Microsoft migrates MSCOM (MSDN and TechNet) to Hyper-V virtual machines
MSCOM have been working for a while to get their infrastructure completely virtualized. If you were at MMS 2008 and heard Bob Muglia’s Keynote, you already know that MSDN.microsoft.com (MSDN) and TechNet.microsoft.com (TechNet) have been successfully running on Hyper-V. Late last week we provide more details of the project (PDF Version Included) and announced that basically both sites are now running on the Hyper-V technology.
We do eat our own dog food a lot with many technologies, but this one is pretty important from a customer perspective as is give some real numbers on perf and stability that many could understand.
We left the back-end database on physical boxes, but moved 100% of the IIS7 machines to Hyper-V RC0 VMs with 4 virtual CPUs and 10GB RAM.
The virtualization hosts are powered by 2 Intel quad-core CPUs and 32GB RAM (2GB are reserved for the Windows Server 2008 parent partition).
The performance report after this migration is very interesting:
- Hyper-V CPU overhead (as measured by the parent partition utilization) was 5% to 6% with linear progression as the number of requests increased.
- CPU over-subscription (three four-processor VMs on an eight-processor physical server) resulted in 3% lower overall performance per physical server based on overall requests per second per 1 percent CPU.
- Requests per second per 1% CPU performance of MSDN over the previous physical server platform improved. This demonstrates to us the viability of efficient consolidation from dedicated older physical servers to shared virtualized platforms.
- Physical MSDN handled 21% more requests per second per 1% CPU than virtualized MSDN.
Read the whole report here.