October, 2009

Just a quick blog post for now.  The TechNet Edge video site just posted a video blog that David Mills and I did, with a preview of the new System Center Essentials (SCE) 2010 Beta.  What’s really exciting about SCE 2010 is that in addition to the existing great Small and Medium Business (SMB) systems management capabilities of SCE, SCE 2010 now includes the virtualization management capabilities of Virtual Machine Manager.

That means that SMB customers and can soon buy one product that has software deployment, systems updates, monitoring and virtualization management, all in one tool designed for mid-sized businesses.  For more information on SCE 2010, check out the SCE website.

We just published a Lab Validation Report for Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, which was written by Enterprise Strategy Group.  This report goes over the installation and configuration of Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and management of those servers with Virtual Machine Manager 2008.

More importantly, the report reviews the performance of Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V in comparison with physical systems, so you can compare how applications might run in a virtualized environment.  If you are interested in some Hyper-V performance numbers, download the report.

Hello Virt Planet!

When I meet with customers and partners about Microsoft Virtualization, I often get asked about similar companies or case studies.  We have a great resource of case studies on Microsoft Virtualization but I am going to start highlighting some of the new ones, as they come out.

The first one I wanted to highlight is for Jefferson County Public Schools in Kentucky.  The Jefferson County Public Schools wanted to contain server sprawl and centralize an IT infrastructure that was spread across 155 schools. And like many organizations, they needed to cut costs.

They did look at VMware, but decided to go with Microsoft. Jefferson Country’s implementation used Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V (and moving to Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V) and System Center products like Virtual Machine Manager 2008 and Operations Manager 2007.

I’ve cited a couple of quotes from the customer that stood out for me and that I think will resonate with many of you:

“The money required for licensing a VMware solution, more than $100,000 for a solution on our scale, could be better used to support district initiatives that improve classroom learning or value-added IT projects, such as building offsite disaster recovery capabilities… With Hyper-V, we have already saved $200,000 in hardware costs, and that’s just by targeting our oldest physical servers.”

“Using Cluster Shared Volumes, we don’t have to pre-allocate a tremendous amount of storage upfront for each one of the virtual machines: instead we can allocate as we go. That’s huge for us because otherwise we would have to pay for and set aside a lot of storage that may not be used for six months or a year.”

Just a quick post today (there are more coming I assure you!).  We have a series of webcasts coming up on best practices on virtualizing Microsoft applications.  Check out this blog entry on the list of webcasts

http://blogs.technet.com/systemcenter/archive/2009/10/22/upcoming-webcasts-on-virtualization-best-practices.aspx

On Thursday, the first webcast is on virtualizing SQL Server.  If you want to virtualize SQL Server, this is a can’t miss webcast.

Hello everyone!

It’s been a little bit of time since I last posted but I promise to post more regularly, as soon as I get back from my vacation in Hawaii :). 

This week, I wanted to cover some new news and some items I tweeted about but didn’t blog.

• I wrote a new post, Virtualization Reality: Why Microsoft® Virtualization Solutions Deliver Value When Compared to VMware® on my other blog, from the Because It’s Everybody’s Business site.  It covers how the Microsoft cost comparisons are done and a view on the VMware cost calculations.
• We have just announced that Microsoft and Red Hat have completed certification on each others products.  If you want to run Red Hat on Hyper-V or MS applications on Red Hat KVM, you want to read this post.
• There is now official documentation for migrating a cluster from Hyper-V to Hyper-V R2.  Hans Vredevoot wrote up a great list of links for migrating Hyper-V clusters.
• Windows Virtual PC and the associated Windows XP Mode for Windows 7 has been Released to Manufacturing (RTMed).   Ben Armstrong announced this on his blog.
• I still see a lot of misrepresentations about Hyper-V and whether it’s a bare metal hypervisor.  There is a great post from Netapp on what the misconceptions are and why Hyper-V is really a bare metal hypervisor.

Thanks everyone.  Look out for more posts upcoming and you can always follow me on Twitter (@edwinyuen).