Welkom in Amsterdam!
Windows is now big! And when I say big I mean HUGE. They do not only power smaller and smaller devices but larger and larger as well. Some specs for the now Windows Server 2012 (yes they are calling it that so stop calling it Windows Server “8”): You can run 64 nodes in a single cluster, you can use up to 4 TB of memory per server, you can run 4 000 VMs, a single VM can support 1 TB of memory and 64 TB of virtual disk!
Given those figures we are very close to seeing the end of the physical server as the goto solutions for information and transaction heavy solutions such as BizTalk tend to be. All this virtualization also makes it easer to maintain and move around as the specs of the different applications changes. Good news for us.
The most impressive part was the way they got more than 1 million I/Os per second from a single virtual machine. Compare this number to your fairly standard (and fast) SSD drive that has about 8 000. I can safely say that physical servers is no longer they primary way to go. Even SQL server can deliver it’s very near maximum performance in a virtual environment. One Microsoft guy said about 99% of all tasks.
The other things they they focused on was the good capabilities to utilize hybrid cloud. They even provisioned a AMS server using Windows Systems center. They also talked a lot about how to integrated different versions of the cloud and how it can be monitored from the same place, including that AMS server. For us familiar with other cloud providers that focus mainly on IaaS, this is a very good thing because most of the time it simply comes down to maintainability.
In Berlin in 2010 I blogged about the keynote as well, and in that post I “predicted” that we might see a future in which we buy desktops in the cloud for our company and they look and behave just as they normally would. We are not quite there yet in some aspects but in other aspects, Microsoft has surpassed my predictions and also my expectations! We can now run servers in the cloud just as we would run them on prem.
Blog Post by: Mikael Sand