100% Windows VMs. Proxmox or Hyper V

[francisco.]

Hi forum,

I have a cluster and 99% VMs are Linux based but now I will set up +30 VMs Windows based.

Question, must I use Hyper V for getting more performance or continue with Proxmox?

Pros: Free
Cons: Windows

Suggestions?

Regards.
Francisco

 

[gkovacs]

We run Hyper-V alongside our Proxmox cluster, and while we do not have comparative benchmarks, performance of Windows under Hyper-V is top-notch (but it is also fine under KVM). So I don't think that you should decide based on general hypervisor performance, but rather these factors:

- compatibility and issues with hardware/software (Hyper-V is expected to have less bugs/compatibility issues with Windows machines)
- storage infrastructure (is your SAN/NAS set up for Proxmox able to provide for Hyper-V, does it provide decent performance)
- backup strategy (Hyper-V does not include built-in automated backup facilities, replicating the backup features of Proxmox for 30 guests incurs significant licensing charges)
- cluster management solution (while the Hyper-V hypervisor itself is free, management of it is not)

You can find some more info in this thread:
http://forum.proxmox.com/threads/12241-KVM-vs-Hyper-v-2012-Performances

 

[francisco.]

We run Hyper-V alongside our Proxmox cluster, and while we do not have comparative benchmarks, performance of Windows under Hyper-V is top-notch (but it is also fine under KVM). So I don't think that you should decide based on general hypervisor performance, but rather these factors:

- compatibility and issues with hardware/software (Hyper-V is expected to have less bugs/compatibility issues with Windows machines)
- storage infrastructure (is your SAN/NAS set up for Proxmox able to provide for Hyper-V, does it provide decent performance)
- backup strategy (Hyper-V does not include built-in automated backup facilities, replicating the backup features of Proxmox for 30 guests incurs significant licensing charges)
- cluster management solution (while the Hyper-V hypervisor itself is free, management of it is not)

You can find some more info in this thread:
http://forum.proxmox.com/threads/12241-KVM-vs-Hyper-v-2012-Performances

You're right. I will think about that.

Thank you.
Francisco.

 

[wahmed]

The only viable reason i think to use Hyper-V would be if you are planning to use RDP. Without doubt RDP or Remote Desktop will have better performance on Hyper-V since you will be able to take advantage of RemoteFX in Hyper-V. Other than that i dont think there is any good reason. But this is not to say that you will not have good performance for RDP on Proxmox. We have several RDP customers on our cloud with Proxmox as only platform. RDP performance good enough to even play YouTube video without noticeable lag. But only playable in original view and not full screen.
We also have several MS SQL Servers on Proxmox that serves other clients large finance database. We use for Ceph for all our storage. Going to partial cluster with Hyper-V would mean setting up another storage.

 

[kaufenpreis]

With respect to some of the cons, Proxmox VE performs well enough with Windows if you use KVM's virtio devices in lieu of emulated hardware. However, the freely available virtio drivers are not WHQL-certified, which produces annoying error messages when you attempt to load them.

With respect to the lack of Mac OS X support, a large part of this is due to Apple's terms of use for OS X. I can't really blame Proxmox or the KVM folks for not pursuing Mac OS X support since doing so would violate Mac OS X's EULA and could potentially get them or their customers sued.

Lastly, I can't say that I've ever had any stability issues with the Proxmox VE web interface, but using the graphical console can be a struggle. I don't think I've gotten it to work in anything except Mozilla Firefox.

 

[Stewge]

The only reason I'd look at Hyper-V nowadays is if I specifically needed RemoteFX via Virtual Desktops (ie, virtualized Win7/8 machines per user). Even then, I've found even this RemoteFX scenario doesn't perform well enough to do anything practical with the VM. Alternatively, I can use PCI-E passthrough (granted it's fairly experimental in PVE atm) to some Win8.1 virtuals and use one of many 3D streamer applications and play games remotely (Steam in-home streaming is superb and can be made to stream the whole desktop). It's also worth mentioning, that RemoteFX STILL works in 2012R2 without a vGPU. It simply offloads the encoding to CPU instead, so throw more cores at it and it's no different to Hyper-V.

I'm happily running a few dozen Windows VMs (usually Win7, a few Win2008R2 and Win2012R2) without issues. Performance is good and the only time I have serious stability issues is usually a result of Windows patches.

The primary reason I prefer PVE to Hyper-V is backups. Hyper-V has no backup system but does link into the standard Windows backup system is complete garbage. Even if you initiate a Windows Backup from the hypervisor, certain scenarios and applications can actually interrupt the backup process from within the VM

As said by gkovacs above, performance-wise most hypervisors are pretty close now and the real difference is in other features you may need, of which Hyper-V has very little.