Who has the bigger hypervisor footprint: VMware ESX/ESXi OR Hyper-V/Hyper-V Win 2008?
By Tarry Singh at 25 August, 2009, 9:53 am
Jeff Woolsey is going after VMware again, and this time its about the footprint of the hypervisor.
The question or more notably the things to ask should be these:
- How good-enough is Hyper-V vs VMware ESX
- How cheaper is Hyper-V vs VMware ESX
- How stable is Hyper-V vs VMware ESX
- How enterprise ready is Hyper-V vs VMware ESX
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And we aren’t even talking about all those cool features that AppSpeed and the frills that VMware is releasing. We just want basic functionality and some good-enough virtualization. Do however note that VMware’s Standard editions do also give you good enough virtualization. Hyper-V offers the same.
Time For Some Analysis
With VMware’s own metrics in mind, I decided we should perform an apples to apples comparison. Specifically, over a 12 month period from June 30th 2008 to June 30th 2009, comparing: Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 (R1) and VMware ESXi 3.5 in terms of numbers of patches, size of patches and availability. I specifically chose these versions because I wanted to take a reasonable, historical sample size (12 months) of both platforms. Both Hyper-V R2 and VSphere have RTM’d within the last 90 days and that wouldn’t be statistically relevant.
What did we compare? Wanting to keep the comparisons as close as possible, here’s what we analyzed:
- VMware: Security and Critical Patches
- Microsoft: Critical and Important Patches
Both Microsoft and VMware also have optional patches, but I didn’t include this type because they are optional, so we could focus on the most acute patches.. Finally, let me very clear about the Microsoft patches. These counts include ALL critical and recommended patches, meaning if there was a critical patch for IE or some other Windows component I counted it. Had I ignored these types of patches, that wouldn’t be a fair comparison.
Comparison #1: Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 & VMware ESXi 3.5
Disk Footprint & Patch Count. Here’s what we found:
- Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008: 26 patches, totaling 82 MB.
- VMware ESXi 3.5: 13 patches, totaling over 2.7 GB.
Yes, I said over 2.7 GB. To put it another way,
- VMware ESXi 3.5 had a 33x greater patch footprint
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Hi Terry,
I work for VMware, and know something about ESXi patches. Jeff is making an invalid comparison that needs correction.
ESXi 3.5 is roughly 200 megabytes, small enough that it can be released as a complete firmware image. So, ESXi patches are complete firmware images that supersede each other with the changes integrated into the rest of the image, so adding their sizes the way Jeff does is an extreme over-exaggeration of ESXi 3.5’s code churn. VMware would have to have changed every single line of code in ESXi for every patch to make Jeff’s numbers true.
I’m not sure that even if you could get the actual changed binary sizes from VMware that you could make a valid comparison about stability and reliability. To get a significant comparison, I’d just ask customers which system crashes less.
ESX Purple screens… I’m not running Hyper-V in production yet, but we’ve had blades dumping to purple off and on for the last year.
And remember ESX 3.5 update 2? Yea, we had 3 days where we were unable to power on VMs.
To get a significant comparison, I’d just ask customers the last time a patch made thier VMs unusable.
Clarification on that first line. I’ve yet to have Hyper-V dump, tho it’s not under heavy load. ESX had been dumping on and off for the last year or so. (VMWare claimed it was an Intel problem, saying they weren’t releasing a fix for it… I don’t know what the end resolution was, but either Dell Firmware or VMware fixed this issue… but it took 9-10 months)
Another side point, yes, the storage is a poor comparison, but your last comment annoys me. VMWare/ESX is not as wonderful as the publicity they get.
This “Analysis” makes no sense…
Footprint, as I understand it, means the resources (disk, cpu, memory) the Hypervisor uses for itself and not for the VMs.
Patches sizes and number means nothing if you can do it hot and with no downtime keeping the system secure…