Amila is a Senior Support Engineer working for Ridgecrest Asia Pvt Ltd in Colombo, Sri Lanka. He is responsible for the entire network system and directly report to the CEO. Ridgecrest is a software development company for the s528026262_766904_3631 financial sector and they are currently running one major project for optimization of stock exchange systems on one of the Fortune 500 banks in USA.

When he joined the company they were running Windows Server 2003 and Exchange Server 2003 but also Ubuntu clients and other open source products. Amilas’s experience was mostly on the Windows platform and since they were running some .net applications he managed to setup a few virtual machines and used Sharepoint for the intranet.

Because of the nature of the business and the many tight deadlines Amila cannot afford any downtime in the system so he decided virtualization is a good solution. He heard about the IT Pro Momentum program and decided to do an evaluation of virtualization solutions. He tried out both VMware and Hyper-V to compare features, performance and price. Because he liked the Live Migration feature in Windows Server 2008 R2 he decided to use that for his evaluation.

After he had done the testing he, in his own words: “had a painful discussion with my CEO for moving from open source to windows. Finally I won.”

They are now planning to have 5 Windows Server 2008 R2 running 17 virtual machines. The main benefits he sees are migration of virtualized guests from one physical host to another with no downtime, easing servicing, planning and reorganization while significantly limiting detrimental effects on production services. He also like the new disk quorum features in Windows Server 2008 which allows you to have clusters in multiple locations.

“I can say confidently to any interested parties, with properly equipped hardware you can enjoy a number of benefits that weren't possible before. The single largest benefit to any company making use of Hyper-V virtual dedicated servers is the cost efficiency factor. It is far more cost effective to build multiple virtual dedicated servers than it is to build physical dedicated servers. IT departments in any business are able to maintain the same performance levels, security and reliability at a far reduced cost.”

If you are interested in piloting any of our latest technologies like Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows 7, Exchange 2010 and soon Office 14 with support from us, please send me an email and I will give you more details about the IT Pro Momentum program. Read more IT Pro Momentum stories here

For more information on Microsoft Virtualization technologies, visit the Virtualization web. If you want to play around with the Release Candidate of Windows Server 2008 R2, you can download that here