Hyper-V

We use Hyper-V across the entire organization. Everything that requires a server is virtualized, and Hyper-V makes it easy to configure a fault-tolerant cluster for a very low price. With replication, we also don’t worry as much about downtime or data loss.

Our customers use Hyper-V for scenarios where the cost associated with VMWare solutions is simply not advantageous. It is a simple to use hypervisor packed with enterprise functionality.

We use Hyper-V for production servers and virtualising test environments across the organisation.

Testing
For testing it allows us to quickly roll back a machine to a 'clean' environment, enabling us to guarantee testing from a known point. This is something that is done very regularly in our business as we are a software development house and need that guarantee that the test environment is not spoiled by a previous build of our software, or an operating system update.

Servers
Almost all of our servers are now virtualised, this helps us manage our physical environment by reducing the hardware requirements. It also allows virtualised machines to be ported with ease if a problem arises on the host server.

We use Hyper-V to support our private cloud for development and consulting purposes. Using Hyper-V provides us tremendous flexibility. We're able to run many VMs on a single host and use it to replicate many different environments for testing.

Hyper-v was used to host all Windows infrastructure (700+ servers) in the company. We migrated from VMware, which saved the company over 100K in licensing.

We use Hyper-V for development VMs as well as for production VMs. I run, manage and help developers use our 600+ development VMs including all the underlying infrastructure.

I have been using Hyper-V for about half a year for creating clusters on Linux (RedHat, Ubuntu).

We began to make an entire conversion to Hyper-V over the last 2 years for our new DC and also our remote locations. The problem it was supposed to solve was the increasing cost of VMware.

We use Hyper-V at an enterprise level to create and maintain all of our virtual machines. Currently, most of this resides on an IBM Blade Center with four blades and about 12 VMs.

Hyper-V is being used as our hypervisor platform to support our disaster recovery/secondary data center operation. VMware runs our other data center. Hyper-V was implemented in DR to save licensing costs over VMware and also as a way for the bank to assess its capabilities in a slightly less critical operation. It has been a very successful project.

We used Hyper-V to support virtual applications and additional virtual machines for production and development. The ability to spin up a virtual environment which could be backed up and re-stored quickly was critical for our infrastructure for development of new support for our client base. We tested several virtual environments during the time phase and Hyper-V was one of them.

Our Hyper-V infrastructure was built to reduce the cost of licensing for SQL Server that we previously had with systems running VMware. We have both a Test/Dev infrastructure and a Production infrastructure. Each contains a number of host servers with multi-path connections to storage systems (EMC VNX for less critical systems, and SolidFire for critical systems. SQL Servers were transitioned from stand-alone systems to SQL farms. We have, and will, save close to $7M over a five year lifespan just on the SQL licensing. These Hyper-V systems are used across numerous business organizations in our company, with both internal - and external-facing applications.

Hyper-V is used across R&D, IT, and support. Each department has their own Hyper-V server but can use VMs from another department's server if need be. We create Virtual Machines in Hyper-V for testing and quality control purposes and to recreate issues from clients in order to track down the proper fix for that issue. The business problem it addresses is having to recreate so many different environments for testing, quality assurance and support. We can test upgrades, patches, configuration setting, etc., with little overhead costs.

We use Hyper-V as for production as for our internal needs. We have several Hyper-V clusters for different departments in our organization - Dev, QA, Ops and IT. First three use Hyper-V for development, testing and deployment. IT uses Hyper-V for internal projects. We also provide solutions hosted on Hyper-V for our customers. Hyper-V helps us to keep our clustered environments reliable, scalable and highly effective.

Hyper-V is used for very specific workloads within our organization, generally dev and test only. It helps solve the need to virtualize workloads within our environment.

We use Hyper-V 2008 R2 in the Enterprise (which thankfully I don't have to support) and we use Hyper-V 2012 R2 in the lab supporting the infrastructure. This consists of required resources such as domain controllers, WSUS, Monitoring that are required for the lab domain. Used because the environment doesn't change much and cheaper than VMware.

We have 6 Hyper-V hosts and over 100 VMs. Most of the VMs are a Microsoft operating system from 2003 to 2012r2 and Windows 7, 8 and 10 for the vdi environment. We also have several Linux guests as well. We are migrating from 2008r2 hosts to a 2012r2 cluster. It has served us very well and saved the college thousands of dollars a year in software costs. We do use Virtual Machine Manager to manage the virtual environment and we will be implementing Hyper-V replicas for business continuity in the near future.

I designed, built out and currently manage several Active, Passive Win2012R2 (migrated from a 2008R2 cluster I build originally) Hyper-V clusters using an EqualLogic SAN storage group as the shared storage array (this reduced total server install base from 98 at two locations to 18 at four locations).

We use Hyper-V as the hypervisor at all of our company offices, with multiple clusters hosting approximately 150 virtual servers. We have recently replace dVMWare with Hyper-V due to cost considerations as well as ease of use. Hyper-V was already included in our Microsoft license agreement and includes features that were very expensive through VMWare. We have found that Hyper-V was very easy to use because its interface is built on Windows, which our technicians were already familiar with after using it on most of our servers.

We are in a migration process from Windows Server 2003 to Windows Server 2012 R2 with Hyper-V. We have virtualized all site based servers so there is only one physical server and and 5 virtuals. This process has made deployments faster, easier and cost effective. If you're a Return on Investment kind of person then you should differently invest in Hyper-V.

The product addresses the ever growing need to integrate newer technologies and keeping the total cost down so your budget can be used elsewhere.