Recently we asked few times if should company virtualize Windows 7 Guest OS or stay on Windows XP. The answer is straight forward, go for Win7. Reason being – better VM/logical processor support. If you have Hyper-V with Win7 as guest OS, the VM/logical processor ratio is 12:1. With other guest OS, the ratio is only 8:1. You can scale out more and have better density.
Most people are familiar with VMs/core concept. VMs/core implies only physical core support. Logical processors can be either physical or multi threaded cores. As an example, Intels Westmere processors support 6 cores. With multi threading support, you actually have 12 logical processors. This means that on just one of these Westmere processors, we can scale up to 144 VMs!
Then comes the licensing question. What is the best general licensing model to virtualize so many VMs. The best way to go for most cases is to purchase Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 Datacenter edition. The Datacenter edition gives unlimited VMs per processor licensing. It is a very cost effective way for most cases. Let’s be honest that density and VM/logical processor will always increase, you want to have the flexibility to scale up.
To know more about licensing on Microsoft Products, the best place to get the information is to visit http://www.microsoft.com/singapore/licensing/
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