This week at VMworld Europe 2009 we're showcasing a number of European customers who have deployed Windows Server Hyper-V, System Center and App-v 4.5. You can watch two videos below.
One is of Bouygues Construction based in France. Bouygues does civil engineering, electrical contracting, and maintenance, employs 51,100 people and operates in more than 80 countries. This video is in French with English subtitles, and includes discussion of their Hyper-V and SCVMM deployment on Dell servers with EMC storage.
The second is Saxo Bank of Denmark. They’re an investment bank, and they used a Web-based trading platform and excellent customer service to drive rapid growth over 10 years, which in turn has led to a rapid expansion in the number of servers required to handle the bank’s data-intensive operations. Saxo Bank has deployed Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager to consolidate servers in the datacenter. Saxo plans to virtualize nearly all applications over the next few years, with the project expected to produce a 3-year internal rate of return of 150% and a net present value of 5.8 million Danish kroner (~U.S.$1.2 million).
Enjoy. A bientot.
Patrick
VMworld Europe's tagline this year is "virtually anything is possible". Kinda reminds me of Mike's blog post on Monday about Red Hat. And for many IT pros, "virtually anything is possible" might apply to the fact that Microsoft is exhibiting at, and sponsoring, VMworld Europe for the second year in a row. Tres bien, as they say in Cannes.
So if you're one of the 3,000 paid attendees expected at VMworld Europe 2009, below's a sneak peak at what you'll find inside booth #133. If you're not attending, I'm going to attempt to post some pix ... maybe video if I'm lucky ... from the booth so you can see the action. No doubt there will be plenty of other blogs coming from VMworld Europe. You can see most of them at the Virt blog aggregator.
So what am I expecting to see in Cannes? Outside of the Microsoft booth, I'd expect to see early versions of client hypervisors, interop announcements, new product packaging, cloud computing announcements, and likely an update about VMsafe. Should be a busy week.
As for Microsoft, of course we'll be showcasing our server virtualization platform - Hyper-V. (Citrix might do a little bit of that, too). We'll have a total of 4 demos in the booth:
I was hoping we'd be demoing the lab manager functions in Visual Studio 10, or the integration to System Center DPM 2007 sp1 and Iron Mountain cloud backup. Oh well, maybe next show. I know we will be there to answer all your licensing questions about the above scenarios. I do recall about 33%-50% of all the people I met in the booth last year had licensing questions. Thankfully Chris Wolf (Burton Group analyst) will have a session on that topic Feb. 24 at 3:15pm. Check it out.
The Microsoft-presented session (comes with the sponsorship) is Feb. 25 at 2pm in Les Ambassadors 2/3. I know Jeff and Edwin have some good demos for this session.
This will also be the first time Paul Maritz takes the stage in front of his European customers and partners. Let's just hope he can pronounce Cannes better than Diane did last year [hint: it's not pronounced like "canz"].
Now it's off to Cannes, and the beautiful promenade with lots of well-dressed locals walking their tiny little dogs. A memory I won't forget. No doubt the poodles will offer a better welcome than we did in Vegas ;-).
Bonjour from Cannes. This is just a quick post about Citrix making public the Essentials for Hyper-V news. It's been talked about already by Alessandro and others.
There's lots of opinions of what this means for the virtualization software vendor landscape. But that's less important really than what it means for IT pros and developers. They're now getting much broader access to the benefits of a hypervisor platform, one that's interoperable with other hypervisors, and one that will have a common management interface. It's a reminder that virtualization is just another means to an end (obviously a great one, otherwise I wouldn't blog here). The value has become management, automation, processes, and the like.
That's enough from me. Here's a video with Simon Crosby, CTO of Citrix, and Mike Neil, GM of virtualization, talking about Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V. Enjoy,
[update: Two items. First, the real-world clock on our blog is out of sorts. I hit publish on this blog on Feb. 23, not Feb. 20. Just in case someone out there was wondering. I'll try to fix this issue. Second, Barry at Citrix blogged about Essentials for Hyper-V, too, and included demo. Check it out].
Hi, I’m Mike Neil, general manager of virtualization at Microsoft. It’s been a while since I’ve blogged here, but today’s post is worth a read.
Ever since we released Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and Terminal Services, System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 and Microsoft App-V 4.5 last year, customers and partners have been getting huge value from server consolidation projects, have been able to increase business continuity at much lower costs than with VMware, and have decreased the time and cost required to deliver applications to end users. And while doing this, they’ve been able to use a familiar set of system management tools for both their virtualized and non-virtualized systems and applications across the datacenter and desktops. In fact, Chris from Kroll Factual Data wrote about his DR project on this blog last year. So in many ways I’m pleased that we’ve been able to help so many customers and partners break down the barriers to enterprise-wide virtualization.
But until today there’s been one barrier, not product related, that we haven’t been able to overcome to meet customer and partner demand: the ability to run and support Red Hat Enterprise Linux within a guest VM on WS08 Hyper-V and Hyper-V Server 2008. For all of those who have emailed me, my colleagues and your Microsoft account teams and partners, I’m pleased to say that today is the first big step to delivering that support.
Microsoft and Red Hat recently signed agreements to test and validate our server operating systems running on each other’s hypervisors. Customers with valid support agreements will be able to run these validated configurations and receive joint technical support for running Windows Server on Red Hat Enterprise virtualization, and for running Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V or Hyper-V Server 2008. You can see Red Hat’s news release here, and watch a public webcast discussing this news.
So how are we doing this? Red Hat has joined Microsoft’s Server Virtualization Validation Program, and Microsoft is now a Red Hat partner for virtualization interoperability and support. Microsoft will be listed in the Red Hat Hardware Certification List once we’ve completed the Red Hat certification process in H2. In addition to the agreements, Microsoft will publish Linux Integration Components for RHEL when the testing and validation is complete. The folks at Red Hat tell me that they’ll provide WHQL [Windows Hardware Quality Labs] drivers for a variety of Windows Server versions. So not only will you get cooperative technical support, you’ll also get high-performing enlightened VMs.
You might also be wondering – when can I get this? I don’t have a calendar date for you just yet, but I know that validations are now underway and will be as comprehensive as possible. Each company is doing its respective validations separately with the first validated configurations available at different times later this year.
And I’m sure you’re wondering about tools to manage those RHEL guests running on Hyper-V? Good news there. We know virtualization projects aren’t successful unless the right management tools are in place to manage both the virtual and physical. System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2, which will be released in calendar Q2 2009, includes cross platform monitoring and support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux server versions 4 and 5 so that you can manage the applications and OS in the guest VM. Other Linux distros will be supported, too. This will allow you to monitor end-to-end data center applications that are distributed across both Windows Server and RHEL, whether these servers are physical or virtual.
I suspect that you’re now as excited as me about these agreements. But maybe you’re wondering … what took so long? That’s a fair question given the number of customers and partners that have been asking for this result.
Let me say that I’m sure everyone reading this can appreciate the distance between Microsoft and Red Hat is measured in more than just the 2,900 miles between Redmond, WA and Raleigh, NC. Microsoft and Red Hat have competed for customers and partners for some time now and as platform vendors continue to compete in the marketplace. Yet, our customers have told us that technical support for server virtualization is an area we must work together. And that’s certainly understandable when you consider the fact that roughly 80% of the primary guest (in a VM) operating systems on x86 servers today come from Microsoft or Red Hat. Indeed, customer demand is the main driver behind these agreements with our competitor.
One thing I’d like to point out: since these agreements are focused on joint technical support for Microsoft and Red Hat’s mutual customers using server virtualization, the activities included in these agreements do not require the sharing of IP. Therefore, these agreements do not include any patent or other IP licensing rights.
I want to leave you with the point that Microsoft is pragmatically focused on helping customers and partners be successful in a heterogeneous IT world. We’re committed to enable and support interoperability with non-Windows OSes. As a result we take a multifaceted approach to interoperability, be it customer-driven industry collaborations, such as this Server Virtualization Validation Program, be it standards that promote common technologies (e.g., device virtualization through the PCI-SIG), or proactive licensing of IP (e.g., Microsoft’s Virtual Hard Disk format, Microsoft’s Hypercall APIs), or the creation of technologies that bridge different systems (e.g., protocol licensing and documentation, Integration Components for Linux). In the end, customers with mixed IT environments expect it all to work together and today’s announcement is one way of making that happen.
Below you can read an FAQ that is also on Red Hat's website.
Mike
FAQ
Q1: Is this a joint agreement between Red Hat and Microsoft?
A1: It’s not a joint agreement. Red Hat has signed an agreement to join Microsoft’s Server Virtualization Validation Program, while Microsoft has joined Red Hat’s Virtualization Certification Program . Microsoft will be listed in the Red Hat Hardware Certification List once it has completed the Red Hat certification process.
Q2: It seems like customers should have had this type of support some time ago. What took so long to provide customers with technical support?
A2: Microsoft and Red Hat started hearing requests for bilateral validation soon after Microsoft’s Server Virtualization Validation Program went live in June 2008. Both companies quickly agreed to work together; finalizing the details around comprehensive, coordinated technical support has taken some time. As a result, customers will be able to confidently deploy Microsoft Windows Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, virtualized on Microsoft and Red Hat hypervisors, knowing that the solutions will be supported by both companies.
Q3: Are there other components of the deal that have not been disclosed yet?
A3: No. The agreements are specific to establishing coordinated technical support for our mutual customers using server virtualization. The agreements have nothing to do with patents, and there are no patent rights or other open source licensing rights implications provided under these agreements. The agreements contain no financial clauses other than test fees for industry-standard certification and validation.
While Microsoft and Red Hat continue to compete in the marketplace, customers have told us that technical support for server virtualization is an area where we must work together. Now we have agreements to test and coordinate technical support and provide customers with a new level of mutual support between Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Windows Server for their heterogeneous IT environments.
Q4: What versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Virtualization will be validated, to what versions of Windows and Hyper-V?
A4: Validations are now getting underway, and are planned to be comprehensive. Each company is doing its respective validations separately, with the first results expected later this year.
As a participant in Microsoft’s Server Virtualization Validation Program, once Red Hat submits test logs indicating that Windows Server 2008 runs properly on the Red Hat Enterprise virtualization, the specific version of Red Hat used in the tests along with parameters of the virtual machine tested will be posted on Microsoft’s Server Virtualization Validation Program website. At that point customers can confidently deploy Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2003 SP2, or Windows 2000 Server SP4 and later and receive coordinated technical support from both vendors.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux SVVP completion is planned for calendar H2 2009.
Microsoft currently plans to validate Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 as a guest on Windows Server Hyper-V. Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V (all editions) and Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 will now support uni-processor virtual machines running:
· Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 (x86)
· Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 (x64)
· Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 (x86)
· Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 (x64)
Q5: How do customers get support for the validated solutions? Who do they call?
A5: Customers with valid support agreements with both companies call either Microsoft or Red Hat to have their issues resolved. If the first vendor contacted cannot resolve the issue they will work with the other vendor to come to a resolution for the mutual customer.
Q6: What level of support agreement is required from Red Hat and Microsoft for a customer to receive support when running RHEL on Windows or Windows on RHEL?
A6: Customers with current Microsoft support agreements for Windows Server 2008 will be entitled to obtain support under this agreement. Where an existing agreement is not in place, customers can identify their willingness to purchase ‘per-call’ support.
Any customer with a valid Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription, and using Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 or 5.3 guests will be entitled to support under this agreement.
Q7: How do these agreements compare to agreements you both have with VMware and/or Citrix?
A7: There is no change in Microsoft's or Red Hat's relationship with VMware. Note that both Windows Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux can be deployed on VMware ESX. Red Hat doesn’t have any virtualization agreements with Citrix at this time. Both VMware and Citrix have product configurations that have been validated through the Microsoft Server Virtualization Validation Program.
Q8: How do I find out what validations have been completed?
A8: Validations will be posted to the respective Microsoft and Red Hat web sites:
http://www.redhat.com/rhel/compatibility/hardware/
http://www.windowsservercatalog.com/svvp.aspx
Q9: Who will be the primary beneficiary of this agreement?
A9: The primary beneficiary of this agreement will be Microsoft and Red Hat customers. Of course, a secondary beneficiary will be the virtualization ecosystem because it will be more useful to customers, leading to wider deployments and faster technology development.
I’m David Straede, president of SBWH.com, a Windows managed server provider. Virtualization using Hyper-V and System Center is the most exciting thing SBWH has been a part of since we started beta testing IIS 4.0 in 1997.
SBWH in 1999
Twelve years ago we got 15 servers in a rack. Today, we can put 960 in one rack! It’s easier than we expected, and it is saving us hundreds of thousands of dollars. Let me explain why we moved to Hyper-V. In late 2007 SBWH had been using HP BL20P Blade Servers for some time. We were getting 48 servers per rack, and adding more racks as customers came our way.
SBWH in 2007
Larger contracts can take months for customers to get approved, and a University had notified us they were ready to sign. When we went to order a new rack and power for it, the facility we were in advised us they were at capacity. To keep from losing the business, we suggested virtualization. Since they were “using VMware," we priced out the costs to setup the host systems. The VMware ESX solution came to over $30,000. When we went back to the University, they laughed, and said “We can’t afford that, we just use the free version. The features of ESX did not justify the cost.” Since we knew they were six months away from a go live, and we had just started testing Hyper-V Beta 1, we offered them a deal to be a pilot customer.
Knowing we needed a rock solid solution with our reputation on the line straying from the market leader in virtualization, we started deploying internal servers on Hyper-V. Things like domain controllers, external DNS, POP3 mail servers, stats servers, monitoring and other management servers were all moved to Hyper-V. We were blown away by how easy and how stable the beta was. We continued to load up the HP BL460c dual quad core servers that had 32 GB of RAM with guest operating systems. We found 15 guests per host to be the sweet spot.
To be honest, we were so focused on the need to expand without using more power, we did not look at cost savings until Microsoft asked us to do a total cost of ownership and return on investment study. We spent two days pulling bills, calculating power, cooling, equipment lease costs, and detailing the time we spent setting up and managing servers. The savings are huge.
To make a long and detailed study short, 120 operating system environments running on 120 HP BL460c servers (1 quad core, 2 GB RAM, 146 GB local disk) along with power, cooling, floor space, etc. came to about $190 per server per month. For the Hyper-V solution, we used faster dual quad core servers, 32 GB RAM each, connected to a mid-range HP SAN. Loading each host to only 10 guest systems, the cost per server came down to $65 per system per month. That’s $180,000 in annual savings!
Our saving became even greater when we detailed the management costs. Virtual servers require management. Without configuration, operations monitoring, backups, and tools to manage the virtualization, you turn any system admin’s job in to a headache. Without getting in to the details of service provider license agreements, we saved another $70,000 by using Microsoft’s System Management Suite Enterprise.
One final story I will share for today. I went to a large customer’s place to talk about virtualization in mid-2008. Two different divisions came to my talk, one that had implemented VMware ESX and one that needed to be virtualized. I connected to some of our Hyper-V systems, showed them how it was installed, configured a new guest, and explained costs. A guy from the ESX side said, “well you can’t move a live system from one server to another.” So I asked if they had ever used that feature. “Well once, when we needed to replace some RAM”. I asked him when he did that, and he replied 5 pm. Why at 5pm? “Well it is rare, but the move can crash the OS”. Given the option to do a fast move in Hyper-V, would two or three minutes of down time be an issue after hours? Most folks I ask that say no.
We are testing Windows Server 2008 R2 now with Live Migration. Need I say more?
David Straede
For more on how customers are saving with virtualization, click here and watch this video:
Join the beta program [Live ID required]. Then bookmark this link to the program site to get the latest information about upcoming events.
Greetings! I’m Chris Steffen, Principal Technical Architect with Kroll Factual Data and you may have seen some guest posts from me before. At Kroll Factual Data, we’ve done a lot of work with virtualization and while flexibility and cost savings were major considerations for initiating our virtualization efforts, I also wanted to share some of the green benefits we’ve experienced through virtualization technologies.
The most simple and obvious benefit of virtualization is server consolidation and utilization. For the most part, stand alone servers do not utilize anything near 100% of their resources. Virtualization is a great technology for enabling you to move and combine stand alone servers onto on a single Hyper-V host. Ultimately your Hyper-V host configuration will determine the number of Virtual Machines (VMs) that you can run, but we’re running about 30 VMs on a single, beefy Hyper-V host. Today we are running about 650 VMs on 22 Hyper-V hosts, which completely make up our production environment, with each of our VM hosts running at about 90% utilization.
From a numbers perspective: if you figure that a 1U rackmount stand alone server uses about 10,000 kWh annually, it would take approximately 6,500,000 kWh to run our entire production environment annually on standalone servers. Using Hyper-V virtualization, we are able to reduce our power consumption to about 700,000 kWh per year, for a savings of nearly 90%.
Keep in mind that this is only a reflection of computer hardware operating costs: it does not include the additional “green” savings that we get from reduced cooling, data center real estate, and computer hardware purchase and maintenance.
Kroll Factual Data commitment to energy awareness extends beyond the data center: the KFD campus in Loveland, Colorado is run entirely on renewable, wind powered energy. Kroll Factual Data is serious about environmental stewardship and taking responsibility for our impact on the environment in which we do business. As a technology company, virtualization is a critical component in utilizing technology in an environmentally friendly way.
I recently provided an overview of our green benefits as part of the Microsoft Live and Virtualized Live Meeting series in a session titled “Green IT and Virtualization”. You can listen to the playback of the session at this link and as part of it you’ll also hear from Francois Ajenstat, Director, Environmental Sustainability at Microsoft and Ward Ralston, Group Product Manager Windows Server at Microsoft. Another great tool Microsoft recently made available is the Hyper-Green site, which helps companies calculate their potential green savings through server consolidation on Hyper-V. I urge you to check out the Live Meeting and the Hyper-Green site when you have a chance.
For KFD, going “green” was not only the right thing for our company to do, virtualization also made it the most cost effective and flexible technology solution.
Thanks – Chris
Big happenings in NYC yesterday as SteveB and EMC's CEO Joe Tucci met with a room-full of IT execs to talk about an extended 3-year alliance. The announcement is here. In short, the companies are going to work more closely together in the areas of data loss prevention, collaboration and virtualization.
What's that you say? EMC - 80% owner of VMware - working more closely with Microsoft around virtualization? Here's an excerpt from the joint announcement:
Microsoft offers one of the fastest-growing and most cost-effective virtualization solutions from the desktop to the datacenter, including the ability to manage both physical and virtual environments from a centralized management console. EMC’s technology solutions enable storage, protection and management of information in Microsoft virtualized environments including Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Microsoft System Center, and jointly supported mission-critical workloads such as Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft SharePoint Server. EMC Consulting’s Application Practice, a thousand-person strong team with deep Microsoft knowledge, provides expertise in assessing, planning and implementing Microsoft’s technologies in a wide array of virtualization solutions.
That's all well and good - 1,000 EMC consultants trained on WS08 Hyper-V, System Center and key Microsoft applications that will be virtualized. But can those 1,000 consultants really look past VMware?
Thankfully CNET interviewed Steve and Joe and asked them about it. Here's the excerpt:
In the agreement, one of the areas you talked about working more closely in is virtualization. VMware is affiliated with EMC, which is probably Microsoft's biggest competitor in virtualization. So how credible is the notion that your companies can work together? And where do you draw the lines of cooperation? And how does that benefit customers? Ballmer: We're not sitting here pretending we're partnering with VMware. That's more competition.
In the agreement, one of the areas you talked about working more closely in is virtualization. VMware is affiliated with EMC, which is probably Microsoft's biggest competitor in virtualization. So how credible is the notion that your companies can work together? And where do you draw the lines of cooperation? And how does that benefit customers?
Ballmer: We're not sitting here pretending we're partnering with VMware. That's more competition.
With EMC, which is a large majority owner in VMware, but is also independent, there's a lot that rides on virtualization. The fact of the matter is the storage business is being transformed also by virtualization. And virtualization is transforming the storage business. We want to do very well in virtualization. While Joe may own 80 percent of VMware, he still thinks it's a good idea to sell storage in places where perhaps we'll win as opposed to VMware. Despite the fact that there's a level of competition with EMC's majority-owned division or entity, there's also a lot of cooperation around how virtualization affects the rest of our product line and the rest of EMC's product line. Let me just say, we're happy with the state of affairs. Of course, there's going to be competition in the virtualization space. I think EMC is as good as you're going to get in terms of being able to both--I won't say compete, but own a competing entity, if you will--and partner with us where we want to. We really respect Joe and the EMC team for that. Tucci: I agree with everything Steve said. I think I'd add a point that says to really serve our customers, you need to form partnerships and alliances. And if you look for that alliance or partnership to be perfect where there's zero areas of overlap, I'm not sure that's physically possible with two powerful companies. So, what you have is this co-opetition. As long as, like Steve said, you define the rules, you both know what you're doing, and have respect and understanding. For sure there will be many Microsoft applications running under VMware, and that's fine, because it's a win-win. There will be many times where a customer will pick Hyper-V and want to use EMC storage. And that's fine. We'll work together there. I think it's an acknowledgment by two people that have great respect for each other, and two companies that are powerful, that this is a very good way to go. Ballmer: There's enough shared interest for this to work. If it's 90 percent-95 percent competition, it's hard to get the little bit of cooperation. We're nowhere like that. We're 80 percent-85 percent cooperation, something like that. So, that makes it easier to do the whole thing. Tucci: Good point. Ballmer: I can't tell you we're "co-opetiting" or whatever you call it very well, for example, with Oracle. So, I'm not pretending you can do it with everybody in the business.
With EMC, which is a large majority owner in VMware, but is also independent, there's a lot that rides on virtualization. The fact of the matter is the storage business is being transformed also by virtualization. And virtualization is transforming the storage business. We want to do very well in virtualization. While Joe may own 80 percent of VMware, he still thinks it's a good idea to sell storage in places where perhaps we'll win as opposed to VMware.
Despite the fact that there's a level of competition with EMC's majority-owned division or entity, there's also a lot of cooperation around how virtualization affects the rest of our product line and the rest of EMC's product line. Let me just say, we're happy with the state of affairs. Of course, there's going to be competition in the virtualization space. I think EMC is as good as you're going to get in terms of being able to both--I won't say compete, but own a competing entity, if you will--and partner with us where we want to. We really respect Joe and the EMC team for that.
Tucci: I agree with everything Steve said. I think I'd add a point that says to really serve our customers, you need to form partnerships and alliances. And if you look for that alliance or partnership to be perfect where there's zero areas of overlap, I'm not sure that's physically possible with two powerful companies. So, what you have is this co-opetition.
As long as, like Steve said, you define the rules, you both know what you're doing, and have respect and understanding. For sure there will be many Microsoft applications running under VMware, and that's fine, because it's a win-win. There will be many times where a customer will pick Hyper-V and want to use EMC storage. And that's fine. We'll work together there.
I think it's an acknowledgment by two people that have great respect for each other, and two companies that are powerful, that this is a very good way to go.
Ballmer: There's enough shared interest for this to work. If it's 90 percent-95 percent competition, it's hard to get the little bit of cooperation. We're nowhere like that. We're 80 percent-85 percent cooperation, something like that. So, that makes it easier to do the whole thing.
Tucci: Good point.
Ballmer: I can't tell you we're "co-opetiting" or whatever you call it very well, for example, with Oracle. So, I'm not pretending you can do it with everybody in the business.
So for the next 3 years it'll be EMC playing the role of Switzerland in IT virtualization, despite VMware pumping $200 million profit toward EMC's bottom line and contributing billions more toward EMC's market cap. I hope it does because it'll be a huge win for thousands of customers who are deploying Hyper-V today. It'll certainly be interesting to watch.