TechEd 2011 kicked off yesterday and so far it's been a great show! I spent most of the day on the EMC booth talking to customers, partners and specialists from Microsoft. Most of the questions I heard around virtualization were regarding high-availability and disaster recovery. This tells me that customers are entering Phase 2 of their virtualization journey in which they are virtualizing mission critical applications and looking for ways to provide high level of protection for these apps. I'll present more on the phases of the virtualization journey on Wednesday at 1:30 in VIR203 or expect a recap here after the show.
Speaking of virtualizing mission critical business applications, Microsoft announced expanded support for virtualized Microsoft Exchange 2010 SP1 yesterday which was received with praise by the virtual community. Specifically, the enhanced support states that Microsoft will support virtualizing the Unified Messaging server role and combining Database Availability Groups (DAG) with hypervisor based clustering, high-availability or migration scenarios including Live Migration.
As always, be sure to follow Microsoft's support guidelines included in the Exchange Team Blog announcement and be sure to check out the new white paper from Microsoft on Best Practices for Virtualizing Exchange Server 2010 with Windows 2008 R2 Hyper-V.
And if you're at TechEd, be sure to come by booth #901 to say hi to myself and the rest of the EMC team!
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