VMware or Hyper-V for Developers [closed]

Question

I'm looking to replace a couple of machines in the office with a more powerful multi-processor machine running either VMware or Microsoft's Hyper-V with a view to hosting a mix of Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008 and Linux operating systems. The machines are used mainly for testing ASP.Net or Perl web sites. I don't need advanced features like live migration of running systems but it would be useful to be able to restore a machine to a known state. Performance is not really a big issue either unless one is noticeable faster than the other.

My question is: Should I play safe and go with VMware or is Hyper-V mature enough to be a candidate?

Answer 1

VMware did recently release a free version of ESXi recently.

VMware has a few advantages:
1. VMware virtual machines are portable across different types of hardware. IIRC, Hyper-V uses the drivers from the Host OS.
2. VMware virtual machines are portable across different VMware products (although you may need to use their converter tool to go from some hosted virtual machines to ESX or ESXi).
3. The VMware platforms have been in use much longer, and are quite mature products and generally better-known for troubleshooting.

With VMware, you could develop and test a virtual machine on your local system using VMware Workstation, Fusion, Server, or Player, and then deploy it to a production server later. With Hyper-V, I believe you would have to build the virtual machine on the target box for best results. If performance isn't really that big of an issue, then VMware Server may be the best option, for it can run most .vmx machines directly and is generally a bit easier to manage; if performance becomes critical, you still have the ESX or ESXi upgrade option that you can use those same virtual machines with.

This entry talks about how Virtual Server machines will not run on Hyper-V:
http://blogs.technet.com/jhoward/archive/2008/02/28/are-vhds-compatible-between-hyper-v-and-virtual-server-and-virtual-pc.aspx