Virtualisation – you can slice and dice your cores, RAM + disk allocated to each VM.

BTS09 running on W2K8 Hyper-V performs on ‘average’ between 80-95% (MS findings of the physical h/w underneath. Which is not bad at all.

For e.g. A client needs to implement a BTS farm (redundancy is important) so they’re up for at least 2 ent. lic. using the traditional method – when given they are just breaking into the bts world.

“Show me it working…” is their current mindset.

Getting 1 ent. lic. and being able to spin up unlimited bts VMs on the one physical machine – makes perfect sense for them…for now. At a later date – they have all the bts infrastructure to spin up a new box, and move a bts vm over there (thus incurring an additional license cost then, not now)

Given you can get h/w redundancy built into many boxes these days (e.g. psu, nics, RAM etc) a ‘failure’ isn’t as bad as it was.

Going many core cpus (in my experience) has outperformed many cpus fewer cores.

So from a MS perspective (I can see what they’re trying to do), they reduce the price tag of BTS while giving you much of the same functionality ‘virtually’ – easing the USD$40K price tag.

Note: From the field – it’s OK to virtual bts, but not too performant to virtualise SQL.

HTH,

Mick.