers need a virtualization platform that can take advantage of the increased processing power. VMs under ESX4 does just that with support for up to 8 vCPUs and 255GB of RAM. On the other hand, Hyper-V comes up short and is not yet enterprise-ready, as noted pointedly by Burton Group.

Recently, Microsoft has been trying to bust the myth that Hyper-V is an immature, 1.0 product, stating that it’s “a very scalable, highly reliable product.” They go on to say that we should go ahead and give it a try ourselves. Well Eric Sloof over at ntpro.nl did just that and even followed the steps documented in a TechNet article. In addition, Microsoft’s own Hyper-V Program Manager, Mike Sterling, points users over to it in this forum post. You might be surprised to find how easy it can be to bring down your entire Hyper-V host. Eric has even captured the host crash in a video. Check it out here:

http://www.ntpro.nl/blog/archives/1043-When-Im-feeling-blue.html

Would you run your mission critical, production applications on a platform this instable? I wonder what would happen if a normal user with VM creation rights provisioned a VM and accidently stored it on a CIFS share. Hmmmm…..Microsoft may need to rename their mascot IT 22-7.

All of you have probably heard of the VMware Cost-Per-Application Calculator which was launched a few weeks ago. To prove that VMware has a lower cost per application and a higher virtual machine density, The Taneja Group conducted a series of tests showing VMware’s free ESXi outperforming Microsoft’s Hyper-V in each of these areas. Feel free to read the entire document but for those who are time constrained, here is a summary of their technical findings:

• Hyper-V is still an immature product with limitations such as memory overcommitment and limited SMP vCPU support for older Windows OSs and Linux. Did you know Hyper-V only supports one Linux flavor with only one virtual processor? Anyone actually running Hyper-V Linux guests in production?
• Using a DBHammer workload in the guest, you can run up to 100% more VMs on ESXi than on Hyper-V. Actually, there was no technical limitation in creating even more VMs under ESXi, unlike on Hyper-V:

• On a CPU intensive workload (SPECjbb), ESXi delivers 24% more performance than Hyper-V running on the same hardware. This is mainly due to ESXi leveraging large pages and RVI. Hyper-V does not support these technologies.
• So what does this all mean to you? Utilizing VMware’s technology, VMware can be 5% to 29% less expensive than Microsoft.

We encourage everyone to try the calculator to see how much they can save with VMware. Here is a quick video demo on how to use the tool, presented by the creator himself, Alberto Farronato. You’ll find his accent quite sexy: