TechNet/MSDN IIS7 front-end servers running 100% virtualized using Hyper-V

We get a lot of questions about best practices for Hyper-V and IIS. The answer is pretty simple so far...it just seems to work, aside from the normal overhead for virtualization on a workload. Customers are already starting to or planning to deploy IIS on Hyper-V. MS IT is the first in line and has just released a report describing their experience with front-end IIS servers on a couple of big MS web properties.

A couple of months ago, Microsoft IT migrated all of their IIS7 front-end servers for TechNet and MSDN web sites to run virtualized on Hyper-V RC0 with 4 virtual CPUs and 10GB RAM. The hardware used for the virtualized IIS servers are 2 Intel quad-core CPUs and 32GB RAM (2GB are reserved for the Windows Server 2008 parent partition). Backend databases are still on physical servers at this point.

These are big sites -- TechNet recieves 1 million hits a day and MSDN gets 3 million per day. After a couple of months bake time, the results of the migration were officially released yesterday here in some detail. These VMs are using Windows Server 2008 Enterprise RTM with the standard install option. The general consensus from the experience by our IT folks? It just worked...