We say this all the time, but don’t listen to us, listen to other people using VMware. We will eventually look back on planned downtime (or emergency downtime for patching) like something quaint and obsolete. (What’s a good example of something an admin would have to do 30 years ago that we laugh at now? Wait for your overnight batch job to come back? Load the line printer with green bar fan-fold paper? Swap giant disk platters? I’m sure you can come up with better ones. Anyway, we’ll think of it like that.)
Link: It’s Just Another Layer » So how important is LiveMigration/VMotion now?.
One of Microsoft’s big marketing statements I’ve heard several times
is that LiveMigration wasn’t that important since clients don’t change
when they do work on hardware even with LiveMigration. I’ll cover why
this in depth on why this is a flawed thought for an enterprise company
in a future blog entry.Along comes a critical use case this past week. MS08-67
came out and threw most companies I know of into some serious chaos
while they rolled this patch out ASAP. Now this one does impact any
Windows OS including Server Core. Anyone that would be using Hyper-V
would obviously be affected right now. Let’s walk through trying to
deploy this for 120 Hyper-V hosts with Quick Migration (which causes a
service interruption) as fast as humanly possible with business buy-off
to do this ASAP outside of Maintenance Zones.
