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Comment by wannacboatmovie | Hacker News Reader

> Regrettably, there is currently no substitute product offered.

Not quite.

Microsoft gives away Hyper-V Server for free, no license key needed. It is not time limited or crippled in any way.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/evaluate-hyper-v-...

It runs in Server Core mode and the learning curve is much steeper outside an AD domain or for non-Windows turbonerds; but once set up properly it is extremely powerful and I prefer it over VMware. Linux support for Hyper-V is built-in and outstanding.

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Well, obviously, there is "currently no substitude product offered unless you are willing to move to something else"

In which case, of course, Proxmox is there since years. So why would you encrap yourself with hyper-v and postpone the show for only a couple of years when you could implement a robust solution ?

Hyper-V isn't so bad in traditional enterprise. You can buy a perpetual license on something which includes patches for the next 10 years (despite people saying for the last 10 years Microsoft is imminently going to force new products to subscription only), that license can cover the guest VM Window licensing, and support comes through the same contract you manage your desktop/laptop clients from. It integrates with the management of the rest of your domain and is, generally, actually pretty decent what it does for the given customer use case.

If you're building a hip new product with a bunch of Linux VMs you defined yourself greenfield then it probably seems a little ridiculous, especially since most of your stuff is likely containers or at least hybrid cloud conscious out of the gate. At that point you can grab a low cost subscription for your couple of servers and call it a day for a few grand a year.

Nutanix is probably the option most people looking at (or currently using) Hyper-V would be weighing right now.

wdym not crippled and powerful? it was always a literal cripleware that not only lacks of basic VM flexibility (usb/devices passthru etc) and cant run any guest except windows and linux, but also hard to mange due to lack of basic cli / gui. It has no advanced features that were added for datacenter edition back in 2016 and in fact pretty much dead as windows server itself

microsoft virtualization is long stuck in the past and forgotten, iykwim

if you need something more or less sane luke esxi, proxmox or even xen are way to go.

Let’s clear some things up here if you don’t mind.

All HyperV hosts can only run Windows and certain Linux distros, this is not a limitation of the free offering.

Passthrough is also not available for most types of hardware in all versions of HyperV. An imperfect workaround is to use passthrough with Remote Desktop. I’m not telling you it’s good I’m telling you it exists.

HyperV server has a basic cli interface and it is indeed harder to manage than Windows Server with a desktop experience. When using the Server Core versions which do not have the desktop experience or the LTSC versions, the ui is the same. Some commands are not available.

Yes there has not been a release of the dedicated HyperV offering since 2016. It does not mean Microsoft will not release another one.

>It does not mean Microsoft will not release another one.

Sure seems to be the way they are thinking / acting / talking in public though.

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-server-inside...

https://www.reddit.com/r/HyperV/comments/pejok9/microsoft_is...

> All HyperV hosts can only run Windows and certain Linux distros, this is not a limitation of the free offering.

I'm not sure where y'all are picking this up from, FreeBSD is even officially supported. I've run Redox and Haiku in it as well.

For non-production use cases though I recommend grabbing the latest Windows Server via a trial instead. The downside is you get 180 days per period and it can be renewed for 3 periods before it expires. The upside is you can just install Server Datacenter and get the kitchen sink, including full desktop. You do one VM migration and re-install and then the when that trial fully expires it's time to upgrade to the newer version of Windows Server anyways.

A hot tip is that Datacenter licensing allows you to activate VMs using a special CD key, so you can run a cluster of fully licensed Windows Server Standard VMs. Not sure if the Datacenter trial also works in the same way but I'd be kind of surprised if it didn't.

Hyper-V Server stops at the 2019 release - post 2029 it's dead (no Hyper-V Server 2022)

So that buys you five years at essentially no cost to figure out your next move. I'm not complaining.

*for now

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