What I wish I’d known in 2013, is how much improved Hyper-V would be!

The winning story from our coveted Geekmas day one competition, David has shed some light on what he wished he’d known leading into this year and as a result has bagged himself loads of TechNet goodies inc. an MSDN subscription. His story focuses on the age old server virtualisation battle, see who came out on top below.

  By David Mullenger, Systems Co-Ordinator at Suzuki.

  ‘Ohhh how I wish I had known how much improved Hyper-V would be.'

'Casting my mind back several years, virtualisation was discussed with many a peers.

The lack of challengers for VMWare, led to a data centre needing more and more care.

But then from the ashes a giant awoke, Oh look at Hyper-V, Microsoft had spoke.

So now we face an industry choice, stay with VM or listen to the voice.'

Like many IT professionals over the last year, I believe the above is very relevant in today’s changing landscape of server virtualisation. For many years I have worked with VMWare, learning support skills on a platform that I hadn’t previously worked with. On the job training and a ‘search engine fix’ scenario had us more reactive than proactive. However now Microsoft has given us something to think about, a return to a trusty host operating system is very well on the cards. The ability to change between a trusty GUI and a lightweight server core installation gives me hope that even the junior support staff will be able to help troubleshoot problems within the virtual data centre without the need for VMWare knowledge. The ability to use virtual disks and storage tiers, shared virtual hard disks and migration tools, all great selling points and all this on a platform we have grown to know and love.

My first look at Hyper-V in Server 2012 was in the classroom and I have to say I left that training course refreshed (that may be hard to believe after 5 days training). My mind thinking up ways to get a technology refresh project off the ground. The days of struggling through pages and pages of documents just to work out how to configure SNMP on a VMWare host could soon be over, I was rejoicing as if Christmas had come in February. Next stop for me was to spread the message, Hyper-V is THE alternative…. but as with all IT projects, you can’t take 1 man’s word for it. With this in mind, a project team was set up to investigate for our environment, and low and behold Hyper-V was put forward as the best suiting hypervisor.

Although, I regret not having made this change in 2013, I’m already looking forward to 2014 and embracing a hypervisor on a platform I know very well. My battles with ESX could be a thing of the past, although with my experience I am sure it will put up a fight all the way through any migration and not lay down until the power cords are pulled from the hosts and the vmdk files wave goodbye as they finally grow up to be vhdx.

If I’d known it was such a hit before the beginning of 2013 – I think Hyper-V would already be our server virtualisation platform. Onwards and Upwards!

A final thank you to all those who took part in the ‘12 Days of Geekmas’ in 2013 and a huge congratulations once again to David, we hope the prizes come in handy! We’ll be back with more competitions throughout the year, so stay tuned to the blog and @TechNetUK for all latest and greatest tech information!