I’ve gone back and forth on my excitement for Hyper-V 3.0. I’ve always been a Hyper-V fan, but still wary due to some of its limitations and have run VMware in my production environments, although I run Hyper-V in my home lab. I’ve also said that Microsoft should hold back a bit on their seeming over-the-top attacks on VMware with regard to how much Hyper-V 3.0 will erode VMware’s install base. That said, as time goes on, I get more excited about Hyper-V 3.0. Here are three awesome things coming to Hyper-V 3.0 that I wish were here right now:
- Ability to replicate Hyper-V virtual machines from any storage device to any other storage device. This feature will make it possible to implement affordable disaster recovery.
- New virtual switch. VMware has enjoyed an enterprise-class feature set with the distributed virtual switch. This kind of features comes to Hyper-V 3.0 with the name Extensible Virtual Switch and brings a lot to the table.
- Unlimited (sort of) Simultaneous Live Migrations and Storage Live Migrations. Microsoft indicates that an unlimited number of Live Migrations can take place at the same time (vSphere 5, 128 per data store). The same is true for Storage Live Migrations (vSphere 5, 8 per data store). I say “sort of” because, while there are no inherent Hyper-V-impose limitations, bandwidth limitations will play a significant factor here.
These are, by far, not all of the new features coming in Hyper-V 3.0, but there are ones that will have an impact on data centers everywhere.