This morning I read an article on Network World that I thought I’d write about. It reported a claim by the Burton Group (yes; them again) where it was claimed that:
- You should virtualise Exchange
- You should not use Hyper-V to do it: because it does not have ordered virtual machine start-ups.
Let’s take these two, one at a time.
Virtualise Exchange
You can imagine that I’m all for virtualising as much as is reasonable. A recommendation to virtualise Exchange always needs to come with a disclaimer. You know this already if you’re a regular reader: Microsoft does not support highly available Exchange databases on any highly available virtualisation platform. That means no Exchange 2007 CCR on VMware HA/DRS/VMotion. No Exchange 2010 DAGs on XenServer clusters. It doesn’t matter what virtualisation product you use; you cannot mix Exchange clustering in virtual machines with virtualisation clustering. I’ve already flogged this one so I’ll quit now.
Ordered Virtual Machine Start-up
This is the Burton Group’s answer to Charlton Heston’s corpse gripping his six-shooter (oh yes; I did go there!). This is a tiny thing and the difference between what they prefer (in VMware) to what Hyper-V has is tiny. The Burton Group’s preferred ordering mechanism for VM’s would be:
- VM1 starts up
- Wait for VM1, then start VM2 and VM3
- Wait for …. etc.
Microsoft went a different way. You can specify (in seconds) how long a virtual machine should wait before starting up after a host powers up.
Here’s my thinking: The Burton Group would like you to avoid the virtualisation solution that can really change how IT works and go with something else because of one tiny feature. Huh! I love how great IT experts take care of their customers and readers ;-) Hyper-V is not the complete solution. It’s the facilitator for Dynamic IT and for Optimised IT. System Center are the agents that make use of Hyper-V. You can change how you deploy servers and applications. You can change how you monitor them. You can change how you back up your business. You can change how you present user applications to the business. You can do all of this from an integrated management solution that manages Hyper-V and your physical infrastructure. So …. get all that versus pay between 2 and 5 times more for a virtualization solution with the ability to start up VM’s in a specific order. I know which enterprise ready solution I’d go for.
Basically, if you look at the Burton Group study… they took all the VMware features, and then declared “This is what it takes to be Enterprise ready!!”. And guess what… VMware met all the criteria they were the basis of (surprise). Then Burton Group went to VMworld and declared VMware the victor… and it was met with great applause (I’m sure that was a shock).
So in the Burton Group’s mind, if you don’t do what VMware does… and don’t do it the way VMware does it… then you are not “Enterprise Ready”. I thought analysts were supposed to be unbiased and think outside the box? Hmmm… guess not. I guess it’s ok if VMware has them in their back pocket… however it would be nice if they used a blank slate to establish the criteria of what really matters. But it’s just easier to hold the leader up as the standard and blindly march to VMware’s drum.
For anyone really familiar with how VMware’s VM Restart Priority really works, it’s incredibly basic in what it provides. I simply can’t see how it qualifies as ‘required’ to deploy a virtualization platform.