On the first day of TechEd for developers, I answered quite a few questions about Hyper-V. Today from 11:00 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. (Wednesday June 4, 2008) and tomorrow from 1:30 - 2:30 p.m. I'm presenting on incorporating Hyper-V into the application lifecycle management process. Look for me at the Technical Learning Center's Red Section. I'll talk about agile testing using Hyper-V and using virtualization to shorten the systems development lifecycle.

Yesterday a few people asked about virtualizing SQL Server. It all depends on the workload. Many small and medium businesses are running SQL Server production systems on Virtual Server today. Hyper-V provides greatly improved performance over Virtual Server. However, no matter who the vendor is or what the platform is, virtualization does introduce some overhead. Because of that, it's not suitable for building an OLAP cube or high volume OLTP.

Another questions concerned the migration of physical machines into a virtual environment. This is known as P2V, short for physical to virtual. Microsoft's System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) includes a P2V tool for migrating an entire physical machine into Hyper-V. For those who don't purchase SCVMM, there are third party P2V products. Acronis True Image with Universal Restore is one of them.