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.
