Microsoft Server and Cloud Platform Blog : Windows Server 8

Private Cloud - Not Just Another Name for Virtualization

Edwin_Yuen — Wed, 13 Jun 2012 18:00:00 GMT

One of the questions I hear while I’m at events or speaking with customers is “how does virtualization differ from private cloud computing, aren’t they really just the same?”

My answer to this question is a resounding “NO!”

If you look at the NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) web site, the key characteristics of cloud computing are defined as:

On-demand self-service
Broad network access
Resource pooling
Rapid elasticity
Measured service

While virtualization provides functionality, such as resource pooling and rapid elasticity, and serves as the foundation for cloud computing, there are other characteristics lacking which are required to experience the full benefits of a true cloud computing environment.

I think some of this confusion comes from the cloud washing that has been going the last couple of years as some vendors have tried to take their existing offerings and reposition them to take advantage of all the buzz around cloud
computing.

At Microsoft, we understand that you as customers don’t want to be cloud washed; you want the facts and information that help you knowledgably advance your IT organization and in turn, your business. We’re also aware that you want to take advantage of your existing hardware, software, and IT staff skills as you evolve your datacenters from traditional physical server deployments, to consolidated virtualized environments, then onto a fully automated private cloud. The solutions we offer help you do this on your terms and at the pace that’s right for your business.

If you take a look at our Private Cloud Overview, you’ll see that the terms we use to discuss our private cloud offering align to the standard definitions and characteristics. We’ve also created a short three minute video on the Private
Cloud Benefits page where I talk about how System Center 2012 plays a critical role in bringing cloud computing and IT as a Service to your environment, enabling a higher level of automation and self-service. The other critical point I touch
on in the video is the ability of System Center 2012 to deeply manage your physical and virtual environments, as well as deep within your applications regardless of which environment they’re running in. This provides you with a single experience
for managing across your IT resources.

The combination of Windows Server and System Center 2012 provides you with a complete solution for enabling your own private cloud IT environment and you can find details in this whitepaper titled “Microsoft Private Cloud – Making it Real”.
I hope the information proves helpful to you as you’re exploring the benefits of private cloud solutions and ways of improving the efficiency of your IT infrastructure.

Thanks for reading and your time.

---- Edwin

Hyper-V Wins Reader Vote in ZDNet’s “Hyper-V or VMware?” Debate

Microsoft Server and Cloud Platform Team — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 00:17:00 GMT

ZDNet readers have spoken, voting in favor of Hyper-V 54% to 46%, as part of a lively discussion between Jason Perlow and Ken Hess in this week’s ZDNet Great Debate: “Hyper-V or VMware?”

Advocating for Hyper-V, Jason Perlow made a strong argument emphasizing the robust feature set as well as the superior price point of Microsoft’s Private Cloud, concluding that “2013 will be a big year for Microsoft as CIOs examine the licensing bottom line and evaluate the value that Hyper-V brings as a complete end-to-end virtual infrastructure and private cloud solution”.

Check out the full debate on ZDNet and thank you to everyone that voted!

ZDNet Debates: Hyper-V or VMware?

Microsoft Server and Cloud Platform Team — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 18:25:00 GMT

Yesterday morning, ZDNet kicked off its Great Debate “Hyper-V or VMware?”, with opening comments from Jason Perlow and Ken Hess. Microsoft supporter Jason Perlow made a strong case for Hyper-V, noting that the functionality in Windows Server “8” Hyper-V exceeds that in vSphere, without the need for the expensive add-ons and third party enhancements that VMware requires.

Reiterating key points from his articles, Windows Server 8: The Ultimate Cloud OS? and Is Microsoft's Hyper-V in Windows Server 8 finally ready to compete with VMware?, Jason states that 2013 will be a big year for Microsoft as CIOs examine the licensing bottom line and evaluate the value that Hyper-V brings as a complete end-to-end virtual infrastructure and private cloud solution.

The debate will resume today at 11:00AM PST. Don’t miss the opportunity to follow the action in real-time and join the conversation on ZDNet!

Windows Server “8” beta available now!

Microsoft Server and Cloud Platform Team — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 16:05:00 GMT

Bill Laing, Corporate Vice President, Server and Cloud at Microsoft, announces that Windows Server “8” beta is available now!

Read Bill's post on the Windows Server Blog for more information. Windows Server "8" beta available now.

Windows Server Blogs are Moving

Microsoft Server and Cloud Platform Team — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 22:29:00 GMT

Microsoft is working to streamline our blogging process. All future Windows Server Blogs will be located on the dedicated Windows Server Blog Site. Check the blog often for detailed Windows Server information and updates.

Please click here for past Windows Server "8" posts.

The Team that Puts “Amazing Power” at People’s Fingertips

Microsoft Server and Cloud Platform Team — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 16:30:00 GMT

Members of the Windows Server team speak with Microsoft News Center about their groundbreaking work in moving customers to the cloud—and what else they find fascinating.

Check out the full interview with the Windows Server Team to Learn More.

Windows Server 8: Server Applications and the Minimal Server Interface

Microsoft Server and Cloud Platform Team — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 21:22:00 GMT

Windows Server is, without a doubt, a comprehensive and complete platform, composed of hundreds of components supporting a wide array of roles. As we continued to develop the Windows feature set, we saw the need to streamline the footprint of Windows Server by enabling the removal of components that are not always necessary for all Server installations. We refactored the previously “monolithic” features of Windows Server into smaller components which allow us to offer system administrators more granular control of what components and features are installed. The introduction of Server Core as a common base component across all Windows Server editions and installation modes allows us to address many of the previous limitations of Server Core.

In Windows Server 8, users can transition between Server Core and Server Graphical Shell at any time, with a single command and a single reboot. Accordingly, we enabled the installation and removal of server GUI components from the command line, PowerShell, and within Server Manager. In addition, we created over 2,300 PowerShell cmdlets to enable command-line and remote management of all server roles. We also introduced enhancements to Server Core itself to increase application compatibility; for example, the full .NET Framework 4.5 is now available out of the box on Server Core.

Developing Windows Server 8

In Windows Server 8, the recommended application model is to run on Server Core using PowerShell for local management tasks and then deliver a rich GUI administration tool capable of running remotely on a Windows client.

Server applications using this model would:

1. Be capable of running in the Minimal Server Interface configuration to take advantage of the reduced resource utilization and servicing footprint.

2. Detect presence of available components and adapt the application behavior accordingly

3. Fail gracefully when required dependencies are not available

4. Support command line installation which does not require UI interaction

5. Support centralized or remote administration, where appropriate

The Minimal Server Interface

In addition to Server Core and Server Graphical Shell, we are introducing a new experience in Windows Server 8 called the Minimal Server Interface. The Minimal Server Interface enables most local GUI management tasks without requiring the full GUI Shell or Internet Explorer to be installed. It is an intermediate state that is installed by enabling the Graphical Management Tools and Infrastructure Windows feature and not enabling the Server Graphical Shell feature.

Technically, the Minimal Server Interface is a full Windows Server install excluding Internet Explorer, Windows shell components such as the desktop, Windows Explorer, Metro-style application support, multimedia support, and the Desktop Experience. It provides many of the benefits of Server Core (reduced footprint, attack service and serviceability) for those applications that can be made to work without IE or the Shell. We refactored all of the GUI management tools and frameworks (such as MMC.exe) into separate installable packages, and removed extra fonts and graphical resources.

In previous versions of Windows, developers could rely on a relatively large set of dependencies (usually the Windows Foundation) always being available. Because it is now possible to transition between Server Core and Server Graphical Shell, this is no longer the case.

For example, any applications with a dependency on Internet Explorer, the WebBrowser control, or the Microsoft HTML (MSHTML) Engine, can no longer assume those dependencies are available at all times. Furthermore, it is not sufficient to check for these dependencies at installation time, because they can be installed or removed at any time.

In many cases, the limitations of what is not installed (Minimal Server Interface or Server Graphical Shell) inherently prevent access to the parts of your application that are not supported. For example, MMC is not available on Server Core; thus, users wishing to use a snap-in associated with your service would be unable to do so because the *.msc extension is unregistered and MMC.exe itself is not installed. If the Minimal Server Interface or Full Server were later installed, MMC would be installed and registered and your snap-in would be immediately available for use, with no work required on the part of your application.

In other cases, some work is required on the part of the application developer to ensure a great experience on all Server Installation Levels. For example, a MMC snap-in that embeds a WebBrowser control will not work on the Minimal Server Interface, even though MMC is installed and available for use. The same snap-in, however, will work if Server Graphical Shell were installed. In this case, the snap-in should detect that Internet Explorer is not available and display an error message informing the user that a required component is missing. The error message could also provide the user with a hint that the dependency requirement may be met by installing the Server Graphical Shell. The same concept applies to components such as HTML Help and actions that launch URLs using ShellExecute.

When the graphical user interface is not available, command line installation and administration is the preferred solution for management. Consider deploying PowerShell cmdlets to enable the configuration and control of your application’s services. PowerShell cmdlets inherently support remote invocation, which makes it possible for administrators to configure services remotely and in bulk; this scenario is ideal in private cloud deployments.

The Minimal Server Interface fulfills two major purposes. It is a compatibility option for applications that are not ready to support our recommended application model but still want to benefit from some of the benefits of Server Core. Additionally, administrators who are not yet ready to move to remote or command-line based management can install the graphical management tools (the same ones they would otherwise install on a Windows client PC) alongside the Minimal Server Interface or Server Graphical Shell.

The best way to determine if your application is ready for the Minimal Server Interface is to test it. Try installing your application and check that all functionalities work as expected. Many applications will “just work” without any changes required on your part. Other times, adjustments may be required. Keep in mind that it is also possible for a user to install and configure your server application under the Server Graphical Shell, and then scale back to Server Core in production.

Summary

Windows Server 8 empowers administrators to deploy servers with “just enough” of content and capabilities to fulfill their server’s desired function. By increasing deployment agility and refactoring monolithic components – such as the Windows Foundation – into smaller, installable packages, we’re putting more power in the hands of system administrators than ever before.

Please keep in mind that this blog article is not meant to be a definitive – or even complete – guide to developing for Windows Server 8. For example, we are still in the process of drafting the official logo requirements and developer best practices. With that said, we wanted to give developers a sneak peek of what is already available in the Windows Server Developer Preview and empower developers to make design decisions now that will enable their applications to work seamlessly on all installation states of Windows Server.

David B. Cross

Director of Program Management

Windows Server

Jeffrey Snover Talks Windows Server 8 Storage Management on TechNet Radio

Microsoft Server and Cloud Platform Team — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 17:25:00 GMT

In this episode of TechNet Radio, Distinguished Engineer and Lead Architect for Windows Server, Jeffrey Snover, discusses storage management in Windows Server 8 with Senior IT Pro Evangelist, Chris Henley. Jeffrey explains that customer success is predicated on efficient storage management, and highlights how Windows Server 8 meets this need, whether the storage is directly attached to a server or is an external storage array. Additionally, Jeffrey explains how storage management features in Windows Server 8 integrate with PowerShell and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012, as well as what this all means for cloud computing and virtualization going forward.

For more information, read Jeffrey’s post on the Microsoft Server and Cloud Platform Blog and visit the Microsoft TechNet Radio site for more TechNet Radio episodes.

Windows Server 8 Hyper-V and High Availability

Microsoft Server and Cloud Platform Team — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 23:50:00 GMT

A few weeks ago we provided an overview of some of the new features and advancements we have made with Windows Server 8 Hyper-V. Today, I would like to turn the topic focus to High Availability (HA). As customers host more and more critical workloads in virtual environments, the need for integrated HA solutions for any size customer becomes increasingly important.

HA may mean different things to different types and size of organizations. In one example, if I am running a highly transactional workload, such as a storefront application, I may require 5x9 reliability. Many businesses run applications that are still critical to their needs, but they may not require this type of availability, or have the IT budget to support it. In our planning for Windows Server 8 Hyper-V we wanted to continue to deliver the best-in-class high availability solutions, and offer further options for the wide needs and budget of all types of businesses.

Windows Server Failover Clustering has been at the core of our solution offering, and we continue to build on this technology in Windows Server 8, adding many new features including:

Support for guest clustering via Fibre Channel. Windows Server 8 provides virtual Fibre Channel adapters within the virtual machine allowing your workloads access to storage area networks using fiber channel fabric. In addition, a virtual fibre channel enables you to:

Cluster guest operating systems over Fibre Channel providing HA for workloads within VMs

Use Windows multi-path I/O (MPIO) for high-availability and load balancing on the storage path

By employing MPIO and Failover Clustering together as complimentary technologies, users are able to mitigate the risk of a system outage at both the hardware and application levels.

Live migration enhancements. Live migrations have been enhanced to use more available network bandwidth which dramatically increases the performance of Live Migration and enables concurrent Live Migrations with no limits. The number of Live Migrations possible is governed by how much you want to invest in your network infrastructure.

Massive Scale. Windows Server 8 will now support up to 63 nodes and up to 4,000 virtual machines in a cluster.

Encrypted cluster volumes. Hyper-V, Failover Clustering and BitLocker now work in concert to create the ideal and secure platform for private cloud infrastructure. Windows Server 8 Cluster disks that are encrypted using BitLocker Drive Encryption enable better physical security for deployments outside secure data centers, providing a critical safeguard for the cloud and helping protect against inadvertent data leaks.

Cluster Shared Volume 2.0 (CSV). CSV has been greatly enhanced in a number of ways. From a usability standpoint:

CSV is now a core Failover Clustering feature (no longer a separate component that needs to be enabled)

Enabling CSV on a disk is now a single right click with the mouse

CSV disks are now included in the Failover Cluster Manager Storage view easing management

To support up to 63 nodes in a cluster, CSV has been improved in aspects of both performance and scalability. In terms of integrating with our partners, CSV has specifically been enhanced to work out of the box with storage filter drivers such as those used by: anti-virus, data protection, backup and storage replication.

Hyper-V application monitoring. With Windows Server 8, Hyper-V and Failover Clustering work together to bring higher availability to workloads that do not support clustering. It does this by providing a light-weight, simple solution to monitor application running in the VMs and integrating with the host. By monitoring services and event logs inside the virtual machine, Hyper-V and Failover Clustering can detect whether the key services that a virtual machine provides are healthy and provide automatic corrective action such as restarting the virtual machine or restarting a service within the VM.

Virtual machine failover prioritization. Virtual machine priorities can now be configured to control the order in which specific virtual machines failover or start. This ensures higher priority virtual machines are given the resources they need and lower priority virtual machines are given resources as they are available.

Inbox live migration queuing. Administrators can now perform large multi-select actions to queue live migrations of multiple virtual machines with ease and efficiency.

Affinity (and anti-affinity) virtual machine rules. Administrators can now configure partnered virtual machines so that at failover, the partnered machines are migrated simultaneously. For example, administrators can configure their SharePoint virtual machine and the partnered SQL Server virtual machine to always failover together to the same node. Administrators can also specify that two specific virtual machines cannot coexist on the same node in a failover scenario.

File Server Transparent failover. You can now more easily perform hardware or software maintenance of nodes in a File Server cluster (for example, storage virtual machine files such as configuration files, virtual hard disk files, and snapshots in file shares over the SMB2 protocol) by moving file shares between nodes with little interruption to server applications that are storing data on these file shares. Also, if a hardware or software failure occurs on a cluster node, SMB2 transparent failover lets file shares fail over to another cluster node with little interruption to server applications that are storing data on these file shares.

In our planning for expanded HA capabilities, we focused on two core goals:

To provide the built-in ability to failover an entire data center
While also providing affordable entry level HA options for customers.

To meet these goals, we developed a new functionality called Hyper-V Replica.

While Failover Clustering can be used to make a virtual machine highly available, it does not protect businesses from outage of an entire data center without the use hardware-based SAN replication across data centers. Hyper-V Replica fills an important customer need by providing an affordable in-box disaster recovery solution from an entire site, down to a single VM. It provides asynchronous, unlimited replication of your virtual machines over a network link from one Hyper-V host at a primary site to another Hyper-V host at a Replica site, without reliance on storage arrays or other software replication technologies.

In the event of failures at the primary site, the administrator can manually failover the production virtual machines to the Hyper-V server at the recovery site. During failover the virtual machines are brought online, and within minutes the rest of the network can access them successfully with minimal impact to the business. Once the primary site or virtual machines are restored, the administrators can easily revert the virtual machines back to the Hyper-V server at the primary site.

I have only touched on only a few of the core High Availability features that Windows Server 8 Hyper-V provides. You can see that with these enhancements we are building a virtualization platform that can support all your workloads and ensure the availability needs of your business.

David B. Cross

Director of Program Management

Windows Server Engineering

Windows 8 Platform Storage – Part 2

Microsoft Server and Cloud Platform Team — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 18:15:00 GMT

A prior blog entry began our whirlwind introductory tour of some of the more significant platform storage enhancements being introduced in Windows Server 8 – this follow-up entry concludes our introduction.

In Windows 8 Platform Storage – Part 1, we listed your storage related requirements. We also described our resultant set of assumptions guiding Windows 8 platform storage development. Finally, we had a brief introduction to some Windows 8 platform storage capabilities including:

Improved NTFS metadata integrity on commodity storage
Maximized NTFS availability through online file system scan and repair and
Storage Spaces – platform based storage virtualization for business critical application deployment on cost-effective commodity storage hardware

The following additional Windows 8 platform storage enhancements support objectives listed in the prior blog:

Data Deduplication – Windows Server 8 implements state of the art (sub-file) data chunking and compression to deliver optimal data deduplication, and thereby maximize storage capacity utilization for a variety of workloads. The implementation is transparent to the primary workload on the server – this is achieved by minimizing I/O impact through scheduled and selective optimization, and minimizing server impact through low resource (CPU/memory) usage. Further, the implementation strongly optimizes for high data integrity – this is achieved by performing data integrity validation on all data as well as metadata, and by ensuring redundancy for all metadata as well as “popular” data chunks. Windows 8 servers that enable deduplication as well as BranchCache apply the same algorithms both to on-disk and on-the-wire savings, thereby benefiting from faster download times as well as reduced bandwidth utilization over wide area networks. The below table lists a sampling of expected savings from deduplication for common workloads:

Workload	Content	Typical capacity savings
User Documents	Documents, Photos, Music, Videos	30-50%
Deployment Shares	Software binaries, Cab files, Symbol files	70-80%
Virtualization Libraries	Virtual Hard Disk files	80-95%
General File Share	All of the above	50-60%

Windows Storage Management API – a comprehensive and extensible WMI v2 based storage management API enables easier “single point” administration and management of heterogeneous storage infrastructure (including Storage Spaces). In-box PowerShell command-lets enable simplicity of end-to-end provisioning and ongoing administration, as well as inherent support for remote execution and scripting. Application developers including those delivering sophisticated storage management solutions (e.g. System Center or equivalent) can now rely on a single Windows API. Storage hardware vendors can enable easy administration of their gear either through the industry standard Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S) or via a Windows host-based Storage Management Provider interface.

A comprehensive single-pane-of-glass storage management GUI utilizes this API to deliver task based, multi-machine heterogeneous storage management.

Offloaded Data Transfer – joint innovation with major external storage array vendors has resulted in Windows Server 8 providing an incredibly efficient mechanism to perform cross-application and cross-machine data transfers.

In situations where data is simply moved from a source location to a target and wherein no computations are performed on the dataset (e.g. file copying or virtual machine provisioning from a “golden image”), Windows Server 8 works with advanced external storage arrays to directly transfer this dataset without requiring the data to be transferred to/from the Windows servers. Obviously, this minimizes impact on host network, host CPU, or host memory and enables increased efficiencies through better external storage array and storage network utilization. In the future, we expect additional enhancements to external storage arrays that will also enable offloaded data transfers cross-storage-arrays and also across geographically distributed datacenters.

On Windows 8 servers which store data on advanced storage arrays supporting this capability, administrators can (transparently) enjoy the benefits of very fast and efficient data transfers through the simple act of “dragging and dropping” files using Windows Explorer. Further, applications have access to simple yet powerful APIs so they too can directly invoke this functionality.

Awareness and utilization of thinly provisioned disks – beginning with Windows Server 8, NTFS identifies thinly provisioned disks and enables transparent capacity reclamation (e.g. when files are deleted) for better capacity utilization. Further, sophisticated applications can also identify thinly provisioned disks through both WMI or via PowerShell, and can invoke commands to enable capacity reclamation when appropriate. Applications are also notified via standard events whenever capacity exhaustion thresholds are crossed on such thinly-provisioned storage, thereby enabling them to take appropriate action.

Storage Optimizer – Periodically, without any user intervention, a storage optimizer task completes maintenance activities including intelligent compaction of file system allocation to enable capacity reclamation on thinly provisioned disks (including on thinly provisioned spaces).

Platform storage enhancements in Windows Server 8 enable a cost-effective, scalable, and continuously available dynamic IT environment supporting business agility and flexibility. There is much more left to share about these and additional platform storage capabilities in Windows Server 8 – so stay tuned!

Rajeev Nagar

Group Program Manager – Windows Storage & File Systems

Windows 8 Platform Storage – Part 1

Microsoft Server and Cloud Platform Team — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 18:53:00 GMT

Organizations of every size – small and medium businesses, enterprises, and commercial hosting providers – have an insatiable need for storage. In Windows Server 8, we have invested significantly to deliver the most cost-effective platform for scalable and continuously available data access. This blog provides an overview of the rationale for our platform storage investments. Also, we will begin a whirlwind introductory tour of some of the more significant platform storage enhancements being delivered in Windows Server 8 – a follow-up blog entry (Windows 8 Platform Storage – Part 2) will conclude this introduction.

Our customers have very concisely articulated their storage needs:

(a) Guarantee data integrity

(b) Ensure service availability

(c) Maximize value derived from capital investment in storage infrastructure

(d) Minimize storage management complexity and associated ongoing operational costs

The following assumptions underlie our feature enhancements within Windows Server 8 to address the abovementioned needs:

(a) By delivering a richer set of storage virtualization capabilities in the platform, a diverse subset of customer workloads can be successfully deployed on cost-effective industry standard (commodity) storage components.

(b) Storage vendors strive hard to make their components more robust. Nevertheless, given an increased reliance on commodity storage infrastructure, partial or complete failures of storage components are to be expected. Despite such failures, data integrity as well as service uptime must be maintained.

(c) As storage needs scale, more storage infrastructure is deployed. At large scale, storage component failures become “routine” and must be easily handled without commensurate increased complexity.

(d) Maximizing utilization of all deployed storage capacity enables containment of the rate of growth of deployed storage, and, therefore, decreases need for additional capital expenditures.

(e) Some customers incur significant capital expenditure to deploy very highly capable “external storage arrays” for mission critical workloads within their datacenters. Joint innovation with our partners, and deep integration of Windows with these sophisticated storage arrays results in significant additional value to such customers.

(f) A uniform and rich set of storage management capabilities within Windows that can enable multi-machine heterogeneous storage management will reduce storage management complexity and associated operational costs while increasing organizational agility and flexibility.

The following subset of Windows Server 8 platform storage enhancements targets objectives described earlier:

Improved NTFS metadata integrity on commodity storage – Beginning with Windows 8, NTFS has been enhanced to solely rely on the “flush” command in lieu of “forced unit access” (aka write-through) for all operations that require write ordering to ensure file system metadata integrity. This enhancement decreases the possibility of metadata inconsistency due to unexpected power loss on commodity hard disk drives while enabling the disk to cache associated data as long as safely possible. Cost-effective industry standard SATA drives can, therefore, be more reliably utilized.

Maximized NTFS availability through online file system scan and repair – very large volumes (e.g. 64TB) can now be confidently deployed without fear of service downtime associated with file system check/repair operations. Windows 8 performs online scanning for corruptions, online identification of error conditions for on-disk file system data structures, and online repair. Windows 8 now incurs file system downtime only when absolutely needed and such downtime is proportional only to the specific number of (online) detected corruptions. All of these enhancements together deliver significantly improved NTFS uptime. The below graphic contrasts downtime incurred to detect and correct a single NTFS corruption, between Windows Server 2008R2 and Windows Server 8:

Further, this capability is enhanced through Cluster Shared Volume integration in clustered deployments, and manageability is significantly improved through file system health reporting in Action Center, Server Manager, and via PowerShell.

Storage Spaces – Windows Server 8 delivers powerful platform-based storage virtualization capabilities enabling utilization of cost-effective commodity storage hardware for business critical application deployments. Two new concepts are introduced:

(a) Storage Pools: these are units of capacity aggregation, administration, and workload isolation

(b) Spaces (virtual disks): functionally equivalent to physical disks from the perspective of all users and applications, spaces deliver additional sophisticated capabilities including just-in-time allocation as well as resiliency to physical disk failures

As briefly introduced in Bill Laing’s post, Storage Spaces enable a diverse set of customers ranging from enthusiasts (such as Bill) to enterprises and hosting entities, to easily deploy continuously available cost-effective storage using commodity components. Storage Spaces were designed to be highly scalable supporting deployments ranging from just a few terabytes to multiple petabytes. Supported disk connectivity options include SATA (Serial ATA) and SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) – the latter option is expected to be more widely utilized in business environments. Features include:

Optimal and flexible storage utilization through thin-provisioning and trim support
Easy (elastic) capacity expansion – simply add more drives to the pool
Resiliency to physical disk failures – high-performance mirroring (two or three copies), or parity based redundancy (with integrated journaling), is combined with rapid recovery and integrated per-pool hot-spares. As a result, despite storage hardware failures, applications and associated services can continue operating. Proactive background scrubbing further assists in minimizing possibility of downtime despite media failures.
Application driven seamless error correction – some enterprise-class applications have traditionally maintained data checksums (or equivalent) enabling them to auto-detect data corruptions. Such applications can now be enhanced to (also) intelligently auto-correct and, thereby, seamlessly recover from data corruptions. This is enabled by an API which supports rendering all mirrored copies consistent from an application-determined “correct copy”.
Pools can be comprised of heterogeneous media types (SSDs, or various HDDs e.g. 15K RPM, 10K RPM, or 7200 RPM) and space allocation can be targeted to specific underlying media for optimal performance.
Ease of management via integration with the new Windows Storage Management API (see Windows 8 Platform Storage – Part 2) and full PowerShell support. The ability to delegate administration per-pool and per-space enables multi-tenant deployments.
Continuously available and scale-out deployments through integration with Failover Clustering as well as with Cluster Shared Volumes. Note that clustered deployments require fixed provisioning.

In a nutshell, Storage Spaces deliver scale, availability, data integrity, and high performance on commodity hardware without “breaking the bank”.

A follow-on blog entry (Windows 8 Platform Storage – Part 2) will complete this introduction to some of the noteworthy platform storage enhancements in Windows 8. Until then, do let us know what you think about the upcoming Windows 8 features mentioned here.

Rajeev Nagar

Group Program Manager – Windows Storage & File Systems

Windows Server 8: Introducing Hyper-V Extensible Switch

Microsoft Server and Cloud Platform Team — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 01:00:00 GMT

Hyper-V users have asked for a number of new networking capabilities and we’ve heard them. In codename Windows Server 8 we are adding many new features to the Hyper-V virtual switch for virtual machine protection, traffic isolation, traffic prioritization, usage metering, and the troubleshooting. We are also introducing rich new management capabilities that support both WMI and PowerShell. It’s an exciting set of functionality! But we didn’t stop there.

Many customers have asked us for the ability to more deeply integrate Hyper-V networking into their existing network infrastructure, their existing monitoring and security tools, or with other types of specialized functionality. We know that we have an exciting virtual switch in Hyper-V, but there are still opportunities for partners to bring additional capabilities to Hyper-V networking.

In Windows Server 8 we are opening up the virtual switch to allow plug-ins (we call “extensions”) so that partners can add functionality to the switch, transforming the virtual switch into the Hyper-V Extensible Switch.

There are several reasons why IT professionals should be excited by the functionality for the Hyper-V Extensible Switch. First, extensions only deliver the functionality you want in the switch. You do not need to replace the entire switch just to add a single capability.

Second, the framework makes extensions into first class citizens of the system, with support for the same customer scenarios as the switch itself. That means capabilities like Live Migration work on extensions automatically. Switch extensions can be managed through Hyper-V Manager and by WMI or PowerShell.

Third, you can expect to see a rich ecosystem of new extensions allowing you to customize Hyper-V networking for your environment. Developers code extensions using existing, public API so there isn’t a new programming model to learn. Extensions are coded using WFP or NDIS, just like other networking filters and drivers, a model most developers are already familiar with. They can use existing tools and know-how to quickly build extensions.

Fourth, extensions are reliable because they run within a framework and are backed with Windows 8 Certification tools to test and certify them. The result is fewer bugs and higher satisfaction.

Fifth, we’ve extended Unified Tracing through the switch to make it easier for you to diagnose issues, which will lower your support costs.

We unveiled the Hyper-V Extensible Switch at the //BUILD/ conference, along with an ecosystem of partners showing live demonstrations of early versions of their products. The session of live demonstrations can be viewed on our web site at http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/BUILD/BUILD2011/SAC-559T

Briefly, the extensions showcased were the following:

Cisco unveiled the Nexus 1000V for Hyper-V, in addition to their VM-FEX extension with direct I/O (SR-IOV). The CISCO announcement can be found here http://newsroom.cisco.com/press-release-content?type=webcontent&articleId=473289
Inmon demonstrated traffic capturing and analysis with their sFlow product.
5Nine showed their Virtual Firewall.
Broadcom demonstrated a DoS Prevention extension that emulates the functionality they provide in their OEM switch platform.
NEC demonstrated an extension that converts Hyper-V to an OpenFlow virtual switch and integrates it with their Programmable Flow product. More information can be found here: http://www.necam.com/About/read.cfm?ID=f630663c-29c4-484c-91ba-bb18e16bd9f4

These partners showed six great demonstrations of the flexibility and openness of the Hyper-V Extensible Switch. We are excited by each of these partnerships, as they are helping us validate the Windows Server 8 platform. They also suggest the broad range of customer value that can be delivered through an extensible networking platform in Hyper-V.

I encourage you to check out the Windows Server 8 Hyper-V Extensible Switch.

Mike Neil

General Manager, Windows Server engineering

Windows Server 8 Heterogeneous Storage Support

Microsoft Server and Cloud Platform Team — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 19:15:00 GMT

Whether you’re talking about closet space in your house or the capacity of your datacenter, storage is something you can never have enough of. But storage space alone isn’t the whole story. Storage for data needs to be both flexible and reliable. Microsoft recognizes the crucial importance of storage today more than ever, which is why we focused so deeply on storage in Windows Server 8. If you read my previous blog, you’ll recall that I talked about the storage and continuous availability enhancements in Windows Server 8 and discussed how we provided functionality to create a more cost-effective storage platform for our customers.

We are also addressing storage for mixed mode environments. Some of our customers have a mix of Windows and Unix/Linux client machines. Windows Server 8 multiprotocol storage technologies aren’t new to Windows Server. The IT admin can use the same Windows Server 8 system to store data from both Unix/Linux clients (via the NFS protocol) and Windows clients (via the SMB protocol). We have continued to augment this capability, including use of improved clustering to deliver a more highly-available storage platform that is also a cost-effective choice for our customers.

For example, the Services for Network File System (NFS) server and client on Windows Server have come a long way since Services for Unix (SFU) was first offered. After integrating these components into Windows (with the Windows Server 2003 R2 release), we’ve steadily focused on improving stability, reliability, and performance of our NFS stack. The NFS protocol itself has evolved from its traditional file serving roots into a viable file-based storage protocol for server applications.

So how does this progress show up in Windows Server 8? Let’s look at some key features for NFS for Windows Server 8:

Storage for VMware Virtual Machines over NFS: Now with Windows Server 8 you can confidently deploy the Windows NFS server as a highly available storage back end for VMware virtual machines. We re-designed critical components of our NFS stack and focused on providing transparent failover semantics to NFS clients.
NFS v4.1 server: The NFS v4.1 protocol represents a significant evolution of the NFS protocol, and we’re excited to deliver a standards-compliant server-side implementation in Windows Server 8. Some of the Windows Server 8 NFS v4.1 server features include: a flexible single-server namespace for easier share management, full Kerberos v5 support (including authentication, integrity, and privacy) for enhanced security, VSS snapshot integration for backup, and Unmapped Unix User Access to enable easier user account integration. Windows Server 8 supports simultaneous Server Message Block (SMB) and NFS access to the same share, identity mapping using RFC-2307 based identity mapping stores for easier and secure identity integration, and highly available cluster deployments.
PowerShell everywhere: In response to customer feedback, over 40 Windows PowerShell cmdlets provide task-based remote management of every aspect of the NFS server -- from configuring NFS server settings to provisioning shares and share permissions.
Identity mapping is simpler: Windows Server 8 includes a new flat file-based identity mapping store. Windows PowerShell cmdlets also replace cumbersome manual steps to provision Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services (AD LDS) as an identity mapping store and to manage mapped identities.

In addition to NFS protocol support, Windows Server 8 will now provide an inbox iSCSI software target. The Windows iSCSI Software Target enables a Windows Server to provide remote block storage (disk devices) for applications and workloads using a converged Ethernet network. Today the Microsoft iSCSI Software Target is already available as a free download for Windows Server 2008 R2, and if you‘ve tried the Windows Server 8 Developer Preview build, you may have noticed iSCSI Software Target 3.3 is now an inbox feature.

As a Windows Server 8 feature, the iSCSI Software Target can be easily managed by the new integrated File Services role available in Server Manager and can be automated using over 20 Windows PowerShell cmdlets.

These attributes make the iSCSI Software Target ideal for:

Network/diskless boot: By using boot-capable NICs or a software loader, you can deploy hundreds of diskless servers. With the Windows iSCSI Software Target, the deployment is fast; we tested 256 computers deployed in 34 minutes. By using differencing virtual disks, you can save up to 90% of the storage space for the operating system images. This is ideal for large deployments of identical operating system images, such as a Hyper-V server farm or High Performance Computing (HPC) clusters.
Server application storage: Some applications require block storage, (e.g., Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and Exchange Server). The iSCSI Software Target can provide these apps with continuously available block storage. Since the storage is remotely accessible it can also consolidate block storage for central or branch office locations.
Heterogeneous storage: The iSCSI Software Target supports non-Windows iSCSI initiators, making it easy to share storage on Windows Servers in a mixed environment.
Dev/Test/Demo/Lab environments: When the iSCSI Software Target feature is enabled, it turns any Windows Server into a network-accessible block storage device. This is perfect for the testing of applications prior to deployment on SAN storage.

With the investments and enhancements that we have made for NFS and iSCSI, Windows Server 8 will provide an even more compelling storage platform that addresses our customers’ heterogeneous IT requirements. Both NFS and iSCSI target can be deployed with Windows failover clustering to enable transparent fail over of workloads, ensuring applications continue to work without errors in case of a network or node failure.

These are exciting times with the upcoming storage features with Windows Server 8, and I look forward to sharing more over the coming months. Thank you for reading.

Thomas Pfenning

General Manager, File Server Team

Announcing Private Cloud Community Evaluation Program

Microsoft Server and Cloud Platform Team — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 20:50:00 GMT

Post by Garth Fort, General Manager of the Management and Security Product Management Team:

Cloud Computing is emerging as a major opportunity in shaping the nature of business and IT conversations. Cloud Computing enables what we call “IT as a Service”. IT needs to be delivered to businesses in a manner that is agile & cost-effective while delivering the service levels that businesses require to be competitive and effective. A cloud based service demonstrates the key attributes of self-service, elasticity, pooled resources and usage based management that can meet the challenges of delivering “IT as a service”.

You have heard the promise of what the Private Cloud can offer and it is about time that we owe you and ourselves a world class Private Cloud solution. With System Center 2012 and Windows Server Hyper-V, we are delivering on it. To help you understand how we do this, we are excited to announce the Private Cloud Community Evaluation Program (Private Cloud CEP). With our Private Cloud CEP, we will show you how and help you build your own Private Cloud infrastructure from scratch.

System Center 2012 combined with Windows Server Hyper-V helps you deliver flexible and cost effective private cloud infrastructure to your business units in a self-service model, while carrying forward your existing datacenter investments. Recognizing that applications are where core business value resides, System Center 2012 offers performance based monitoring and deep application insight which combined with a “service centric” approach helps you deliver predictable application service levels. System Center 2012 also empowers you to deliver and consume private and public cloud computing on your terms with common management experiences across your environments.

We have had great success running the Community Evaluation Programs for individual System Center products where we invite customers to join us virtually as we talk and demonstrate in great detail about all that is new with System Center 2012. Based on growing interest in Microsoft’s Private Cloud offering, we are ready to kick-off a new program that focuses on how the System Center 2012 products work together to help you create and manage a Private cloud in a very structured manner. As a part of this program you will have clear learning themes that will help you all the way from creating your Private Cloud infrastructure to deploying and monitoring applications in a self-service model. This program will provide you an opportunity to evaluate the products, with guidance from the product teams and understand how System Center 2012 and Windows Server Hyper-V will really change the way you look at Private Cloud.

The program begins on November 1st, 2011 at 1 PM PST and I will be doing the kick-off session. I invite you all to a guided journey to the Private Cloud and beyond. To learn more about the program and sign-up, please follow the link below.

Private Cloud CEP Application: Click Here

Enjoy the program!

Garth

Windows Server 8: Driven by the Voice of the Customer and Partner

Microsoft Server and Cloud Platform Team — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 15:56:00 GMT

Most people have heard of the campaign where customers say, “Windows 7 was my idea.” Well, Windows Server 8 continues to carry that torch and has become a solution that customers can truly say was their idea.

As Bill Laing mentioned in his Windows Server 8 Introduction post, input from our customers and partners (our “ecosystem”) is an essential part of our Windows Server product strategy. We invested heavily in voice of the customer activities, with more than 26,000 customers and partners surveyed, 200+ ecosystem meetings held and 6000+ ideas captured. We were able to build a great foundation of insights as we evolve from feature-oriented product development to a focus on end-to-end IT scenarios. Rather than shipping a laundry list of great individual features, our goal for Windows Server 8 is to deliver the functionality needed to improve the real life experiences customers go through each day in their business.

As the leader of the Windows Server Partner & Customer Ecosystem team I’ve had the privilege of being very close to our ongoing customer and partner engagements since the beginning of the product planning cycle. Our approach has helped us expand beyond incremental improvements and focus on delivering broad functionality that not only solves key business problems for customers , but does it in a way that supports customers both today and as they progress further with cloud computing.

Customers told us things like:

“I want our servers to seamlessly expand across clusters of servers that can be added or removed on demand.”
“I want servers to have the ability to monitor themselves for issues that may need to be investigated and alert - a Smart Server.”
“I need to have dynamic resource scheduling\allocation without intervention.”
“I want to have a truly portable operating environment that moves with me from device to device.”

When we consolidate feedback like that across 200+ customer and partner meetings, plus broader surveys, we heard very clearly that you’re really looking for the ability to scale in an efficient and cost-effective manner across your own private cloud and securely connect to external cloud services. You need to proficiently manage your infrastructure – maximizing uptime and minimizing downtime. The platform you build on needs to be open and scalable and support cross-premises applications. With today’s environment, you need to support a mobile and flexible work style – giving appropriate levels of access to data from wherever an employee is. It was extremely valuable to understand how each of these areas played out in different markets, segments and geographies. It also became very clear that partners would play a pivotal role in making all of this a reality.

Looking back at our approach
How we got to this point in the product cycle has been a huge team effort across our full ecosystem. The chart below provides a look at our approach.

Pre-Planning is when we reached out to that broad set of customers and partners to gather their vision of where their businesses are heading. That surfaced 6000+ ideas (similar to those above) that fed the formal Planning phase. Those requirements turned into storyboards and concepts that were reviewed with customers and partners. Once validated, they became formal scenarios and our Vision was set for Windows Server 8. This is the point where we kicked off co-engineering efforts with partners who would help us complete certain scenarios, including Continuous Availability, Hyper-V switch extensibility and Claims-Based Access Control. These partners were at the recent //build/ conference where we introduced Windows Server 8. (Visit Channel 9 to see short videos from the following partners: Brocade, DynamicOps, Emulex, Gemalto, InMon, QLogic, Titus, Websense, Broadcom, Cisco, Dell, HP, IBM, Intel, NEC, NetApp).

As we entered the Development phase, these partners (and others) were deeply engaged to ensure Windows Server 8 delivers on the priority scenarios that came out of the initial pre-planning discussions. Whether it was developing drivers, hardware components, core functionality or additional functionality on top of our scenarios, the ecosystem has been a true partner in our ability to deliver what customers have asked for – and at the same time establish a platform that will support them into the future.

It’s been a rewarding experience for all of the Windows Server team to have customers and partners engaged throughout each phase of the product cycle. Our end goal is to deliver the most customer centric solution yet for Windows Server. Based on the response from //build, we appear to be on that path and we have our entire ecosystem to thank. Here’s to continued partnership and active “voice of the customer” dialogue between now and launch!

Natalia Mackevicius

Group Program Manager
Partner and Customer Ecosystem

Windows Server 8: Standards-Based Storage Management

Microsoft Server and Cloud Platform Team — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 18:13:00 GMT

Windows Server 8 is a cloud optimized OS. You’ve probably heard that phrase or similar comments a lot recently since we introduced Windows Server 8 last month (see Bill Laing’s blog post.) Let’s drill in a bit to explain what that really means and why it matters to you. In the past, Windows Server was a great OS for a server and its devices. Windows Server 8 is a great OS for lots of servers and all the devices connecting them whether they are physical or virtual, on-premise or off-premise.

At the BUILD conference, we showcased for the first time all the new capabilities that deliver on this vision including scalability, availability, Hyper-V, networking, manageability and storage.

Whether we are talking classic architectures or private/public/hybrid cloud architectures, one thing is absolutely clear – there is a large and growing appetite for data. Customers’success is predicated on the efficient and effective management of storage. Windows Server 8 is there to help meet that challenge whether the storage is directly attached to a server or is an external storage array. Working with our storage partners, we are delivering a new set of capabilities, APIs and PowerShell Cmdlets.

Windows Server 8 introduces a new WMI-based API called the Storage Management API (SMAPI) and corresponding set of PowerShell Cmdlets. These provide storage management primitives to manage direct attach storage on the OS as well as external storage arrays. The PowerShell Cmdlets replace tools like diskpart and diskraid. The API is comprised of a WMI object model along with the corresponding set of methods and properties. Storage partners plug into the new API either by:

Implementing the SNIA (Storage Networking Industry Association) industry standard for storage management called SMI-S (Storage Management Initiative –Specification)
Implementing a new provider model called the Storage Management Provider (SMP)

Many storage products already support SMI-S. We participate in SMI-S Lab Plugfests with the storage vendors to ensure interoperability so that things “just work” when you use Windows Server 8. What does “just works” mean? Simple - after you enable the Windows 8 Microsoft Storage Management Service feature, you will be able to discover and manage SMI-S storage devices without installing any additional software. Either model will work just fine and will have the same level of support by in box tools (including support for proprietary extensions) and UIs. Partners that do not already support SMI-S should evaluate both provider approaches (SMI-S and SMP) and make a decision based on their business needs. Either is a great choice but only one is required. (BTW - kudos to SNIA and the participating vendors both for developing a good standard and for holding regular plugfests to ensure interoperability. )

Storage vendors that implement SMI-S won’t have to wait until Windows 8 to reap the benefits of that investment. System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 (SCVMM 2012) delivers great private cloud management using SMI-S to manage storage arrays. SCVMM 2012 uses SMI-S to interoperate with a large number of arrays from multiple partners including NetApp, EMC, HP, Hitachi, Dell, IBM, and Fujitsu, to provide storage discovery & provisioning as part of virtualization management.

SCVMM 2012 uses its storage management capabilities to deliver three scenarios:

End-to-end Mapping

Identify how VM, hosts, and clusters relate to the underlying storage infrastructure

Host and Cluster Storage Capacity Management

Adding storage to a host or cluster including unmasking, initialization, partitioning, formatting, validating, and CSV cluster resource creation (in shared storage case)

Rapid Provisioning

Creation of new VMs leveraging the SAN to copy the VHD

Windows Server 8 offers a rich set of storage capabilities natively through the SMAPI. Not every storage capabilitywill be available via the API surface as storage vendors each offers their own special features. We’ve thought about that as well and designed a no-compromises solution which gives you access to these features. For storage partners who want to showcase additional new features and capabilities, SMAPI offers a pass-through mechanism. The pass-through mechanism works with both the SMI-S and SMP providers and gives partners like System Center and 3^rdparty storage vendors the ability to light up new capabilities without having to wait for the next version of the SMAPI. (Future versions of SCVMM will use the SMAPI and be able to use both SMI-S and SMP providers.)

Call to Action for Storage Partners

Plug into Windows Server 8 Storage Management API

Already have a v1.3 or later SMI-S provider?
Continue to enhance and update that provider. Work with Windows 8 to ensure the inbox tool sets work well for your hardware, as well as test with SCVMM 2012. The new storage management capabilities available in Windows Server 8 support SMI-S. Additional capabilities in your array can be accessed by partners like System Center using through pass-through mechanism which will talk directly to your SMI-S provider.
Don't have an SMI-S provider?
Evaluate both the SMP and SMI-S and make a decision based upon your business needs.

Deliver new value-add on top of the platform

SCVMM 2012 delivers powerful end-to-end virtualization scenarios that include storage discovery and provisioning. Future releases of SCVMM will leverage the new SMAPI and pass-through capabilities to deliver more storage integrated virtualization capabilities. Storage management vendors should do the same. The existing scenarios in SCVMM 2012 will continue to work with no regression in functionality or scale in a future release that utilizes the Windows 8 SMAPI.

Collaborate with Microsoft

Continue to engage with Windows and System Center to understand which end-to-end scenarios best showcase your hardware + our software working better together.
Windows Server will continue to grow the Storage Management API in future releases of the operating system. Pass-through gives partners a way to deliver innovation and value-add prior to the next release. Popular capabilities implemented via pass-through are the prime candidates for inclusion natively in the next release of the SMAPI.
Join us at the SNIA plugfests to ensure that we interoperate so we deliver the best possible experience for our customers.

Windows Server 8 is a cloud optimized OS and its new standards-based storage management capabilities deliver efficient and effective management of storage.

Jeffrey Snover

Distinguished Engineer and Lead Architect for Window Server

Windows Server 8 Hyper-V Overview

Microsoft Server and Cloud Platform Team — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 20:51:00 GMT

Last month at the BUILD Conference we introduced Windows Server 8 and began discussing how it will help customers deliver the most dynamic, available, and cost-effective server platform for what we call "cloud optimized IT." I wanted to follow up on Bill Laing's blog post and dig into the advancements in our Hyper-V virtualization role, which provides a complete virtualization platform, increased scalability and performance, and connectivity to cloud services.

Using Windows Server 8 Hyper-V, organization can deliver fully isolated, multi-tenant clouds, enable high scale and low cost data centers and provide the most manageable, extensible and interoperable platform for cloud. Below are just a few examples of some new and enhanced features in the Windows Server 8 Developer Preview that support a complete virtualization platform and provide the best platform for the cloud.

Multi-tenancy, Isolation & Quality of Service (QoS)

Hyper-V Network Virtualization:

Allows you to keep your own internal IP addresses when moving to the cloud while providing isolation from other organizations' VMs - even if those VMs use the same exact IP addresses

Hyper-V Extensible Switch provides:

Multi-tenant security and isolation options
Traffic shaping and network traffic control
Built-in security protection against malicious VMs

Quality of Services (QoS) bandwidth management to improve overall performance in virtualized environments.
Resource Metering to support more detailed and accurate usage billing

But we did not stop there. The growing importance of virtualization and cloud services in enterprises and for hosting providers requires increased system responsiveness to meet SLAs and customer expectations. Windows Server 8 provides significant improvements in scalability and performance for virtualized platforms that help IT organizations use a fixed amount of resources to run more workloads faster with Hyper-V, and to offload specific processes to hardware. The result is a high density and highly scalable environment that can be adapted to perform at optimum levels based on customers' requirements. Windows Server 8 includes a number of features that help support faster, even more reliable virtualized environments. Here are just a few of the new capabilities in the Windows Server 8 developer preview.

Massive Scale & Performance

Support for up to 160 logical processors per host
Support for up to 2 TB of memory per host
Support for up to 32 virtual processors per virtual machine
Support for up to 512 GB of memory per virtual machine
New VHDX virtual hard disk format with support for up to 16 TB per virtual disk and support for next-generation hard disks with larger disk sectors

Hyper-V Pass Through Disks have no maximum limit other than what is supported by the guest OS

Hyper-V Single Root-I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) which enables you to map Network Interface Cards (NICs) within VMs for scale up workloads. SR-IOV is particularly important for workloads that require >10GbE
Hyper-V Offloaded Data Transfer (ODX) which enables secure, offloaded transfers between virtual disks, arrays and across data center with little to no CPU utilization.
Guest Fiber Channel which provides:

Increased virtual machine storage options with support for Fibre Channel storage area networks (SANs)
Support for guest clustering via FC
Support for guest multi-path IO (MPIO)

Complete VM Mobility

Share Nothing Live Migration allows you to Live Migrate VMs with nothing but a network connection
Live Storage Migration enables no downtime storage servicing and storage load balancing
Concurrent Live Migrations and Concurrent Live Storage Migrations allows you to Live Migrate as many virtual machines or as much virtual storage as you'd like. Hyper-V has no limits. The only limits are based on how much hardware you provide
Live Migration Prioritization
Hyper-V support for SMB2.2 file based storage, making it easier to provision and manage storage, taking advantage of existing network investments

With Windows Server 8 Hyper-V, we heard you loud and clear. Per your request, any part of a virtual machine can be live migrated with or without high availability. The choice is yours. Cloud computing on your terms provides you maximum flexibility based on your requirements.

Windows Server 8: The Ideal Foundation for the Cloud

Windows Server 8 Hyper-V technology supports a dynamic IT environment that adapts quickly to changing business needs and scenarios. Hyper-V provides the tools and supports processes that can increase automation and reduce the overall costs of an organization's infrastructure. By doing that, a data center becomes completely dynamic and enables full decoupling of the physical infrastructure from the logical workloads - a key value that private cloud solutions provide.

Cloud computing takes virtualization to the next level by treating compute, network, and storage resources as a flexible pool that can be allocated to any workload. By providing the ability to increase and decrease utilization based on demand, cloud computing gives IT greater elasticity and scale, empowering end users to use self-service support and freeing up IT resources.

This is just a glimpse at a few of the new capabilities in Windows Server 8. We'll dig deeper in the next few blogs.

Mike Neil
General Manager
Windows Server & Cloud

A Warm Reception for "Windows Server 8"

Microsoft Server and Cloud Platform Team — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 18:53:00 GMT

The engineering teams that have been working so hard on the next version of Windows Server, code named “Windows Server 8” have been excited to show the world all the new features they’ve created in response to customer feedback. They had an opportunity to inform a select group of reviewers and were delighted with the reception that "Windows Server 8" has been receiving.

On September 14th at the BUILD conference, we released a developer preview of Windows Server 8 to help software and hardware partners prepare new and existing applications, systems, and devices for this upcoming product. The coverage starting coming in immediately.

Comments like “…takes your breath away,” and “a game-changer in the world of server and operating systems,” have made the teams here at Microsoft proud that they have been successful at serving their customers. We’d like to share a small number of the articles that have been posted so far as a way to share our excitement.

First look: Windows Server 8 improves scalability and scope: Jonathan Hassell, writing for Computerworld states that “Windows Server 8 changes everything…It takes the operating system an order of magnitude higher than it’s been before and makes data centers fully ready for lights-out management, easy scalability and agile provisioning and support.”
Windows Server 8: A Leap Ahead: Sean Deuby writing for Windows IT Pro discusses some of the new enhancements in “Windows Server 8” as well as the Customer Focused Design for defining the features.
Windows Server 8: Hyper-V 3.0 Evens the Odds with vSphere: Michael Otey, writing for Windows ITPro states that the “upcoming Hyper-V 3.0 release that’s included in the next version of Windows Server has closed the technology gap with VMware’s vSphere” .

We want to thank our customers for giving us their input and feedback as we’ve moved toward this preview, and we look forward to continued feedback as we progress toward beta and finally release. Let us know what you think. We will continue our blog series on Windows Server 8 with a post about virtualization this week.

Storage and Continuous Availability Enhancements in Windows Server 8

Microsoft Server and Cloud Platform Team — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 16:03:00 GMT

Greetings from the Storage Developer Conference, where I had the opportunity to introduce attendees to some of the new storage capabilities in “Windows Server 8.” Following Bill Laing’s post introducing the product, I would like to share more about our investments to give customers more unified, flexible, and cost-efficient solutions that can deliver enterprise-class storage and availability.

Windows Server 8 will provide a continuum of availability options to protect against a wide range of failure modes in different tiers – storage, network, and compute. These options will enable higher levels of availability and cost-effectiveness, as well as easier deployment for all customers – from small business to mid-market to enterprises - and across single servers, multiple servers, and multi-site cloud environments. Windows Server 8 delivers on continuous availability by efficiently utilizing industry standard storage, network and server components. That means many IT organizations will have capabilities they couldn’t previously afford or manage.

For example, at the conference we are highlighting our work with the SMB 3.0 protocol - a key component of our continuously available platform. SMB 3.0 transparent failover, along with SMB 3.0 Multichannel and SMB 3.0 Direct, enables customers to deploy storage for workloads such as Hyper-V and SQL Server on cost efficient, continuously available, high performance Windows Server 8 File Servers.

Below are some of the key features we’re delivering in Windows Server 8 involving SMB 3.0.

Transparent Failover and node fault tolerance with SMB 3.0. Supporting business critical server application workloads requires the connection to the storage back end to be continuously available. The new SMB 3.0 server and client cooperate to provide transparent failover to an alternative cluster node for all SMB 3.0 operations for both planned moves and unplanned failures.
Fast data transfers and network fault tolerance with SMB 3.0 Multichannel. With Windows Server 8, customers can store application data (such as Hyper-V and SQL Server) on remote SMB 3.0 file shares. SMB 3.0 Multichannel provides better throughput and multiple redundant paths from the server (e.g., Hyper-V or SQL Server) to the storage on a remote SMB 3.0 share. Network path failures are automatically and transparently handled without application service disruption.
Scalable, fast and efficient storage access with SMB Direct. SMB Direct (SMB over RDMA) is a new storage protocol in Windows Server 8. It enables direct memory-to-memory data transfers between server and storage, with minimal CPU utilization, while using standard RDMA capable NICs. SMB Direct is supported on all three available RDMA technologies (iWARP, InfiniBand and RoCE.) Minimizing the CPU overhead for storage I/O means that servers can handle larger compute workloads (e.g., Hyper-V can host more VMs) with the saved CPU cycles.
Active-Active File sharing with SMB 3.0 Scale Out. Taking advantage of the single namespace functionality provided by Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV) v2, the File Server in Windows Server 8 can provide simultaneous access to shares, with direct I/O to a shared set of drives, from any node in a cluster. This allows utilization of all the network bandwidth into a cluster and load balancing of the clients, in order to optimize client experience.
Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) for SMB 3.0 file shares. Remote VSS provides application-consistent shadow copies for data stored on remote file shares to support app backup and restore scenarios.

Alongside our SMB 3.0 Server implementation in Windows Server 8, we are working with two leading storage companies, NetApp and EMC, to enable them to fully integrate SMB 3.0 into their stacks and provide Hyper-V over SMB 3.0 solutions. Having NetApp and EMC on board not only demonstrates strong industry support of SMB 3.0 as a protocol of choice for various types of customers, but also highlights how the industry is aligned with our engineering direction and its support for our Windows Server 8 storage technology.

There is so much more to share about our work in Windows Server 8 storage and availability. Look for more from me soon!

Thomas Pfenning
General Manager
Server and Tools

Microsoft and Dell – helping customers start the journey to Private Cloud

Microsoft Server and Cloud Platform Team — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 13:58:00 GMT

By Ed Anderson, Microsoft

Today Dell offers vStart 50m for Hyper-V

In April Dell and Microsoft announced a new, three-year initiative to help our customers deploy and manage virtualization and private cloud technologies. Since that time, we have been hard at work to deliver solutions that do just that. Today I am excited to share the first new solution from our initiative – Dell’s vStart 50m, a pre-built virtualization appliance that brings together Dell hardware and software and Windows Server Hyper-V to help organizations quickly and easily achieve benefits of virtualization without needing specialized skills.

Announced today, Dell’s vStart 50m is the newest offering in Dell’s vStart line and the first to support Hyper-V. Using vStart 50m, customers can focus their resources on creating business value rather than building infrastructure, shortening their path to private cloud and with a lowered TCO. You can learn more about this new solution from Dell and get started today.

No matter where you are in your virtualization or cloud journey Microsoft, and our great partners like Dell, have solutions that will help you get cloud benefits today – on your terms. This is just the beginning of the new solutions coming from the Dell and Microsoft initiative and I look forward to sharing more soon.

Ed Anderson
Marketing Director
Microsoft Server and Tools Business

Windows Server 8: An Introduction

Microsoft Server and Cloud Platform Team — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 22:41:00 GMT

Today at the Microsoft BUILD conference I had the pleasure of introducing the developer preview of the next release of Windows Server codenamed Windows Server 8, now available on MSDN. In a room full of software developers and hardware partners I got to share some of our thinking behind the design of Windows Server 8 to help them prepare their new and existing applications, systems, and devices for the new release. Now, on this blog, I want to share that same thinking more broadly with a series of posts from me and members of my team.

Let me start with a reminder that this is a developer preview version, the purpose of which is to enable our development team to engage with the industry as we progress toward final release. This developer preview is not for deployments in enterprise environments. However we do welcome feedback from IT professionals doing early evaluations, and I would like to thank many of you for your help in getting us to this point. So far we have surveyed over 26,000 customers, had more than 200 customer meetings and documented over 6000 customer requirements during the course of planning and development.

As the person who leads Windows Server and Windows Azure engineering, I have had the experience of building and operating a cloud platform. We have been able to apply many of our insights from Windows Azure to Windows Server 8, enabling us to deliver world class cloud capabilities to enterprises of all sizes. Windows Server 8 will be a big leap forward, especially in terms of helping IT organizations progress beyond virtualization to build private cloud services. We innovated and worked with the industry on virtualizing network and storage infrastructures for multitenant support. Our goal is to give customers the choice and flexibility to build and deploy applications across their choice of private and public cloud environments, or a combination of both.

Another big area of focus is on manageability and serviceability of cloud infrastructure without service down time. For example, one of the most common customer comments we have heard is that patching and updating servers is a costly and error prone process. We are delivering new technologies, such as “cluster aware updating,” and the ability to script workflows with Powershell to make it an easier and repeatable process to patch multiple servers while maintaining continuous service availability.

Continuous availability of services typically requires expensive hardware infrastructure, but not every IT organization can afford the necessary hardware. So, with Windows Server 8 we are delivering high availability and disaster recovery at a much better price point, using software technologies and commodity networking, storage and servers. For example, we are giving customers access to high-end storage capabilities that before required specialized hardware, such as device pooling, disk virtualization, and thin provisioning, in Windows Server 8. To evaluate how development is progressing I have a server in my office with 10 disk drives ranging in size from .5 to 3 terabytes. I find it very easy and quick to pool the disk drives, create volumes, and have them available for service within minutes using the new built in tools.

This is just a taste of what’s coming in Windows Server 8. There is much, much more to discuss over the coming weeks and months, so I’ve asked some of our engineering leaders to write posts on this blog to further explain some of the hundreds of new features. Be on the lookout for those posts in the coming weeks and months. We look forward to engaging with you on the new technologies in Windows Server 8.

Best,
Bill Laing
Corporate Vice President, Server and Cloud

“Windows Server 8” sneak preview

Microsoft Server and Cloud Platform Team — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 18:02:00 GMT

If you’re in IT you are likely pulled between an almost infinite need for more computing power to deliver business solutions and the ever increasing demands for greater agility, higher efficiency and lower costs. Fortunately, you can now deliver on these seemingly contradictory demands by leveraging the benefits of cloud computing with our public and private cloud solutions. And they are only going to get better.

Today we are excited to give you a sneak peek at the next step in private cloud computing by showing you just two of hundreds of new capabilities coming in the next version of Windows Server, internally code-named “Windows Server 8.”

At 36:50 of this online video we demonstrate how Windows Server 8 virtual machines will help you build private clouds of greater scale by supporting (at least…) 16 virtual processors fully loaded with business critical workloads like SQL Server. Then we show you how you can deliver improved fault tolerance and flexibility, without the added tax or complexity of additional hardware, tools and software licenses, by using the new built-in Hyper-V Replica feature. All it takes is a few clicks, a network connection and Windows Server 8.

But this is just the beginning! We’re looking forward to sharing more about Windows Server 8 at Microsoft’s BUILD conference, September 13-16, in Anaheim.

Welcome to the new Microsoft Server & Cloud Platform Blog

Microsoft Server and Cloud Platform Team — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 20:16:38 GMT

We’re pleased to welcome you to the new Microsoft Server and Cloud Platform blog! The purpose of this blog is to provide you with all the latest Server & Cloud Platform product news and updates on topics related to private cloud and virtualization technologies, as well as Windows Server operating system, System Center IT management, and Forefront security products.

More specifically the type of information we will be posting here includes the latest news regarding product releases, opportunities for and with Microsoft partners, detailed product information and commentary from subject matter experts, great customer stories, reports from key Microsoft events and, announcements about our latest customer programs and promotions.

Other ways that you can stay up-to-date with the latest Server &Cloud Platform news include:

Twitter: @MSServerCloud
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/Server.Cloud

Stay tuned for the latest Server & Cloud Platform updates!