Interesting example of using virtualization in production environment was reported on SOA and BPM conference in Reading on 26 November.

The task was to have a BizTalk group cluster in production. For 2 BizTalk servers in the group they needed to have at least 6 physical computers ( 2 BizTalk and 1 SQL in one node) to achieve their goal. Hardware expenses for such a configuration were considered as unacceptable.

Instead of deployment to physical environment another way was chosen. They used Hyper-V on Windows Server 2008 and deployed virtual BizTalk and SQL servers on 2 physical computers (each one represents a cluster node) only. The hardware cost is twice less in this case.

Although such a configuration in live environment is not supported by Microsoft they have facilities to copy images of virtual machines to physical environment and work out all problems with Microsoft support team in that physical ‘mirror’ of live environment.

The key question is about performance of such deployment. It seemed that for their particular scenario (BPM scenario, orders, invoices, shipping notes exchange, day load is about 2500 messages) it worked fine. They say as well that BizTalk servers are far from full load.

I am not sure that such a configuration is very suitable for low latency scenarios but for some scenarios it is very interesting to keep in mind.