Generally speaking, I like to focus my blogs on what we\u2019re doing at Microsoft regarding Hyper-V virtualization and pretend the rest of the Internet doesn’t exist. However, there\u2019s some buzz on the web about a topic that I feel I need to address. Today, this blog is the first of a multi-part blog on the topic of Hyper-V\u2019s High Availability\/Quick Migration capabilities compared to VMware\u2019s VMotion (Live Migration) capabilities. <\/p>\n
Before I dive into details, let me take a step back and discuss why high availability is absolutely CRITICAL to virtualization. <\/p>\n
Virtualization is an awesome technology. It provides numerous benefits for reducing overall TCO, one of the most obvious benefits being power consumption savings. If you have a data center with 10,000 servers and you cut that number in half with virtualization (2:1 consolidation) you will achieve very tangible power and cost savings by retiring those 5,000 servers. Just look at your monthly power bill. Honestly, 2:1 consolidation is dead simple. (In fact, our own internal IT has been using Virtual Server for years now IN PRODUCTION with over 2,500 virtual machines and easily achieves 8:1 consolidation with four 9\u2019s uptime. With Hyper-V, we see those consolidation ratios climbing in a big way.) <\/p>\n