Tips and Tricks from Posey
Windows 10 Hyper-V vs. Windows Server Hyper-V: Which Platform for Which Workloads?
The differences between these two versions of Hyper-V are quite significant, depending on what you intend to use them for. Here’s a quick look at each platform, from their features to licensing quirks to intended use cases.
Someone recently asked me if there are any real differences between Windows 10 Hyper-V and Windows Server Hyper-V.
The short answer is that Windows 10 Hyper-V is primarily intended for use as a development platform or by users who need to run applications that don’t run on Windows 10 (like a Linux application). Conversely, Windows Server Hyper-V is suitable for hosting production workloads.
Since the two platforms are designed for completely different purposes, they also have different feature sets and licensing considerations.
What Windows Server has on Windows 10
One of the most important differences is that Windows Server supports failover clustering and high availability for virtual machines (VMs), unlike Windows 10. Technically, failover clustering is not a Hyper- V, but high availability is a key capability for any production environment.
Similarly, Windows Server supports the Hyper-V Replica feature, which is not available on Windows 10. If you are unfamiliar with the replication feature, it allows individual virtual machines (and disks individual virtual hard drives associated with a virtual machine) to be asynchronous. synchronized with one or two other Hyper-V hosts. Thus, in the event of a primary host failure, a VM copy can be activated on one of the replicated hosts.
Another feature that exists in Windows Server Hyper-V but not in its Windows 10 counterpart is Virtual Fiber Channel. Virtual Fiber Channel allows a virtual machine to use a physical host bus adapter to connect to Fiber Channel storage.
Another Hyper-V feature that you can’t get in Windows 10 is discrete device assignment. The Discrete Device Assignment feature was introduced in Windows Server 2016 and allows a Hyper-V virtual machine to use a physical PCIe device. The Discrete Device Assignment feature works with Windows 10 guests, but the Hyper-V host must be running Windows Server 2016 or later.
Shared VHDX is an additional feature supported by Windows Server Hyper-V but not Windows 10 Hyper-V feature. Shared VHDX functionality was introduced in Windows Server 2012 R2 to facilitate the creation of guest clusters.
What Windows 10 has on Windows Server
It would be easy to assume that the version of Hyper-V included with Windows 10 is just a watered down version of the hypervisor included with Windows Server. Believe it or not, however, there are at least a few Hyper-V features that are in Windows 10 but not in Windows Server.
One of these features is Quick Create. The Quick Create feature helps Windows 10 users speed up the virtual machine creation process by giving them the option to select an operating system image from the Quick Create gallery.
Another Windows 10-only Hyper-V feature is the default virtual switch. Microsoft provides the default virtual switch to facilitate connectivity to virtual machines without having to manually create a virtual switch. As such, the default virtual switch is more of a convenience feature than one that provides a real difference in functionality.
The big picture
This is by no means an exhaustive list of all the differences between the two versions of Hyper-V. There are so many other things to consider. For example, Windows Server includes licenses to run Windows Server as a guest operating system (although licensing terms vary widely between Standard Edition and Datacenter Edition). You don’t get that with Windows 10 Hyper-V.
Similarly, Microsoft advises its customers not to run applications in a Windows Server Hyper-V parent partition. This restriction does not exist with Windows 10. It is almost certain that Windows 10 Hyper-V users will run both applications and virtual machines.
As you can see, there are considerable differences between the Hyper-V feature sets in Windows Server and Windows 10. These variations mainly indicate the differences in how Microsoft views the hypervisors used. Windows 10 Hyper-V is likely designed as a tool for a single user to host dev/test VMs or run applications that wouldn’t otherwise work. In contrast, Windows Server Hyper-V can host enterprise class workloads.
About the Author
Brien Posey is a 20-time Microsoft MVP with decades of IT experience. As a freelance writer, Posey has written thousands of articles and contributed to several dozen books on a wide variety of computing topics. Prior to going freelance, Posey was CIO for a national chain of hospitals and healthcare facilities. He has also served as a network administrator for some of the nation’s largest insurance companies and for the Department of Defense at Fort Knox. In addition to his ongoing work in computing, Posey has spent the past several years actively training as a commercial scientist-astronaut candidate in preparation for flying on a polar mesospheric cloud survey mission. from space. You can follow his spaceflight training on his website.
Comments are closed.