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Virtualization

Should You Virtualize Your Exchange 2007 SP1 Environment?

Lots of folks are trying to save money in their data centers by optimizing their infrastructure usage with virtualization.

Interestingly enough, with the release of Hyper-V and Microsoft’s program for hardware virtualization vendors, the support policy for Exchange and other applications has changed.

A couple of weeks ago, a post appeared on the Exchange Team Blog asking the question, “Should you virtualize your Exchange 2007 environment?” They lay out several scenarios where virtualizing at least some of the Exchange infrastructure might make sense. read more...

by February 5, 2009no comment

Virtualized Performance: Fusion vs. VirtualBox

Been playing around a little bit with VMware’s Fusion 2.0 and Sun’s VirtualBox 2.1.2, two virtualization platforms that are available for Mac users.

I will eventually expand this brief test to include Parallels 4.0, since it seems that Parallels and Fusion are the frontrunners when it comes to virtualization on the Mac platform.

For this initial test, I wanted to understand the differences in which the virtual disks were accessed and how that impacted performance.

Sun’s VirtualBox, although a nice little application for being free, doesn’t allow for the configuration of multiple processors, the network interface binding is a little strange, and merely doesn’t seem to have the flexibility. Fusion (and Parallels for that fact) provides the capabilities to support multiple virtual processors, works great with multiple Ethernet interfaces, and provides better integration into the platform being virtualized. read more...

by January 25, 2009no comment

Ballmer on Virtualization

Interesting quote from Steve Ballmer on virtualization that he gave during his September 25 Churchill Club speech:

“If you want virtualization on 80 percent of servers instead of 5 percent of servers, you better not charge three times as much as the price of the server for the virtualization,” Ballmer said. “For certain high-end applications, the approach that VMware has used is a perfectly good approach, but it’s not an approach that is going to lead to virtualization of a high percentage of servers.” read more...

by September 29, 2008no comment