Our Infrastructure Engineer Aidan Finn has published a whitepaper that looks at how Microsoft is adopting virtualisation across the entire IT infrastructure.
It used to be that virtualisation was locked away safe in the hands of geeks or software testers where it wouldn’t ruin the day for the rest of us. However, the technology has matured to the point that virtualisation is now the primary architecture of choice for deploying servers, desktops and information worker environments. That’s right; virtualisation is more than just for servers!
It seems that no matter what industry newspaper, conference or website we pick up or attend, we’re bombarded with marketing materials and arguments about virtualisation solutions. If you’re an architect or a decision maker you need to know more than the tiny details; you need to think about the big picture. It seems that everyone is getting into battles about tiny details and misquotes. Maybe it’s time to think about the big picture.
How will these new technologies fit into my existing infrastructure, how will I manage then and will they add positively to my business?
Microsoft has been in the virtualisation business for years. When we first think of virtualisation we have a very limited point of view … machines. As you’ll soon read, there’s much more to virtualisation than reducing the number of servers in the data centre.
It’s true that Microsoft has been in the server virtualisation market for a while but they gained little acceptance outside of the test lab. They sold their solutions as being ready for the enterprise but we rightly greeted those comments with great scepticism. IT professionals viewed their 2 products for PC’s and Servers as nothing more than point solutions with very limited functionality when compared with the competition.
However, Windows Server 2008 has changed the game somewhat. New technologies and a new strategy mean that we now need to re-evaluate the solutions we are being offered. It’s important that we view the direction of the entire infrastructure and how we want to manage it when deciding what virtualisation technology we will adopt.
This document will discuss the Microsoft virtualisation strategy and why you might want to seriously consider adopting it. There will be a comparison with competitor solutions. These competitive solutions are excellent products and I’ll try to discuss them a little. However, there is a good understanding in the market of these technologies so I’ll focus a bit more on the less understood Microsoft strategy.
I will be discussing technology but I don’t intend this to be a “level 400” technical analysis. This document is intended to be a briefing to help you with gathering information for a fair analysis of alternative solutions in your decision making process.
You can read the rest of the document by downloading this whitepaper.
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