Frenzied Wombat
Potato del Grande
IMHO, for a home lab this is more than offset by features like dedupe and replica. Sure, in an enterprise environment you'll have a SAN doing the dedupe and snapshot shipping, but absent a SAN (SMB environments) these features of Hyper-V become pretty powerful. Native support for 4TB of memory on the host (and 1tb per guest) is another added bonus.. With 32 gb of ram being the max for the free ESX hypervisor, that's what-- four or five VM's? ESXi w/ Vcenter vs 2012R2 Hyper-V makes for a hotly contested white paper, but when it comes to comparing the free ESX vs Hyper-V, there just isn't any comparison.Yeah, except that it doesn't virtualize VT-x/d, so if you want to do a lab within a lab (such as, for example, virtualizing Hyper-V or ESXi), you can't. I'm running Hyper-V on my VM server over here and it's truly annoying that I can't play with ESXi inside of it (with 64-bit support, anyway).
ESXi is still the way to go. 32GB RAM cap for the free hypervisor, but honestly, that's a small price to pay if you aren't planning on running a universe of VMs. The only other annoyance is that VMware has destroyed support for fake-RAID in 5.5, where there used to be a trick or two to do it in 5.1 and lower. Get a real RAID card, if not only because it'll help your IO bottlenecks anyway.
Edit: Also, not sure where this 32GB RAM limit on non-Xeons is coming from, butnot true in my experience. Unless I'm missing something here.
EDIT: Confirmed that 2012 R2 support VT-d and SRV-IO.