Hyper-V
The company I work for has spent a year trying to use Virtuozzo for its server Virtualisation, after a year of poor service and several interesting issues we have made the decision to move away from Virtuozzo as a virtualisation platform.
In the time we spent on Virtuozzo Microsoft released Hyper-V, if they had released it before we started looking at Virtuozzo we would probably have been an early adopter (despite the fact we are corporately standardised on Server 2003). Our previous foray in to the world of Virtualisation was conducted using Micrsoft Virtual Server 2005 which was pretty bland feature wise which was one reason for trying out Virtuozzo. The benefit of hindsight now shows me that Virtual Server 2005 would have done as a platform for the past year.
Now that Hyper-V has been released we are once again looking at the possibility of using Microsoft Virtualisation Products as our Virtualisation Platform, I plan to release a couple of blog entries about how we’re going about doing this and highlighting anything interesting I come accross for you folks to read.
We’re installing Hyper-V on a Dell Power Edge PE1950 rack mount server, the basic spec of the machine is
- Quad Core Xeon running 2.33 Ghz
- 4 Gigabytes of RAM
- Dual 73 Gigabyte 15K RPM SAS drives
- 1 Terabyte SAN storage
- Dual NICs
Already I can see room for improvement on that specification, sadly the box wasn’t originally purchased to be a Virtualisation work horse. So I’ll be looking up the cost of a RAM upgrade (12 / 16 gig) plus perhaps a second processor to add a little more computation power.
As I type this the server is booting up in to Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition, the 64 Bit version obviously as Hyper-V doesn’t run on the 32 Bit version. My initial impression of Server 2008 is that it is much slicker than previous versions, as yet I’ve not found any new features which would cause me to make the jump to Server 2008 as the corporate server OS choice however its early days yet.
Next task - Installing Hyper-V.