MMS2012 session AM-B323 Understand How Hyper-V and System Center Stand Up against the Competition

One of the many breakout sessions at Microsoft Management Summit 2012 (MMS2012) was session AM-B323 titled Understand How Hyper-V and System Center Stand Up against the Competition

As I am always interested in stories from Microsoft about their solutions versus VMware I decided to view the recorded session. My review is at the end of this posting. For more features comparisons see my posting titled Microsoft Hyper-V 3.0 compared to VMware vSphere 5 

Summary of the session: with Window Server 2012 and System Center 2012 customers get a lot more functionality for a lower cost compared to VMware solutions.

The session  which lasts 1 hour 14 minutes can be viewed for free for all by going to the MMS2012 site. After login select Keynote and Sessions in the top menu, then Application Management. If you do not to bother about login:
The recording of session AM-B323 can be viewed here.
The PowerPoint slides can be downloaded here.

The abstract of the session is:
With the launch of Microsoft System Center 2012, Microsoft is bringing to market the most comprehensive and integrated datacenter and cloud management solution. When combined with Hyper-V, it enables customers to build autonomous, efficient and cost effective private clouds, and enables customers to focus on what’s important to them: their applications and services. In this session, we compare and contrast the Microsoft technologies with vSphere and vCenter from VMware, and showcase why Microsoft offers the best solution for your datacenter today and in the future.  (Speaker(s): Matt McSpirit; Vlad Joanvic)

I think it is a very good session. Everyone currently focused on VMware vSphere should spent some time to see what Microsoft is delevering with Hyper-V and SC2012. Although presented by a Microsoft employee I did not find much bias or incorrect information on the competitor. Ofcourse in all marketing only the current and future features of Hyper-V/SCVMM are compared to those of vSphere. Besides Fault Tolerance which was kind of downgrade the speaker did not notice vSphere features like SDRS, Storage I/O Control etc etc.

Matt McSpirit clearly explains what Hyper-V and SCVMM 2o12 has to offer and what VMware has to offer. The session explains a lot of about functionality and vision of Microsoft on private cloud and management of it. It explains the restrictions in functionality of vCenter Operations Suite. vCOPS is focused on the virtual machine and does not have knowledge of the workload running in it (Exchange, SQL, SharePoint etc).
The sessions explains the current features of Hyper-V version 2, the free Windows Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 SP1. Noticed a small mistake where a slide mentions ESXi 5.0 being the free hypervisor offer from VMware. Obviously the free hypervisor is called vSphere Hypervisor. In the last part of the session the new features of Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V are discussed. Lots of new features!  Even distributed switches seems to be a new feature of Hyper-V which I was not aware of. This is a version of Cisco’s Nexus 1000V Series switch designed to support Hyper-V. It is a distributed virtual switch that fits Hyper-V virtual machines with virtual Ethernet cards that can be managed via another component of the switch, Cisco’s Virtual Supervisor Module. Also I/O controls seem to be included in Hyper-V. See the slide at the end of this posting. I /think Microsoft will offer network i/o control but not storage i/o control.

Finally the costs of Microsoft versus VMware solution are compared. This is the typical apples to oranges compare which I discussed earlier in this posting: Mythbusting:Can a VMware private cloud cost 5 to 16 times more than Microsoft private cloud?

I do believe Microsoft has a strong valueable and cost effective solution for private cloud using Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012. We will have to see how well these new features will perform and work together. I am very curious how VMware will respond to this.

The slide below is taken from the session and shows the features of vSphere versus Hyper-V R2 and Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V.