EMC Guest Post on Microsoft Virtualization Team Blog

I recently posted a guest blog update on the Microsoft Windows Virtualization Team Blog web site.  The topic of the post (partially provided below) is to highlight an exciting project we are working on with Microsoft in which we are creating a 16 node Hyper-V cluster consisting of 1024 virtual machines hosted on an EMC Symmetrix VMAX.  As part of the test we are capturing best practices and recommendations to be published soon in a joint whitepaper.  What's exciting is that not only are we creating one of the largest Hyper-V configurations in the world but we are finding that we can easily scale beyond our initial performance goals due to features available in Windows Server 2008 R2 and the EMC Symmetrix VMAX!

 

EMC and Microsoft Think Big

EMC and Microsoft have been thinking big lately.  How big?  We've set out to build and test one of the largest Hyper-V environments in the world.

Any why not?  With the release of Windows Server 2008 R2, Microsoft introduced features such as clustered shared volumes (CSVs) for storing multiple VHDs on a single LUN, more efficient processing of networking traffic, as well as improved memory management and support for 256 logical processors.  Meanwhile EMC's storage arrays are known for delivering unprecedented levels of scalability, availability and performance.  In particular, EMC's Virtual Provisioning technology saves space and provides high levels of performance, which is something that solutions that tend to use CSVs can benefit from.  Combined, Windows Hyper-V and EMC storage platforms can easily support a large-scale, highly available virtualized configuration.  Plus, here at EMC, we continue to see wide adoption of Hyper-V including large scale deployments (this includes one of our customers who is currently running seven 16-node Hyper-V clusters on one EMC Symmetrix VMAX!).

...to continue reading, access the Microsoft Windows Virtualization Team Blog site. 

In the meantime, come visit me and the rest of the EMC Microsoft specialists at Microsoft TechEd in New Orleans from June 7th-11th. You can find EMC at booth #1101 where I'll be showcasing our Microsoft virtualization solutions all week.  I also encourage you to attend Break-out Session VIR207: Advanced Storage Infrastructure Best Practices to Enable Ultimate Hyper-V Scalability to hear more details about this test and specific recommendations as a result of our findings!

 

Comments

[Chad Sakac]

Adrian - this is pretty darn cool. I don't want to give you props, as you are taking away from my v-agenda :-)

Seriously, pretty darn impressive.

[Virtual Winfrastructure]

Coming from the VirtualGeek, that is quite a compliment.. thanks!