I’ve been to Las Vegas too many times to count and have always left with good stories, but I never thought that my best Vegas story would be work-related. That story of course is about last week’s marketing activity at VMworld. Definitely not your typical day at the office.
While I have enjoyed the headlines (My Favorite: Microsoft attacks VMware with Poker Chips), the speculation as to what transpired has been most amusing to me. Unfortunately, I have to disappoint all those Oliver-Stone-like conspiracy theorists out there. Sorry, but Las Vegas Police were never called to the scene. Nor were we escorted out. We didn’t even attract the eye of hotel staff or security. Sorry! More than anything, I am glad that the right tone came through and loved hearing that it was “Great to see”, “Relevant and unexpected”, and “Pretty hilarious”. I couldn’t help but eavesdrop when I saw attendees share the collateral with a friend or hear someone chatting about it during the conference.
The street team did a great job, and the marketing effort exceeded expectations (3,800 cards in <90 minutes, 25+ articles/blogs, 15,000+ visits and 175,000+ hits to www.VMwareCostsWayTooMuch.com in 7 days, and multiple tough questions on TCO to Paul Maritz). And, yes, that’s more visits to the site than attendees at VMworld! The site and the on-the-ground activity were part of our marketing/PR efforts at VMworld and designed to cut through the noise (over 200 press announcements in 3 days) with one, simple message: Microsoft offers a better TCO than VMware.
Well, all good things must come to an end. Like a developer who spins up a VM for app test/dev and deletes it when he/she is done, our VMworld test is now complete. It was successful, scrappy, and fun. On Monday, the site will go away, but we may leave a short message for those that stumble upon it later. While the site goes away, the facts still remain. TCO matters when it comes to IT purchases. We cited this TCO difference back in February, and now we have customers reiterating the same points in case studies and analysts taking note of it in their reports. It’s of course important to tell the vision for where the technology is going but that must also be grounded in the reality that customers face today.
One random thought to close, I wonder what VMware would say if we asked to pay for our VMworld Europe sponsorship with casino chips? I now have a stockpile of messenger bags that have served a chip-carrying purpose before…
Brett Shoemaker
Tim Litton posted a blog about performance optimization for Hyper-V, looking at fixed versus dynamic VHDs. Here's an excerpt:
The following graph shows the relative performances for a number of different scenarios (with Dynamic VHD being the baseline). Fixed VHD always performs better than a Dynamic VHD in most scenarios by roughly 10% to 15% with the exception of 4k writes, where Fixed VHD performs significantly better. Recently, QLogic published a benchmark for I/O throughput for storage devices going through Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V (http://www.qlogic.com/promos/products/hyper-v.aspx) that closely matches the native performance, thus demonstrating Hyper-V’s ability to bring the advantages of virtualization to large-scale datacenters.
The following graph shows the relative performances for a number of different scenarios (with Dynamic VHD being the baseline).
Fixed VHD always performs better than a Dynamic VHD in most scenarios by roughly 10% to 15% with the exception of 4k writes, where Fixed VHD performs significantly better.
Recently, QLogic published a benchmark for I/O throughput for storage devices going through Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V (http://www.qlogic.com/promos/products/hyper-v.aspx) that closely matches the native performance, thus demonstrating Hyper-V’s ability to bring the advantages of virtualization to large-scale datacenters.
Patrick
VMworld 2008 officially began Monday with the opening of the Labs, Exhibitor Hall, and VMware’s Partner Day, but yesterday morning really kicked off the start of the conference for many with Paul Maritz giving the Welcome and Opening Keynote and Cisco, HP, and Intel following with keynotes in the afternoon. With an estimated 14,000+ attendees this year here in Las Vegas, we thought we would extend a warm welcome to everyone. There will be a lot of marketing activity here this week (swag, banners, etc.), so we wanted to do something that would not only highlight our offering but also stand out from the rest of the crowd.
Since VMworld is at The Venetian this year, attendees were met by familiar faces as they made the trek from their hotels to the Sands Expo Center…
And, since we’re in Vegas, we thought it only fitting to play to the setting and help out with those first wagers…
With the shifting virtualization landscape, we wanted to continue to demonstrate Microsoft’s commitment to the market…all in the spirit of friendly competition of course! So we chose to highlight our value and cost advantage over VMware; one part of the “Why Microsoft?” story. Those that followed the URL on the cards (www.VMwareCostsWayTooMuch.com) found answers to the comparative questions that customers evaluating virtualization technologies commonly ask in the form of case studies and testimonials from actual customers.
Yes, it’s different from the norm, but when you’re in the neon lights and over-the-top environment of Las Vegas, it’s tough for a simple banner to really grab your attention!
Hi, my name is Pat Hanavan, vice president of Product Management in Symantec's Data Protection Group, and I'm pleased to share that today (September 15, 2008) Symantec announced a new Backup Exec 12.5 agent supporting Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, as well as support for upcoming releases for Windows Essential Business Server 2008 and Windows Small Business Server 2008. Backup Exec 12 and Backup Exec System Recovery 8 were the first backup and recovery products certified for Windows Server 2008 when they were released in February 2008.
Backup Exec version 12.5 introduces a new Agent for Microsoft Virtual Servers which substantially improves the speed, flexibility and simplicity of backup and recovery for Hyper-V virtual systems. Backup Exec understands the structure of the Hyper-V environment and presents the same logical structure in the backup administrator GUI, so backup administrators can manage backup and recovery functions for their physical and virtual systems via the console.
Backup policies can be defined across systems and image style backups of individual guest machines can be performed, with Microsoft Volume Shadow copy Services (VSS) being invoked prior to the backup to ensure a stable point-in-time for the entire guest machine. With Backup Exec's patent-pending Granular Recovery Technology, individual folders and files can be restored from the image backup directly to the original guest machine. Entire guest machines can be restored, with flexible options provided to rename a server, change network configuration if desired as well as power on the guest machine following restoration.
And best of all, Backup Exec's new agent for Hyper-V supports an unlimited number of guest machines within a host server! Previously customers would need to purchase an agent for each guest machine.
Backup Exec System Recovery 8.5 expands upon its award winning physical-to-virtual capabilities by offering the ability to automatically convert from a physical backup to Hyper-V virtual format (.vhd) following a backup operation. This is especially useful for customers who are running single physical systems in branch offices but with the need to quickly switch to a virtual hosted system in the event of a system failure.
In closing, Symantec is very pleased to have delivered the new support and capabilities for Microsoft Server 2008 systems, including great power and flexibility for Hyper-V environments!
While you getting ready for the weekend, or getting ready to head to Vegas, you might be interested to check out these first-look demos of Hyper-V Server 2008 (standalone hypervisor, due in a few weeks) and live migration with Windows Server 2008 R2.
Adam wrote this about the Hyper-V Server demo:
The Virtualization Launch this week revealed Hyper-V Server for the first time ever - a dedicated OS just for hosting Hyper-V virtual machines. Bryon Surace took some time out from his launch activities to give us a quick tour around the product.
Adam wrote this about the live migration demo:
When I met with Edwin to go over the new features in Virtual Machine Manager, he had some other really cool stuff he wanted to show me - so cool we weren't really sure if we were allowed to show it yet.Word is out though now, so I'm gonna go ahead and let you see this sneak peek at Hyper-V Server and Live Migration.Think of Hyper-V Server as just an operating system stub that allows you to run virtual machines - no requirement for a full host OS just to run VMs. Live Migration provides fault tolerant virtual machines with no downtime when failing over to other clustered hosts. It's a really cool feature, and one many customers have asked for.
If you're headed to Vegas, remember that it's going to be in the high 90s F (high/mid 30s C) during the day, low 70s (low 20s C) at night. Not a cloud in the sky, but likely a few clouds in Maritz's Tuesday keynote ;-)
Hello, my name is Karl Schulmeisters, director of alliance technology and architecture for the Microsoft global alliance at Unisys. We are a global systems integrator that focuses on large scale-up solutions particularly in the public sector, financial services, federal government and pharmaceuticals industries.
I watched Monday’s mid-day keynote at the Virtualization Launch in Bellevue, in which Senior VP of Server and Tools, Bob Muglia, spoke and brought a Gartner analyst on stage for an industry view. The traditional viewpoint of virtualization is that it is driven by cost savings, Green IT and operational efficiency. But according to Gartner, those are tactical considerations. Gartner believes that virtualization unlocks Cloud Computing, which in turn fundamentally transforms how IT is run.
I’m not sure that virtualization itself unlocks Cloud Computing. Pervasive connectivity and standardized data protocols, like XML, are more crucial to this. What virtualization lets you do though is to get rid of the issues of app conflicts that have grown out of the PC industry’s history of using dedicated machines for a particular server type. Essentially it lets you isolate the various application servers as though they were on a separate physical box without having to assume the cost of that separation.
Where I agree with Gartner is their somewhat radical notion that Cloud Computing is the future of INTERNAL IT!! Because it moves IT operations from managing components in silos to managing pools of resources in clouds. Gartner identified the four key hallmarks of Cloud Computing as Services Orientation, Utility Pricing, Massive Elasticity, and Delivered over the Internet. And the only difference with the modern IT approach is the delivery over the Internet. IT delivers over the Intranet.
The Gartner analyst did a nice job of categorizing the big change issue that virtualization brings to the puzzle – the decoupling of components previously locked together (Hardware, OS, Apps) that enables a new set of solution categories:
· Infrastructure As A Service: hardware pooling, dynamic hardware provisioning, Pay for usage, etc. which are built on virtualized hardware
· Grid Computing, which is essentially a service that delivers virtualized Hardware PLUS OS but not much more.
· Software Appliances – which is a service that delivers virtualized OS plus Application, and can run independently of the particular OS environment. JavaVM apps fit this profile
· Application Streaming – which is a service that delivers virtualized applications
This differentiates nicely the distinctions between different Cloud Computing directions. Amazon’s ESS online storage is Infrastructure As a Service. Grid Computing, ala Google Gears, is really a Software Appliance – Google Gear Apps target the Google Gears runtime (OS) environment. Facebook is pure application streaming – all Facebook Apps are thin browser apps that connect to other types of back end services
So where does Microsoft fit in this? Kevin Turner comes out to tell us. Software plus Services is one of the four pillars of innovation that he cites and Kevin differentiates between MS Online, which is targeting Commercial customers, and MS Live services, which is targeting the consumer world. In particular he points out that unlike the other players in the S+S field, Microsoft offers the ability to have the commercial services operate either as locally installed solutions, partner hosted solutions or Microsoft generically hosted solutions (i.e., App Streamed, Software Appliance Mode or Infrastructure As a Service)
Seems to me this approach is a much stronger way to bridge to this coming world. Rather than via 100% commitment to one or another mechanism in a world that is not yet tried and true.
I am very pleased to see that Microsoft is not limiting its view of virtualization simply as a means of offering Infrastructure as a Service. And I am looking forwards to PDC 2008 this October to see what cool things are in store (Kevin Turner closed by throwing up a teaser slide about the new things that will be released at the PDC).
Karl Schulmeisters
Unisys
My ears are still ringing from Monday's virtualization event in Bellevue. Not necessarily from the keynotes or demos, but mainly from being 10 feet away from the stage as the band Live played a 60+ minute set during the party. Here's a photo I snapped with my T-Mobile Dash.
I was fortunate enough to meet and speak with several customers and partners (and the members of Live). It was great to meet Matt at MLS Network of New England (who requested greater coordination with OEMs around NIC teaming for Hyper-V), Michael from Heidelberg in Germany (who's using Windows mobile phones and MS Dynamics to provide mobile access to internal data), and Howard from Heidelberg ... who has more PIMs than goals in his adult hockey league ;-)
Next week many of us will be in Vegas. I'm looking forward to my 4th straight year attending VMworld (despite having to go to Vegas). It appears this year's conference will be much larger than last year, and I'm looking forward to hear Paul Maritiz speak. Who knows, maybe Paul will mention Microsoft in his keynote and create greater interest to visit our booth.
For those of you who will be there, stop by our booth (#1120) to see demos of WS08 Hyper-V, SCVMM 2008, Windows Server terminal services, MS Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (from the Kidaro acquisition) and VDI using Vista/Citrix XenDesktop. And I think there's a customized laptop and "Gears of War 2" XBox giveaway.
You might also be interested to know that Microsoft is participating in a couple sessions. On Thursday (9/18) at 9am, we'll co-present a breakout session (EA4460) with VMware on Microsoft's Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP). On the same day, but at 2pm, several folks will present our strategy and demo Microsoft's desktop and server products.
A few other things to know:
Hope to see you next week at Microsoft's booth at VMworld.
The show begins in 10 hours, but the news it out:
The keynote will be shown here in the morning [noon EDT]: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/events/virtualization/default.mspx
UPDATE:
Here is a clip from Bob Muglia's keynote featuring the first public Hyper-V Live Migration demo. More videos are available here.
By now you might have seen that VMware ESX 3.5 update 2 has passed the Microsoft Server Virtualization Validation Program. They announced it here.
today announced it has qualified its industry-leading VMware ESX hypervisor under the Microsoft Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP). VMware ESX 3.5 update 2 (ESX 3.5u2) is the first hypervisor to be listed under the program, providing VMware customers who run Windows Server and Microsoft applications with access to cooperative support from Microsoft and VMware.
Of course we all read that VMware only agreed to participate in SVVP a couple weeks ago, around the time we announced expanded technical support for 31 server applications running on validated hypervisors. Congrats to them for achieving a validated configuration so quickly. ESX 3.5 update 2 now joins Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V as being validated to run Windows Server and associated Microsoft server applications. And now that ESX 3.5 has passed SVVP, VMware customers will join Novell customers as receiving cooperative technical support (if there's a support policy in place, and the customer is running the validated configuration) for Microsoft software running in/on their virtualization software.
I'd expect to see other hypervisors pass the SVVP soon. There are 7 vendors now committed to participate in SVVP, the newest addition being Unisys.
And given today's news, it's a good time to review the details on Microsoft's support policy for Microsoft software running in non-Microsoft virtualization software, read KB article 897615. Here's an excerpt:
for vendors with whom Microsoft has established a support relationship that covers virtualization solutions, or for vendors who have Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP) validated solutions, Microsoft will support server operating systems subject to the Microsoft Support Lifecycle policy for its customers who have support agreements when the operating system runs virtualized on non-Microsoft hardware virtualization software. This support will include coordinating with the vendor to jointly investigate support issues. As part of the investigation, Microsoft may still require the issue to be reproduced independently from the non-Microsoft hardware virtualization software. Where issues are confirmed to be unrelated to the non-Microsoft hardware virtualization software, Microsoft will support its software in a manner that is consistent with support provided when that software is not running together with non-Microsoft hardware virtualization software.
UPDATE on Sept. 9 - I incorrectly noted that vendors who pass SVVP will be noted in a KB article. Wrong. I'm told the vendors will be listed in the Windows Server catalog. You'll see three vendors' products listed there now. And if you're attending VMworld 2008 next week, there's a new session being added so that you can learn more about SVVP from Microsoft and VMware. See session EA4460