Hyper-V for VMware Administrators: Migration, Coexistence, and Management

Book Preface

Greetings! I’m Brien Posey. For those of you who don’t know me (or my work), I am a freelance technology writer and a 13-time Microsoft MVP. Given my background, it should come as no surprise that I spend a lot of time working with Microsoft’s Hyper-V. Even so, it wasn’t just my Hyper-V background that made me decide to write this book. There were actually a few different things.

One of the main reasons why I wanted to write this book was because I have had a lot of people asking me about Hyper-V migrations recently. Apparently, there are quite a few VMware shops that are either making the move to Hyper-V or are looking at the possibility of running multiple hypervisors. I thought that writing a book would be a way in which I could help with those sorts of projects. Before I move on, let me just say up front that I am not going to tell you that Hyper-V is superior to VMware. Conversely, I don’t believe that VMware is better than Hyper-V. Hyper-V got off to a bit of a rocky start in the Windows Server 2008 and 2008 R2 days, but today it is a very capable enterprise-class hypervisor.

There are some things that Hyper-V does better than VMware, but there are other things that VMware does better than Hyper-V. VMware and Hyper-V are both excellent hypervisors, and I am not writing this book as a way of bashing VMware.

The reason that I say that is to underscore the idea that I am not encouraging a migration from VMware to Hyper-V because I think that VMware is inadequate. Every organization has their own reasons for migrating, but oftentimes the real driving factor behind a migration is economics. In certain situations, Hyper-V can be much more cost effective than VMware. I am going to spend some time talking about licensing costs later on.

I also wanted to write this book because even though migrating from Hyper-V to VMware isn’t overly difficult, it can be a jarring experience. Hyper-V and VMware actually have a lot of similarities, but the management interfaces could not be more different. Back in the 2008–2010 time frame, I was working exclusively with Hyper-V. One day I was asked to work on a project that required me to use VMware. Even though I was familiar with the basic concepts that VMware uses, I have to confess that I felt like a fish out of water. Performing even the simplest of tasks took a lot of effort because I didn’t know my way around the VMware interface. Going from VMware to Hyper-V can be just as abrupt of a transition, so I wanted to write this book as a way of showing you what you need to know about Hyper-V, and how the various Hyper-V features compare to what you are currently using in a VMware environment.

With that said, let me give you an idea of what you can expect from this book. First, I am going to make this book as hands on as I possibly can. I am actually going to walk you through the migration process in a step-by-step manner.

Of course, blindly following a set of instructions would probably be a bad idea, so I am going to explain some things along the way. For the purposes of this book, I am going to assume that you have a basic working knowledge of VMware, but that you have never worked with Hyper-V before. Of course, if there is something that you already know about Hyper-V, you can always skip ahead rather than reading my explanation.