There is still time to register for the  VMware vs. Hyper-V Hands-on Workshop we are holding on Wednesday, November 18th, at the Hilton Boston/Woburn hotel in Woburn, MA.

The workshop will begin at 8:30 am and includes lunch. During the workshop John Laferriere will present a quick overview of Corporate Technologies. Next I will present a talk based on our VMware vSphere 4 vs. Hyper-V R2 white paper. Next Sean Daly and Joe Gries will do hands-on demonstrations of the two technologies. This will be followed by Q&A and lunch.

We are encouraging attendees to ask us about specific use cases and solution requirements to optimize the value of the workshop.  For more details and to register please see the invitation.

There are many, many choices available when it comes to virtualization technologies. Even within server virtualization, there are many options. Once the choices have been narrowed, it is still a chore to wade through the options and limitations to determine the best fit for a given datacenter environment.

Some frequent decision points include:

• Is your environment large enough to bother virtualizing?
• If you are running VMware, should you consider Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V R2?
• Can Hyper-V run other guest operating systems?
• What should a Windows-only shop do?

To help ease the effort, we’ve created a decision flow chart involving the two contenders on the short list at most sites – VMware vSphere 4 and Microsoft Hyper-V R2. This chart starts from your current infrastructure and leads you through the important decisions, and to the conclusions you are likely to reach.

The chart is based on much more detailed information provided in our vSphere vs. Hyper-V whitepaper available for download in this blog posting as well as the associated talk available here.

Hopefully this chart will help you make your server virtualization decisions. Please get in touch if you would like to review the whitepaper or have us evaluate the virtualization options for your datacenter. (Please click on the image for a full-size view.)

In a previous post I discussed the topic of deduplication for capacity optimization. Removing redundant data blocks on disk is the first, and most obvious, phase of deduplication in the marketplace. It helps to drive down the most obvious cost – the cost per GB of disk capacity. This market has grown quickly over the last few years. Both startups and established storage vendors have products that compete in the space. They are most commonly marketed as virtual tape library (VTL) or disk-to-disk backup solutions.

Does that mean that deduplication is a point solution for highly sequential workloads? No. There is another somewhat less obvious benefit of deduplication.

What storage administrator does not ask for more cache in the storage array? If I can afford 8GB, I want 16GB. If the system supports 16GB, I want 32GB. Whether it is for financial or technical reasons, cache is always limited. What about deduplicating the data in cache? When the workload is streaming sequential backup data from disk, this may not be very helpful. However, in a primary storage system with a more varied workload, this becomes very interesting.

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