Jeff from the Windows Virtualization Team Blog: Generally speaking, I like to focus my blogs on what we’re doing at Microsoft regarding Hyper-V virtualization and pretend the rest of the Internet doesn't exist. However, there’s some buzz on the web about a topic that I feel I need to address. Today, this blog is the first of a multi-part blog on the topic of Hyper-V’s High Availability/Quick Migration capabilities compared to VMware’s VMotion (Live Migration) capabilities.

Before I dive into details, let me take a step back and discuss why high availability is absolutely CRITICAL to virtualization.

Virtualization is an awesome technology. It provides numerous benefits for reducing overall TCO, one of the most obvious benefits being power consumption savings. If you have a data center with 10,000 servers and you cut that number in half with virtualization (2:1 consolidation) you will achieve very tangible power and cost savings by retiring those 5,000 servers. Just look at your monthly power bill. Honestly, 2:1 consolidation is dead simple. (In fact, our own internal IT has been using Virtual Server for years now IN PRODUCTION with over 2,500 virtual machines and easily achieves 8:1 consolidation with four 9’s uptime. With Hyper-V, we see those consolidation ratios climbing in a big way.)