Great point about the vCenter database.

Whether the AD dependencies is a trivial concern or not is the exact idea that I am struggling with. I appreciate your candid response.

The vSphere management server should probably be hosted on a physical box tho implementations do allow for its virtualization. I generally prefer to have a physical DC regardless of vmware or hyper-v for sake of clock accuracy and general paranoia. I guess the difference here is that with hyper-v failover clustering it is a non-negotiable whereas it is not strictly required for vmware setups.

Does it matter that Microsoft Hyper-V environments need an established Windows environment? Remember I am talking about production implementation using best practices for your company / my customers. I know Hyper-V can be configured in a workgroup without a DC, but is that really an production implementation option considering feature needs like Live Migration and HA?

Sure when you set up the question that way, To put it in perspective, Hyper-v is about as useful as ESXi or ESX in standalone mode. Chances are your SMB customers already have an established AD infrastructure. Considering Hyper-V is pretty awful at running different linux variants I would think that most people would be considering Hyper V for Windows VMs.

Do you view a layer of separation between Active Directory and the hypervisor as an added benefit? What happens if you corrupt the AD database in VMware versus Hyper-V environments?

Another loaded question, what happens when the SQL database on your vcenter server explodes. Yikes! Hyper-V will have problems but the VMs will still load, as long as you didnt have the services on the hyper-v host running on some special domain account. You will lose all advanced features but hey thats what backups are for.

In the end it all comes down to cash $$. How small is your SMB, 50 users, 500 users? How many servers do you need and what needs to be running on it? Is SCOM a necessity, maybe but Hyper-V shouldnt really impact this purchasing decision, SCOM is primarily for guest managment and should be considered even in a vmware implementation.

SCVMM is also nice and not particularly expensive but from your article it seems you consider it necessary to perform quick/live migrations, just to clarify, its not. Hyper-V (free) as well as the paid for editions are both capable of performing HA functions. In light of this, considering Hyper-V is essentially free whereas vmware ESX4 starts at about $2000 per processor and vcenter is another $1500, not to mention the yearly support contract fee, I can see numerous advantages to Hyper-V for a small business environment.

Hyper-V's technical limitations such as inability to overcommit memory and general lack of wide linux support as well as unavailable equivalent features such as vlockstep should be what drives the final decision, not trivial prerequisties such as the need for AD.

The SMB scenario like you describe for you and your company is the “poster child” example. Would it have been just as easy to build a couple of Hyper-V hosts, configure the fail over clustering, and begin migrating servers to VMs? In theory at the end could you end up with 1 physical DC/AD/DNS/DHCP server. Would you need SCVMM or live with the Hyper-V Manager / Powershell to Live Migrate? How many Hosts would have been needed?

I'm not asking you, but I'm just trying to visualize the path to achieve the same results with a different solution.

I'm trying to stay away from talking about beyond the implementation project. The day to day administration and support will differ with each company and it's IT team. BUT, your point is valid about this post not going far enough. There is so much more to consider before the best decision can be made.

The SMB scenario like you describe for you and your company is the “poster child” example. Would it have been just as easy to build a couple of Hyper-V hosts, configure the fail over clustering, and begin migrating servers to VMs? In theory at the end could you end up with 1 physical DC/AD/DNS/DHCP server. Would you need SCVMM or live with the Hyper-V Manager / Powershell to Live Migrate? How many Hosts would have been needed?

I'm not asking you, but I'm just trying to visualize the path to achieve the same results with a different solution.

I'm trying to stay away from talking about beyond the implementation project. The day to day administration and support will differ with each company and it's IT team. BUT, your point is valid about this post not going far enough. There is so much more to consider before the best decision can be made.

There are several articles out there that compare Hyper-v to VMware but these comparisons need to be ever changing due to the many updates and upgrades being done on both sides. I will continue to add to the below list as I find out more data on this …