VMware ESX took home our Clear Choice award because in our performance and qualitative analysis of the hypervisor and the
first tier of management tools offered by each vendors it showed depth and maturity while Microsoft’s Hyper-V’s components
were both very Windows-focused and very rough.
Performance, as reported earlier this month, heavily favored VMware, although Hyper-V edged out ESX in a few contests. On the compatibility front, Microsoft’s Hyper-V’s early lead in the number of supported hardware platforms (based on the widespread
of support for Windows 2008 Server itself) is completely offset by a dearth of support for non-Windows virtual machine (VM)
operating systems. While VMware’s supported hardware list is shorter, its support of a comparatively vast number of operating
systems made us cheer (see compatibility story).
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