* Assumes servers have 2 processors with a maximum of 8 cores/processor System Center has Standard and Datacenter Management License Editions: SC uses a Management License model that charges based on the number of cores and managed operating system environments (OSEs). Hyper-V advanced features are available through the Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) component in Microsoft’s System Center (SC).

Once you have your trial environments in place, it can still be difficult to compare “advanced” features not only because similar features have different names, but also because functions don’t overlap completely, and it is not possible to do an apples-to-apples comparison. Fortunately, both VMware’s vSphere and Hyper-V’s System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) provide trial versions so you can test feature implementation for yourself and decide if free is good enough, or if a licensed feature is worth paying for. Or that free Failover Clustering works just as well for you as paying for VMware HA. However, VMware and Hyper-V implement features differently, and you may find paying for vMotion to be a better fit than free Live Migration. It is possible that all the virtualization features you require are available in the free version of Hyper-V or VMware. For example, Live Migration and Failover Clustering are available with Hyper-V, and the corresponding features in VMware – vMotion and VMware HA – are not available until you purchase a VMware “Essentials Plus” license. If you look at the features available in the free hypervisor versions, Hyper-V provides more functionality than ESXi. Which is better and how do you decide between them? Download our vSphere vs Hyper-V comparison matrix – both technologies can provide redundancies that will maximize your uptime and that will allow you to squeeze out the most performance.

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