How to Choose Between Hyper-V and vSphere

A short whitepaper from Gartner comparing Microsoft's Hyper-V in Server 2012 and vSphere 5.5. The PoV is high-level, but outlines cost and functionality considerations when comparing the two hypervisors.  Key findings are:

• Hyper-V has made significant strides towards being an actual competitor with vSphere in terms of functionality and cost with the release of Server 2012
• Hyper-V may be suitable for small deployments where centralized management is not required.
• Functionally Hyper-V falls short to vSphere in SRM, non-Windows based guest support (e.g. live Linux snapshotting), DRS, and Storage DRS.
• Although Hyper-V now has equivalent technologies to VMware's HA and affinity rules, it is more complicated to implement and manage, requiring multiple tools
• vSphere still has a significant market lead over Microsoft, due in large part to the first-mover advantage and better hybrid cloud offerings

Although Microsoft may be moving from being simply a niche player in the hypervisor space, they are still a far cry from gaining significant market share from VMware.  Hyper-V has a significant OS footprint relative to that of ESXi (5GB vs 144MB respectively), requiring more patching and likely more downtime as a result.  Tools like SRM and DRS are integral to many organization's data center and DR strategies.  Lastly, while Hyper-V offers more hardware support than vSphere, this is really only an advantage for small organizations or home labs, as most enterprises have the resources and IT maturity to standardize hardware or purchase blade server technologies.

Dammit Apple, you ruin everything

Not one to miss out on an opportunity for free software/upgrades, I upgraded my 2011 Macbook Pro to OSX Maverick last weekend.  The upgrade generally went pretty well, although it was slow.  OSX got some minor face lifts, including the launcher menu with an opaque background:

Aside from that, nothing has really changed for me- I don't use Apple Chat/iChat, I don't intend to buy ebooks from Apple ever, and I don't own an iPhone or use iTunes.

What has significantly changed for me is Apple as decided to dumb down its nifty Wireless Diagnostic tool introduced with OSX Lion.  Gone are the days when I could monitor and track useful performance data for my wireless network connectivity from my MacBook.  It has since been replaced with a stripped-down, diluted utility that wraps up logs so you can send them to Apple for support...

F*ck you Apple.  Seriously.  You had such a great, useful, practical utility tucked away in your dumbed-down OS and you managed to ruin it and strip it of any meaningful utility.

Perhaps there is still a way to get the rich monitoring information once before available, but if there is, I haven't figured it out.  I'll continue to dig, but the fact that I have to do so is ridiculous- it was perfect before!

This may be the final tick in the box for me to leave OSX all together to a more useful and practical OS that leaves some semblance of respect for its users. Now where'd I leave that BSD Live CD...