Virtualization, Cloud, Infrastructure and all that stuff in-between

Interesting to note this post and register post here of a beta version of hosted Exchange and MOS (MS Office Sharepoint) offered by Microsoft itself.

Would assume this is one of the reasons they are building out vast new datacentres as they try to keep pace with Google’s range of online applications.

Working for a service provider, I’ve seen the technical challenges of offering multi-tenanted versions of these applications in the past (show stopper for most service providers that need to offer an SLA), even that MS won’t support them unless they have helped build and design it themselves via their consulting arm.

I have to wonder if MS are adopting virtualization under the hood and some kind of on-demand provisioning to handle the isolation required or just piling them onto a shared AD/SQL/Exchange infrastructure. There are a huge number of questionably supportable “tweaks” required to achieve the latter.

Hopefully it’s better in the the current 2007/8 round of products. Microsoft do support some those products under VS2005r2 virtualization for end-customers – so would be interesting to know if they do it in-house or are {planning to} moving to Hyper-V.