Bob Hunt is a Senior IT Pro Evangelist, part of Microsoft's Development and Platform Evangelism program. He introduced and contributed repeatedly to the February Migration & Development Blog Series and stopped by the Zone to talk about migration, the Microsoft Cloud OS and what he sees happening amongst the customers he works with regularly.

We started off by asking Bob how he would advise customers to go about making the decision when and how to migrate from their current Windows Server 2003 or Windows Server 2008 R2 platform to Windows Server 2012.

Compelling Events

"It generally comes down to a compelling event," responds Hunt. "Either a business reason compelling event, or the IT compelling event where hardware is end of life, you need to move all the virtual machines someplace else and would love to be able to do more, squeeze more out of that VM space than it's currently doing. That generally becomes more of a density virtualization discussion, where if this virtual machine was running Windows Server 2012 instead of Windows Server 2003 or 2008 R2 there are more things that it could be doing."

For the third type of compelling event, he specifically points to the Hyper-V piece of the argument, "based on the significant cost advantages of not having to license virtualization from VMWare. When the VMWare renewal comes up and you can say 'I can do all this with Microsoft and I'm already licensed for Windows Server so I don’t need to spend that same amount of money with VMWare that I did in the past, that becomes a financial compelling event."

Don’t Reconfigure Your Entire IT Infrastructure – Add Private Cloud Where It Makes Sense

We talked about Microsoft’s focus on Windows Server 2012 along with System Center 2012 being the foundation of Microsoft’s Cloud OS. 

Hunt's perspective is somewhat grounded in history. "The Private cloud is a mixed bag. As someone who was at the tip of the spear talking about it two years ago – back then it was hot, the future. The problem is it became noise. Oracle started talking about it, as did VMWare, IBM, Cisco and every other company under the sun. It became overused, everybody was talking about it and it got to be just noise. 

"Taking that to next step," adds Hunt, "we were among the first to talk about hybrid cloud. We were telling customers there are significant benefits to private cloud, but you don’t have necessarily business reasons to reconfigure your entire IT infrastructure to move everything to a private cloud. Maybe you just want future deployments to be in the cloud. But you also want the options of keeping costs lower. Private cloud doesn't necessarily save you money unless you make it highly automated, more highly automated than the typical customer is comfortable with.

"That's what drives how large cloud providers like Microsoft and others are able to do technology at very high scale at very low cost. That's where integration between the public cloud and the private cloud make more business sense."

Hunt suggests that decision criteria start to focus on the flexibility in where workloads end up being located.

"Our advantage is the ability to do monitoring, management and deployment seamlessly across physical, private and public cloud all under System Center. All essentially part of a private cloud infrastructure where I can use private cloud to deploy to physical hardware, I can deploy to virtual hardware, I can deploy to cloud, all at the same time. I can monitor it all on the same dashboard, and make them all feel, act and perform like they’re part of my infrastructure. Can’t get that elsewhere.  Not even close."

We'll conclude our interview with Bob Hunt’s observations on the value of System Center to companies that are migrating platforms and applications in our next post.