Microsoft Eats Own Hyper-V Dog Food, Deploys Homegrown Hypervisor In Its Global Datacenters (Video Interview)

At last week’s GigaOM VIP reception, just before their Structure 08 conference, we bumped into Arne Josefsberg, General Manager Online Infrastructure at Microsoft. He happened to be passing by in San Francisco and kindly agreed to get on record with comments on Hyper-V adoption at Microsoft. As he answered our late night questions, the party was just breaking up (hence the disturbing background sounds).

Update: also check out this article on GigaOM, since Om Malik caught up with Microsoft’s corporate VP of global foundation services, Debra Chrapaty, for a video chat as well.

Although Arne declined to put exact numbers to the amount of servers at Microsoft, he did confirm he is responsible for dozens of datacenters around the world to support the software giant’s online services. To give you an idea, Data Center Knowledge noted from a Microsoft executive that the company is adding no less than 10 000 servers per month.

Here is a datacenter lesson from Arne:

“As Microsoft obviously deploys a huge amount of processor, compute and storage capacity, [the need for] efficiency and utilization become super important to us. We work very closely with the Windows Operating system division. Hyper-V is actually becoming one of our key-technologies to drive better utilization of the hardware. We have Hyper-V in multiple datacenters in the Live-network, in production environments taking live traffic. It’s going quite quite well. So we are very jazzed about Hyper-V and virtualization as a technology to scale out our infrastructure.”

Arne’s team has been working closely with the Hyper-V development team for over a year and did not limit this collaboration to the hypervisor, but also the management tools and on how to manage hypervisors at very large scale.

When asked about cloud computing, Microsoft refers to its ‘Software plus Services’ strategy which combines software on the desktop (still the major revenue driver for Microsoft) with centralized datacenter-based services. Microsoft seems high on its hybrid flavor of cloud computing and hopes to lead the way in this nascent industry as well.