Flexibility, Hyper-V and BIG-IP Virtual Edition

Many (most) people don’t want to depend on only one vendor for anything, whether that be security, storage or virtualisation, especially if it’s a critical application, platform or technology. This is one of the reasons that Hyper-V is growing in importance as a virtualisation platform. Being able to use several virtualisation platforms within a single organisation is added to the usual virtualisation benefits of cost savings and greater efficiencies to give an added benefit – that of flexibility. When your organisation is looking to adapt the data centre into a cloud environment, extend it to a hosting provider, or simply to virtualise on-premise, flexibility and being able to rely on several virtualisation platforms is good because this builds in redundancy and robustness. A potential drawback is the possibility of needing separate application delivery controllers per platform, which is why this blog from Damian Flynn is really interesting from the F5 customer perspective, detailing how the BIG-IP Virtual Edition works well with Hyper-V (just as F5 works well with VMware and Citrix).