Microsoft.com Goes Virtual

Now this is what corporate blogging is supposed to be about.

Today, Rob Emanuel, a Microsoft technology architect, blogged about Microsoft using Hyper-V technology for Microsoft.com. He earlier blogged—and much more briefly—about using Hyper-V Release Candidate 0 for the MSDN and TechNet sites.

Presumably, Rob's post supports today's Hyper-V release to manufacturing. I didn't see the blog post until this morning (it wasn't there at midnight Pacific time), even though it has a time stamp of 4:38 p.m. PDT yesterday. I assume that Rob simply forgot to update. Too many pesky blogging systems label time when a post is created, forcing the blogger to manually update time and date later on.

I love it when Microsoft employee bloggers describe how the company's dog food is caviar—and that's meant as a compliment, by the way. Microsoft is quick to use its own technology, but it's not as fast telling other people about it. That's changing, and Rob's post is indicative of the trend. The best Microsoft case study is Microsoft.

Rob has put together a nice, concise primer, including Microsoft.com site stats and deployed hardware. Companies like Microsoft don't easily disclose this kind of information. There are competitive and even security considerations, which make the post's existence that much more impressive.

As of today, Microsoft has "25 percent of production traffic" running on Hyper-V, Rob blogged. "Based on these results we are ready to fully host www.microsoft.com web servers on Hyper-V and we're targeting end of June for 50 percent of the load. As soon as we complete deployment of our new hardware infrastructure in diverse data centers, we'll complete the full virtualization."

I don't want to excerpt too much from the post, but these statistics are worth calling out: Microsoft.com "handles 15,000 requests per second, 1.2 billion page views per month, and 280M worldwide unique users per month as well as supporting ~5000 content contributors from within the company," Rob blogged. "This site has close to 300GB of content consisting of some seven million individual files on each server."

Microsoft transparency is best when the company opens up the soul of its own IT operations. No case study is better than Microsoft.

Around the World in Less than 180 Days

When is late early?

This morning, Microsoft announced that its Hyper-V virtualization technology had released to manufacturing. From one perspective, the software shipped late, because it missed the February 27 launch of Windows Server 2008. Looked at another way, the software is early, because the RTM was less than the previously stated "released within 180 days." RTM is more like 120 days, or two months early.

The first rule in any kind of product marketing: Promise one thing and deliver something more. Or as my former JupiterResearch colleague Michael Gartenberg often says, "Under promise and over deliver." I expect there will be many "early" blogs and news stories about Hyper-V today, even though the software is late. Still, Microsoft deserves credit for making up so much development ground so fast. Kudos.

That said, two months early understates just how quickly Microsoft moved out Hyper-V. This morning, I spoke with Mike Neil, general manager of Microsoft Virtualization, about the release timetable. Hyper-V is "available today from Download Center." Microsoft had been indicating August availability just a few months ago.

So it's not August, not third quarter, not second half. Microsoft really released Hyper-V in the first half of the year. That's unusual, given in Microsoft parlance, release almost always means release to manufacturing, with availability some weeks later. "I've been consistent [about] 180 days, and I've always said within," Mike emphasized.

Maybe Microsoft's Server and Tools division had some other pressure—another deadline driving development to reach quality goals early. "It was good to slip this one [in] under the reign of Bill Gates," Mike said. Tomorrow is the Microsoft chairman's last day as a full-time employee.

For those enterprises not wanting to manually download Hyper-V, "on July 8 we will make it available through our Windows Update process," Mike said. The software has already been validated by OEMs for more than 200 systems, he added. Microsoft has expanded the list of supported operating systems, which now includes Windows 2000. See the list.

Windows Server 2008 shipped with the Hyper-V beta, which Mike said most enterprises should be able to easily update manually (through Download Center) or automatically (through Windows Update). The "how easily" should be known shortly, as enterprises begin to deploy the virtualization software.

Hyper-V comes at a time when more enterprises are putting more emphasis on virtualization. According to a recent eWEEK survey of 402 IT decision makers, 32.1 percent of enterprises will have deployed virtual desktop infrastructure by year's end. Meanwhile, 22.3 percent of enterprises will have deployed application virtualization.

Gartner predicts the number of deployed virtual machines will rise from 540,000 at the end of 2006 to more than 4 million in 2009. The major driving force—as in 90 percent of users—is server consolidation.

Many enterprises are consolidating servers in a massive trend not seen in a decade. Sun hugely benefitted from late-1990s server consolidation leading up to the so-called Year 2000 crisis. Mike Neil rightly observed that the TCO concerns drove the last decade's push to consolidate. The reasons are much different today: green computing, as IT organizations seek to reduce energy consumptions and costs related to cooling data centers, regulatory compliance and mobile computing trends, among others.

Pricing is unchanged from earlier announcements. Windows Server 2008 SKUs with Hyper-V cost just $28 more than those without. The price of the additional benefit might not seem much to customers but it could mean more to Microsoft and its partners. Hyper-V inclusion could snatch away potential customers from VMware, among other virtualization developers.

With previous Microsoft virtual server software, businesses had to license two virtualization instances, one for the server partition and another for the applications. Microsoft has modified licensing such that customers pay for only one virtualization instance.

Circling back to this blog's title—headline, if you prefer—and play off the Jules Verne novel, "Around the World in Eighty Days": Server and Tools is rapidly emerging as Microsoft's can-do division. According to a Forrester report published on Friday, "80 percent of firms cite the Redmond software giant as their primary server OS vendor." The division has posted more than 20 consecutive quarters of growth.

At a time when Microsoft's co-founder is stepping aside and CEO Steve Ballmer has sales and marketing executives running the company, it's interesting to see the division with best execution is run by a technical leader—Bob Muglia.

Mike Neil is in the right place, and he knows it—at least for June 26, 2008: "I'm the happiest guy at Microsoft," he said.