Results of The Great Big Hyper-V Survey of 2011 (part 2)

In yesterdays blog I started with the first part of my analysis of the Hyper-V Survey:

• Why Hyper-V?

• Hyper-V Implementation

The second part focuses on these three topics of the survey:

• Systems Management

• Private Cloud?

• The Year is 2012

SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT

In this part we want to learn how people are managing their Hyper-V servers. Somehow I was not surprised to see that over 56% use System Center Virtual Machine Manager as their primary management tool. Many will be pleasantly surprised if they see what VMM 2012 can do for them! There are still a number of tasks you can only do (efficiently) in Hyper-V Manager or Failover Cluster Manager. So the 38% is understandable too.

If you are using VMM, PowerShell support is included. For those that don’t there is James O’Neil’s fantastic Hyper-V PowerShell Library. Some of that will hopefully appear in the next version of Windows.

Naturally VMM is the most popular System Center product with Ops Manager and DPM directly to follow. Again Essentials is hardly used at all. Opalis and Service Manager are too recent to make a real impact yet.

Even with the included PowerShell only a third use VMM PowerShell. There is still a lot of work in educating scripting languages with Microsoft products. This will take time.

More than half of all people use the VMM library and I am sure if the other half realize what it can do for them, they would use the library as well.

Less than 21% use VMM self-service. In the current version of VMM this is hardly an attractive feature. Things are bound to improve with 2012.

I looked at quota’s for one of my VMM presentations, but that is the only time I really tried to find out how this could be useful. This concept needs a lot of reworking before it gets used a lot.

Not surprisingly access to VMM is limited to a small group of IT. Delegation of Administration needs improvement in VMM 2008 R2 and that’s what we get in 2012.

Less than a third have implemented PRO integration. Not a very intuitive installation at all, I am not surprised. I am sure that Dynamic Optimization as a standard VMM 2012 feature will be warmly received

The answer to the next question shows that a relatively large part of the respondents have fairly small Hyper-V environments. One VMM server can handle quite a number of Hyper-V hosts. In VMM 2012 I expect the roles to be split among more machines, especially in larger private cloud implementations.

With VMM 2008 you still had the choice of using the included SQL Server SQL Server Express. The next version requires a full version and for High Available VMM with High Available VMM database the Enterprise version will have to be used.

Of course the virtualization environment is monitored and in a lot of cases with Operations Manager. In my opinion the current management packs for Hyper-V are very poor and need a lot of improvement. Hopefully we’ll see this with Ops Manager 2012.

Both host and guest level backups are most often used.

And disk has become a favourite of most answerers. Will tape ever go away? That depends on the retention time possible with disk systems combined with a steep increase of disk capacity and a sharp decline of disk prizes.

CSV and Backup. They never went together well. Ever heard of redirected access? If you have you will want the next version to really really improve on this.

PRIVATE CLOUD

Here we are looking at the future of virtualization

If application and virtualization are managed by the same people there may not be a great demand for delegation of administration. In the current version of VMM this was fairly limited. When Hyper-V environments become bigger and larger private clouds emerge, delegation will be come a lot more important. VMM 2012 takes care of that.

Not surprisingly over 80% have not (yet) deployed a private cloud. Nevertheless we will learn that even smaller companies can benefit from the private cloud approach. VMM 2012 is the living proof of that approach.

Not everybody is sure about deploying a private cloud based on Hyper-V but I think that will change when we learn what Microsoft has planned for the next version. We can soon start to apply private cloud technology by upgrading VMM to the 2012 version. It accepts the three major hypervisors as fully equal citizens.

Here you go. More than 70% believe they will base their private cloud on VMM 2012. Good choice

The important bricks of the new fabric are expected to be used. So that’s good. These numbers are bound to grow in the coming year when it is clear what VMM 2012 can do for virtualization and private clouds.

A desire for Firewall integration support in the private cloud is spread across two camps of almost 50%. Yes or No, what will it be?

Most responders say they will backup virtual machines at the host/storage level and implement in-VM backups when requested. There is still a small amount who never backup. Living on the edge?

Monitoring in the cloud is not any different from monitoring a regular virtualized environment. So this is consistent.

This is a less expected answer. More than 70% don’t expect integrating private and public cloud. Hey, that is interesting. Does Microsoft realize this? Will this change if software makes this a lot easier?

The majority expect their environment to be very dynamic. Constant change is what everybody will have to get used to.

If you share out fabric resources in the cloud you might eventually want to make users pay for this. More than 45% say this is not the case but they are also the ones who think they will not implement a private cloud. We’ll find out next year.

Of course security will remain a big concern and yes this also applies to the private cloud. But it will not be all that different from the current situation. Strikingly a lot of non-technical reasons are given that might make implementing a private cloud more difficult.

THE YEAR IS 2012

What are you doing in 2012?

I reckon that most of Hyper-V users realize very well that the hypervisor and its management are behind compared to its biggest competitor. Many of the lagging points have been included in the recent versions of R2 and SP1. Almost 90% of the respondents are seriously considering using Hyper-V in “Windows Server 8”.  Keep your eyes on Build which will reveal a great deal about Microsoft’s new operating system and hypervisor.

In the previous answers it was clear that DR was hardly implemented. It is good to see that the respondents are interested in Hyper-V Replica which allows you to replicate a virtual machine from one location to another with Hyper-V and any network connection regardless of server, network or storage vendor.

Today we saw the round of applause in the social media and blogs about Microsoft’s official statement that Hyper-V would be included in the client version of Hyper-V. See also this blog of mine

Another good indication of how System Center 2012 will be adopted can be deduced from the final answer. VMM 2012 will be used by the majority. Ops Manager 2012 and DPM 2012 again are in place 2 and 3.

I am already curious how the answers to the Great Big Hyper-V Survey of 2012 will stack of to those of this year. We are working hard to make this survey a lot more representative. I am sure the numbers will grow significantly in the coming year and 2012 will mean a radical shift for Microsoft Virtualization. Come and join the club!

And if you are still not convinced … take a look at this very funny video: http://vmlimited.ctp.trafficmgr.com/

Finally, I’d like to thank everyone for participating in this survey and all those people who have paid attention to the blogs, have retweeted and helped us understand what goes on in the world of Hyper-V and Microsoft Virtualization.

I also thank Aidan Finn and Damian Flynn for partnering in this survey. It was good fun and very educational.