Compare Hyper-V vs VMware
Here you will find out:
- what are VMware and Hyper-V
- Hyper-V vs VMware
- how DiskInternals can help you
Are you ready? Let's read!
What is VMware?
VMware vSphere is a cloud-centric virtualization system.
It consists of many components that allow you to create a specific virtual machine, meaning that Windows, Linux (various distros) or FreeBSD can be installed on this "separate computer". You can switch, for example, from Windows to Linux with a single keystroke, without bothering with tedious reboots.
What is Hyper-V?
Hyper-V is another visualization option and is a hypervisor developed by Microsoft.
This visualization platform is best suited for large corporations when the system appears to be one, and each computer can work individually without affecting the work of other computers.
Hyper-V can have many components for creating IT structures from a minimum to a higher level.
Architecture comparison
Hyper-V is based on its parent and child sections. These are particular areas of isolation within which information systems operate.
The parent section is used to create and manage the child partitions of the system and includes the WMI provider. It, in turn, provides an interface for remote administration.
The host operating system runs in the parent section, as does the virtualization stack; guest operating systems are located in child sections.
Only the parent partition has access to the hardware; children can interact with the hardware only with the permission of the parent partition.
VMware vSphere consists of many components that are combined into one system for creating VMs:
- ESX and/or ESXi hypervisors; in fact, everything works on them
- A server that connects hypervisors to the VMware vCenter Server control center
- Other important components that are needed to increase VM capabilities; their composition may be different and depends on the selected license
In both cases, the VM will have two file systems. One is the parent on which the VM is stored (NTFS / VMFS), and the second is the guest, which is inside the virtual disk (NTFS / EXT / ZFS / XFS ...).
Memory comparison
Hyper-V and VMware are two major visualization tools and which hypervisor to use depends on each individual’s needs.
As for Hyper-V, dynamic memory management is a priority here. This allows you to allocate memory to the virtual machine in accordance with the requests of the VM, that is, to allocate as much as is necessary for basic loading and simple operation. There is also a redistribution of memory between running virtual machines, which leads to an increase in the consolidation coefficient of virtual machines on the Hyper-V R2 host server up to 40%. Dynamic Memory has the ability to remove unused memory pages from the virtual machine and transfer them to the most needing VM on the host - this can significantly increase the performance of the VM.
While a little is more complicated, there are several memory management mechanisms that interact with themselves to increase performance. Memory management here goes through a host that uses a certain amount of memory for itself, and it distributes the rest to virtual machines. All this is divided into blocks and when one block of the partition is full, it is redistributed to the disk.
VMware Snapshots vs Hyper-V Checkpoints
These visualization systems can restore prior states of a system after its failure. In the same sense, this function works differently in VMware and Hyper-V.
So, the differences between VMware and Hyper-V are:
- Snapshots are located in the virtual machine itself, and control points on the host (however, they are available for export)
- The maximum number of images is 32, and the breakpoints in Hyper-V are 64
- VMware has the ability to upload snapshots in production, but in Hyper-V, there is no such possibility
In general, Hyper-V vs VMware is a long-running competition, but few can definitely say which visualization is better since both platforms are good and well designed. Often, the question is a price, so the choice is strictly up to the individual.
DiskInternals software for Hyper-V and VMware
Damaged, deleted files are Hyper-V and VMware easy to recover using certain DiskInternals programs:
- Partition Recovery software is perfect for recovering Hyper-V files. It restores files to partitions and has a deep scan option. There is no limit for recovery, which is especially useful when restoring a VM.
- If you virtualize Windows, then NTFS Recovery will be the best option for finding and recovering files of any type. The recovery mechanism and algorithm are approximately the same as for Partition Recovery, but this program works exclusively with file systems NTFS, NTFS4, and NTFS5.
- For VMware recovery, you will need VMFS Recovery. It is purposefully configured to recover VMware disks and is designed for professionals. This program mounts virtual disks into local disks and restores VMDK files stored on disks formatted by the VMware ESX / ESXi server. Unicode support is also available here. Any recovered data is exported to local or remote locations (including FTP).