Windows Virtualization Team Blog

Microsoft Acquires Opalis Software

2009-12-11T15:29:00Z

Good news for a Friday. Brad's post (with video interview) announces the acquisition of Opalis Software. Why is this important to virtualization projects? Thoughts below, but first some background on the business.

Microsoft’s Server and Tools Business (STB) is a $14.1 billion business.

Within STB, the Management and Services Division is focused on reducing customers' costs and improve IT efficiency to drive businesses forward with a suite of products and services built around the System Center brand. In August 2009, Microsoft reported that the Management and Services Division revenues grew more than 30% from 2008 to 2009, and is now at approximately $1 billion in annual sales.

Financial terms of the acquisition won’t be disclosed. Opalis recently reported 104% increase in new license bookings for calendar Q3 (compared to Q3 2008), selling to enterprise and managed service provider customers.

So how is Opalis Software used? Here's some examples:

• Incident response standardize and automate triage, diagnose and repair processes to reduce the number of incidents.

• Provisioning orchestrate datacenter tools to configure, deploy, and verify IT services in response to an incident or change request. Provision server, storage, or network resources across physical, virtual or cloud environments.

• Virtual service management automate virtual lifecycle management to control server sprawl and extend management best practices, such as incident management and provisioning, to your virtual environments.

• Run book procedures automate re-occurring maintenance and administrative tasks, such as data and file handling, database and application support.

• Cloud Computing automate cloud lifecycle management, to request, provision, release and track costs of cloud resources.

So there's a summary. Brad says much more in his video interview. An analyst at Gartner forecasted that, by end of 2010, at least 50% of the automation and workflow management tasks in support of virtual server infrastructures will be supported by next-gen Run Book Automation-based tools. That's exactly what Opalis has created, and will become part of System Center.

As the CEO of Opalis wrote in his blog post today:

I believe, with the Opalis technology, Microsoft will have the most complete virtualization stack available from any single vendor.

Indeed, a good Friday.

Patrick

Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool v2.1

2009-12-10T15:20:00Z

Virtualization affects how we plan, build, deploy, operate, and service workloads. Customers are creating large libraries of virtual machines containing various configurations. The patch-state of these virtual machines are not always known. Ensuring that offline virtual machines are properly patched and won’t become vulnerable the instant they come online is critical.

I am therefore very pleased to state that the Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool v2.1 has now been released!

Congratulations to the Solution Accelerator team for this release!

The Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool 2.1 has free, tested guidance and automated tools to help customers keep their virtualized machines updated, without introducing vulnerabilities into their IT infrastructure.

The tool combines the Windows Workflow programming model with the Windows PowerShell interface to automatically bring groups of virtual machines online, service them with the latest security updates, and return them to an offline state.

What’s New?

Release 2.1 is a direct response to customer and Microsoft field requests to support the R2 wave. Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool 2.1 now supports the following products:

· Hyper-V-R2

· VMM 2008 R2

· SCCM 2007 SP2

· WSUS 3.0 SP2

· OVMST 2.1 also supports updates to Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 virtual machines.

Bryon Surace

Senior Program Manager

Hyper-V

More on today's announcement with NetApp

2009-12-08T06:06:00Z

We published some news today with NetApp; see here. In short, Microsoft and NetApp...

today announced a new three-year agreement that deepens product collaboration and technical integration, and extends joint sales and marketing activities to customers worldwide. Under the new agreement, the two companies will collaborate and deliver technology solutions that span virtualization, private cloud computing, and storage and data management, enabling customers to increase data center management efficiencies, reduce costs, and improve business agility.

As NetApp's partner site states, we'll work with NetApp to sell/market disaster recovery solutions using NetApp HA and DR storage with Hyper-V and System Center. There's a sample customer blueprint (.pdf) here with datacenter configs. And there's datacenter consolidation solutions, which are discussed in this white paper (here).

Above and beyond this, examples of technical integration include

the creation of NetApp's SnapManager for Hyper-V, which integrates their storage with Hyper-V and supports CSV.
NetApp management pack for System Center Operations Manager

In addition, NetApp is working with the Dynamic Datacenter Toolkit for enterprises and Powershell commandlets to rapidly provision VMs as the foundation for private cloud computing environments.

Patrick O'Rourke

City of Frisco (Texas) saves big with Hyper-V and NetApp

2009-12-01T23:52:00Z

Hi, I'm Jim Schwartz, a director of virtualization solutions marketing in Redmond.

A great example of why companies are adopting virtualization and the resulting benefits can be seen in Texas, at the City of Frisco. The city, one of the fastest growing in America, needed to scale a siloed IT infrastructure to accommodate data growth of 200-300% year.

Check out this NetApp blog to learn how the City’s move toward virtualization resulted in substantial savings and maximized uptime for Exchange, SharePoint, and other apps.

Also don’t miss the Microsoft and NetApp live webcast on Thursday, December 3 at 11am Pacific/2pm Eastern: Virtualize with Microsoft and NetApp: Consolidate and Increase Uptime with Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and NetApp. City of Frisco Enterprise Technology Manager Tim Yarbrough will join the discussion to talk about his environment and Windows Server 2008 R2 upgrade. You will have the opportunity to submit live questions to Microsoft and NetApp experts during the webcast.

Thanks,

Jim

LiveMeeting on Microsoft’s Integrated Virtualization Strategy: Thursday, Nov. 19, 8:00 AM PST

2009-11-17T22:44:48Z

Join us Thursday, November 19, 8:00 AM PST for a LiveMeeting session on “Microsoft’s Integrated Virtualization Strategy, Products and Solutions” presented by Kenon Owens, Technical Product Manager.

This LiveMeeting is exclusive to members of the System Center Influencers Program (which is also open to virtualization enthusiasts). Not a member? Visit the program overview on TechNet to learn more about the program and how to join.

Join Information Available on Influencer Portal. Members of the program will need to log into the Connect site to access the LiveMeeting join information.

Abstract: Through this 200 Level presentation, learn about the Microsoft virtualization strategy from the client, to the datacenter, to the cloud--and how it will help you cut costs and build value. In this session we review Microsoft virtualization products and discuss how you can use them to solve today's IT issues (cost cutting, consolidation, business continuity, green IT), develop new computing solutions (VDI) and build a foundation for a more dynamic IT environment, including cloud computing. This session reviews all of the latest Microsoft virtualization products, including Application Virtualization (App-V), Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MED-V), Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V, and Microsoft Hyper-V Server, as well as the System Center management platform (including Virtual Machine Manager 2008). Learn about the innovative pricing and licensing structure that allows further savings to lower both acquisition and ongoing ownership costs. Learn how you can enable IT to become a cost cutting mechanism with Microsoft virtualization and management technologies.

- dave //

Visual Studio Lab Management 2010 beta 2

2009-11-06T06:20:00Z

Hello, this is Bryon Surace again. I’m a senior program manager on the Windows virtualization team at Microsoft.

Recently, the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 beta 2 became available for public download. Part of this release is the Beta 2 version of Visual Studio Team System 2010 Lab Management; an integrated solution to give you all the benefits of virtualization for application lifecycle management. Congratulations to the Visual Studio Lab Management team for reaching this milestone!

Beta 2 Improvements:

§ Simplified Virtual Environment creation

§ Lab Environment Viewer with full-screen capability

§ Manual and automated testing in virtual environment

§ Build-deploy-test workflow for virtual environments

§ Enhanced workflow process parameters UI and report

§ Network isolation with support for domain controller VMs

§ Setup & Config – verification and auto provisioning of accounts

§ Virtual Machine templates

§ “In-Use” support for shared environments

The main features of Lab Management are:

Easily manage more complex test configurations

Lab environment as a first class entity for managing multi-machine test environments
Setup multiple configurations for testing quickly
Consistent, reliable access to test environments
Create multiple copies of test environments for parallel testing

New “clean” environment in minutes

Environment snapshot: lightweight and efficient
Facilitates exploratory testing

Scheduled build/test cycle on steroids

Snapshot to clean environment
Build triggered app deployment
Testing in more realistic environment

Rich bugs with environment snapshot

reduce the number of no-repro bugs

Visual Studio Download Page – you can download all the required components from there. This video can guide you through the download and installation process of TFS. And check out the Lab Management blog.

Thank you,

Bryon Surace

Re-blog: Microsoft Site Recovery Solution Launch

2009-11-04T07:27:00Z

I'm re-blogging here. Over at Virt Planet blog, Jim wrote the following:

This week Microsoft is launching a comprehensive solution to help customers implement cost effective, end-to-end site recovery programs. Built on proven capabilities in Windows Server 2008 R2 and the System Center management suite, Microsoft is helping IT Professionals leverage Windows Server Hyper-V and Failover Clustering along with tools like Virtual Machine Manager to deliver cost effective site recovery.

The Microsoft Site Recovery Solution ecosystem is ramping with a broad range of storage replication partners like Double-Take Software, EMC, HDS, HP delivering solutions that take advantage of the Microsoft Cluster Resource DLL. With cluster integration IT Professionals can deploy streamlined and operationally effective site recovery.

You can learn more about the Microsoft Site Recovery Solution by joining the Microsoft team and Enterprise Strategy Group on Thursday, November 5^th at 10:30am Pacific for a webcast Building Effective and Highly Available Disaster Recovery Solutions Using Microsoft Virtualization This webcast looks at key drivers for site recovery solutions and reviews practical deployment considerations (you can view the recorded version of the webcast after the 5^th). Microsoft and select partners will also be demonstrating Site Recovery Solutions at TechEd, so if you plan to be in Berlin during the week of November 9^th, make sure to stop by the Virtualization Solutions kiosk in the Technical Learning Center.

Patrick

Upcoming Webcasts on Best Practices for Virtualizing MS Server Applications

2009-10-27T22:25:00Z

We’ve got some great webcasts coming up in the next few weeks to discuss recommendations for virtualizing MS server applications and the benefits of choosing hyper-V + System Center as your virtualization solution. Each technical webcast will focus on a specific server application- Exchange, SQL and SharePoint. Please see below for detailed information.

TechNet Webcast: Microsoft Virtualization Best Practices for SQL Server (Level 300). Thursday, Oct. 29, 2009 at 10am Pacific time

Virtualizing business critical applications will deliver significant customer benefits including cost savings, enhanced business continuity and an agile and efficient management solution. This session will focus on virtualizing SQL Server using Microsoft solutions, the benefits over key competitors such as VMware, and guidance for virtualizing SQL server for Production and Test/Dev scenarios focusing on consolidation, scale, load balancing, dynamic provisioning and high availability. We will go into technical details with best practices. Customer evidence and results from lab deployment tests will also be discussed.

TechNet Webcast: Microsoft Virtualization Best Practices for Exchange Server (Level 300) Wednesday, Nov. 4 at 10am Pacific time

Virtualizing business critical applications will deliver significant customer benefits including cost savings, enhanced business continuity and an agile and efficient management solution. This session will focus on virtualizing Exchange using Microsoft solutions, the benefits over key competitors such as VMware, and guidance for virtualizing Exchange for various Production scenarios. We will go into technical details with best practices. Customer evidence and results from lab deployment tests will also be discussed.

Update: More than recession: IDC's server virtualization tracker report

2009-10-27T04:24:00Z

Update: The folks at IDC asked that I remove this blog post until further notice.

That said, do check out Roger Johnson's post. He discusses Dell PowerEdge R910 and his Hyper-V deployment at Crutchfield. I met Roger at VMworld 2009. He's a VCP, having run an ESX Server-based datacenter for some time before Crutchfield moved away from VMware and onto Hyper-V/SCVMM earlier this year.

Patrick

Virtualization: desktop to datacenter

2009-10-20T21:54:00Z

It's been a while since I've posted a blog ... but that one really caused a stir in the Virt circles in the Bay Area. Hopefully it doesn't mean I can't hit up those people for Sharks tickets.

I've stumbled across some interesting items that I wanted to share with you.

Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack 2009 R2 is now available. The big thing is support for Windows 7. Read the blog here. Here's an excerpt:

If you are an MDOP customer, you can download MDOP 2009 R2 through Microsoft Volume Licensing Site (MVLS). For others who wish to evaluate MDOP products, the MDOP software is available at MSDN and TechNet (in accordance with your MSDN or TechNet agreements, except for AIS).

MDOP has been licensed for over 21 million desktops worldwide! In a recent survey completed for Microsoft by Answers Research, and including 1000 IT professionals across five countries, we learned several interesting facts:

66% of MDOP customers deployed three or more of the MDOP products

52% of them deployed MDOP across more than half of their PCs

94% of MDOP customers said they would recommend MDOP to a colleague

When comparing MDOP and non-MDOP customers, customer satisfaction with Software Assurance increases by 25%

Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MED-V) V 1.0 SP1 - This updated tool will support Windows 7 and enable enterprise deployment of virtual Windows XP environments to support incompatible applications. A Beta version of MED-V 1.0 SP1 will be available by the end of 2009 and final release is scheduled for the first quarter of calendar year 2010.

On the server side, the latest is from Gartner Symposium in Orlando. Gartner announced their top 10 strategic technologies for 2010. Not surprisingly, virtualization is named or underlying several of the strategic technologies. And speaking of, Gartner also shared data on server virtualization adoption today and forecasted through 2012. Read this article. Here's an excerpt:

According to Gartner, 18% of server workloads this year run on virtualized servers; that share will grow to 28% next year and reach almost half by 2012. But growth is anticipated among the small-to-midsize businesses (SMB), and it's in this segment that Microsoft has a good chance to build a customer base. By 2012, VMware's share is expected to shrink to 65% but the base of VMs will have grown to 58 million, a 10-fold leap. By that time, Gartner believes, Microsoft will hold 27% share, Citrix 6%, Red Hat 2% and others about 1%.

Along those lines, I had a great email exchange a couple weeks ago with Steve at PoundHost in Maidenhead, UK. I was giving a presentation at IP Expo / VM Expo conference in London, and wanted to highlight PoundHost's business results since switching to Hyper-V and System Center away from VMware tools, and since PoundHost has deployed the Dynamic Datacenter Tookit for hosters. PoundHost has a very compelling story of how technology can really help a business transform itself and create new opportunities. The Microsoft case study doesn't really do it justice. Here's some of what Steve shared with me:

Cost. "It meant we could offer Linux and Windows at the same price (when we went live with the beta of R2 we had Linux guests but we don’t now). It means we can offer low cost VMs on high quality (and cost!) host servers which ultimately give the end user a better experience. [It] works out about £1.00 per guest assuming 60 guests per host."
Common management tools. "We were also very impressed with a demo we had seen of System Center Virtual Machine Manager and Ops Manager so we now use both in our infrastructure."
Choice. "I’m a VCP and have a lot of experience with ESX but I’d never use it again now I’ve used Hyper-V under R2"
Grow business. "[We've] expanded our Hyper-V/System Center offerings into our managed services company Server Arcade "
Grow business: profitability boost by 55%
Customer service. "We’re also doing the customer control panel now for Poundhost which is based on the Dynamic Datacenter Toolkit."

Check out more about the Dynamic Datacenter toolkits and partner alliance at their blog.

Patrick O'Rourke

Microsoft and Red Hat Complete Cooperative Technical Support

2009-10-07T10:00:00Z

Hi, I'm Mike Neil, general manager of Windows Server and Server Virtualization. Back in February we announced our work with Red Hat to enable cooperative technical support for virtualized environments. I'm excited to announce we've completed certification in each others' programs! Customers now can deploy Microsoft Windows Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux and a range of select applications, virtualized on Red Hat and Microsoft virtualization products, knowing that the combined solutions will be supported by both companies.

Here are the details:

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2, 5.3, 5.4 have passed cert tests when running on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V, Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2. See more at RedHat's certified hardware site.
Windows Server 2003/ Windows Server 2008 / Windows Server 2008 R2 are validated to run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4, using their KVM-based hypervisor. See more at Microsoft Server Virtualization Validation Program site.

Beyond the OS, both companies have select applications that would receive technical support when running on certified server virtualization software. The Microsoft applications can be seen in KB article 957006. On the Red Hat side, you can now run JBoss Enterprise Middleware within a virtual machine guest on Hyper-V and receive coordinated technical support. This is a step forward for enterprise customers, hosting providers, systems integrators, and those who want to offer their customers the top x86 operating systems to run applications.

And as mentioned in my February post, Microsoft provides the systems management tools, via System Center suite, to manage physical and virtual IT systems and applications, including non-Windows software such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We do a world-class job of managing Red Hat Enterprise Linux, so customers can use one pane of glass to manage their legacy Unix and Linux environments together with their Windows Server environments. Read more here, but here's an excerpt from the website:

System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 supports monitoring of the following operating systems:

HP-UX 11i v2 and v3 (PA-RISC and IA64)
Sun Solaris 8 and 9 (SPARC) and Solaris 10 (SPARC and x86)
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (x86/x64) and 5 (x86/x64) Server
Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 (x86) and 10 SP1 (x86/x64)
IBM AIX v5.3 and v6.1 (POWER)

The work with Red Hat is just one of numerous examples of the way we're helping customers and partners running mixed IT environments with Windows and open source technologies. A little over 2 months ago, we announced that the Linux integration components (ICs) for Hyper-V would be contributed to the Linux Driver Project and the drivers licensed under GPLv2. The community has embraced us and helped ready our submission of the drivers for inclusion in the kernel. It was great to see this support and a couple weeks ago what started as our first submission made it into the official kernel tree. The Linux IC code that we contributed is in the staging phase for the next kernel release (2.6.32). See here.

I'll close by saying that Microsoft and Red Hat have competed for customers and partners for some time now, and as platform vendors continue to compete in the marketplace. While the announcement today extends our ongoing technical support collaboration, these agreements do not address, nor do they include provisions relating to patents, open source licensing or other IP matters. We look forward to supporting our joint customers and providing unparalleled solutions for Microsoft's customers and partners!

Thanks,

Mike Neil

How to fix: Hypervisor not running

2009-09-29T05:04:08Z

This is a Hypervisor 101 case that keeps showing itself every so often the forums, mailing lists, etc: A message to the effect of “The Hypervisor is not running” when a user tries to launch a VM. Felipe Ayora, one of our awesome UA people, has created this video that steps through how to investigate such a failure and fix it

http://www.microsoft.com/video/en/us/details/25d07f2e-b2e0-4c0c-b456-79b08bfe58be

Announcing the availability of the updated Infrastructure Planning and Design Guides for Virtualization and System Center

2009-09-24T17:03:00Z

Microsoft has a comprehensive portfolio of technologies when it comes to Virtualization ranging from Presentation Virtualization with Remote Desktop Services to Server Virtualization using Hyper-V with many more in between as below.

· Server Hardware Virtualization. Also known as a hypervisor, Server Hardware Virtualization runs a very lightweight core operating system. The hypervisor can host independent virtual machines (VMs). This form of virtualization requires hardware that has embedded virtualization awareness capabilities. Since the hypervisor is very lightweight, there is little overhead in the system, which allows for more scalability in the virtual machines.

· Server Software Virtualization. An operating system, such as Windows Server® 2003 or Windows Server 2008, runs an application that is able to host virtual machines. Each virtual machine runs a completely separate operating system and application set.

· Presentation Virtualization. Centralized systems host multiple user sessions, and all processing is done on those host systems. The user sessions are isolated from each other. Only the presentation information, such as keyboard and mouse inputs, and video updates are sent between the client and the host system. The client can be a full Windows-based workstation or a Windows-based terminal device.

· Application Virtualization. An application is isolated from the underlying operating system by means of wrapper software that encapsulates it. This allows multiple applications that may have conflicting dynamic link libraries (DLLs) or other incompatibilities to run on the same machine without affecting each other.

· Desktop Virtualization. This is similar to Server Software Virtualization, but it runs on client systems such as Windows Vista®. The client operating system runs a virtualization application that hosts virtual machines. This is often used when a specific person needs to run one or a limited number of legacy applications on a legacy operating system.

With the richness and breadth of these technologies, customers should evaluate their needs against the capabilities and solutions that each of the technologies is targeted at. The Solution Accelerators team has been working furiously to create guides for customers and we are really excited to announce the availability of the Infrastructure Planning and Design Guide for Virtualization updated for Windows Server 2008 R2, which can help customers start their planning and deployment process for Virtualization using the Microsoft portfolio. With detailed documentation and simple flowcharts customers now have a powerful tool in their hands as they plan their deployments. Once the decision to go with a particular technology has been made, detailed guides are available for each of the technologies as well giving business decision makers, infrastructure stakeholders, and the organization as a whole a comprehensive tool for designing their virtual deployments.

As Tom Bittman from Gartner had said “Virtualization without good management is more dangerous than not using virtualization in the first place”. Our System Center suite of products provide a full suite of management solutions for this environment and the Infrastructure and Planning Guides for System Center have been updated for System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2.

Vijay Tewari

Principal Program Manager, Windows Server Virtualization

Hyper-V, your journey starts here!

2009-09-03T19:59:00Z

I have been inundated by people here at VMworld 2009 with tons of questions on Hyper-V and who want to see demos of Hyper-V. This blog post attempts to put together a list material for folks. Given the large amount of material this list is only a snapshot but one which will provide you enough to get started.

First off there is a huge amount of technical articles, documentation, whitepapers, case studies, API documentation that’s available. Your start point should be the Virtualization page here. That site provides links to numerous case studies about customers who are using Hyper-V and Microsoft Virtualization solutions. Next I suggest looking at the solutions site that provides information on the customer focused scenarios. Following this I encourage you to delve into the products that are used to build these solutions.

For the geeks like me who are really looking to understand how to get started and the technical details you should start your journey at the Virtualization TechCenter. For those of you who wanted to just get to the nuts and bolts go straight to the Hyper-V Getting Started Guide. For folks wanting to understand the architecture in some depth you want to start here. Developers can jump straight to the WMI API’s.

Finally for folks who want to see a collection of videos with great demos of the products I’d like to point to Tony Sopers blog which contains a huge collection of these.

Enjoy.

Vijay Tewari

Principal Program Manager, Windows Server Virtualization

Microsoft Virtualization: Best Choice for MS Server Applications

2009-09-02T19:21:00Z

Hello, I’m Zane Adam, general manager of Virtualization and Systems Management. As more and more customers are looking at virtualization to help reduce cost and decrease complexity in their infrastructure, we are seeing lots of questions around virtualizing MS server applications such as Exchange, SQL and SharePoint. What benefits should I expect to see? What do I need to consider when virtualizing these mission critical business application? Should I virtualize all roles within a server application?

We have worked across MS application groups to test our products with hyper-v and we believe that MS virtualization is the best choice for MS server applications. First, MS server applications are built for Windows Server, and because hyper-v is part of the operating system, there is no need to add complexity of support and interoperability by adding a 3rd party virtualization layer. This means there is just one stop for all of your support needs and also assurance that the stack of applications and hypervisor works well together. Second, to help ensure optimal performance Microsoft has specific deployment guidance for virtualizing MS server applications which results in a mixed physical and virtual environment. System Center is the management solution that allows you to view both physical and virtual instances from one console. Third, as you know MS virtualization is up to six times less expensive than other virtualization solutions in the market, which makes running your server applications even that more affordable.

The folks who developed the MS server applications have developed specific guidance on virtualizing individual applications based on deployment scenarios. You can hear more thoughts from them on the following blogs:

Exchange Server: http://msexchangeteam.com/

SQL Server: http://blogs.technet.com/dataplatforminsider/default.aspx

SharePoint: http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint

Also, for more information please visit www.microsoft.com/virtualization/solutions/business-critical-applications .

Thanks-

Zane