There's a reason I call it Dyper-V. Its an immature product and it craps itself every time you need it to do something. Frankly, I have lost 5 weeks of my life and $40K in productivity just from being "forced" to use this product. It amazes me that any software company in the world would release a product like this and still actually be able to call itself a software company. Every product group inside Microsoft is forced to use this embarrassing product. That in-itself creates a cascading effect throughout all the organizations inside Microsoft. Frankly, I'm surprised that the other groups put up with such substandard software when they are held to such high standards themselves. If I have to take the heat first, so be it, but let this be the blog post that actually gets all the groups to stand up and say, *** you Dyper-V. So, let's get started in my long list of why Dyper-v sucks:
- UI is about as responsive as a overdosed dead drug addict in a dark alley way. Why? Asynchronous tasks are great in most apps, but not in Dyper-V. If you try to do anything in the UI, it may or may not do it and it may or may not tell you it did it. Things like deleting or reverting snapshots is an example. I had one time that Dyper-V UI just simply ignored the fact that I told it to revert and then I deleted the snapshot. I lost a day of work because of the UI. Damn it.
- Exporting a VM. Are you kidding me? You have two options, export the configuration or export EVERYTHING oh and be sure you wait at *least* 5 minutes for any previous snapshots to be deleted, otherwise they will show up in any immediate exports you do! Oh, and if two VM HDD point to the same base, guess what...it fails on export after 30 minutes! Umm, and when your exporting, HyperV thinks that the RAM of the VM is being used. What the ***? Really? Are you guys retards? I have to say that the entire Dyper-V team should be fired over these alone! Seriously, fire them all (except for the guy that wrote the actual hardware interface layer, that part is pretty good) and start all over. See if you can find some out of work VMWare guys, oh sorry, YOU CAN'T. I can't even begin to tell you how much time I have lost waiting for Dyper-V to export a VM simply because it wants to export the entire parent VM chain. Freakin retarded...FIRE them all (devs, ui, product managers, program mangers and the BG)!
- Importing a VM. Fails almost 100% of the time when moving VMs from one dyper-v server to another. Why? It puts specific ACLs on the files for the specific machine they were run on. It fails if you import from another Dyper-V machine. How stupid is that? OH, did I mention that if it fails on an import, it deletes the configuration xml file? Yeah, that's retarded too, get a hint dyper-v team! Any what's up with you can't copy files, you HAVE to export and
import. If your OS dies without an export you lose your VMs!
- Trying to take advantage of chained VMs - In building a chained set of VMs, we thought we could gain back some disk space by implementing a full set of VM changes and then reversing out the small changes we needed. In the end, we got screwed by dyper-v again. Why? We'll, it writes the entire paging space to the differencing disk EVERY TIME. WTF...
- Creating VMs - Every time you create a new VM with the VM network adapter, the windows OS sees it as a new adapter and forgets about any previous IP settings. We (I and the internal Microsoft group) didn't learn about the legacy adapter until later in the process that could have saved us days of headaches
- Deleting a VM - OMG, seriously? If you delete a VM you can't get it back (right, the config file got delete)...really? So freaking stupid. ADDED: When you delete a VM, it collapses all your
snapshots AND THEN deletes your VM, and leaves behind the VHD!
- Shutdown of a Windows Server os takes forever! Why? related to the last one, its writing out the entire page file to the vhd. I have wasted at least 30 minutes of my life every time I have had to shutdown a VM. stupid.
- Why the hell can't I get a file out of Dyper-V VMs easily without connecting to a separate network?
- Did I mention that most Fortune 100 companies have dropped support for Dyper-V? Yeah, they hate it as much as I do at this point. The only people that use it, are people that don't have the budget to buy VMWare and want to use the "FREE" stuff. Guess you get what you pay for...
- On and on and on and on...
If the Dyper-V team wants me to take this blog post down, you can pay me the $40K you lost me in productivity. If the VMWare guys want me to keep it posted, you can pay me $40K. First one to pay me wins.
Just a note, the term DyperV wasn't actually first used by I in casual conversation. That credit goes to Dan Holme, @DanHolme. He has similar feelings about DyperV as displayed in this blog post
Chris
Twitter: @givenscj