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.