January, 2011

While the focus of the Partner Technical Services blog is to share information that focuses more on the technical side of the business, I was informed today of an excellent resource that the MPN team has put together to collect blog posts from our Partners. 

What better way to gain perspective on large deployments from Partners like Accenture or Avanade, or dive into the deep technical expertise of MVPs like Shane Young (SharePoint) or Susan Bradley (Small Business Server)?  Who better to learn about the focus of the Microsoft Partner Network than to subscribe to Jon Roskill or Eric Ligman’s blogs?

The following site links to 144 different blogs focused on Microsoft Partners, and a team (of humans!) comb through every post and hand-select the best posts to aggregate into the Microsoft Partner Network Blogger RSS feed.

Check it out!

http://www.microsoftpartnernetwork.com/News/PartnerBlogs

(This post courtesy Iftekhar Hussain)

Last month in TechEd Europe in Berlin, I got an opportunity to present couple of sessions on Advanced Virtualization Management and meet customers, partners. Through this post, I would like to share my experience and bring out the highlights and messaging from the event to everyone’s attention.

The theme of this year’s TechEd Europe was Private Cloud. We announced Hyper-V Cloud, which is a set of programs and initiatives to help our customers and partners deploy private and public clouds to deliver IaaS based on Windows Server Hyper-V, System Center, and related products.

You can see my earlier post about Virtualization and Private Cloud [Part 1] [Part 2] for more information.

In the keynote speech, Brad Anderson, Corporate Vice President, spoke about the transformation IT Pros and developers are experiencing with the cloud including:

• The sweeping change from mobile phones to the datacenter
• How the cloud is changing the face of productivity for IT and business with Office365 and Intune
• How to achieve IT as a service with Infrastructure as a service, platform as a service and Software as a service

You can watch the entire keynote speech on demand here:

I had a pretty busy schedule in Berlin with three of my sessions which I delivered on Advanced Virtualization Management and Microsoft Desktop Virtualization Solutions.

You can watch my breakout session on demand here:

Despite my busy schedule in preparing and delivering these sessions and meeting attendees in the TLC booth, I was also able to attend a few other sessions. There were some great sessions delivered by Microsoft teams on Virtualization and future management products which enable the private cloud-based infrastructure and its management.

The key highlight in the Virtualization track was the unveiling of SCVMM vNext or SCVMM 2012, which provides next generation virtualization and datacenter management. With VMM 2012 you will be able to:

• Manage the Fabric – Deploy bare-metal Hyper-V server and cluster configuration, network and storage management!
• Deploy and Manage Services – end-to-end service lifecycle management via Service Templates and powerful application virtualization technologies such as Server App-V.
• Deploy and Manage Clouds – create private clouds, delegate and provide self-service user access.

You can watch both the sessions on VMM 2012 here:

System Center Virtual Machine Manager vNext: Fabric Management for the Private Cloud

System Center Virtual Machine Manager vNext: Service Lifecycle Management for the Private Cloud

All these breakout sessions are uploaded on TechEd Online and you can watch them at NO COST!

If you could not attend Microsoft TechEd Europe 2010 in Berlin and you are keen to learn Virtualization technologies, you can’t afford to miss these sessions. Go to TechEd Online and search for these sessions with the session codes show below.

I also had an opportunity to meet a lot of you partners and discuss latest technologies, product roadmaps, and the kinds of solutions they are building for their customers. It’s great to see the enthusiasm among partners about opportunities in the Private Cloud and how it helps the IT and businesses of our customers. We here in GPS are committed to assisting and supporting you as you build Virtualization and private cloud solutions for your customers. Please feel free to contact us if you need more information.

Cheers

Iftekhar

Hello Everyone and welcome to the PTS Blog. My name is Iftekhar Hussain, and I am a Partner Technical Consultant here in the Microsoft Partner Technical Services team specializing in Virtualization technologies. Today I would like to talk about how Microsoft Virtualization can fuel private cloud within an organization and how Microsoft partners can tap this opportunity to help customers build their own private clouds.

Cloud: Aren’t we hearing this word a lot these days? In almost every technical conversation, in journals and magazines, at conferences—everybody is talking about the cloud. Though there are a large number of companies, groups, and individuals talking about cloud technologies, everybody has their own understanding and interpretation of the cloud.

So What Is Cloud Computing?

A very simple way to explain cloud computing, is that the cloud is a service with a certain set of tools and resources on the Internet or in-house where you can perform all your computing tasks, save your data, generate and analyze reports, connect with people, or even have fun like playing games or watching TV or movies from any device like PC, TV, phone, or from any place.

Cloud Computing Is Based on These Fundamentals:

• Virtualization and automation
• Interchangeable (fungible) resources such as servers, storage, and networks
• Management of these resources as a single fabric
• Elastic capacity (scale up or down) to respond to business demands
• Applications (and the tools to develop them) that can truly scale out
• Focused on the service delivered to the business

There are two types of Clouds:

Private Cloud:

This is an internal service that can be hosted in-house with set of tools like Windows Server, Virtualization, and management solutions like System Center. It provides compatibility with local applications and keeps your data and information within the premises.

Public Cloud:

Provided by service providers, public cloud offers customers the ability to deploy and consume services. In this category, Azure™ is a highly scalable services platform providing pay-as-you-go flexibility delivered from Microsoft’s datacenters.

In the cloud, automation is a great driver—without automation the whole purpose of the cloud is defeated and its true potential cannot be realized. The following automation is critical in the cloud:

• Automatic provisioning of operating systems and applications as and when user demand arises.
• Automatically provision new servers and other hardware when required.
• Applications can be scaled up with more memory and processor power and other resources whenever load increases.
• Dynamically shifting of load from one workload to another depending upon certain scenarios.

And thus Virtualization and an integrated management solution becomes a super-critical component of a Cloud Platform.

So What Does it Take to Build a Private Cloud of My Own?

These technologies from Microsoft can help creating a fully automated cloud service:

• Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V:

Hyper-V, the Windows Server 2008 R2 hypervisor-based server virtualization technology, is a core component of the Microsoft private cloud which hosts multiple Virtual Machines running business-critical applications increasing the utilization of your hardware, saving cost in terms of power, space, and management.

• Microsoft System Center:

System Center delivers cost-effective and agile datacenter services to manage physical, virtual, and cloud environments in an integrated manner.

• System Center Virtual Machine Manager Self Service Portal 2.0:

VMMSSP 2.0 is an extensible, turnkey solution that empowers datacenters to dynamically pool, allocate, and manage resources to enable on-premises private cloud computing.

A couple of months ago in TechEd Europe 2010 in Berlin, we announced Hyper-V Cloud: a new set of programs that make it easier for customers and partners to build their own cloud infrastructures using the Windows Server platform. There are several programs associated with Hyper-V Cloud.

In my next post, we'll go through what is included in Hyper-V Cloud offerings and learn about these programs in detail:

• Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track
• Hyper-V Cloud Service Provider Program
• Hyper V Cloud Practice Builder
• Hyper V Cloud Accelerate

Stay tuned :)

Welcome to the New Partner Technical Services (PTS) Blog!

PTS is composed a worldwide group of consultants who focus on helping Microsoft Partners succeed throughout the business cycle. We’re here to help you build a practice, answer your presales questions, help you position your business against the competition to win more deals, and consult on technical best practices during your deployment projects. We have both packaged and custom solutions that are designed to help increase revenue as well as expand your skill set to make your business win more throughout the business cycle.

As a Microsoft Partner, you are entitled to free, competitive presales assistance and Advisory Services each year. You have access to 10, 20, or 50 hours of advisory assistance based on your partner level or competencies. In addition, partners have access to no-charge, unlimited online technical support in Online Technical Communities.

You’ll meet some of our Partner Technical Consultants here, as they share some of their industry knowledge that they think will be useful to you as a partner. Because we have the opportunity to work with a huge range of implementations and deployments with our Partners, we come across some rather interesting problems and solutions, which we suspect might be useful to others in such a large community. We hope you enjoy learning about these issues as much as we do!

Our consultants are located around the globe and can deliver benefits to you in several languages. But you can also reach out directly to find your local Partner Technical Services team (https://partner.microsoft.com/global/40011365) to see specifically how we can help you and your business.

Partners, if you have anything you’d like to read about, please let us know! We look forward to sharing our information, and to your input and interaction in the blog comments.