VMWARE ESX VS HyperV

Certain features such as vDS, Host Profiles and VMDirectPath make VMware stand out in my opinion.
I have also seen VMware vCloud Director integrate better with vSphere, although I have explored the Windows Azure platform.

In addition to this, ESXi is a better product when taking security vulnerabilities into consideration as I have seen security bulletins being released even for the Server Core installation of Hyper-V.

We have seen Virtualization come through various stages.. Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware ESX are two solutions. What really matters is how far can someome exploit them. Like Arunraju said, VMware is more matrue in this space than Microsoft, like "hand made" and "machine made".  Both have advantages and disadvantages.

In your situation, your site already runs on ESX as i understand. why just change the backbone when you can change the body itself? Have you considered Azure and EC2? ROI is far greater than hosting it on your side...

I just to correct paulsolov, Hyper-V R2 allows you to hot add VHD storage to the synthetic SCSI controller. The System Center suite (Virtual Machine Manager with Operations Manager) gives you DRS style load balancing.

To followup on danm66, Hyper-V does not allow you to present 4 vCPU as a quad core CPU instead of 4 single core vCPU (as far as I know), but that would be pretty nifty. That would save my on SQL processor licenses.

@kevinhsieh:  I'm not sure that hot add is the issue.  Last week I was on a project where we needed to thick provision a VHD and it required it be offline.  I don't think the issue exists with thin provisioned VHDs. The CPU presentation is the same as VMWare although danm66 was referring that you can more vCPUs into a VMWAre VM vs a Hyper-V VM. 8 vs 4

Well I want to thank you all. we looked at all the pros and cons. and tried to scale best solution. trying to keep everything that we can on one product solution had its advantages. once you start costing ( I know cost wasnt a factor) the price of MSC and MSCVMM with cals, I found that perhaps the processor costs would be much better for our environment with VM enterprise plus. as for our organisational needs both had offered what we required. I found with recent issues that upskilling in ESX was more the problem rather then the product.

so that is how we will proceed. thanks for all for your inputs. your links and info had great value.

Ill go through this soon for the points based on the best support. and will probably spilt some.

AJ

PS sorry for my delay in responce.

This was a hard one to pick. and looking at a product for value not in monetary terms seen a few good points with both.

I was on the way to move to HyperV but have decided to continue with VMware ESX instead. we have Ent Plus and it works well. but as we look to rebuild our infrustructure, I wanted to ensure I had a strong case to move accross. we have had some consultants reccomend one or the other depending who they vendor supported. So I wanted to ask you experts who play in the relm every day.

So thanks for all your assistance on this one. and Yes I am still as confused. I see MS making great inroads into this space in the future. but for now as they build DC's around this part of the world and they use Vmware instead of HyperV. I think I best keep with what I also know and have.