A Linux Infrastructure Manager's Take on Hyper-V

by Peter Galli on August 09, 2010 12:15pm

As Microsoft continues to broaden and extend its virtualization offerings, I'd like to share with you an email that Gordon McDowall, a Linux Infrastructure manager for Fasthosts Internet Limited, shared with us about his experience with Hyper-V:

Hi, my name is Gordon McDowall, I am a Linux Infrastructure manager for Fasthosts Internet Limited, a large hosting service provider based in the UK offering services such as Windows and Linux based web hosting, database hosting, email hosting, connectivity services and dedicated server hosting.

Recently Fasthosts has expanded into the Virtual server market, and this expansion has been based on a system built on Microsoft Hyper-V technology. Initially the offering was for Windows 2008 only, but we have recently released some Linux offerings on the Hyper-V infrastructure already put in place for the Windows Virtual Servers.

This ability to offer Microsoft and Linux VPS servers on the same underlying platform makes administration easier and reduces infrastructure and support costs as our solution runs on a highly redundant Dell blade platform with SAN backends offering up storage to the blades via iSCSI.

Coming from a Linux background, I had some skepticism of how Microsoft could integrate Linux operating systems into the Hyper-V hypervisor. This initial skepticism was quickly quashed after a few discussions with some Microsoft Linux Developers and Microsoft's head of development.  

It was very easy to see just how seriously they were taking this project and  how knowledgeable they were about the Linux operating system. Working so closely with a company like Microsoft in a pioneering project like this has been very exciting and they have been incredibly supportive (even though coming from a Linux background it pains me to admit it!)

Having worked with the Linux Integration Components for a few months now, right from RC1, I have found them easy to work with and very reliable, each time an update has been released the improvement to performance has been very noticeable with our Linux VPS platform running on a par with the Microsoft VPS and on a par with many dedicated servers on dedicated physical hardware.

The Linux VPS servers with the Linux Hyper-V integration components installed have flown through our QA process with nothing at all being flagged by the QA department.

Initial customer uptake and feedback on the Linux VPS product has been very positive. So far so good...