My name is J Wolfgang Goerlich. I am the network operations and security manager for an investment firm,
Munder Capital Management, in Michigan. About a year back, we began a server virtualization initiative. Several products were evaluated including VMware, Citrix Xen, and early release candidates for Hyper-V.
The initiative was all about speed and performance. The two key drivers were speeding up disaster recovery and server requisitioning. It turns out both of these have the same basic need: quick and effective P2V or V2P conversions. That is, physical computers to virtual machines or virtual back to physical.
Most P2V solutions rely upon reading data from disk and writing it to virtual disk format (e.g., vhd). The conversion takes some time depending on the size of the data. Since a typical server in my environment has 180 GB of committed data, it took too long and wasn't effective. There had to be a better way.
I had previously virtualized our storage, using Compellent's Storage Center, so the servers boot from the SAN. I already do P2P conversions by simply re-pointing the disks from one computer to another. This can be accomplished in a few minutes with a couple reboots and a few mouse clicks.
The ideal solution was clearly to drive our server virtualization from our storage virtualization. This meant that the solution had to offer native disk access and work well with our SAN. Hyper-V delivered. A disk from the SAN can be presented to Windows Server 2008, kept offline, and then mapped thru to a Hyper-V vm. This setup eliminated the need for P2V conversion and greatly sped up the process.
Now, with some modifications to Windows, we can snap a physical machine into a vm and back using the SAN. Having already virtualized storage clearly made it easier to implement server virtualization. The only question that remained in my mind was whether Hyper-V offered comparable performance.
I put the vms thru their paces and, yes, they did perform at or above the competition. I also found that I got a lot of value out of Hyper-V during testing. Managing the Hyper-V servers is a breeze. The interface is surprisingly clean and all the controls are where you’d expect them to be.
So I concluded the initiative with a recommendation for Hyper-V. We also found that the licensing on Hyper-V saved us money. Several servers have been installed since making that decision, and the technology has definitely proven itself. And so far our new virtual data center has reduced maintenance, cooling and power costs.