MMS 2002 – Day 2 Recap
(from Boris Nisenbaum, Server & Networking TSP)
Today began with Brad Anderson's keynote. This year's topic for his keynote was "Dynamic Datacenter" and he did a good job show casting a number of Microsoft technologies which enable a truly agile and dynamic datacenter, capable of providing seamless integration and transition between back end server technologies and desktop functionality. From the Windows Server 2008 perspective, Brad demonstrated the synergy between Terminal Services Web Access, virtualized desktop and application virtualization for accessing individual's data from anywhere in the world at any time.
The other part of the keynote was dedicated to the enterprise service management, especially SaaS (Software as a Service) and S+S (Software + Service) models. He raised an objective of managing the attached Services (those that provide higher level of functionality compared with basic services available in the cloud) and provided a glimpse preview of Microsoft System Center Attached Knowledge Services. These attached services can allow enterprises integrate monitoring solutions with business intelligence so that data center infrastructure can be leveraged in the most optimal way. He provided an example where monitoring of the average CPU utilization of the servers in certain geography can allow the organization to develop an optimized approach to the server consolidation task.
Another interesting session I attended was also about managing a virtualized data center. It was called "Dynamic Duo: hardware and Software solutions for Virtualized Clients and Servers" and was delivered by Intel. This session showed how advanced Intel technologies, such as V-Pro and Intel-VT provide unprecedented levels of manageability and performance when used by virtualized clients and servers. An interesting demo of the performance enhancements provided by Intel-VT architecture used in Hyper-V was shown. Here the SQL Server virtualized workload implemented as table indexing task took actually less time on the Hyper-V guest than it took on a physical server! Of course, in real life the performance of the virtualized workload is not likely to be better than physical, the Intel-VT performance enhancements are obvious.
All in all it was another productive day, filled with information and interesting customer interactions.