There is a very interesting article doing the rounds at the moment, “Q&A Microsoft’s utility computing guru talks about his in-house support challenges“.  I blogged it a couple a weeks ago, and found the article fascinating.

The article is all about some of the challenges of Microsoft Internal IT and Virtualization and they used an internal process called “RightSizing” to find good virtualization candidates.  [Personally this type of approach appeals to me in a big warm fuzzy kind of way, but that is another post for another time]

A quick snippet to refresh your memory before I go on:

“Devin Murray is in charge of server purchases for about 40,000 of Microsoft’s end users. His group handles internal computer usage, helping to shepherd the company’s 17,000 servers that provide computing power to 550 buildings in 98 countries“.

Anyway, here is what I thought was a cool bit of statistics, I remember reading somewhere, Microsoft now has over 1200 production virtual machines.  So if we take 1200 and divide it by 17000 we get ~ 7.05%.  Now there may be more machines in other departments and areas, that Devin doesn’t manage, but I thought this was interesting.

So there we go, a bit of unofficial trivia/statistics for you: 7% of Microsoft’s production servers are virtualized.