VMware and Microsoft continue to battle because each sees the other as a threat. The threat at this time is competing in the server virtualization and private cloud computing markets. I’m going to compare Microsoft’s Hyper-V to VMware’s vSphere 5.5.
Both have unlimited number of managed OSE’s per license and Hyper-V also has unlimited number of licenses per host whereas vSphere 5.5 has none. You get 2 physical CPUs per license with Hyper-V and only 1 with VMware which is a reason why the vSphere 5.5 is considerably higher. When looking at all the other licenses, Microsoft offers more with the purchase whereas they have to be bought separately with vSphere 5.5. This contributes to the higher pricing.
When comparing the virtualization scalability VMware has a maximum active VMS per host of 512 whereas Hyper-V has 1,024. The maximum number of physical hosts per cluster is 32 for VMware compared to 64 for Hyper-V and the maximum number of VMs per cluster is 4,000 for vSphere 5.5 whereas it is 8,000 for Hyper-V. Hyper-V offers bare metal deployment of new storage host and clusters whereas vSphere 5.5 does not. Both systems offer integrated application load balancing for scaling-out application tiers but with the vSphere 5.5 it comes at an additional cost. All of the other area are the same, although Hyper-V may offer a better virgin.
When comparing VM portability, high availability and disaster recovery, vSphere 5.5 does not have live migration using compression of VM memory state, live migration over RDMA-enabled network adapters, or live migration of VMs clustered with Windows server failover clustering (MSCS guest cluster). Surprisingly Hyper-V does not have fault tolerant VMs. All of the other sections are offered by both Hyper-V and vSphere 5.5.
When comparing storage, vSphere 5.5 does not have native 4K disk support, hot-shrink virtual SCSI hard disks for running VMs, flash-based write-back cache, SAN-like storage virtualization using commodity hard disks, automated tiered storage between SSD and HDD using commodity hard disks, storage encryption, deduplication of storage used by running VMs, integrated provisioning and management of shared storage, and it can’t present storage via iSCSI, NFS and SMB 3.0. All the other sections are offered by both Hyper-V and vSphere 5.5.
When comparing the networking, vSphere 5.5 does not have ARP spoofing protection, DHCP snooping protection, router advertisement, IPsec task offload, Network virtualization/software-defined networking (SDN), or Integrated network management of both virtual and physical network components. All the other sections are offered by both Hyper-V and vSphere 5.5.
Although I did not find any research to actually state that one system is better than the other, it is my opinion that Microsoft would be the most preferred virtualization server because of the price. Both systems seemed to have the same capabilities, it’s just that you would have to buy more with the vSphere 5.5.

I used the following website for my information:
http://blogs.technet.com/b/keithmayer/archive/2013/09/24/vmware-or-microsoft-comparing-vsphere-5-5-and-windows-server-2012-r2-at-a-glance.aspx