best hypervisor?

[C0bra]

Im wondering which hypervisors you hade the best experience in.

[Oshino Shinobu]

Depends what kind of environment you're using it in and your requirements really. 

 

Some are good for home users or small businesses that are entirely unsuitable for enterprise or large business use. And same the other way round, where solutions suitable for enterprise have a steep learning curve and are complex, to the point there are multiple levels of industry certifications to prove your knowledge of the systems. 

 

I've personally switched to unRAID and I think it's great as a Hypervisor for home use with a few VMs, but it's really a mixture of different uses including a hypervisor, rather than a dedicated one. At work we use VMWare ESXi and vSphere almost exclusively, other than cloud based VMs, as it's required for the sheer size and complexity of the systems my company manages.

 

In terms of ease of use, HyperV is the one I've had best experience with for Windows based guest systems, it's just run flawlessly, never had any stability issues and it's easy to configure and is pretty well documented. For overall use, it's hard to beat ESXi as a dedicated hypervisor as even HyperV is a feature/role on top of a full OS rather than a dedicated Hypervisor like ESXi. 

[Lurick]

Yup, an environment and use case will well direct your use case. If you're not running a lot of VMs then unRAID, TrueNAS, or another system could easily handle just a bit. I think TrueNAS and a few others do docker containers too alongside VM support allowing you to mix things up a bit as needed and conserve resources a bit more and simplify things. I've used ESXi a great deal and it's got a place but it's not the end all be all in my opinion and as mentioned your use case and environment can really be a huge factor/driver in your choice.

[Oshino Shinobu]

3 minutes ago, Lurick said:

Yup, an environment and use case will well direct your use case. If you're not running a lot of VMs then unRAID, TrueNAS, or another system could easily handle just a bit. I think TrueNAS and a few others do docker containers too alongside VM support allowing you to mix things up a bit as needed and conserve resources a bit more and simplify things. I've used ESXi a great deal and it's got a place but it's not the end all be all in my opinion and as mentioned your use case and environment can really be a huge factor/driver in your choice.

Docker is not to be understated for sure, especially for home use. I've migrated several of the VMs I used to host on HyperV over to Docker containers after moving to unRAID. Much lower footprint and easier to re-build them if they break. I've had to re-create my UniFi controller docker several times and it takes literally about 3 minutes to build a new one or restore from a config backup. 

 

Speaking of not being too enthused with ESXi. Some of the most senior technical people at my company hate ESXi and VMWare in general and have expressed multiple times they want to move to HyperV, so at least some of it does come down to personal preference as well. 

[wseaton]

If you prefer HyperV over VMware you're doing it wrong.

 

Type 1 hypervisors are all pretty good and efficient. HyperV core competes pretty good with VMware at a kernel level. 

 

Where HyperV falls short is too many clowns writing utilities for it. VMware keeps control over their ecosystem..Microsoft doesn't. This leads to backup software leaving TBs of orphaned differencing discs and other nonsense. Dont get me started on iSCSI. Microsoft is also increasingly apathetic towards on prem platforms because they want everybody in Azure.

 

For type 2 hypervisors pick yer poison. 

 

 

 

[dogwitch]

docker(a new update can crash older version of what you where using).

anyhow vmware,true nas and uraid.