Gone Critical

Many of us would associate the the term critical with the Register, so when I was asked by Tim Phillips their broadcast and commercial editor to join a discussion titled “Going Critical” I was a little nervous.  The title refers to some Register commissioned research by Andrew Buss at Freeform Dynamics on what Register subscribers are doing about mission critical application in a virtual world.  This indicates that now the initial rush to virtualise all the simple stuff like file and print and simple applications that there is shift in two directions:

• A move to embrace the sorts of techniques associated with private clouds, such as process management, resource pooling, and building scalability.
• Starting to virtualise mission critical applications.

Also on the panel was Alun Rogers one of the founders of Microsoft gold partner Risual, as he’s in the real world making all this actually happen.  

The webcast was recorded and is available on the Register whitepapers website.

I contributed a couple of slides to the deck based on some other research by the Enterprise Server Group on Hyper-V performance with the sort of workloads we were discussing.The other resource I always mention in this conversations is the free Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit (MAPT) which you should use to plan and baseline any  major change to your infrastructure such as physical or virtual to virtual migrations  and version upgrades.