And the winner of the Virsto Xbox is…
Posted Tuesday, May 11, 2010 in News 0 comments
Drum roll please....
We are pleased to announce the winner of the Virsto Xbox... Janssen Jones, Associate Director of Auxiliary Information Technology (AIT) at Indiana University.
When we called Janssen to tell him he won the Xbox, we asked if he would be willing to share some of his experience with Hyper-V. Here is what he said.
Tell us a little about yourself
Janssen: I have been working for the Indiana University since 2002. I have been in my current role for the past four years.
What does your Hyper-V environment look like?
Janssen: We have been active users of Hyper-V since 2008. My department (AIT) is part of TAP (Technology Adoption Program) for both SCVMM and Hyper-V. We currently manage 180 virtual machines across 16 blades. We have a mix of storage in our SAN that includes solid state disks. The overall environment is 90-95% virtualized. It is very easy to see that in a couple of years we will soon be managing 300 virtual machines.
Biggest Hyper-V pain point
Janssen: For our environment we are seeing pain points around troubleshooting intermittent performance problems. These pain points come from not being able to track bad performance to a single VM. This is mostly due to VMs sharing spindles and host servers. For example, a database backup on one server may cause I/O to queue on a totally unrelated file server, just because all of the back-end server and storage resources are pooled. Finding a way to see the entire picture to identify root cause has proven challenging.
How can Virsto One help?
Janssen: I have some ideas, lots of ideas. A couple that come to mind, that I will be including in the scope of some of my tests are:
- A golden image for VDI, create 50 (or more) copies of an image and run our kiosks off that single image.
- Using Virsto One in place of CSV for simplification.
Advice for those starting Hyper-V projects
Janssen: Here at AIT we took a phased approach, and I would recommend that for anyone starting a Hyper-V project. We devoted a fair amount of time before the project to architect and plan our virtualization roll out. Our environment allowed us the flexibility to tackle the stand alone hosts first, then integrate clustering for high availability in our second phase. Specifically, in regards to clustering make sure and spend the time in understanding what workflows need 24x7 support. Also seek out mentors and communities where Hyper-V and virtualization in general are being discussed, because there really are resources out there ready to help.
Lastly, what game are you looking forward to playing on your shiny new Xbox?
Janssen: Beatles Rock Band, of course.
Thank you Janssen for sharing your experiences about Hyper-V. And our thanks to everyone who stopped by our booth at the Microsoft Management Summit in Las Vegas. We look forward to giving away another Microsoft Xbox at Tech•Ed in June.
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