A large number of the production data centers running virtualization technology use VMware ESX. To this end, a lot of the knowledge base out there encompasses the VMware ESX product - this makes sense. So, when a new virtualization technology comes along, it naturally gets compared to ESX. One such virtualization technology that is new to the arena is Microsoft’s Hyper-V. Aaron Delp, a seasoned ESX engineer, has put together a few nice bullet points that will help an ESX engineer get more familiar with Microsoft Hyper-V. Following is an excerpt from Aaron’s points:

• Hyper-V is paravirtualized - paravirtualized means the virtual machine is “aware” (Microsoft uses the term enlightened) that it is virtualized. If the machine isn’t enlightened, it will run in emulation mode. Emulation mode requires a lot of context switching between user mode and kernel mode. This will understandably slow down performance.
• The Hyper-V “Service Console” is referred to as the Management Partition. This is a Windows VM with privileges into the kernel that other VMs do not have. This (at least on the surface) is similar to ESX’s Service Console.
• It is recommended to run Hyper-V on Windows Core (stripped down version with no GUI). The core version will consume less resources, require less patches, etc.
• Server 2008 has “roles” that determine the functions on the server. Hyper-V is recommended to be the only role on the server for production
• Hyper-V does not share memory pages
• Hyper-V has quick migration instead of VMotion

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