Hi—I am Rob Emanuel, a Technology Architect on the Microsoft.com Operations team focusing on virtualization. I wanted to share the great progress we have made rolling out Hyper-V since my first blog a month ago. In that blog I discussed our success with fully virtualizing the web front ends for MSDN and TechNet on Hyper-V RC0. I also highlighted an article our team wrote about how we approached those virtualizations and hopefully conveyed how truly successful we found Hyper-V to be as a web platform.
Microsoft.com Powered by Hyper-V
One of our more challenging systems from a server subsystem utilization perspective is Microsoft Corporation. The site 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. This site has close to 300GB of content consisting of some seven million individual files on each server. Due to this scale and the variety of applications hosted, the site heavily exercises all of the major subsystems - memory, CPU, network, and file I/O – on each server. Based on the load characteristics and the fact that this site is a testing ground for early adoption of Microsoft technology, we expected the production load of Microsoft Corporation to provide a great test for Hyper-V.
