How do you measure big? How do you measure footprint?

I’ve presented a number of sessions on Hyper-V and there are always people in the groups that have had more exposure to VMware than Hyper-V; so I usually end up drawing parallels between VMware and Hyper-V. I’m OK with that because I’m one of those people that learn better when I can relate new content to something I already know. My discussions are actually fairly predictable at this point because for some people, virtualization has become religion. I learned a long time ago that as soon as you start a discussion around religion, people become very polarized and set in their ways. In fact, once I realize that we’re having a religious discussion, I just remind myself that people are still killed for their religious beliefs, so I try to back off a bit on the competitive part of the discussion and focus more on the facts.

The majority of the people attending my sessions want to learn about other virtualization options, they want to learn about the competition and if the “other guy” can do a better job, or save them money. Some people in my sessions just try to find a sound bite or two that they can take out of context to prove the “other guy” is better. I’ve had the opportunity to stand in front of large and small audiences and I always try to take questions. The one thing about questions is that while you can predict the majority of the questions you receive, sometimes a question or two catches you by surprise. A while back someone asked me “How could Hyper-V be more secure if it’s almost 3 GB in size?”. I asked for more detail on the question and come to find out, VMware had posted an article that talked about the fact that EXSi is only 32MB in size and the disk footprint of Server 2008 with Hyper-V was almost 3 GB in size.

Hmmm… I’m pretty good at thinking on my feet, so we were able to have a good discussion, but I felt like the topic needed some additional research. Along comes Jeff Woolsey and the “additional research”. I don’t point you to many blog postings, I don’t want to just regurgitate the same information again, but Jeff did a bang up job in clearing the air and I wanted to make sure you had a chance to give it a look. Please check out part 1 of Jeff’s series on the disk footprint.

Hypervisor Footprint Debate Part 1: Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 & VMware ESXi 3.5

We’ll talk more about this over the next few months, if you have any questions, feel free to send them my way.