Beim VMware-Blog von Eric Horschman wurde vor wenigen Stunden der Artikel “Hyper-V with Server Core – Too Dry and Crunchy for our Taste” veröffentlicht. In zwei Videos wird die Installation und Konfiguration eines iSCSI Shared Storage verglichen. Wie das Ergebniss interpretiert werden kann / soll, ist natürlich jedem frei überlassen. Aber VMware versucht mit Sicherheit ihr Produkt besser aussehen zu lassen…
This first video shows every step required to install Hyper-V and ESXi on a fresh machine. We kept count of the elapsed time, reboots, mouse clicks and keystrokes each product needed and it clearly shows the huge advantage the truly thin and OS-free ESXi architecture has in installation speed and simplicity. ESXi goes from bare-metal to fully installed in one-third the time, half the mouse clicks, hundreds fewer keystrokes and just one reboot vs. seven compared to Hyper-V. The simplicity of the ESXi wizard-driven installation is striking compared to the arduous process needed to first get the Server Core OS installed and then configure Hyper-V in a command line environment.
Our second video starts where the first left off and takes Hyper-V and ESXi through the steps needed to configure two iSCSI datastores for VM use. iSCSI setup is a standard task for any virtualization user that wants to take advantage of shared storage for VM migration and high availability. ESXi’s Windows-based Virtual Infrastructure client makes the iSCSI setup quick and easy. For Hyper-V, the “Windows you know” is nowhere to be seen. Instead, working with Server Core requires you to key in a long sequence of obscure commands to configure iSCSI initiators and targets, partitions and file systems. We generously showed the Hyper-V setup executed with no delays, although it took us hours of digging through Microsoft documents and knowledgebase articles to find the right commands to use when configuring iSCSI in Server Core.
Our Conclusion: Server Core plus Hyper-V is for Experts Only. VMware has put great effort into making ESXi the easiest and fastest hypervisor to install and configure and these videos clearly show the results. Getting the OS out of the hypervisor plays a big part in the streamlined simplicity of ESXi as there is no general purpose OS to configure and manage and the reliability and security issues accompanying the tens of millions of lines of code an OS brings along are eliminated. Microsoft’s OS-centric Hyper-V architecture adds many steps to the setup and puts their users in a quandary: either A) they install Hyper-V on a full Windows Server 2008 OS and deal with the frequent patching and security fixes Windows requires; or, B) they follow Microsoft’s best practice guidelines and suffer with the limitations of Server Core. As the videos show, the tradeoffs with Server Core are daunting — Windows administrators will find their familiar GUI tools are missing and they’ll be left to spend a lot of quality time with search engines tracking down documentation on Microsoft’s obscure command line utilities.
In der nachfolgenden Grafik wird der benötigte Aufwand für die Installation noch entsprechenden gegenübergestellt:

Der OS Streaming Solution von Citrix, der Provisioning Server (PVS), hält immer grösseren Einzug in den Datacentern. Immer mehr Kunden setzen dabei auch auf VMware ESX als Hardware für die PVS Target Devices. Besonders im Zusammenhang mit XenDesktop kann dies ein sehr interessantes Konstrukt sein. Der Erfolg von virtualisierten XenApp Server lassen wir in diesem Fall mal im Raum stehen…