A few weeks ago I blogged about Devin Murray and the [virtualized] server lifecycle management in Microsoft IT (see my post 7% of Microsoft’s production servers are virtualized)

Anyway Devin was interviewed by TechNet shortly after, and the postcast is available for download.  The interview is 22 minutes in length and covers some interesting operational trivia on how to provision and bill back to business units.  A snippet of what I found interesting is below:

  • The ‘Virtual Server Utility service’ is designed to insulate business users from he “hardware refresh”
  • the average VM consolidation ration is 8:1 in prod and 18:1 in dev
  • The offering is a zero profit/loss service where any profits returned back to the business
  • Some of the pains implementing this service was the perception of what they were trying to do
  • The virtual Server host must be as secure/locked down as the most ’sensitive’ VM’
  • VMs are being offered at half the cost of physical hardware, but there is still a monthly operational cost
  • With WSV Microsoft will be able to Virtualize ~80% of their production workloads

Check it out for yourself - WMA | MP3 High | MP3 Low