Thinking about converting from VMW to HV

Good morning all.

I am currently running a laptop with W7 & VMware workstation running several W7 and Linux guests.

I have a rebuild coming up soon (more accurately, a replacement), and am thinking about converting my workload to the built-in Hyper-V when it comes along. I'm also debating modernizing my VMs as well.

So a few questions:
1) One of my key needs is host-shared folders that can be shared to one-or-all of the VMs (both Linux and Windows). Is Hyper-V capable of this?
1A) If it's capable, I assume there's some sort of agent I need to install on my Linux guests to support this, true?

2) Is a Hyper-V host capable of p2ving itself, given enough external storage? I'd rather use my new laptop as the starting point for all of my new VMs rather than having to rebuild them all from scratch. Licensing is not an issue.
2A) Is it capable of smartly reducing disk either during or after? Or is there another way of solving that issue? If I get a 1TB drive - that'll be mostly empty, just fine for holding several smaller VMs, but if I can't shrink the source 1TB to a reasonable size, that'll be a dead path.

Thanks,
-v

voxorg said:

Good morning all.
I am currently running a laptop with W7 & VMware workstation running several W7 and Linux guests.

1A) If it's capable, I assume there's some sort of agent I need to install on my Linux guests to support this, true?

I tried Hyper-V with Linux and i found that if you need a graphical interface the experience is quite bad (very sluggish),
not so bad if you only run Linux in command line mode, although the networking speed may not be optimal.

Notice that i'm not in any way an "hyper-V expert" so if you gain better result it may be interesting to know how

thanks.

voxorg said:

Good morning all.

I am currently running a laptop with W7 & VMware workstation running several W7 and Linux guests.

I have a rebuild coming up soon (more accurately, a replacement), and am thinking about converting my workload to the built-in Hyper-V when it comes along. I'm also debating modernizing my VMs as well.

So a few questions:
1) One of my key needs is host-shared folders that can be shared to one-or-all of the VMs (both Linux and Windows). Is Hyper-V capable of this?
1A) If it's capable, I assume there's some sort of agent I need to install on my Linux guests to support this, true?

2) Is a Hyper-V host capable of p2ving itself, given enough external storage? I'd rather use my new laptop as the starting point for all of my new VMs rather than having to rebuild them all from scratch. Licensing is not an issue.
2A) Is it capable of smartly reducing disk either during or after? Or is there another way of solving that issue? If I get a 1TB drive - that'll be mostly empty, just fine for holding several smaller VMs, but if I can't shrink the source 1TB to a reasonable size, that'll be a dead path.

Thanks,
-v

Hyper-V is a type 1 hypervisor, which means that it runs directly on the system hardware (yes, even Hyper-V on Windows 10 is a type 1 hypervisor). This means it will be faster, but also means that it will support less features vs a type 2 hypervisor, such as hardware accelerations and so on, as this runs on top of an OS.

Regarding your questions:
1) You can share your folders, just create an Internal Virtual Switch with a different subnet and use SMB or other protocol of your choice. Once again, Hyper-V is a type 1 hypervisor, which means it won't talk directly with Windows, like VirtualBox for example.

1A) You can share you files/folders using SAMBA and an Internal Virtual Switch for example, just share all the folders on the network and that's it.

2) By p2ving you mean virtualizing your laptop? Yes it's possible. You can use software like Paragon Hard Disk Manager 15 Professional and create a VHDX and load it on a Hyper-V virtual machine.

2A) You can auto size and it will only fill what it needs.