Yes, the version that ships with Win 8 Pro. It is hands down better in most aspects compared to VMWare workstation. The integration is better, the footprint is smaller, performance and reliability is great and you get it for free. VMWare might have an edge in the OS Support department - it supports more host and guest OSes than HyperV. But I have had very good experience running DragonFly BSD, Various Linux distros (RHEL7, Centos 6.x, Ubuntu LTS etc.) and Windows 7 of course. Sure you don't get as many bells and whistles compared to VMWare but if you don't need them then HyperV is great.
Really? Last I checked, HyperV couldn't do video acceleration nor did it have UI integration (drag from one VM to another, or unity). It didn't seem to have a way to flip from one full screen VM to another. I'm not sure if it can completely redirect USB, either. Nor shared folders, without exposing a network share.
The video thing is probably the killer part though. If I could get essentially penalty free GPU inside multiple VMs at a time and easily flip, then I'd have reason to dump VMware Workstation, which is essentially in basic maintenance mode - v11 literally has no improvements, just s few bug fixes.
The GPU acceleration ends up not mattering for Windows guests which you can RDP to. RDP to localhost with all effects turned on is more than good enough for non-gaming, developer type of work. For Linux too it isn't a problem where most work happens in ssh - for the occassional X11 program you can either use the local console (which sucks agreed) or install Xming and run via SSH X forwarding.
Hyper-V on Windows Server 2012 R2 supports GPU acceleration (need certified GPU), Full RDP-Over-VMBus, USB-Passthrough etc. though.
By better integration I meant my VMs are saved and auto restored between shutdown/reboot cycles without me even noticing, dynamic memory assignment works great and keeps total memory foot print down, I can mount VHDx files outside of the VMs etc. They may be small things but for my workload it feels pleasantly seamless. Workstation always felt heavy and in-your-way and besides as you noted the last few updates have been money for bug fixes essentially.
Thanks for the response. I basically want to run a Linux desktop (XMonad... How'd I live before it?) but also have Windows available for VS/Office, an occasional game, and some hobbyist pro audio stuff. With the security of everything as a guest OS. If Windows had any sort of real containerization it'd be a lot less of an issue.
Unlikely, but if MS ever got serious about making the client great, I'm sure they'd leave Workstation behind right quick. But it's still pretty much a server oriented with a few bones tossed to client use.
Glad to hear it's working well. Have you tried storage features like reverting to snapshots/checkpoints (e.g. reset a disk to known state on each reboot), or shrinking of unused space in thin-provisioned disks?
Snapshots/Checkpoints yes. I have even tried the differencing disks feature and liked it quite a bit. Haven't tried the shrinking unused space part as I never needed it up until now.
The only one issue I had relating to saved VM state was that after a BIOS upgrade restore of VM State failed due to may be the Microcode update I think. But other than that, all good.
