Trust and Hyper-V

I have spent a lot of time onsite in the trenches with customers who have both the .NET Platform and the Java/Unix platform.  Many of these customers are in the telecommunications industry with a heavy focus on Java/Unix. 

Given that Unix was born at Ma Bell, I can understand the love but sometimes what I hear folks partial to Java/Unix say about Microsoft and .NET just doesn't make sense.  Some folks forget that Microsoft is a business---we are not secretly running all of our servers and front-end applications on Unix and Java while selling Windows and .NET. 

We use what we sell.  Not only that, we use what we sell when it is in Alpha and Beta before it gets to customers.  Does this mean our products are bug free and perfect?  Of course not.  I worked for six years in Premier Support at Microsoft---I understand where the issues exist and how they can affect customers.  (I also know from being onsite with customers that it isn't exactly cheap and easy in terms of services and support to implement mission critical applications on the alternative platform, but I digress...)

Virtualization is a key technology now and in the future for our customers, as well as for Microsoft as a business, to reduce hardware and management overhead while maintaining reliability.  In the spirit of living with our products first, it is pretty cool to note that both MSDN and TechNet are COMPLETELY VIRTUALIZED WITH HYPER-V.  This has been the case for weeks now, without issue.  To put this in perspective...

TECHNET receives about 1 MILLION HITS A DAY and MSDN receives about 3 MILLION HITS A DAY

So to the guy at a large telecommunications company who told me a while back that "no one will ever trust Microsoft to write a hypervisor," I hope that this little effort by Microsoft "eating its own dog food" moves the trust needle a little bit further to the right.

For more information on the implementation, check out this post for more details.