Larry Doyle and Hyper-V

Larry Doyle from Netforce in Dublin has been deploying Hyper-V.  This is worth sharing:

"Windows Server 2008 is an awesome product and I am super excited about it!

 

I have been testing Windows Server 2008 since beta release and implemented the eagerly anticipated Hyper-V on our test network as soon as it was available. I was so impressed with Hyper-V that we have rolled it out in a live client production network to consolidate their servers into a single server (Dell 2900, 2 x QuadCore 2.33ghz, 16GB RAM, 4 x gigabit NIC, RAID 1 (2 x 400GB SAS), RAID 10 (6 x 146GB SAS), Dual PSU) running 4 virtual machines - SBS 2003 Premium, Windows Server 2008 64-bit running SQL 2005 64-bit, Windows 2008 64-bit Terminal Services with RemoteAPP (another awesome feature) and a Windows 2003 32-bit Application Server. Snapshots of the VMs and Microsoft System Center DPM 2007 running on their existing Windows 2003 Server provides the Disk to Disk to Tape backup solution while utilising their existing investment in hardware. This has been a total success, delivering a cost effective solution to a small growing business that provides them with the ability to effectively manage and grow their IT infrastructure on a cutting edge technology platform. As the entire solution has been built using Microsoft products, integration is seamless.  This is the future of virtualisation and now truly brings enterprise technology to the SMB market."

 

I can only agree with Larry - Hyper-V is a great

solution (especially when implemented with System Center).

Dave

Comments

• Anonymous
  July 07, 2008
  A great description of employing Hyper-V agreed. However, a production installation on one server? I would add that this type of planning and implementation gives credence to Windows haters, because if that server suffers any physical hardware or OS issues, that customer is down! I may not have the whole picture here, but the synopsis indicated the customer's production kit was collapsed to one server. Cheers.

• Anonymous
  February 04, 2009
  Hi, yes that is correct that it is all on 1 physical server. However, these are the budgetary type restrictions placed by Small Businesses - I think this is a pretty resilient server in terms of RAID, UPS and effective monitored backup solution with DPM giving a quick recovery time. I take back my comment on Snapshots - these should NEVER be used in production. With the SP1 for DPM and patch for Hyper-V you can now backup the Hyper-V host server and the VMs will be backed up while running also.