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on August 6 2008, 10:14 AM
One of the major drawbacks of Microsoft's virtualization pitch is the lack of good case histories—examples of companies that have not only picked Hyper-V for their virtualization platform, but are able to talk about how they made it work.
I've written before about Kroll Factual Data and the advice from Chris Steffen, its lead virtualization dude, much to the displeasure of some VMware users who appear to believe Microsoft's virtualization technology doesn't exist, but is unutterably evil anyway.
I won't dispute either point. I've worked Microsoft products and covered the company for long enough to know a product can be evil, nonexistent and still able to drive the direction of the rest of the market. Such is the power of FUD and high market share.
I can't testify to the diabolical nature of Hyper-V (or hazard a guess at the meaning of the Evil Inside sticker on the box) but Microsoft's hypervisor and broad-spectrum VM management and migration utilities do actually exist, so looking at Kroll's experience with them is useful no matter how strongly you disagree with its choices.
One additional caveat about why Kroll is not normal: unlike almost anyone else other than Microsoft itself, Kroll built out its IT production-server farm using VMs on Virtual Server 2005, the precursor to the Hyper-V hypervisor that's part of Windows Server 2008.
According to Steffen (who blogs about his experience on the Microsoft Hyper-V team blog here and here) the migration from Virtual Server to Hyper-V has been so simple and trouble-free that it's not very interesting. The number of companies taking the same path is so small, however, that it's not very useful, either.
So we'll mostly skip that part, except to say there are several applications Steffen has found would work on top of Hyper-V despite assurances from their own developers that they wouldn't. Blackberry Enterprise Server, for example, would not work on Hyper-V and probably never would, according to the support techs Steffen asked for help.
"We didn't treat it any differently than any other app we put on Windows Server 2008," Steffen says." We jumped through all the hoops they put you through and did all the runaround, and it works fine."
Many of the benefits Kroll gets out of its Microsoft virtualization setup have more to do with virtualization than Microsoft's version of it specifically, at least to hear Steffen describe why he likes it.
(Kroll is a bad romantic partner, by the way; the whole time Microsoft has been sitting on its doorstep and satisfying its every need for technology and support, Kroll has been toying with the competition—using Citrix software for its remote-host environment, and continually evaluating new editions or add-ons to VMware products. It doesn't stick to Microsoft because it's a Microsoft shop; it sticks with Microsoft mainly because of the cost/benefit advantage compared to VMware, Steffen says. Part of that advantage, undoubtedly, is the level of low- or no-cost support, but I may have already mentioned that factor. )
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