{"id":1901,"date":"2013-09-10T04:26:03","date_gmt":"2013-09-10T04:26:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.atumvirt.com\/?p=1901"},"modified":"2013-09-10T04:26:03","modified_gmt":"2013-09-10T04:26:03","slug":"it-cant-just-be-me-a-rant-on-hyper-v-and-scvmm-2012s-failings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/avtempwp.azurewebsites.net\/2013\/09\/it-cant-just-be-me-a-rant-on-hyper-v-and-scvmm-2012s-failings\/","title":{"rendered":"It Can’t Just Be Me – A Rant On Hyper-V and SCVMM 2012’s Failings"},"content":{"rendered":"

After having a rather rough start to a school year<\/a> (read: ass whooped) it’s time to unleash some hatred that has been building for several years. \u00a0I’ll try to give a fair shake, but be warned, there are years of bottled up emotions \"Hyper-V<\/a>here.<\/p>\n

Early on, Hyper-V was being touted as a serious competitor to ESX. \u00a0I was skeptical at the time given how well ESX worked and how long it had to mature, but I wanted to give Hyper-V a fair shake. \u00a0There were a number of comparisons at the time that gave it an “ok” grade but none of the ones I found really ripped it a new one. \u00a0They all agreed on two points: \u00a0It loads virtual machines, and is free.<\/p>\n

However, these two points do not an enterprise virtualization platform make. \u00a0“Don’t worry, Hyper-V 2.0 in 2008 R2 will fix these woes!” they said. \u00a0So, evaluate 2008 R2 I did. \u00a0We had a number of VMs that we needed to run. \u00a0At the time, ESX had no free option, so we decided to run Hyper-V. \u00a0My experience was basically the same as all the other reviewers: \u00a0It loads virtual machines and is free. \u00a0The difference was, I hated it. \u00a0I hated the stupid interface. \u00a0I hated the buggy GUI. \u00a0I hated the stupid limited OS requirements for networking (teaming?! standby nics? wru?!). \u00a0I really hated just about everything about it. \u00a0I was told by fantatical Hyper-V evangelists that I was just lacking SCVMM, and that everything is taken care of with it. \u00a0So, I held of judgement and said, “meh” then switched the host to ESXi when it was free.<\/p>\n

Years passed and our VDI pilot initiative came up. \u00a0I did a POC with ESXi and Hyper-V. \u00a0In the Hyper-V POC I demonstrated that VMs do in fact load, but for the most part the user buy-in was done using VMware. \u00a0When it came to implement our pilot, Hyper-V won out due to cost savings. \u00a0(It’s free and don’t need no fancy features, remember?!). \u00a0I immediately hated it. \u00a0It became clear quite quickly that the consultant designing our VDI solution had extremely limited experience with Hyper-V, let alone Citrix on top of Hyper-V, and led to some really awkward conversations like, “Lets go to technet and read what it says.” \u00a0Ok, thanks. \u00a0I’d like my $300\/hr back please. \u00a0In fact, you pay me.<\/p>\n

After we got the ball rolling with SCVMM 2008 R2 and Hyper-V 2008 R2, we had a functioning Citrix XenDesktop environment. \u00a0The promised land! \u00a0Everything would be awesome! \u00a0Except…there were these little nagging things with SCVMM that just didn’t work the way a sane person would think they should. \u00a0So again I consulted ‘teh interwebs’ and was told (again) that it was “fixed in (the next version) 2012”. \u00a0Luckily, System Center 2012 was due out in a week! \u00a0I immediately jumped to SCVMM 2012 and was relieved…things were better! \u00a0However, they still sucked. \u00a0There are all sorts of stupid little behaviors with SCVMM and Hyper-V. \u00a0Granted, \u00a0a lot of them may be mitigated through deep tuning, I’d like to think that some things should “just work” in basic scenarios out of the box. \u00a0Let me list a few of my gripes here.<\/p>\n