Ok so the title is a bit tabloidish.  But I just finished reading an article that Volker blogged about.

It’s a good (if not enlightening) read, and details some of the challenges of Microsoft Internal IT and Virtualization.  You can read more in the web site “Q&A: Microsoft’s utility computing guru talks about his in-house support challenges“  and  a snippet is below:

How are you changing the conversation internally?  We’re using the SPEC benchmark as our raw computing metric. So, say you want to buy a platform with 200 compute units, but you’re replacing a system with 40 units that you’re not really using fully. You’re using 20% of your existing system, but you want to upgrade by 400%. So we try to shift the business thinking. The conversation changes to why you want to replace the system and what you’re trying to do.

What has the response been from your users? Businesses are very interested in how they are using the systems, and now they want more information. We’re starting to scorecard a lot of our different IT services to show utilization and growth potential, and we’re comparing and contrasting businesses to present different scorecard views to any given [manager]. So they can share best practices at the general manager and CIO level. We also scorecard ourselves, from the perspective of an infrastructure and services provider: the percentage of servers moving to virtualization, how heavily the virtualized servers are being used, and so on.

How are you doing on the virtualization front — what progress have you made? We’ve got about 1,000 production and 500 development applications running on around 70 hosts. The average is a ratio of 8 [virtual machines] to 1 [physical server] in the production space, and around 16 to 1 in test or dev environments. Our goal is for all new applications to go into the virtual environment; we’re not necessarily going back to existing or older applications to virtualize them all.

I think the article is recommended reading, and there are a few key gems to consider.  It’ll be interesteing to see how/when this perfomance data and lessons learned gets released to the public.