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Comment by nunez | Hacker News Reader

Nearly every company/public service/non-profit/whatever uses vSphere/ESX somewhere. You'd be (very) surprised to see where people shoehorn ESXi hosts. VMware is EVERYWHERE, and vSphere/ESX/NSX is still the best game in town if you want to virtualize your datacenter. It's insanely rock-solid tech.

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Yep. Arguably if you have Windows licensing, Hyper-V will do mostly all the same stuff "for free", but only if you want your hypervisors to be exactly as reliable as Windows machines. If you're rolling VMware, your datacenter's backbone tends to be ridiculously solid.

Think servers with four digits of days of uptime, in terms of things you probably shouldn't do, but absolutely can.

That’s not actually different on the Windows side, you should update your priors. There are datacenters full of Server 2019 boxes that have never been upgraded because the guest VMs are mission critical.

Source: I’ve responded incidents on those guests. It’s terrifying, but hypervisor uptime is limited by power not OS choice.

Agreed. I have 20+ Hyper-V Windows Server VMs running since 2017, seeing 400-600 Mbps live video traffic - no major crashes, only due to facility power loss or annual patching reboots.

I mean, I work with every version of Windows Server since 2012 R2 up through Server 2022 on a daily basis...

I'm the other "pro Microsoft guy" here on HN, but I have to agree with the GP comment: VMware stability puts Microsoft to shame.

These days Windows is stable if you don't touch it.

VMware is stable even if one of the disks is out of space, the fibre is flapping, some idiot misconfigured the switches, and the whole cluster has time out of sync... by seven hours.

That's not hyperbole, that's an actual cluster that I got given to look after. It was running like that for months, perfectly fine, with VMware HA just "taking care of things".

If you sneeze in the direction of a Windows Failover Cluster it'll... fail.

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