Over 650 Microsoft.com Servers Will Be Virtualized

At the beginning of June 2008, Microsoft ended its transition to Windows Server 2008 by upgrading the last box running Windows Server 2003 to the latest Windows server operating system. At the same time, the end of the Windows 2003 era marked the start of yet another migration for the Redmond company's servers. This time, to Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V. According to Bruce Kyle, Microsoft Architect Evangelist, the vast majority of the servers running Microsoft.com will be virtualized in the future, the process having already been debuted.

"The server you are accessing at Microsoft may already be virtualized. So far, about 25% of the production servers are running on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V. About 80% of all new servers at Microsoft.com and others will be virtual. This includes about 350 production servers using Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V with another 300 being ramped up in the next few months," Kyle explained.

Microsoft is a company where dogfooding is at high praise. Eating its own dog food, the Redmond giant is running exclusively Windows Server 2008 for its web infrastructure, having started the migration when the server platform was still in Beta. The same is the case with Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, which has barely reached Release Candidate 1 stage, and is being wrapped up for release this summer.

So far, the company is running both its developer and IT professional portals on Hyper-V, namely MSDN and TechNet. Microsoft began testing Hyper-V, the hypervisor of Windows Server 2008 in production environments in February 2008 and as early as May, both MSDN and TechNet were running on completely virtualized servers.

"When you use MSDN or TechNet, you're already on a virtual server," Kyle added. "Hyper-V technology can be used by software developers or testers looking for ways to increase productivity by reducing the time it takes to build and configure a server for development or test use."