Virtualize with Hyper-V
Reduce Costs & TCO
You are under increasing pressure to reduce costs and ensure the best return on investment possible. With Microsoft Virtualization you can lower your total cost of ownership (TCO) by:
- Reducing power consumption and datacenter space
- Increasing hardware utilization
- Lowering upfront costs, including licensing fees
- Simplifying application and desktop lifecycle management
- Lowering operational costs for both maintenance and training
- Leveraging your Windows Server skills already in place
- Utilizing already purchased Windows Server capabilities
Increase Availability of Services
Microsoft Virtualization gives you the opportunity to increase the availability of services, thereby increasing end user satisfaction. With Microsoft Virtualization you can increase availability by:
- Improving service levels
- Minimizing disruption t services
- Enhancing desktop business continuity
- Providing access to applications regardless of location
- Reducing application and user data deployment time
Improve Business Agility
Microsoft Virtualization helps your business become more flexible and adaptable. You can provide the IT resources your organization needs when you need them, and improve business agility by:
- Integrating physical, virtual, and application management
- Accelerating responses to changing business needs
- Performing flexible desktop deployments
- Easily migrating to a new version of Windows
- Providing capacity on demand
Virtualize with Microsoft
Comprehensive Virtualization Solutions
Microsoft virtualization offerings span from the desktop to the datacenter and into the cloud. Regardless of where you plan to use Microsoft virtualization, we provide comprehensive and customer-centric solutions that give you more choice, flexibility, integration and cost savings than VMware.
A Platform You Know with Virtualization Built-In
Microsoft believes virtualization should be an integral part of your IT infrastructure, so we built Hyper-V into Windows Server 2008 R2. This means you can easily integrate it with your existing infrastructure and management tools. Since Hyper-V is the “Windows you know,” you can use the in-house expertise you already have. In fact, if you know Windows, you know virtualization.
Unlike VMware vSphere, which adds another layer to your infrastructure and requires a separate skill set and training, with Microsoft you don’t have to spend valuable resources and time on learning a new skill set. There’s no need to dedicate specialized IT staff to manage your hypervisors.
Physical, Virtual and Cross-Platform Management
The more you virtualize, the more complex your environment can become—and the more critical management is to enabling a cost-effective, dynamic infrastructure. Microsoft System Center Management Suite Datacenter (SMSD) gives you a wide variety of integrated management functionality for your physical and virtual environments, and is the only solution that lets you manage Hyper-V and VMware, all through one pane of glass.
Microsoft lets you manage virtual and physical environments and uses common deployment, provisioning, monitoring, and backup methodologies across both. VMware’s answer to management is to use Virtual Infrastructure Enterprise and Virtual Center, but even this combination falls short: you still can’t manage multiple hypervisors, physical resources or applications.
Virtualization for the Desktop
Microsoft provides more comprehensive, flexible virtualization solutions than VMware for desktop virtualization.
The chart below will clarify some of the feature differences between Microsoft and VMware’s desktop virtualization offerings. Notice that Microsoft’s solution is more scalable and flexible, while offering integrated management for both virtual desktops and physical computers.
More Choice in the Cloud
Microsoft provides comprehensive cloud computing solutions that traverse the entire stack - from public to private to hosted cloud infrastructures.
The chart below will clarify some of the capability differences between Microsoft and VMware’s cloud offerings. Notice that Microsoft’s cloud solution has better management, more choices for cloud deployments, and free solution accelerator toolkits.
More Value for Less Money than VMware
For datacenter virtualization infrastructure and management tools, Microsoft’s solutions simply make more sense. Here’s why:
- VMware is six times more expensive than Microsoft - the numbers speak for themselves
- Microsoft offers its virtualization and management solutions at lower cost and higher value for customers.
- Microsoft's server solution costs approximately one-sixth the cost of a comparable solution from VMware*.
More Features for Your Money than VMware
Microsoft provides many capabilities that VMware does not and cannot offer.
This chart compares VMware Enterprise core features with Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and System Center Management core features. As you can see, Microsoft is ahead in many of the areas required for a robust desktop to datacenter virtualization and management solution.
A Free, Feature Rich Hypervisor with Microsoft Hyper-V Server
You get live migration and clustering for free with
Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2, a stand-alone offering that contains only the hypervisor. These features are available at no additional charge and provide the following benefits for customers:
- Support for live migration for “zero downtime” planned migrations
- Support for host clustering for unplanned downtime protection
- Lower total cost of ownership compared to VMware ESX 3i
- Improved scalability with support for 1 TB host memory and up to 8 sockets