Interesting report into Hyper-V

I’ve just got done reading an interesting tear down of Hyper-V by ESG group that compares Hyper-V to physical hardware and goes into very tiny detail about performance and characteristics.  It’s worth a read and worth forcing your CIO to read if he’s interested in saving some money – to make it easy for anyone who doesn’t want to read the whole thing just read the red box outs.

ESG have taken an interesting approach, they’ve built a lab and done stuff with it:

Commonly deployed applications and services running on nine older physical servers were consolidated onto a cluster of new servers attached to a shared pool of SAS drives within a FC attached disk array.[3] The servers were configured to support a mix of services and applications including Active Directory and print services, network shared drives (Corp, Dept, Home), Intranet(IIS), Red Hat Linux(RHEL), and databases (Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and 2008).

Great approach and different from the normal reviews you see out there, those are some interesting workloads to virtualise especially the SQL Servers and it’s nice to see the penguin in the hat got a crack too.  They go through install, clustering, live migrations, scaling out and they do things like measure performance and disk IO (I’ve stolen their graph below, hope they don’t mind). 

Any how Lab Reports: Microsoft Hyper-V R2: Scalable, Native Server Virtualization for the Enterprise is a thoroughly recommended read.

Si sml

 

Written by Simon May a Microsoft IT Professional Technical Evangelist.

You can read more by Simon at Simon’s Client and Cloud blog.