After a busy week including EMC's and Microsoft's Hyper-V announcements as well as Microsoft TechEd Europe and SQL PASS Summit tradeshows, I was reflecting back on some of the conversations that I've recently had with customers regarding their Hyper-V deployments.
At SQL PASS many customers were interested in virtualizing their OLTP workloads but are staying away from virtualization for Data Warehouse due to the performance requirements and size of the total workloads. Those that were virtualizing SQL Server had very positive things to say including ease of management, stability and performance expectations being met. Most of these customers are using virtualization as a means to consolidate hardware and centralize management. I found very few who were using high-availability features including clustering or Live Migration. For those that haven't moved to virtualization yet, we talked about the benefits of having the operating system, the database files and the application self-contained in a virtualized container for backup and DR as well as mobility across servers.
One topic that continues to come up and surprise me is the silos that IT departments work in. Many of the SQL Server developers and administrators who came by the EMC booth at SQL Pass talked about sizing and performance but would then say something like "well, our storage is managed by a different group so we don't really have a say in it or know what is going on". How can groups within the same company be so disjointed? I also recently met with a large company not named Microsoft running Hyper-V throughout their organization (over 1000 production Hyper-V VMs). They expressed the same challenges. Luckily in that meeting we had the virtualization, applications, networking and storage teams in the same room where they shared their experiences and challenges as if we were in a user group meeting except the attendees were from the same company!
Obviously virtualization solves many technical challenges but introduces several new business process challenges. Who owns the virtual machine? The application team? The Windows team? The storage team? Backup and DR is shared among these teams too now. For most companies this means redefining business and technical processes and working together to ensure virtual machines have the appropriate resources to meet the demands of the applications they are virtualizing (tools like EMC's VSI can also help to provide a visual mapping of VMs to physical SAN resources to easily understand where a VM is at any given time and what resources it has available to it).
Speaking of virtualizing applications, the Exchange team recently posted an update to their team blog regarding virtualization support for Microsoft Exchange 2010. As stated on their blog site, Exchange 2010 is supported with Hyper-V and any virtualization technology listed on the SVVP (Windows Server Virtualization Validation Program). They go on to state "Microsoft supports Exchange 2010 in production on hardware virtualization software for all Exchange Server roles except the Unified Messaging role. Moreover, we do support running Exchange high availability configurations within a virtualized environment, but do not support combining Exchange high availability with hypervisor-based clustering, high availability or migration solutions which automatically failover mailbox servers". Thank you to the Exchange team for posting this statement and clarifying support for virtualizing Exchange 2010.
Finally, speaking of customers and in case you missed it; Chuck Hollis posted an excellent blog update on CAA and the way in which they run their IT department as well as their use of Hyper-V. I've spoken to and met the team at CAA several times and they are a great bunch of guys who like to stay ahead of the technical curve. I don't want to take away from Chuck's blog but CAA is heavily invested in Microsoft technologies including Hyper-V and continues to successfully deploy and manage hundreds of Hyper-V VMs in their environment. Be sure to check it out!
So what does all this prove? First of all, virtualization is everywhere and Microsoft Hyper-V is used in all types of environments with all customer sizes (I've heard some say it is a SMB play only which I couldn't disagree with more). Secondly, virtualization introduces new challenges mostly regarding business processes – don't let these get in the way of a successful virtualization deployment but use the opportunity to revisit what you are doing and how you are doing it. If it forces your IT teams to come together and learn from one another then I'd say it can be considered a success!
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