Tool Providers Are Jumping on the Hyper-V Management Bandwagon

One thing that was apparent at this month's TechEd conference in Houston is that apparently everyone is joining the Hyper-V parade. While VMware still offers the dominant virtualization platform, Hyper-V has increasingly gained share in recent years and as a result, quite a few tools have appeared that offer improved support for Microsoft's hypervisor offering.

Among those talking up their extended Hyper-V support at TechEd were Savision, Veeam and Vision Solutions. Last year's release of Windows Server 2012 R2 and the latest release of System Center included major revisions of Hyper-V, which critics said made it suitable for large deployments. Hyper-V is also the underlying virtualization technology in the Microsoft Azure public cloud.

When VMware's ESX hypervisor first emerged, customers were willing to pay the company's licensing fees because of the savings they achieved by eliminating physical servers in favor of virtual environments. But because Hyper-V is free with Windows Server and it's now up to snuff, many IT decision makers are making the switch. Or at the very least, they are adding it to new server deployments.

"I think 2012 R2 release gave Hyper-V the momentum it needed," said Doug Hazelman, vice president of product strategy at Veeam and one of the hypervisor's early supporters. "Hyper-V is the fastest segment of our backup and recovery business." The company has added Hyper-V support in its new Veeam Management Pack  v7 for System Center.

The new management pack, which already supported VMware vSphere, can now run in Microsoft's System Center Operations Manager to provide improved management and monitoring of its Veeam Backup and Replication platform. Hazelman said administrators can use the Veeam Management Pack for organizations' VMware and Hyper-V environments. With the new management pack, administrators can access it right from the SCO console, he said.

For its part, Vision Solutions talked up its partnership with Microsoft (inked last fall) to help organizations migrate from VMware to Hyper-V. "We definitely have seen a pretty significant update with folks getting off of VMware and moving over to Hyper-V for multi-production servers," said Tim Laplante, director of product management at Irvine, Calif.-based Vision Solutions. "That's especially true when their VMware maintenance is coming due."

The company's Double Take Move migration tool got a good share of attention at this year's TechEd, even though Vision Solutions has offered it for a while. It's a viable alternative to Microsoft's own recently upgraded Virtual Machine Migrator.

At TechEd, Savision previewed a new release of its Cloud Reporter, which will generate reports on both Hyper-V and VMware infrastructure, said lead developer Steven Dwyer. "Its capacity planning, virtual machine rightsizing for Hyper V," Dwyer said of the new Cloud Reporter 1.7 release.

Cloud Reporter 1.7 will generate reports that show capacity of both VMware and Hyper-V together, Dwyer explained. In addition it will offer predictive analysis, which administrators can use for planning and budgeting.

Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 05/30/2014 at 10:38 AM