Nirmal Thewarathanthri is a Technology Specialist working for Tech One Global which was previously known as Tech Distribution. Tech One Global is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner in extensive development and implementation of products in the Microsoft product portfolio with qualified personnel and professional IT services that add value to business. Tech One Global is also a value added Distributor for Oracle Adobe Products and authorized training partner for International Council of E-Commerce Consultants (EC Council) & Microsoft Certified Partner for Learning Solutions (CPLS). Tech One Global not only serves Sri Lanka, but has its branches in Brunei, Dubai and it overlooks Maldives through its partner network.
I got in contact with Nirmal when he wanted to participate in the IT Pro Momentum program to do a project around Hyper-V. Before this project they were running Windows Server 2003 together with Exchange Server 2003. He had lots of reasons to try Hyper-V, quick migration was one of them. To be able to move virtual machines from one physical server to another is something very useful if you want to bring a server down. With the new Live Migration features in Windows Server 2008 R2 this will be even better. Other advantages he saw with Hyper-V were of course server consolidation, to be able to use the hardware to the maximum. Since he had previously worked with other virtualization solutions, he was curious to see how Hyper-V would do compared to them.
After the migration
they now have six Windows Server 2008 servers, four of them are dedicated to virtualization and are hosting 13 Virtual Servers. They also upgraded the Exchange server to Exchange 2007. The migration took around two months to do and now Nirmal is very happy with his choice of Hyper-V. I asked him what the main benefits were:
One of the main benefits is that we can run x64 virtual machines; this was something we couldn’t do with Virtual Server or Virtual PC. Also, Hyper-V has the snapshot/Checkpoint feature which is great when you do testing, Apart from that the Hyper-V Machines can be managed via System Center Virtual Machine Manager and also we have configured an alerting system by integrating System Center Operations Manager with System Center Virtual Machine Manager. To be able to manage all virtual machines from one console is very useful. We are also looking forward for the final release of Windows Server 2008 R2 and also System Center Virtual Machine Manager R2 which enables us to perform live migrations of Virtual Machines.
He did run in to some issues when moving existing virtual machines that were created by Virtual Server. But after installing the available integration tools they managed to get everything to work.
My last question was: Why do you think other IT Pros should go for Hyper-V?
The main reason behind Hyper-V is to consolidate available resource. By implementing Hyper-V you come to a conclusion that your electricity is not wasted and also all available resources are properly utilized.
You can find a lot of information about Hyper-V and Microsoft’s Virtualization Solutions here. If you are interested in doing an early adoption project with support from us, send me an email with the subject “IT Pro Momentum”
When I talked to Nirmal today he told me that he is now also looking at the Beta for Exchange Server 2010 to understand how his company would benefit from that. More information about that Beta and how to download here