You may have seen the "Smoked by Windows Phone" ad campaign, where a Windows Phone does something faster than another phone. Well how about "Smoked by Hyper-V Server" challenge?
As part of my initiative to "Do IT the Microsoft way", I set about switching over from VMware ESXi to Hyper-V. After installing Hyper-V Server 8 Beta, I noticed it seemed to boot a lot faster. This gave me the idea to have my own little "Smoked by Hyper-V Server" challenge.
For this challenge, I used the exact same server, and timed how long it took to boot, starting with the server completely powered off, and ending when a logon screen became available. The server used was an old Intel Core 2 Duo 6400 2.13GHz with only 4GB of RAM, and three 80 GB SATA hard drive.
VMWare ESXi 4.1 Boot time: 6 minutes and 23 seconds.
Hyper-V Server 8 Beta Boot time: 59 seconds.
Both of these are FREE bare metal hypervisors. As you can see, even on those very old hardware, Hyper-V Server boots almost 6x faster than ESXi!
Josh M. Bryant is currently a Director of Technical Product Management at Tanium where he builds products that help customers overcome the challenges of managing very large scale computing environments. Prior to joining Tanium, he was a Premier Field Engineer at Microsoft specializing in Microsoft Exchange Server, and then later a Cybersecurity Architect specializing in Compromise Recovery.