FSOwner
FS Owner
James O'Neill: A couple of Stories have been doing the rounds on our internal Virtualization discussions. One was headed "HOLY COW HYPER-V VIRTUALIZING MICROSOFT.COM!!!!!!" (and before anyone wonders if this is breaking something internal to the world, it's already been described in detail on by Rob Emanuel on the Windows Server blog ). The MS.COM operations team have also produced an article on how they virtualized Technet and MSDN
Now... Microsoft.com is not your average home page. The statistics are staggering: 1.2 Billion hits per month, on average that's over 4,000 every second, but at busy times it peaks at 4 times that. Its 7 million pages take up 300GB of space. It used to need 80 servers to deliver it, but the Ops team migrated it to Server 2008 and newer hardware and saw the opportunity to reduce the number of servers. What became apparent with modern CPUs and RAM sizes, the servers were disk bound Simply throwing more CPU cores and more RAM at the servers wasn't going to reduce the number of boxes needed. Redesigning the site so it used more disk spindles would help - but the quickest win would be to take bigger servers and use Hyper-V to partition them, with each Virtual Machine getting it's own disks that would double the the number of disk IOs available without breaking the site into parts on different disks. But could they use virtualization with out Hyper-V itself becoming the bottleneck. Deploying new servers into the array is involves sync'ing 7 million pages: would virtualizing the servers - even if they ran one VM per box - help deployment ? Even if Hyper-V could scale and wasn't a drag on management and deployment , would it be reliable ? And would running one Mega site on Hyper-V give the Microsoft.Com folks confidence to consolidate some of the smaller machines they mange. ... incidentally Blogs.technet.com where this page is hosted is run for us by a third party.
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Now... Microsoft.com is not your average home page. The statistics are staggering: 1.2 Billion hits per month, on average that's over 4,000 every second, but at busy times it peaks at 4 times that. Its 7 million pages take up 300GB of space. It used to need 80 servers to deliver it, but the Ops team migrated it to Server 2008 and newer hardware and saw the opportunity to reduce the number of servers. What became apparent with modern CPUs and RAM sizes, the servers were disk bound Simply throwing more CPU cores and more RAM at the servers wasn't going to reduce the number of boxes needed. Redesigning the site so it used more disk spindles would help - but the quickest win would be to take bigger servers and use Hyper-V to partition them, with each Virtual Machine getting it's own disks that would double the the number of disk IOs available without breaking the site into parts on different disks. But could they use virtualization with out Hyper-V itself becoming the bottleneck. Deploying new servers into the array is involves sync'ing 7 million pages: would virtualizing the servers - even if they ran one VM per box - help deployment ? Even if Hyper-V could scale and wasn't a drag on management and deployment , would it be reliable ? And would running one Mega site on Hyper-V give the Microsoft.Com folks confidence to consolidate some of the smaller machines they mange. ... incidentally Blogs.technet.com where this page is hosted is run for us by a third party.
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