How Microsoft IT does server Virtualization and Hyper-V

In this interview we met up with Devin Murray (Group Manager) and David Lef (Technology Architect) who are in charge of implementing virtualization within Microsoft.  They've been running Hyper-V since it was in Beta in 2007 and have been running Hyper-V in production since January 2008.  In this interview, we cover the following topics:

• History behind why and when we started implementing virtualization in the environment and what challenges we had.
• [6:22] - Number of servers virtualized in Microsoft's environment and goals of what percentage desired to be virtualized
• [8:07] - Net business impact and how the team manages this area of the business
• [9:54] - Current high availability stats (how many 9's) and how to make this higher
• [12:45] - Configuration of virtualization environment
  • High availability with Hyper-V
  • Why they determined the sweet spot was an 8 node cluster
  • [18:18] - Decision points between using VHDs versus Pass-through disks
  • [19:45] - What workloads he wouldn't recommend using one disk type versus another in regards to performance
  • Downtime they're seeing with quick migration

Watch Part 2 here.
Read more information about MSIT's virtualization strategy.