Toronto - Impact of Virtualization on the IT Industry

  • Article

Main Discussion Points:

  • Licensing and understanding how to license software in virtual environments is a challenge
  • How do you deal with backups of virtual environments and how can disaster recovery be enhanced
  • Understanding how to work with old and new environments (physical vs. virtual).

 

The participants present at this learning circle (approx. 30 or so) were still 'dabbling' in virtualization and were looking for 'how to get started seriously' guidance.

 

  • There was a comment from a customer who said he tried VMWare but went back to servers and used Blades to consolidate because the VM thing was too hard to size correctly
    • this invoked discussion on many companies with experience and the fact that MS SCVMM will help greatly with this in the future
    • sizing came up several times in different discussions
  • There was a question about backups and if snapshots and VM copies still made these necessary
    • Resounding yes - backups still valid BUT with VM technology and replication those backups can be performed somewhere else
  • Hyper-V vs Xen/VMWare/VS 2005 performance discussion
    • I suggested final comparisons shouldn't be made until Hyper-V ships
    • However people using Hyper-V already pointed out performance is hugely better than v-pc/vs 2005
    • I and others suggested virtualization overhead to be 3-5% roughly in line with VMWare
  • USB in Hyper-V
    • one attendee suggested USB would actually be in shipping Hyper-V but I was told afterward it will not be - perhaps you could verify for sure for me and for others (note from Ruth: USB support with Hyper-V has not been announced, however you can always maps USB devices via RDP so if you connect to the VM via RDP, you'll have access to the USB device).
    • a few people asked about USB
  • Would you VM Exchange?
    • Mixed discussion - some yes, some no
    • Side discussion: Virtualization does not mean you can ignore sizing rules, in fact, virtualization can force greater focus on sizing rules
    • ie: Don't put 2 VMs requiring 1000 IOPS on a VM that is running on a 3 disk raid5 simple because there's enough disk space and it's virtualized!