Hyper-V vs VMware vsphere architecture comparison

VMware and Microsoft's two giants have had years of experience in server virtualization-and, of course, the former has been a major focus for the market more than 10 years ago, compared with a much shallower seniority. IT staff or organizations have no choice but to actively grasp the differences between the Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware vsphere architectures and proactively understand the strengths and weaknesses of both technologies. Only in this way can they provide an ideal virtualization solution for employees or customers, or deploy it to a production environment.

In the face of the dilemma between VMware vsphere and Microsoft Hyper-V, we need to take a careful look at the many important components they contain, but from a schema perspective, the following components play the most critical role in choosing the ideal server virtualization product:

· Device driver positioning in the architecture;

· Control layer components;

· Manage program layer components;

In general, virtualization vendors typically provide the following three types of virtualization schemas, respectively:

· Type 2 VMM

· Type 1 VMM

· Hybrid VMM

Since this article does not elaborate on the specific meaning of three types of virtualization architectures, the content is focused on the Typer 1 VMM. Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware use the Type 1 VMM architecture to implement their own server virtualization technologies.

Type 1 VMM can be further divided into two broad categories, namely monolithic Hypervisor design (SCM) and microkernelized Hypervisor design (micro-kernel management program). Both designs use a three-tier structure in different components of a virtualized product.

The lowest level is called the "hardware Layer", and the virtualization feature relies on the hypervisor layer, which runs directly on the hardware layer. The top level is called the "control Layer", and the overall goal of the control layer is to control the component objects running in that layer and provide the virtual machines with the necessary components to communicate with the management program layer.

Note: The hypervisor layer is sometimes referred to as the "VMM layer" or "VM kernel layer".

Design of micro-kernel management program

Microsoft Hyper-V uses a micro-kernel management program that does not force the device driver to function as part of the hypervisor layer--device drivers operate independently in a "control layer", as shown in the following illustration:

Single-chip management program design

As you can see from the figure below, VMware's vsphere is based on a monolithic management program, which requires management programs to identify the device driver and manage it by the management program layer. Based on the figure below, we can intuitively understand that device drivers are part of the management program layer:

The device drivers in the hypervisor must be developed and included in the hypervisor layer, otherwise we will not be able to use the Vsphere virtualization product. You can't run VMware vsphere directly above the hardware, and the product doesn't support this type of usage.

VMware vsphere runs its components in the management program layer as shown in the figure above. These product components include resource scheduling, distributed file systems, and so on. The network protocol stack component that is used to deploy the VMware network is also managed by the management program layer. The storage stack component allows the control layer component to access the storage device.

The monolithic Management program architecture has the following advantages:

· The control work of the virtualization product component does not need to use the operating system, compared to the Microsoft Hyper-V uses the Kernel Management program architecture, this is also the monolithic solution most outstanding superiority.

· Administrators do not need to install security patches for components running in the control layer.

The disadvantages of monolithic management program architecture:

· Without relevant support, VMware's vsphere cannot run directly above the hardware. But VMware has come up with a list of compatible hardware that allows users to successfully run VMware vsphere. You can find specific information on VMware's official website (http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php).

· VMware vsphere is not secure enough. Because VMware provides the APIs necessary to access the hypervisor layer, malicious code can be injected into a hacker with "management layer" privileges to gain control over all virtual machine systems on the vsphere server.

· The initialization time is longer. In this set of schemas, the initialization of the virtual machine kernel depends on the number of device drivers it contains.

· Because device driver initialization is part of the "Manage program layer" initialization, any external code that goes into the management layer is likely to cause a startup/initialization delay, or even a server suspension, if the corruption occurs.

Summary

In this article, we discuss the differences between Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware vsphere Two scenarios, and learn what virtualization architecture The two virtualization products take-the Microsoft Hyper-V Micro-kernel management program architecture and VMware Vsphere Monolithic Management program architecture.

We also talked about the two most noteworthy strengths and weaknesses, which the IT team or organization should be able to reap, help them choose the most ideal virtualization product based on the production environment and fully realize its ancillary value.