Yesterday @bennadel asked Anyone know anything about Hyper-V hosting? Is that better than your run-of-the-mill VPS?. I assumed he meant, "I want to build a billion dollar data center for my media empire. Should I go with Hyper-V or VMware?" That's just my frame of reference. I now understand that the question was to gather information for someone looking for a VPS account. That's a bit different. As far as VPS accounts go, it shouldn't matter which hypervisor is used. They performance of should match the resources allocated to the VM, and it's a better value than dedicated hardware. I would defer to @utdream for answers about VPS accounts on various hypervisors.

I responded that It's functional. But consider it the MSIE of the VPS marketplace. To which he and @JasonPDean wondered what sort of smack I was talking'. So, I figured I'd write a bit about my experience. I run a lot of virtual machines; development "boxes," test environments, cluster nodes, and whatnot. I really like VMware Fusion on Mac OS X. VirtualBox is a fine product. I've used Xen for creating lots of Linux nodes to test HA services. I know guys at VMware and have an understanding of their products. Although I haven't personally been administrator of a vSphere installation, I have purchased VPSes that run on it and been privy to the awesome live migration features.

At eCivis, we use Microsoft Hyper-V on two monster servers to create several instances of Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2. It works very well. Our choice to go with Hyper-V instead of vSphere was primarily due to cost. If you buy a license for Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Datacenter edition, you get licenses to run hosted VMs of Microsoft Windows Server 2008. Of course, prices and participation vary. Offer not valid in all countries. Consult a professional before making any financial decisions. Going with VMware would have cost us a whole bunch more. We had to do some hackery to automate the VM backups with Hyper-V, but it does work very well for running Windows on Windows. We haven't tried to use any other OS inside Hyper-V. If we were a Linux shop, we would have gone a different direction.

So, there you have it.