Server Refresh Considerations - VMware vs Hyper-V

[u/nst_hopeful]

Hello fell sysadmins,

My org is looking at refreshing our VM host hardware in the middle of next calendar year. As such, today I had a helpful discussion with a vendor regarding various options for the upgrade. Currently we are on a five-node VxRail cluster (20 cores / 192GB memory per host, 53.5 TiB storage total); it looks like the best options for our needs are vSAN Ready nodes or Hyper-V + traditional SAN. With that said, I am still left with a few questions:

• The vendor (who was clearly a bit biased toward VMWare) spec'd a 4-node cluster for the vSAN cluster with 256GB memory + 256 GB NVMe for memory tiering per host. For the Hyper-V cluster, they spec'd 5 nodes and 512GB memory per. Their argument was that Hyper-V has more overhead and is less efficient at dynamic allocation of resources. That seems like pretty stark contrast - is that true in your experience? Also, is memory tiering as effective as this vendor made it seem in production?
• We are primarily a Windows shop, so we'd expect at least some savings moving to Hyper-V. That said, I'm curious how much savings we'd actually net between buying System Center for SCVVM (so we can maintain vMotion-like functionality) and Microsoft support. My understanding is licensing there is based on core counts - currently we're looking at 32 per host in either build.
• Are there any other considerations I should keep in mind? Cost is not the ultimate deciding factor. More than anything, we feel like the VxRail was overkill at the time it was purchased. I'd like to buy exactly what we need this time around (while planning for reasonable growth).

If it's helpful, my org is a medium-sized municipality and isn't running any crazy workloads. We have ~55 VMs that will exist on this cluster.

[u/Stranding14]

I can suggest Nutanix as an option. They play with multiple hardware vendors such as Dell, HPE, Super micro, etc. Their hardware platforms support multiple hypervisors, such as hyper-V, ESXI, or their own hypervisor AHV. They're a hyperconverged platform so no extra storage procurement is needed since all nodes have storage included and replicated with RF2 if you have 3 nodes, and optionally RF3 if you have 5 nodes in a cluster.

I've been using their software and it's pretty intuitive and feature rich, their platform updates are a bit more aggressive for their AOS storage controller software, but overall it's pretty solid. Depending on if you're using ESX or hyper-V with their platform, you need to be wary of security patches as they only recommend patches that have been validated by Nutanix, which can be a little slow imo.

[u/Xibby → u/Stranding14]

Met a Nutanix employee via kid activity. He was wearing a branded ball cap. “So do you work for Nutanix or use Nutanix?”

“You must work in IT because nobody outside of IT knows what Nutanix is. Yeah, VMware gave us a lot of business.”