Two interesting virtualization news items

First, VMWare released a very interesting white paper covering their Exchange 2007 migration, which just so happened to include a lot of virtualization. They got a significant consolidation ratio in moving from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007, and they further improved it by packing 4 VMs onto each physical server. They’re using CCR in combination with VMware’s HA, DRS, and VMotion features. Perhaps the most interesting tidbit IMHO is that they’re using virtual tape drives to back up to virtual tapes using the ESE streaming APIs!
Second, the beta of Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 is available. There’s a lot of very tasty goodness there, including failover clustering, live migration, and 32-core support. Mmm, mmm, good!