Microsoft IT’s [using] Hyper-V in production
Virtualization April 19th, 2008I was reading through Microsoft’s TechNet and came across this:
All of Microsoft IT’s Hyper-V production and pre-production hosts are scheduled to run on a Server Core installation. This is because the more secure and available the virtualization host or parent partition is, the more stable and secure the virtual machines are….
Cool. Maybe this means a good portion of Microsoft infrastructure is running in [Hyper-V] virtual machines - that means Microsoft should have nearly virtualized 80% of their production workloads including 64 bit; but it does say scheduled, so maybe they are yet to start. (I know that’s alot of ‘maybes’) I wonder what they are using to manage it? Although I couldn’t find any hints, I can only assume a pre-beta build of SCVMM R2/vNext.
I’m hoping this means we’ll see an update to all the Virtualization support KB’s (like Exchange 2007, please pick Exchange. Exchange officially supported outside of Premier support would make me a very happy camper)
Ok, I digress. Anyway, it looks like Microsoft are using Hyper-V in production. Gotta go, back soon.
May 13th, 2008 at 10:38 pm
FYI - all of TechNet and MSDN are now running on Hyper-V. Not sure if this is publically sharable news or not …
June 18th, 2008 at 12:46 am
I am the platform architect working for Devin Murray, subject of the TechNet article and webcast.
Microsoft IT has indeed been deploying production workloads on Hyper-V for several months now. We are currently about approaching 25% virtualized overall, up from the 7% figure discussed previously. (A big effort is underway to push as many new server requests into VMs as possible.) Part of this effort it redirecting many new server requests into Hyper-V VMs, where a few short months ago we would have been required to deploy them to dedicated physical machines. (Multi-processor, 64-bit, or other basic requirements that could not be satisfied by Virtual Server 2005 VMs.)
We have about 350 production Hyper-V VMs running as of mid-June 2008. We anticipate we will increase that number by about 100 in the next month, then bringing Hyper-V VMs in as a commodity standard available for our internal server customers.
We already have upwards of 300 machines in a queue, ready to be ordered and deployed when we can get the capacity ready. Natural adoption will take over shortly after the Hyper-V final release. With the knowledge we have about our environment and experience we have with Hyper-V so far, I am very confident we will meet or exceed our target to provision 80% of new instances into VMs.