2008 r2 virtualisation

At the same time as windows 7 release, windows server r2 has also been released. Many have overlooked this as the 2003 r2 release provided little in the way of features. This time this is very much not the case.

Whilst 2008 added hyper-v virtualisation many criticised it for a lack of advanced features such as automatic high availability. The lack of these features has forced the implementation of costly 3rd party solutions (vmware/xen).

r2 addresses these issues by implementing them at no additional cost. The enterprise version allows you to run four virtual copies of winows server at no additional cost. This means you can install a second domain controller, fileserver, mailserver etc. all on one machine. Now the obvious issue here is that the single point of failure is the physical machine that the systems are running on. Here comes the clever bit. using supported storage medium. Now this traditionally means an expensive fibre channel SAN system, but these days high level kit is much cheaper and there are lots of options. Whatever route is chosen the result is a reliable box of storage space. It is then possible to plug into this shared storage two servers (removing the previous single point of failure) running R2. As they are running R2 which supports "live migration". What this means is that the virtual machine runs on machine 1. A mouse-click can cause the machine to move to the second physical machine without any reboot.

What is less well publicised is that as well as manual migration R2 also brings automated migration, so if a server dies then its machines will automatically move to the other active server. Obviously there are licensing implications in this, but clearly this is a must-have feature. What this means additionally is that old-school active/passive clustering suddenly becomes pointless, as paying money to have a server ready to jump into action is not needed. Instead the second server can run useful services.

This probably marks the beginning of a price war between the different offerings.

http://www.microsoft.com/hyper-v-server/en/us/default.aspx