Hello Virtualization Planet! I know in my last blog I wrote that I would be posting more but things have gotten very busy for me. As I told a colleague recently, if blogging and tweeting were my only job, it would be a lot easier. :)
Still, things are freeing up and I hope to post more going forward (at least until baby #2 for me arrive)….
The big thing I wanted to post on is Microsoft Management Summit 2010. I’m heading out to Las Vegas for the show this weekend. I’ll be speaking on Tuesday, at 1015am, at session BD02 - Understanding How Microsoft Virtualization Compares to VMware. If you will be at MMS, please swing by and at least say hi to me.
In addition to my session, I’ll also be doing a demo during the Day 1 keynote. For those who are not attending MMS, you can still watch both the day 1 and day 2 keynotes live, which I strongly recommend. We’ll be making some really neat announcements and some great demos so it’s a must watch even if work with systems management, virtualization, datacenters or desktop. The schedule is as follows:
· Tuesday, April 20, 8:30 – 9:45 AM PST: Managing Systems from the Datacenter to the Cloud, Bob Muglia, president, Microsoft Server and Tools
· Wednesday, April 21, 8:30 – 9:45 AM PST: User Centric Client Management, Brad Anderson, corporate vice president, Management and Services Division
You can watch the keynotes from the Microsoft News Center at the times post above. I hope to see everyone either in person or live online!
Edwin Yuen Director – Virtualization
I’m back. I’ve been running a little slient recently but hopefully, I’ll get back to my regular rhythm (for those who follow me twitter, you may have seen what’s been driving me crazy!).
Today, I wanted to highlight some of what Microsoft and a lot of people on my team have been working on for the last couple months. We are working hard to expand our outreach with the online community. We’ve worked hard on blogs and twitter feeds but we want to go well beyond. I think I can break down what we’ve done in three areas.
Come check out our new Community web portal
Our goal is not to bombard you every time you turn the corner, but we want to be accessible in the media sites you are already spending time in and cut back on your time you need to troll around on the internet. We are making our information easy to find, because we know you want real-time information without wasting your time to get it.
If you want an easy location to see all of the blogs & forums currently available from Microsoft virtualization experts - visit the new Community page on our virtualization website to see where conversations are already occurring around server and client virtualization, as well as the private cloud.
Join us on Facebook
All of us are busy but we always seem to have time to check up Facebook, right? Well, if you are Facebook user, you can get all the latest Microsoft Virtualization news right in Facebook. Sign up to day to become a fan of Microsoft Virtualization on Facebook and gain access to information you want.
We keep this page up-to date with press articles, analysts news, as well as the latest resources such as eBooks and whitepapers.
Want to see how easy it is to set up a Microsoft Virtualization environment? Watch the demo series in the video section.
Want to see where the next event is that Microsoft Virtualization experts will be at? Check out the events tab to find out more information & register.
Have questions you want answered? Post a question our wall & have the facebook community help you out. Our fans include the product group teams here at Microsoft
It’s more than just the Microsoft perspective
I know that most of you want to hear the Microsoft perspective but you also want the whole picture. We want to bring more perspectives from from your peers, who have actually used Microsoft Virtualization solutions and from industry experts to get their take on the virtualization world. We want to provide fair and balanced information that you can trust and refer to as a good resource of information. We want you to provide you access to the the best virtualization information resources.
With that in mind, we are inviting guest bloggers to post in this space so you can get every angle of how virtualization is changing the desktop and the datacenter and how it will impact you in the workplace.
Be the first to hear it
There is often a lag period from when we announce new product & feature sets here at Microsoft, to customers actually hearing about it and understanding it. I’ve spoken with many people that aren’t aware of all the changes that have occurred across our client & datacenter solutions over the past few years.
To help, we have an RSS feed on our Virtualization home page, that you can check to see the latest information from the latest case studies to industry articles related to virtualization. Our goal is to get customers educated on our products and solutions TODAY so you can make educated decisions about virtualization.
Want to be more involved in the conversation? We have a twitter account that follows Microsoft virtualization experts, as well as industry experts and our press announces. Follow MS_virt to keep up to date with news. Retweet/favorite/reply back – we love hearing from our customers and value their opinions and feedback.
I hope this all sounds exciting to you and provides you some great resources for more information on Microsoft Virtualization. In the future, look for us to provide more information on other community resources, including other ways to interact with other Virtualization experts. If we missed anything or you have a great new idea, let us know. As always, you can comment or send me feedback and I’ll work on it!
Edwin Yuen Senior Technical Product Manager – Virtualization
In late September I was lucky enough to get a chance to attend Microsoft’s “New Efficiency” event in San Francisco to talk about the importance of the new products they are bringing to market – including Windows® 7, Windows Server® 2008 R2 and Exchange Server 2010. Each of these solutions brings an exciting new experience to the end user, and helps not only enhance the way they connect with their PCs, but also to target what’s most important in today’s enterprise environment: efficient computing.
As AMD’s director of commercial software, I’ve had a front row seat to the kinds of new efficiency AMD and Microsoft have been driving in the industry for years now. And, quite simply, it just keeps getting better. I was able to sit down with Vineet Thuvara, the Worldwide Launch Leader for Windows Server, to talk about just that. Check it out:
Margaret Lewis (@margaretjlewis) is a Product Marketing Director at AMD. Her postings are her own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.
Hello, my name is Vipul Shah and I’m a Senior Product Manager with the Virtualization Team.
Due to its ability to drive down costs and drive up resource usage, Microsoft SQL Server consolidation is top of mind for our customers these days. Microsoft virtualization, which includes Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and System Center, is one of the well known mechanisms to enable this. Today, Ted Kummert, Senior Vice President, Microsoft Business Platform Division, released a video (click here) that outlines how virtualization enables consolidation.
So the natural question is – can we achieve higher amounts of throughput as we consolidate? Can we improve the throughput with recent advances in hardware and the recent release of Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V?
To address this, we recently performed tests that are discussed in the Best Practices for SQL Server Virtualization webcast (click here) and in the SQL Server Consolidation Guidance (click here).
In our tests, we ran a complex stock trading application workload on servers with Second Level Address Translation (SLAT). In physical environments, the operating system translates virtual memory addresses to physical addresses. However with virtualization, we have an additional translation (the second level address translation) because you are running operating systems within virtual machines. This means additional CPU cycles are spent doing this translation. The SLAT enabled processors complete this translation within the silicon, leading to performance advantage compared with non-SLAT enabled CPUs. You get these processors from both Intel and AMD.
We chose a 16-core HP DL585 server with SLAT-enabled AMD processors with HP EVA 8000 storage running Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V. We created virtual machines (VM) each with 4 virtual processors and 7 GB RAM using a fixed-sized VHD format. We started to run our workload with one VM and gradually increased the load, adding more VMs as we went along. We found that we were able to increase the throughput with consolidation. The workload scaled near-linearly up to 4 VMs consuming all of the physical cores on the server (16 cores total). Then we added even more VMs, consolidating up to 8 VMs. We over-committed virtual-processors to physical-cores ratio by 2:1. We were able to run heavy load (3000 batch requests per second), consuming about 70% CPU on the server. The tests also found that Windows Server 2008 R2 offered improved performance than the prior release as shown by the dotted red-line in the graph.
Microsoft virtualization (Hyper-V and System Center) combined with advances in hardware technology (such as SLAT-enabled technology) can provide a solid consolidation platform for production workloads using SQL Server.
Microsoft continues to work with partners to offer solutions that help our customers realize the benefits of virtualization (click here). Further guidance from our partners will be forthcoming. For more resources on virtualizing Microsoft server applications, click here.
Vipul Shah
Microsoft Virtualization Team, Senior Product Manager
If you haven’t heard by now, today, Microsoft and HP announced a three-year, $250 Million agreement to build a strategic partnership to simplify technology for our customers. This agreement between Microsoft and HP will result in collaborations in engineering roadmaps, prepackaged application solutions, and comprehensive virtualization offerings and integrated management tools.
To get more information on the actual announcement itself, the press releases, videos, and other details, click here.
One the key areas for the agreement is Virtualization. By working on integrating the technologies from both companies, Microsoft and HP can provide customers with a management solution that goes from Infrastructure to Application, from Cloud to Desktop. I think it’s clear that the future of IT it’s not just a discussion of physical and virtual management but how to manage IT holistically, which includes both physical and virtual infrastructure.
In the near term, the technical result of this partnership is that we’ll see data center management solutions based on both the System Center family of tools and HP’s Insight Software. This allows for heterogeneous management of data centers, integrating not just monitoring but also provisioning and maintenance of both physical and virtual systems.
Second, there are new “Smart Bundles” that bring Virtualization solutions to Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs), using HP Servers, Storage, and Networking along with Windows Server and Insight software, all managed with System Center Essentials (SCE) and HP Operations Center. SMBs can really benefit from virtualization and these new Smart Bundles provide a single, cost effective package for virtualization.
Over the next three years, customers can expect to see deeper integration of Insight Software and System Center, interoperability between Business Technology Optimization software with the System Center, increased collaboration on run book automation, HP and Microsoft services integrating their expertise on virtualization and cloud based implementations, and much more.
How this impacts virtualization is that the focus of this partnership is in the area I have repeatedly highlighted as the key to virtualization, management. I’m sure many have heard the phrase that virtualization without good management is worse no virtualization in the first place. This statement becomes more and more true as everyone deploys more virtualization.
Like I’ve posted many times, management of virtualization and the integration of virtualization management into the rest of IT is what should be the focus of customers. Too much focus is spent on technologies & features and too little is focused on implementation and management. In the lifecycle of your systems, you will spend more time, energy, and money on management of the systems than on the initial implementation. Great management capabilities reap benefits on a daily basis. That’s why I’m so excited about this announcement and why I think the people who benefit the most from it are customers who are implementing and will continue to implement virtualization.
Hello Virtualization Planet followers! I’m back for a quick update on a couple of items from the past month a couple new ones.
First, I made what I considered a really important post right before the holidays. The post, Cutting through the FUD: Facts you should know about Hyper-V and System Center, really is a response to some of the negative attacks that I saw late last year. Now, I want to stress again that this isn’t all the articles out there (it’s really in the minority), but I felt compelled to respond. Still, I think that 2010 is going to be a good year for everyone.
Second, I think that I forgot to highlight the release of the Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool 2.1. The Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool provides tested guidance and automated tools to help keep virtualized machines updated, without introducing vulnerabilities into the existing IT infrastructure. The tool combines the Windows Workflow programming model with the Windows PowerShell™ interface to automatically bring groups of virtual machines online, service them with the latest security updates, and return them to an offline state. This latest version supports all our latest R2 releases and is available for download at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc501231.aspx.
Finally, I wanted to highlight two new whitepapers that have been released. They are
How Customers Are Cutting Costs and Building Value with Microsoft Virtualization: http://download.microsoft.com/download/6/0/2/6025DD0C-CC79-4D06-B4F6-EDAF5993CE86/HyperV-VMware-Cost-Comparison-Jan2010.pdf
In-Guest Monitoring with Microsoft System Center: http://download.microsoft.com/download/A/7/7/A77AB5C5-8ABA-4C3F-B0DB-12F51D789775/In-Guest-Monitoring-with-SC-Jan2010.pdf
You can find these two whitepapers and more like them at the Microsoft Virtualization Compare site.
Happy New Year to all my readers. In keeper with the positive tone I’ve been on recently, I wanted to again highlight more case studies about Microsoft Virtualization. We recently published two case studies that exemplify the cost savings, scalability, and flexibility benefits that customers consistently realize with Microsoft virtualization. Both highlight the capabilities of Windows Server Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager.
OTRUM is a Norwegian company that provides interactive television solutions to the hospitality industry. Although it had been using VMware, it needed a virtualization solution that was more affordable, easy to set up and scale, and simple to manage. After learning that Hyper-V was included in OTRUM’s licenses for Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter, it implemented the technology, along with System Center products. By switching from VMware, OTRUM immediately saved more than NOK 50,000 (U.S.$8,775) in license fees, and will save another U.S.$20,000 over three years on VMware support costs. And, by managing its data centers from a central console, the company simplified administration of its physical and virtual server environments, saving about 20 hours per month in management time.
“Hyper-V works better than VMware. It’s easier to set up and, with System Center Virtual Machine Manager, I have a single console for managing the whole virtual environment, including one remaining VMware host… Running several servers on the same physical machine is more cost-effective. But having Hyper-V virtualization software included with our Windows Server licenses meant even greater savings.”
Mercuri Urval, a Switzerland-based international personnel and management consultancy, realized similar benefits. While the company was using virtualization technologies from VMware and Citrix, it needed to develop a new server infrastructure that would provide better performance, flexibility, and ease of use, while being cost-effective. With Windows Server 2008 Datacenter and Hyper-V, and System Center Virtual Machine Manager, it can now add new virtual servers or migrate existing ones in just minutes, and activate test environments easily to test updates or new software installations.
Because Windows Server 2008 Datacenter can accommodate an unlimited number of virtual servers on each physical server, Mercuri Urval saved U.S.$48,000 on Citrix licenses, and saw an additional 35 percent cost reduction by eliminating VMware licenses and its external terminal solution.
“With Windows Server 2008 Datacenter, we developed a simple, clear, cost-effective, and scalable solution that provides our employees access to information regardless of place and time. And with the flexibility provided by Hyper-V, we can develop our IT gradually, without disrupting daily business.”
For those who follow this blog, you have noticed that the blog is much more about Microsoft Virtualization and why you should use it and less about what is negative with the competition. While I do write and make comparisons with VMware, my goal is to promote Microsoft Virtualization.
Still, when I meet users and customers, especially at shows like TechEd EMEA and VMworld, I often get asked "why do comparison to VMware at all?" The honest answer is that we get asked for comparisons against VMware and often, we have to respond to negative attacks on Hyper-V. While it’s within anyone’s right to post their opinions on Hyper-V, lately, there has been a lot of comparisons and opinions that I feel fall into the FUD category. That’s why I felt compelled to write up something to respond.
What is FUD? I think a lot of people forget what FUD really stands for. FUD is Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. FUD is when people make assertions or statements that simply are trying to scare people away from what they are attacking. FUD is not simply an argument that you don’t agree with. I do want to make clear that not everyone is pushing FUD. There are many articles and bloggers out there, including Pro-VMware ones, that are not pushing FUD. I read many of them regularly and I respect and appreciate what they write (even if I don’t always agree :) ). Unfortunately, lately, there still seems to be articles and posts, that people keep highlighting due to their provocative titles, that are more FUD than fact.
The issue is that the FUD being spread about Hyper-V is for one purpose, to get you not to try Hyper-V and System Center. Very few of the FUD articles say something like “Try both solutions out and compare". They all basically say “It’s not worth your time to try it, trust me” or “You might try it a little but don’t deploy it as it’s very risky and your business might suffer because of it.” This goes against the most basic point that I make on my site, which is to try Microsoft Virtualization , evaluate it, deploy it for workloads, ask others who have deployed it, and see for yourself.
What I want to do today is not address specific articles on Hyper-V. I want to address a couple of key facts to help sort through the FUD that is being posted. So let’s start:
My final point is one that based on my conversations over the years, that many of you agree with me on. Virtualization and Hypervisor choice is not like going to war. You don’t have to pick one side only and you don’t have to destroy the other side to successful. People take it way too seriously. Virtualization is a great technology but it’s simply that, a technology. Something we use to make our lives easier and better.
As I have stated throughout this post and in most of my posts, try Hyper-V and the Microsoft Virtualization products for yourself. That is the only way to determine what Microsoft Virtualization can do for you.
I wanted to highlight a couple new resources that are available for Hyper-V. The first is an amazing update to the Hyper-V Technical Information and Resources page on TechNet. There is great information for Hyper-V including:
This is definitely a site to bookmark as a Hyper-V technical reference.
Another nice resource for all the IT Pros out there is a new reference poster available for download, which covers Windows Server 2008 R2 Feature Components architecture. Here is the Hyper-V Architecture.
The full poster includes not only the Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V architecture, but other Windows Server 2008 R2 features such as
This is a nice poster to have around to review what’s in Windows Server 2008 R2.
-Edwin
Hello again! I’m back with another Microsoft Virtualization case study. Here is another great real-world example of how much impact Microsoft virtualization can have on your business. This time, it’s Podravka, a Croatian food company competes with global giants like Kraft and Nestlé. Competing in this space means Podravka must be incredibly agile and lean. But, because every time Podravka rolled out a new product it needed additional infrastructure, its IT staff had a hard time keeping pace with business needs.
Its growing servers were gobbling up energy and cooling resources, floor space, and management time, and it was very close to filling its data center space. And the more dependent Podravka became on its servers, the more management worried what would happen if they failed.
Podravka had used VMware GSX in its test environment, but VMware ESX Server was too expensive for a large-scale production environment. Instead, it deployed Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise with Hyper-V and Microsoft System Center. The benefits are pretty impressive: IT staff respond quickly to business needs by deploying virtual machines in hours instead of weeks. It created a low-cost disaster-recovery facility, and reduced its data center footprint by 93 percent, which opens up growing room and eliminates the need for an expensive new data center.
I think these two quotes really sum up the impact of Microsoft Virtualization.
“We were able to reduce our server holdings by 76 percent and our energy costs by 78 percent. We can funnel this $2 million savings into other areas of the business, such as new product development, that will make us more competitive.”
“Our staff is 20 to 40 percent more efficient. Only six people manage our infrastructure, and we will be able to accommodate more growth without increasing our headcount.”
I’ve been highlighting Microsoft case studies recently because they do such a great job of showcasing tangible benefits from using Microsoft virtualization. Highlighting more real-world examples is something that a lot of you have been asking for when I meet you at shows and meeting. I just saw another one that is definitely worth a read: PEAB is a fast-growing Swedish construction and civil engineering firm that—like many companies—was grappling with server sprawl and all the IT management and financial challenges that come with it.
PEAB found that using Windows Server 2008 Datacenter with Hyper-V and Virtual Machine Manager provided all the capabilities they needed at less cost than VMware. It cut server deployment time by 87 percent, reduced costs for licensing and energy consumption, and expects to trim hardware purchases by 40 servers annually and staff management time by 280 hours annually.
Here’s what PEAB had to say:
“Microsoft had a very promising evolution path for Hyper-V, and it was much less expensive than VMware. With Windows Server 2008 Datacenter, we would obtain unlimited virtual-machine licensing, which represented a big savings.”
“With Hyper-V, we have much greater flexibility in responding immediately to business needs. The business is not waiting on IT. Our staff can now spend more time proactively helping business users, enhancing our network, and devising more effective disaster recovery responses.”
Well, I’m back after some time off for the holidays and recovering from TechEd EMEA. I wanted to start off the week with a couple of quick notes. I wanted to remind everyone that you can follow me on my Twitter account (@edwinyuen) and also on the Because it’s Everybody’s Business blog that I contribute to.
While I was back, I filmed a video on System Center Essentials (SCE) 2010, covering why small and medium businesses would use virtualization and how SCE 2010 can help them. For more information on SCE 2010, take a look at the SCE website.
Finally, I want to point out a new webcast, called Thrive Live! IT Professional Virtualization Tour. It’s a TechNet webcast that talks about Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V, VHD Native Boot, Windows XP Mode, and Virtual Machine Manager. The webcast is Thursday, December 10th at 8am Pacific time. To register, use the following link:
http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9697801
Look out for a couple more posts this week, as I have some new case studies on Microsoft Virtualization.
Hello again from Berlin. As many of you probably saw on TV (or in the streets), it was an amazing celebration for the fall of the Berlin Wall. As for TechEd, day 2 has been amazing. I think that the thing everyone I’ve spoken to at the show is how friendly everyone is at the show. TechEd EMEA has always been one more of most community friendly shows and this years show really feels like friends and colleagues getting together, not just a show where you see others who might use the same technology.
I think the decision to move the show to Berlin really worked out. The weather is a little cold for most people (though not me, growing up in Minnesota) but everyone has been very positive and it makes the show not just enjoyable but really fun (and I’m sure the beer availability helps out too :) ).
Today, I had my session with Jeff Woolsey of Hyper-V, doing Hyper-V R2 and Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) 2008 R2 overview. It was a packed crowd, with literally every seat in the room taken. Like I do for most of my session, Jeff and I asked the crowd, before we started, how many people run VMware and how many people run Hyper-V. The number of hands raised were very close, almost identical. This is a dramatic difference from two years ago, especially from my first TechEd EMEA where literally everyone used VMware and I could count the number of Hyper-V users on my finger (out of an audience of 400+). It really made my proud of the work everyone at Microsoft Virtualization has done over the last three years.
For those who are at the show and want to learn more about Virtual Machine Manager, I’ll be doing an Interactive Session on Thursday, 1330 in Interactive Theater 4 – Green. I’ll be doing more demos from my demo rack and going into details on advanced VMM features.
I’ll write my wrap-up of TechEd EMEA on Thursday. Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter (@edwinyuen), as I’ll be actively tweeting from the show.
Also, we are still running two promotions now, one for TechEd attendees and one that is open for everyone. The TechEd attendee contest is our twitter promotion for our resident SMB Expert, David Mills. Just sign up to follow David (@dmills_ms) and all new followers are entered to win a Archos 5 Media Player. We’ve already given two players away and there are still two more players to give away. For more information, see the details here and here.
The other promotion is our blogging contest. Through our System Center Influencers program, we will be awarding $100 Visa gift cards each month for the next 6 months, to the best blogs related to that month’s topic. Not part of the System Center Influencers program? Just send e-mail to SCNETSUP@microsoft.com to join. More details for this contest here.
That’s all from Berlin today! I hope to actually get to see more of the city before I leave and I look forward to talking to everyone at the show.
Hello again. Right now, I’m in Berlin for TechEd EMEA 2009, which is really exciting as Monday was the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was also Day 1 of TechEd EMEA. Despite a down economy, it’s a sold out show with over 7,000 people. If you want to follow the show, you can do so virtually at the TechEd EMEA website.
Today, I did some interesting press interviews and spent most of the rest of the day talking to other attendees. If you are actually at the show, come check out my session, SVR205, on Tuesday at 1330. Jeff Woolsey and I will be covering Hyper-V and VMM overview. Plus, I would love to get a chance to meet some people.
The keynote for the show was in the afternoon and it had two killer demos. The first, was an incredible demo of Exchange 2010, which hit General Availability today and is ready for download. Even though I’ve been on EX2010 and Outlook 2010 for a while, I learned several things from the keynote. Plus, I can’t stop raving about the new Ignore thread features, which once and for all gets rid of the “Please don’t reply all or please remove me from this thread” e-mail threads we get this time of year. The other demo was a great System Center demo by Jeff Wettlaufer, which really seamlessly brought together what the suite of System Center applications can do.
On the downside, yes, I didn’t really get the IT dream videos either. And yes, there probably should have been more developer content. Still, overall, I think the keynote (especially the demos) set a good tone for the show.
A couple more things from Berlin. First, don’t forget to follow me on Twitter (@edwinyuen), as I’ll be actively tweeting from the show. Second, we have another twitter contest. This time, if you are a TechEd EMEA 2009 attendee, all you have to do is start following my close friend David Mills (@dmills_ms). We will be giving away an Archos 5 PMP each day, winners coming from all of David’s new followers. You can get more details on the contest here and here. Finally, we have a new blogging contest with System Center. Through our System Center Influencers program, we will be awarding $100 Visa gift cards each month for the next 6 months, to the best blogs related to that month’s topic. Not part of the System Center Influencers program? Just send e-mail to SCNETSUP@microsoft.com to join. More details for this contest here.
That’s all from today! I’ll write more tomorrow and if you are in Berlin, make sure to stop me if you see me for a chat!!
I’m back with another great case study. This time, it’s Fpweb.net, a Sharepoint hosting provider. Fpweb.net switched from VMware ESX to Microsoft Virtualization, resulting in so many benefits by using Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V and Virtual Machine Manager that I can’t list them all.
But I do want to highlight some of the cost savings and competitive advantages Fpweb.net has gained:
- Saved $100,800 in licensing costs over the VMware solution
- By virtualizing 115 servers, it avoided an increase in data center rental costs of $180,000 a year
- FPweb.net provisions virtual machines 60% faster—which is key to getting new customers up and running quickly
Without a doubt, it’s probably best to hear it directly from the customer:
“There’s no question that consolidating servers and making more efficient use of resources is a win-win situation. Hyper-V gets us there more cost effectively than any other virtualization technology.”
“Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter is primed for large-scale data centers like ours. The Datacenter license includes unlimited virtualization rights. Compared to VMware, which requires a license for each virtualized operating system, we are able to scale our virtualization solution at no extra cost.”
“In hosting, the biggest obstacle to customer service is time: customers want us to stand up their solutions and perform migrations, upgrades, and other services right away. Using Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 to automate server management, we gain time in the data center to hit the ground running and wow customers from the outset.”
Like I’ve written before, we have a great repository of case studies covering all the different Microsoft Virtualization technologies, not just Hyper-V. If you are interested in Virtualization, I strongly suggest you take a look.
Hi, I’m Jim Schwartz, Director of Virtualization Solutions at Microsoft and I’m writing as a guest on Edwin’s blog today.
Despite tough times, an Enterprise Strategy Group study shows that 31% of businesses surveyed said DR will be their main driver for Virtualization in 2009. This shows a continued shift as IT Pros who look beyond test/dev and basic server consolidation scenarios in deploying virtualization technologies.
Having a plan to deal with worst case scenarios like disasters and widespread system outages presents technical and business challenges--application and data availability need to be maintained; however, deployment and operational costs are always an issue. Virtualization has been a game changer for many companies seeking to mitigate impact to critical applications and data. Businesses previously unable to justify end-to-end site recovery are finding solutions now within reach.
This week Microsoft is launching a comprehensive solution to help customers implement cost effective, end-to-end site recovery programs. Built on proven capabilities in Windows Server 2008 R2 and the System Center management suite, Microsoft is helping IT Professionals leverage Windows Server Hyper-V and Failover Clustering along with tools like Virtual Machine Manager to deliver cost effective site recovery.
The Microsoft Site Recovery Solution ecosystem is ramping with a broad range of storage replication partners like Double-Take Software, EMC, HDS, HP delivering solutions that take advantage of the Microsoft Cluster Resource DLL. With cluster integration IT Professionals can deploy streamlined and operationally effective site recovery.
You can learn more about the Microsoft Site Recovery Solution by joining the Microsoft team and Enterprise Strategy Group on Thursday, November 5th at 10:30am Pacific for a webcast Building Effective and Highly Available Disaster Recovery Solutions Using Microsoft Virtualization This webcast looks at key drivers for site recovery solutions and reviews practical deployment considerations (you can view the recorded version of the webcast after the 5th). Microsoft and select partners will also be demonstrating Site Recovery Solutions at TechEd, so if you plan to be in Berlin during the week of November 9th, make sure to stop by the Virtualization Solutions kiosk in the Technical Learning Center.
Jim Schwartz Director Virtualization Solutions, Microsoft Corporation
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.
Thanks everyone. Look out for more posts upcoming and you can always follow me on Twitter (@edwinyuen).
I saw another article from Brian Madden site’s (which I saw via Twitter) which asks the question that many VDI adopters forget, which is Who controls the new virtual desktops? Is it the Server team or the Desktop team? Traditional IT has been very easy to delineate in terms of responsibility, usually by function or hardware. VDI (and virtualization in general) really blurs those lines of responsibility. A Brianmadden.com user quoted in the post sums up the issue pretty well
"Desktop people don't own the server hardware. The one BIG issue in my mind that no one talks about…is that the desktop IT guys have very little control and leverage over the infrastructure that runs their desktops when it comes to VDI. With VDI, the desktop IT team simply owns and controls the content inside the VM - the VM itself and everything under it is locked away from the desktop IT team."
The issue is more complex than just adjusting responsibility of IT groups. Virtualization is clearly creating new configurations and situations that have to be dealt with. This issue really isn’t going away, as we integrated storage & networks, desktops & clouds. I think the most important thing to remember is that we need to leverage virtualization to make IT better. It’s a key technology but it’s just a technology. It’s not a business process or model. We should virtualize to make IT more efficient, not just virtualizing for the sake of virtualizing.
Don’t forget. Virtualization works for the benefit of IT. IT doesn’t work for the benefit of Virtualization.
For more news, follow me on twitter @edwinyuen
For those who use IBM hardware, there is some great news today. IBM has released the Microsoft Assessment Planning Tool for IBM, which is based on the existing Microsoft Assessment Planning Tool. This tools provides specific guidance on how to consolidate and virtualize workloads on IBM System x and BladeCenter servers. If you use IBM systems, you should check this out. You can get the tool from
http://www-947.ibm.com/systems/support/supportsite.wss/docdisplay?lndocid=SYST-MANAGE&brandind=5000016
Note, this page is full of IBM resources for Microsoft Systems Management Solutions, including IBM PRO packs for Virtual Machine Manager.
First off, I wanted to apologize for the lack of postings to my blog. I’ve been a little under the weather of late. Still, I saw this article and thought that it brought up some important points about virtualization and small and medium businesses (SMBs).
While the article headline is a little over the top, the actual post and the reference document it links to brings up important themes. This line in the article sums things up well.
In fact, if there’s such a thing as “over-virtualization,” an SMB server room is where you’re most likely to find it. Schultz says that in some cases, SMBs may actually be virtualizing to an unhealthy degree. These smaller businesses sometimes find themselves “going on a craze of trying to over-consolidate, and trying to over-optimize, to the (detriment) of performance.”
Again, it all goes back to understanding why businesses should virtualize and how much virtualization they need. I’ve said it again and again, that too much focus is on implementing virtualization and not enough on planning virtualization.
Does this mean that SMBs should not virtualize? Absolutely not. I think that SMBs may benefit the most from virtualization. The difference is to actually plan and use virtualization to benefit you, not have you benefit virtualization and virtualization vendors.
Day 3 is my last day at VMworld 2009. This day went really well but somehow, I can’t help but feel a little disappointed when compared to previous VMworlds, but more on that later.
First, there was Stephen Herrod’s keynote today. Certainly, Stephen is a great speaker and it was interesting than the previous keynote. Still, it had the same issues as Paul’s keynote, which is that much of the content was shown before or not really new. They talked about PCoIP, with the Teradici protocol in software (at least they actually showed the software this time). However, much of what they showed in relation to desktops, View, and employee-owned IT has been done by Citrix before, some of it years ago. It might be cast as new, with a new name or term, but the basic concepts and end user results are already there with Citrix and even with the new Remote Desktop Services in Windows Server 2008 R2.
Then we saw the big mobile demo. There was a tweet a couple days back, hinting at a big deal between VMware and a phone company. Didn’t happen. It was very disappointing. They showed a Visa app, running on Android, on top of Windows CE. Cool concept but showing Android running on a old, Windows CE build is not that neat. Where was Windows Mobile 6, Blackberry, or iPhone? Sure they support ARM but what about next gen chips like the nVidia Tegra or Qualcomm SnapDragon? Also, what was up with that phone. At first, I thought it was a toy. It was the size of a netbook. If you have a full size tablet stylus for a “phone” demo, something isn’t right.
Next, there was a big discussion of how long VMware has had VMotion (6 years), all these stats, how mature it is (we get the message, you’ve had it while). I think the big question is why, after 6 years, is VMotion still tied to HW only. They showed off “future” integrated with Disk IO. We can do all that and more, with the PRO feature of VMM. At MMS 2009, we showed physical hardware failures and CPU power usage driving Live Migrations. With our inbox and partner solutions, we can do Live Migrations based on HBA congestion, application parameters, and even service level monitoring.
That’s the key to really using Live Migration/VMotion. VMware can talk all day about app level insight and what they will have in the future. We’ve been doing that for longer than VMware has had VMotion and we’ve already linked it to Live Migration, something they aren’t even talking about.
I did go to the open Q&A with Paul Maritz and company. Someone asked the question about the restrictions on Microsoft and Citrix. Tod Nielsen responded that while it was perceived that VMworld was an industry event, it really never was. He said it really is a show about VMware and they can set the rules of what people can see. It was a really fair, reasonable response. I just wished they would have cleared up that “mis-perception” months back, so everyone was on the same page.
This all relates to my final point, which was really my first point, on being a little disappointed in the show. This is my first VMworld as an attendee. I was always a speaker. Going to actual sessions, I really never actually saw a demo. Most of my sessions were people reading Powerpoint slides to me. I even had one session where the demo was a very long video and the speaker just narrated the video. Often, when an important point came up, the speaker would say “I don’t want to go into details” and I wanted to scream “Please, I want more details”. There was just too much sales pitch, not enough actual technical information. I know this wasn’t all sessions but it was for me.
And this leads to my biggest disappointment. In the past, when we were sponsors, Microsoft would get a session to present the Microsoft story. it’s always been VERY well attended. What was really great about it was most of the audience were not familiar with Microsoft Virtualization and they got a great starter on our products. We could then follow-up one on one to answer questions. This year, we had to the first level conversation in the booth only. Then, you add on that there are comparison sessions without equivalent sessions from the competitors. All in all, I really think it really makes it hard for customers to really learn about everyone’s products and how they compare for themselves.
My question to everyone is did you miss not having a Microsoft or Citrix session? Would having a session help you learn more about Microsoft Virtualization? If we can’t do a session at VMworld 2010, where would you want to see a session on Microsoft Virtualization? A Microsoft show? A Citrix show? A new, independent show?
Let me know by comments here and by my twitter (@edwinyuen). I also want to thank all the hundreds of new followers on twitter. I appreciate your time and good luck on winning the ZuneHD. I wish I could win it myself. Have a great show and keep following me on this Blog and Twitter. I promise to keep it informative even after VMworld.