Hyper-V – It’s good enough…right?

Microsoft’s Hyper-V is continuing to make a splash in the virtual pool.  The 2012 release is leaps ahead of the 2008 release in function, stability and lets face it - cost.  We all know that VMware is the king today; it provides us with that five 9’s when deployed with recommended hardware configurations.  The downside is those five 9’s come with expensive software licensing.  Now using Hyper-V is as simple as turning on a role inside the server, even a junior admin can do that and have a virtual environment.

Of course the environment might not be five 9’s, more like two or three 9’s but that is good enough for most companies right?  Some managers or accounting folks would think so.  When you look at number such as 98% or 99% does it really need to be better than that?  Besides your accountants and managers are excited with all the money save going away from VMware’s expensive licensing. 

What is often forgotten with this is the math, how long of an outage is that 1.0% or 2%?  Well respectively that is 3.65 days and 7.3 days of unplanned outages in a year.   When the percentages are put into that context is that really an outage that a company can handle?  Even at 99.9% the outage is still over eight hours.  Of course these outages could occur at different times in the year and “if” they occur on a weekend or during a light work day maybe it’s okay...but how often do unexpected outages follow our work / personal schedule?  Are you more likely to have an outage on the busiest day of the year…don’t answer that. 

So the question is with 99% uptime you have 3.65 days of unexpected downtime verses VMware with 99.999% or 5.2 minutes of unexpected downtime.  Yes it costs more but maybe these are the number to share with the people that make the financial decisions before someone says, “it’s good enough…”