there are good use cases for using Hyper-V instead of bare metal. Imagine the following scenario: you want to provide and maintain centrally managed resources that are maintained and designed in a way that you cannot make a single, small customer pay.
From your partner levels both with Microsoft and Astaro and your web site I figure that you mostly deal with smaller customers (correct me if I am wrong) and you probably a) will not necessarily meet the requirements for virtualization in those organizations, but b) have a customer base that is not necessarily willing to pay for HA solutions or simply does not have the budget for that.
I simply do not want to talk about the money they can spend on monitoring the avaliability of infrastructures, upgrading the system, maintaining it.
For this customer base a key-turn, centrally managed solution would probably save a lot of money and provide a better level of service. How many of your customers do host their websites inhouse these days? They move them to centralized datacenters and ISPs who have specialized on providing a decent service through central resources for a good, affordable price.
This is only possible if you use centralized, prepackaged solutions that are very easy to manage on a large scale.
The same applies to any kind of server virtualization. From my previous experience working for a large German systems integrator working with mid-sized to large enterprise accounts, I have learned that they almost all move to a kind of virtualization. In fact you have to specify a reason for NOT deploying your solution in a virtual environment; and if they are able to manage 10.000+ servers under VMWare there is no reason why this shouldn't be possible in smaller installations, even if you have the one or other "time critical" service among it.
Imagine your server farm with say 200 physical servers; you just cannot apply the same standardized way of deploying and managing those machines as you can when using a virtualized, highly standardized and hardware-independant infrastructure.
Now imagine how easy it would be for you to maintain 30 virtual ASGs inhouse and maybe just use the RED as a kind of "MSSP connector" to your small, self-hosted, maybe Hyper-V based virtualized infrastructure. This would save a lot of travel time and you can easily e.g. deploy version upgrades - even major ones - by using smart virtual infrastructure containers.
Now, again imagine your small customer. How cool would it be if say a sales rep on the road would not connect to the tiny HQ internet connection, but connect to your datacenter (with a big internet pipe) and go from there to the HQ or to a significanly faster providable internet that if he would use the company's uplink.
I personally use a lot of cloud based resources; not only despite the fact that they are centralized and taken away from me, but e.g. for backup and mail hosting especially BECAUSE they are centralized and accessible from everywhere.
Supporting Hyper-V in the end is nothing more or less than supporting yet another management infrastructure; the security problems of the underlying infrastucture or its security features are basically not so important; the systems mangement features are the ones to keep in mind.
By the way, I personally would rather perfer to have Xen supported than Hyper-V (because of it being a linux based, rather open source-ish virtualization platform), but for a microsoft shop there are good reasons to request Hyper-V support.
there are good use cases for using Hyper-V instead of bare metal. Imagine the following scenario: you want to provide and maintain centrally managed resources that are maintained and designed in a way that you cannot make a single, small customer pay.
From your partner levels both with Microsoft and Astaro and your web site I figure that you mostly deal with smaller customers (correct me if I am wrong) and you probably a) will not necessarily meet the requirements for virtualization in those organizations, but b) have a customer base that is not necessarily willing to pay for HA solutions or simply does not have the budget for that.
I simply do not want to talk about the money they can spend on monitoring the avaliability of infrastructures, upgrading the system, maintaining it.
For this customer base a key-turn, centrally managed solution would probably save a lot of money and provide a better level of service. How many of your customers do host their websites inhouse these days? They move them to centralized datacenters and ISPs who have specialized on providing a decent service through central resources for a good, affordable price.
This is only possible if you use centralized, prepackaged solutions that are very easy to manage on a large scale.
The same applies to any kind of server virtualization. From my previous experience working for a large German systems integrator working with mid-sized to large enterprise accounts, I have learned that they almost all move to a kind of virtualization. In fact you have to specify a reason for NOT deploying your solution in a virtual environment; and if they are able to manage 10.000+ servers under VMWare there is no reason why this shouldn't be possible in smaller installations, even if you have the one or other "time critical" service among it.
Imagine your server farm with say 200 physical servers; you just cannot apply the same standardized way of deploying and managing those machines as you can when using a virtualized, highly standardized and hardware-independant infrastructure.
Now imagine how easy it would be for you to maintain 30 virtual ASGs inhouse and maybe just use the RED as a kind of "MSSP connector" to your small, self-hosted, maybe Hyper-V based virtualized infrastructure. This would save a lot of travel time and you can easily e.g. deploy version upgrades - even major ones - by using smart virtual infrastructure containers.
Now, again imagine your small customer. How cool would it be if say a sales rep on the road would not connect to the tiny HQ internet connection, but connect to your datacenter (with a big internet pipe) and go from there to the HQ or to a significanly faster providable internet that if he would use the company's uplink.
I personally use a lot of cloud based resources; not only despite the fact that they are centralized and taken away from me, but e.g. for backup and mail hosting especially BECAUSE they are centralized and accessible from everywhere.
Supporting Hyper-V in the end is nothing more or less than supporting yet another management infrastructure; the security problems of the underlying infrastucture or its security features are basically not so important; the systems mangement features are the ones to keep in mind.
By the way, I personally would rather perfer to have Xen supported than Hyper-V (because of it being a linux based, rather open source-ish virtualization platform), but for a microsoft shop there are good reasons to request Hyper-V support.
