14 DAY TRIAL // According to Microsoft, Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V has been ready for deployment into production environments as early as Release Candidate 0, made available for download in December 2007. And just as the case with Windows Server 2008, Microsoft is jumping the gun on the adoption of Hyper-V. Ahead of its finalization, the Redmond company had switched almost its entire server infrastructure, with the exception of a single box, to Windows Server 2008. The transition included even "www.microsoft.com". Now the official website for Microsoft is getting prepared for yet another switch, to Hyper-V.
Microsoft's portals for IT professionals and developers, TechNet and MSDN, have already been virtualized. "MSDN.microsoft.com (MSDN) and TechNet.microsoft.com (TechNet) have been successfully running on Hyper-V. Specifically, we migrated MSDN March 31 2008, and then followed up with TechNet April 18 2008. This article provides further details about testing methods and the results from Hyper-V Beta to RC0 that generated our confidence to fully roll out MSDN and TechNet on Hyper-V in production. These are just the first steps," the Redmond company revealed.
By taking Microsoft.com and virtualizing it via Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, the software giant aims to prove that the hypervisor technology, formerly codenamed Viridian, is more than ready for real-world implementation. A loyal adept of dogfooding practices, Microsoft has been little hesitant to bet of Hyper-V, even on an early stage in the product's development as Release Candidate 0. Since then, Microsoft has released an update, namely the RC1 build.
"Our production testing began in early February 2008, when we installed the Hyper-V role on two physical servers, with each hosting three VMs running MSDN. Production load on these six VMs progressed from a cautious 1 percent to 20 percent very quickly and smoothly. During the next six weeks, we tested various amounts of load and VM combinations to better understand the performance characteristics and scalability of the product and the site. MSDN was also deployed directly onto matching physical servers to compare VMs against physical performance, scale, and stability with the same load characteristics," Microsoft added.