Microsoft Server and Cloud Platform Blog

Lufthansa Systems Boosts Customer Satisfaction with Private Cloud

Microsoft Server and Cloud Platform Team — Thu, 23 May 2013 16:00:00 GMT

Cloud computing is catching on like wildfire. Indeed, the global cloud computing market is expected to grow from $40.7 billion in 2011 to $241 billion in 2020, according to Forrester Research. As interest in cloud computing increases, a key challenge hosted service providers face is keeping up with the skyrocketing number of customers.

Lufthansa Systems, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Lufthansa Group, operates a global network of modern data centers with locations in Kelsterbach, Germany; London; Dallas; and Singapore. As the company expanded its data center capacity, it was becoming more difficult to meet customer expectations for high availability—while still keeping costs in check.

Lufthansa Systems had already replaced its physical servers with a virtualized data center environment, but it hadn’t been enough. The company wanted to avoid the cost of continually adding IT staff and capital equipment as demand for its services grew.

To make its server environment even more efficient, Lufthansa Systems turned to Windows Server 2012 with Hyper-V and Microsoft System Center 2012. The “management features were key for us,” says Bardo Werum, the company’s senior vice president infrastructure. “They turn a ‘mere’ virtualization environment into a highly effective private cloud.”

First, Lufthansa Systems has dramatically increased data center efficiency by quadrupling its server density from four-node clusters to 16-node clusters. This, in turn, has freed up a greater percentage of virtual machines for actual production as compared to failover production. “We were looking for the next step beyond virtualization, and this is it,” says Werum.

Second, Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012 have enabled the company to reduce IT costs significantly.

Third, by using less hardware and managing virtual machines more effectively, the company has been able to improve data center uptime “With Windows Server 2012, we can give our customers better service level agreements—that’s good for them and good for us,” Werum says.

Finally, Windows Server 2012 is making it possible for Lufthansa Systems to increase revenue by offering new services to customers. For example, the company has created a self-service capability in which customers can create and configure virtual machines whenever they want. It now also offers its clients anytime, one-button testing of virtual machine replication.

In the end, it all adds up to improved customer service, says Werum. “Higher availability and faster disaster recovery are the main reasons for us to adopt Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012,” he says. “They lead to increased customer satisfaction.”

To learn more, please read the full Lufthansa Systems AG case study.

Hitachi Systems: Thriving in a Rapidly Evolving Environment

Microsoft Server and Cloud Platform Team — Thu, 23 May 2013 13:00:00 GMT

The market for third-party data centers is exploding. Today, roughly one in three businesses is outsourcing IT solutions to a hosted service provider, according to research compiled by Channel Partner. By 2015, the number of organizations using third-party data centers is expected to hit 35 percent.

As an increasing number of businesses outsource their IT, hosted service providers are rapidly evolving their business models to accommodate the growing demand. One such company is Hitachi Systems, Ltd., which provides comprehensive IT services to a wide range of enterprises.

Hitachi Systems’ goal is to boost its sale of cloud services to 100 billion yen (about $1 billion U.S.)—or 20 percent of its total sales—by the end of 2015. To do that, the company built a virtualized private cloud infrastructure service called Business Stage Resource On Demand. Yet to boost its competitiveness, it needed to provide the best performance and availability, while at the same time reducing costs.

The company had been using Windows Server 2008 R2, but it needed an operating system and hypervisor with greater virtual machine capacity, live workload migration capabilities, and state-of-the-art replication features.

Hitachi Systems liked what it saw when evaluating Windows Server 2012 operating system, and has since decided to use it as the operating system for its new platform.

With Windows Server 2012 and Hyper-V, Hitachi Systems has increased its competitiveness in a rapidly evolving hosted services market. For one, the company has been able to boost data center performance. Because Windows Server 2012 has high virtual machine capacity—up to 64 virtual processors and 1 terabyte of memory—it can now cost-effectively boost computer power for its customers.

Likewise, Hitachi Systems has been able to improve availability and data protection. With features like Hyper-V Network Virtualization and Hyper-V Replica, both of which are built into Windows Server 2012, the company can tap into advanced availability and disaster recovery features that it previously would have had to buy separately and integrate at high cost.

Hitachi Systems has also been able to lower costs. Because its data center administrators are familiar with the Windows interface, they can easily operate Windows Server 2012 with Hyper-V. And with so many management features built into the operating system, the infrastructure is now easier to maintain and support.

With Windows Server 2012 and Hyper-V, Hitachi Systems can now respond very quickly to customer needs. The company can create a virtual private cloud that easily connects to customer data centers. What’s more, it can tap into Windows Azure Services for Windows Server 2012 to introduce new services for customers that are simple to deploy and administer.

All of these benefits are adding up to stronger sales. “Thanks to Windows Server 2012, we’re now on track to meet our ambitious sales target,” says Hideo Tsuru, PMI Project Management Professional and Senior Chief Engineer for the company’s Cloud Computing Business Promotion Project. “And we’re better positioned to provide the performance, availability, and services our customers expect.”

To learn more, please read the full Hitachi Systems case study.

Cloud Broiler: Hyper-V: A Platform that Scales out for Building the Largest Public and Private Clouds

Microsoft Server and Cloud Platform Team — Wed, 22 May 2013 18:31:00 GMT

Hyper-V 3.0 in many ways is the crown jewel of our enterprise virtualization and private cloud strategy and is the heart of where many of the improvements in our flagship Server OS reside. So we should probably talk about what has improved since our previous Hyper-V releases, and what you can do with our hypervisor technology out of the box in Windows Server 2012 today.

The feature chart above paints an amazing picture here. When I was first exposed to Hyper-V, it was as a beta offering as part of a Service Pack in Windows Server 2008. For a free and beta quality offering, and as a skeptic coming out of the Open Source and VMware community working at IBM at the time, it was good, but I didn’t seriously think it would present a huge challenge to the competition.

My, how time has passed, and how much Hyper-V has grown in those five years.

Today, in Windows Server 2012, Hyper-V has matured into not just a solution that is at parity with our competition’s hypervisors, but vastly exceeds them in many areas. We now support up to 320 logical processors on a single virtualization host, if you can find a box that big to run it on! We also support up to 4 Terabytes of main memory per system.

Each VM can be assigned up to 1 Terabyte of dynamic memory as well as up to 64 virtual processors per VM – which includes Linux VMs as well. I don’t think we’ve done a particularly good job of talking about how well Linux scales and performs on our hypervisor, and in the coming weeks, I’m going to get a bit more into that as well.

You can have up to 64 Hyper-V servers in a single cluster, which supports up to 8000 VMs.

And that’s just raw compute scalability. In Windows Server 2012, we’ve also introduced a new virtual machine storage format called VHDX that enables you to have up to 64 Terabytes per virtual disk.

These are some pretty amazing numbers here, and I have been fortunate enough to work with partners who are building some of the largest private cloud offerings using this very same technology. And it should also go without saying that these same very improvements in Hyper-V allow Microsoft to scale out its own Public Cloud infrastructure with Windows Azure.

It’s been five years since we’ve introduced Hyper-V, and in every area that counts in terms of raw scalability, we exceed by a considerable margin what our competitor’s x86 hypervisor technology is capable of doing. We can run the largest VMs for mission critical workloads. We have the largest VM disks for the most demanding storage requirements. We support the largest cluster sizes for scale-out infrastructure, and we also have the deepest integration with hardware features supported by our vendor partners in order to extract the highest performance out of that equipment as possible – more of which I will delve into in future posts.

I also want to re-iterate that everything you see here you get out of the box in Windows Server 2012 – we don’t charge you extra for this. And in fact, if you use our Hyper-V Server product, you get all of this for free.

No, seriously, it’s free.

Hyper-V: It’s not just about the numbers

Clearly, we think Hyper-V is a very big deal and everyone who works with it is extremely proud of the Server team that put so much hard work into it. But these big scalability numbers are meaningless unless the software does exactly what our customers want it to do.

First, we believe that Hyper-V needs to handle the most important mission-critical workloads of your enterprise, and that we want you to be able to virtualize everything. What do we mean by everything? We mean that there shouldn’t be a single workload at your enterprise that is considered non-virtualizable, regardless of the performance characteristics of the applications running on it.

Internally, at Microsoft, we’re big on dogfooding, so Hyper-V runs all of our important systems, be it our messaging infrastructure, our application servers and our databases. To get a bare-metal box provisioned from our internal IT rather than a new virtual server takes an act of Congress, basically.

So we want you to throw your biggest, baddest, nastiest workloads at Hyper-V. That’s why we’ve enhanced our hypervisor to the extent that it will be almost impossible for the typical enterprise to exceed its capabilities on pure hardware scalability concerns alone.

We’ve proven, for example, that we can achieve 1 million IOPS with virtualized instances of SQL Server – that’s four times faster than what was capable with Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2. Seriously, if you have a single business intelligence app or a highly transactional database that needs more than a million IOPS then we really want to hear from you.

It’s also important to stress that we believe that a hypervisor’s performance must increase in a linear fashion as you add processor cores, in order to maximize your investment in server hardware. We know that these big server boxes in your datacenters are expensive and represent a significant cost to your organization’s IT. Nothing should be wasted.

The other thing that I would really like to stress is that Hyper-V 3.0 should really be in top consideration in your organization as your main hypervisor platform particularly if you have a lot of Microsoft workloads.

Whether it is Dynamics, Exchange, SharePoint, Lync or SQL Server, you can be assured that our engineering and software product teams have worked very closely to ensure that everything is tightly integrated and performs optimally when virtualized. We deeply understand the performance characteristics of our own workloads and know how to keep our hypervisor busy.

I mean, we make all these software products, right? Why wouldn’t we want to make sure our products perform best on our own hypervisor?

This is just a tip of the iceberg of the many performance and scalability enhancements you’ll find in Windows Server 2012. If you’d like to dive deeper into any of the things I have mentioned, be sure to click on the links we’ve provided below.

About the Author: Jason Perlow is a Technology Solution Professional with Microsoft Partner Hosting & Cloud Services based in the Miami-Fort Lauderdale area. He can be reached at jasonpe@microsoft.com. Read more about the Cloud Broiler blog series here.

Cloud Broiler: We Hope You’ll Enjoy Your Meal

Microsoft Server and Cloud Platform Team — Wed, 22 May 2013 18:30:00 GMT

About the Author: Jason Perlow is a Technology Solution Professional with Microsoft Partner Hosting & Cloud Services based in the Miami-Fort Lauderdale area. He can be reached at jasonpe@microsoft.com

* * *

Welcome to the first installment of the Cloud Broiler blog series. For those of you that follow my writing exploits elsewhere on the web, thank you so much for seeking me out at my new “chateau” here at the Microsoft Server & Tools Blog.

Over the next several weeks and months, I’m going to highlight all the different features and capabilities of our Windows Server and Cloud OS platform, at a very high level, so that our overall message and positioning of these products are better understood. And if you need to deep dive into any particular area that interests you, we will be sure to provide those resources for you.

We have an extensive multi-course tasting menu to cover Windows Server 2012 over the next several weeks, so I hope you are hungry, and make sure you leave room for dessert.

Hyper-V Scalability Enhancements in Windows Server 2012
VHDX and Storage Enhancements in Windows Server 2012
Block-based Enhancements in Windows Server 2012
All about our new Windows 2012 file server (Storage spaces, SMB 3, CSV)
High Availability Enhancements (Clustering and Migration Prioritization for VMs, Live Migration queuing, SAN snapshots, Synchronous)
An Overview of Migration and Replica features in Windows Server 2012
A Map of the Microsoft Virtualization and Systems Management Universe: The Roles Our Products Serve Relative to the Competition
Linux support in Hyper-V
Server 2012 Networking improvements – On being Agile in your enterprise
Why should my sysadmins care about Powershell 3?
Multitenancy with IIS8: Doing more with less hardware
An update on what we’ve done with Remote Desktop Services
All about Dynamic Access Control and why it’s important to your organization
DirectAccess and Trusted Platform Modules: Why you should care
Running Microsoft Workloads on Hyper-V: Why Our Products Perform Better on our Hypervisor

So let's get started and meet me at my first post in the Cloud Broiler series!

Partnering Through Disruptive Change

Microsoft Server and Cloud Platform Team — Tue, 21 May 2013 20:00:00 GMT

Tomorrow morning I have the privilege of keynoting our annual Hosting Summit conference here in Seattle with over 400 of the world’s most influential hosting service providers. As I’ve been preparing for that talk, I thought it would also be a good time to share a few thoughts more broadly about the key role hosting partner organizations play in our Server & Tools strategy here at Microsoft.

A disruptive technology shift such as cloud computing typically causes a lot of churn in the marketplace. There are great economic benefits for customers and plenty of opportunities for vendors who are agile enough to embrace the transition in a thoughtful way. At Microsoft, this transition sets the underpinnings for our Cloud OS initiative, where customers have the flexibility to deploy their infrastructure and applications in the location that best suits their needs – be it their own datacenter, Windows Azure or in a hosted datacenter – and simply have it all work together. This simple, but powerful concept has been actively embraced by companies around the world since we debuted it last year. A couple of great recent examples include Hitachi and Lufthansa.

With over 20,000 partners and a business growing four times faster than our on-premises business, the hosting business, and more specifically the partners who deliver these solutions, are an indispensable part of our strategy in the Server & Tools group. These organizations are the trusted technology providers to customers of all sizes from around the world. As such, much of how we’re now designing our products is meant to cater directly to the needs of these partners.

Other large technology vendors have confused both customers and their distribution channel by either mandating all enterprise computing should be done in their datacenter, or by launching new and untested solutions that may compete with their current partner ecosystem. At Microsoft we’ve been clear from the start about the importance of these partners and about the valuable services they provide to customers.

This message has resonated well with our partners as we see more and more service providers standing up infrastructures built on Hyper-V and System Center and decommissioning their environments built on other hypervisors and management tools. Two recent examples are Global Micro and TeleComputing who each saw significant performance improvements, as well as the dramatic cost savings associated with Hyper-V and System Center, and consequently moved their entire infrastructure over to the Microsoft solution stack. This means thousands and thousands of VMs from these two organizations migrated and are now running at lower cost and higher performance on Microsoft technology.

There is no doubt that Cloud Computing is a disruptive technology and working through transitions like this is part of why I love being a part of the software industry. I also firmly believe that Microsoft has a vision for the future that offers the most comprehensive solutions to our customers. But most importantly, I believe our hosting service provider partners are in a great position to deliver these solutions and really help customers realize the benefits this massive transformation will provide.

For more information, I’d encourage you to go to our website at www.microsoft.com/server to learn more about our latest products and how hosting service providers can deliver the solutions that meet your business needs.

Eugene Saburi
General Manager – Server and Tools Hosting

Microsoft Virtual Academy Live Q&A May 21: System Center 2012

Microsoft Server and Cloud Platform Team — Wed, 15 May 2013 17:00:00 GMT

On May 21, Microsoft Virtual Academy (MVA) continues its monthly series of free Q&A sessions led by Microsoft technical evangelists. This month, we’re releasing several great System Center 2012 SP1 courses and have invited Microsoft expert Symon Perriman to answer any questions you may have about the product. Find out about technical capabilities, get advice for using products in a live environment, and learn from your peers in the industry during this this live discussion. Register now.

TechEd 2013 is Rapidly Approaching! Join us this Year in New Orleans from June 3-6th

Microsoft Server and Cloud Platform Team — Mon, 13 May 2013 16:00:00 GMT

For the rookies: TechEd is Microsoft’s premier event for IT Professional and Enterprise Developers. And for the long-time veterans of TechEd, you already know that this event is the best venue to learn new technologies, network with your coworkers and peers across a multitude of industries, and ask questions of the experts. Brad Anderson, Corporate Vice President, Windows Server and System Center Program Management will be delivering the opening keynote.

Once you register as an attendee, you will also be able to register to take Microsoft certification exams onsite – at 50% off the regular exam price! In addition to this great discount, you will find all the resources you need to succeed right at the conference. Start with the introductory session to get your certification questions answered. Then, take advantage of the Study Hall or jump into one of the MCT-led exam prep sessions before conquering your Microsoft certification path.

This year, TechEd features nine tracks you can leverage to tailor the conference experience to your professional needs. Each track features a deep-dive into a different cutting-edge Microsoft technology so that you can focus your week on what’s most important to you. This year’s lineup includes:

Architecture & Trustworthy Computing

Data Platform & Business Intelligence

Developer Tools & Application Lifecycle Management (ALM)

Modern Datacenter

Office 365 & Unified Communications

SharePoint & Enterprise Social

Windows Azure Application Development

Windows Client, Access & Management

Windows Phone

Each track is loaded with talented speakers and teachers to help you navigate each technology. With all the experts under one roof, you can be sure that your questions get answered.

Finally, don’t forget the great opportunities to connect one-on-one with other attendees the entire week. From the learning sessions, to TechExpo, to the closing party at the Mercedes-Benz Superdome, take advantage of the opportunity to reconnect with old friends and meet ones.

TechEd sold out last year, so don’t miss your chance in 2013! Register now and ensure your spot today. See you in New Orleans!

Cloud Delivered, Microsoft Presents TechEd 2013

Microsoft Server and Cloud Platform Team — Thu, 09 May 2013 22:30:00 GMT

Ready to get out of the office and get some serious training for your next technology project? Microsoft TechEd North America or TechEd Europe is the place to do that. With over 400 technical sessions in nine learning tracks, New Orleans or Madrid are the places to be.

Join Microsoft Corporate Vice President, Brad Anderson, as he kicks off TechEd North America on June 3^rdin the USA and TechEd Europe on June 25^th in Spain. Garner deep insight on Microsoft’s vision for public and private cloud computing, or test it hands on with over 200 labs in a custom learning environment.

Network with your peers and enjoy the best food and entertainment the area has to offer! Hear more about these events from Brad Anderson himself in his latest blog post and then register at http://www.msteched.com before it’s too late!

Windows Azure for IT Professionals Jump Start - May 16th

Microsoft Server and Cloud Platform Team — Mon, 06 May 2013 16:00:00 GMT

Register now for a free online live Jump Start presented by Microsoft Virtual Academy (MVA) on Windows Azure for IT Professionals on May 16. Through numerous scenarios and demos, Microsoft Lead Azure Technical Evangelist David Tesar and Azure Group Technical Product Manager David Aiken will help you understand how you can use Windows Azure Infrastructure Services, such as Virtual Machines and Virtual Networks, to migrate, extend, run, manage and monitor common workloads in the cloud. Enjoy the fast pace, and get your questions answered during this live online interactive experience.

For more on what promises to be a great event, read the Born to Learn blog.

Know vSpeak? Learn to be Bilingual

Amy Barzdukas, GM STB Mktg — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 16:00:00 GMT

Gordie Howe once famously said, “All hockey players are bilingual. They know English and profanity.” No doubt, there are times when most IT Pros feel similarly gifted (like when a production server goes down as you’re about to head home for dinner). That said, there is real (and growing) value to be found in becoming bilingual in a different way – learning how to operate the increasing number of heterogeneous IT environments where VMware and Microsoft solutions co-exist.

Many IT pros that I spoke with at the Microsoft Management Summit in early April told me that Hyper-V is gaining real traction, but that in many cases it’s an “and” world, not an “or” one. But, while many VMware experts see the value in skilling up on the Microsoft platform, they’d like to know how what they already know translates between the two. And it starts with the building blocks—the specific technologies you’d use to build a private cloud.

So here is a bit of a primer on the building blocks of the private cloud in both “Microsoftese” and “vSpeak”:

As you review the following, please keep in mind that these are rough comparisons, intended to showcase similar technologies that address a particular need. In subsequent posts, I will explore some of these differences.

The hypervisor: Everyone knows which is which in the world of the hypervisor. Today when we do comparisons, it’s between Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012 v. the vSphere hypervisor that is part of vSphere.

VM management: This refers to what is used to perform the day to day tasks of managing the virtual machines running on the infrastructure, from deployment and migration, through to templating and cloud creation. Here, vCenter is what the majority of vSphere admins will be used to using on a day to day basis – in Microsoftese, that’s Virtual Machine Manager.

Self-service: A crucial tenet of private cloud is that it enables agility by allowing IT to delegate access to infrastructure through self service, which gives application owners, VM owners, and service owners the ability to access the resources they need, in a controlled yet intuitive manner. For people with vCloud Director familiarity, the vocabulary for the Microsoft private cloud is “App Controller.”

Application insight and monitoring: The Microsoft stack uses Operations Manager to start to gain visibility into the physical and virtual infrastructure, which provides levels of insight into both Microsoft and heterogeneous infrastructures, from the metal right up into the applications running inside the VMs, from both inside and outside the infrastructure walls. The Vspeak equivalent is the vCenter Operations Management Suite.

Protection: A private cloud needs to consider backup, too. vSphere Data Protection is analogous to Data Protection Manager, which plays a part in protecting Hyper-V virtual machines, but also workloads and applications inside the infrastructure, too.

Service Management and Automation: How IT pros can introduce the ability for users to request resources, infrastructure components, virtual machines, cloud capacity, and more, and how they can automate all their stack into a powerful private cloud, rely on Microsoft’s Orchestrator and Service Manager, or, in Vspeak, vCenter Orchestrator and vCloud Automation Center.

From a licensing and acquisition perspective, both VMware and Microsoft have made significant strides in simplifying the acquisition of their portfolios, with Microsoft adopting a single licensing approach for System Center, which provides organizations with all the key capabilities listed here, with the exception of Hyper-V, which is available as a component of Windows Server 2012, as well as a standalone free download.

VMware has taken a similar approach, combining the still-individually-licensable products in an offer known as the vCloud Suite.

Now we’ve got the basics down. Bilingualism is more than knowing the words, though, you need to know how to make sentences. To learn more about Microsoft’s private cloud technologies and how they compare with VMware’s, watch some sessions from MMS. Learn from Matt McSpirit about how the clouds compare, learn more about migration tools from Matt and Mark Gosson, and learn more about the hypervisors themselves with Matt again.