Hyper-V ‘standalone’ (on baremetal) with RHEL/CentOS 6.x guest VM

hyper-vhyper-v-server-2012rhel6vmware-esxi

My exposure to virtualization has been limited to Virtualbox &VMware-player on Desktops, and to VMWare ESXi &KVM on Linux server, and exclusively with Linux guests (RHEL/CentOS). So please pardon my limited knowledge of Windows server — terminology, product offerings etc.

My software product, is presently supported on RHEL6.4, on baremetal servers and also on virtual servers in VMWare ESXi & KVM. I am presently evaluating adding support for Microsoft Hyper-V, however reading the Wikipedia page, I learnt that Hyper-V is related-to/part-of MS Windows Server 2012-R2 and that it supports only up to RHEL6.3! On Microsoft website, I wastaken to the page for MS Windows Server 2012-R2, where it appears that Hyper-V is not a standalone virtualization product but perhaps part of Windows Server 2012-R2 (embedded feature?), and that MS Windows Sever 2012, needs to be in an active-partition of the baremetal server, for Hyper-V to be able to virtualize additional servers. Also, I read this comparison between Hyper-V and VMWare-ESXi. So my questions are:

  • Is my understanding correct that Hyper-V is not a standalone product ?
  • Is RHEL support limited to 6.3 only ? It is nearly a year that 6.4 was released, yet I didn't find any information on roadmap / support plan for Hyper-V for this guest OS, or did I miss anything ?
  • Is there no free version / evaluation version of Hyper-V (which one could use to try before buying) ?
  • Is what VMware writes in it's comparison, really true that to have Hyper-V you have a min. of 5GB and typically 10GB footprint of baremetal installation ?
  • Finally, there seem to be some serious performance concerns for someone moving from VMWare ESXi to Hyper-V. Is this true ?

I found a lot of resources on running Windows Server as guest VMs on Hyper-V, but very little on running Linux guest VMs on Hyper-V, which leads me to think that Hyper-V is perhaps not so well suited for the latter purpose (running Linux guests). While the answer may be somewhat open-ended and more of an opinion, but if someone can provide clear reading material that discusses these aspects, in a neutral manner, would really appreciate.

Best Answer

Here are some answers for you:

  • Yes, Hyper-V is part of the Windows operating system, it's not a standalone product.
  • RHEL guests are fully supported up to version 6.4 on Hyper-V systems, both the ones based on Windows Server 2012/R2 and the previous ones based on Windows Server 2008 R2.
  • There is a free version of Hyper-V; is called "Hyper-v Server" and is freely available to download and run; it's a stripped-down version of Windows Server which only supports the Hyper-V role. You can find it here.
  • However, the parent OS is still a full (or semi-full) Windows Server system, thus it obviously has a bigger footprint than ESXi.
  • Performance can differ between hypervisors, but not so much; talking about "serious performance concerns" really smells of propaganda. Anyway, you should of course perform some load tests and see for yourself.
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