A question came to me recently concerning my use of VMware ESXi on my home lab servers rather than Microsoft Hyper-V. I should of course acknowledge there are other options such as Linux and various other hypervisors but let’s stay on point for now.
At work I run both ESXi and Hyper-V, there are certainly features I’d like to play with on both and I need to keep my skill set up to date so I can’t really afford to miss out on one of them. That being said the issue was quickly resolved when I looked at some of the virtual appliances/simulators I wanted to test and do lab work on – many of them (at the time of writing) are still only available for VMware ESXi/Workstation. The second point that pushed me to VMware is the ability to nest Hyper-V inside ESXi but the inability to do it the other way round. As I am using two high end servers for my lab my physical hardware is limited in quantity but flush for resource. It is easy for me to deploy a Microsoft Server 2012 R2 or 2016 virtual machine on ESXi and then enable Hyper-V within this guest. This allows me to play with both hypervisors without having to rebuild my lab equipment or buy more physical kit.
I wouldn’t be surprised if over time my lab changes to suit my needs, I might perhaps sling Nutanix on and try their hypervisor ‘Acropolis’ or maybe something else, it just has to give me the maximum amount of flexibility to run anything and everything I could want.
Interestingly my original plan was always to install Microsoft Server 2016 Nano server on the bare metal and run a Windows 10 desktop on VMware workstation from my normal PC to manage everything. Maybe when some of these virtual appliances and simulators become available on Hyper-V I will give that a go.
I’d certainly be interested to hear what other people are using for home labs so feel free to drop a comment below or get in touch on Twitter @bytesizedalex
Hi. I am just jumping into those same waters (having migrated to ESXi just last week) and for the same reasons too. Even the devices available in both flavors seemed to be a more convoluted process to set up on Hyper-V. However, my goals were to look at the appliance(s), not compare and contrast the installation processes on Hyper-V vs. ESXi (the Cisco Nexus 1000v switch for example).
Anyway, like badges, it has become a hobby of mine to find and collect appliances … 80% of which I will likely never find the time to look at. lol
Hey Fritz,
I know exactly what you mean! I have simulators for EMC storage which I haven’t used in years but I keep them just in case!
Alex
Windows Server 2016 and Windows 10 Anniversary edition both have the ability to do nested virtualization finally, and there are a few articles floating round on using it to run ESXi on Hyper-V.
I’m not saying that this solves everything or means you should replace your solution with Hyper-V in the lab now, but I think the use cases where you need ESXi are slowly becoming less.
It’s also nice to see vendors starting to support hyper-V more and more, like EMC DD VE is Hyper-V compatible now with v6.
Hey Ben,
This is something I’ve been keeping an eye on, in fact I’m very tempted to rebuild using S2D and give it a play. As you say vendors are starting to build their appliances for native Hyper-V which is fantastic. Really exciting times to see the developments from all vendors – just need more time to try them all!
I concur with Ben. For home use, I am retiring my ESXi system and replacing it with Hyper-V 2016. While ESXi supported my legacy workloads in the past, I no longer have this requirement. Couple this with more free features in Hyper-V compared to the similar ESXi and my decision was made.
Cheers.
This is so true – I’m keeping a close eye on a couple old appliances that I use which don’t yet have a Hyper-V equivalent but it’s becoming much easier to look at migrating. I wouldn’t be surprised if there is a follow up post in the near future explaining why I moved away!