December, 2009

Edwin posted a good blog this evening about re-occurring Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt the spreads via traditional journalism or blogs. I don't know for sure, but I suspect his post had something to do with an InformationWeek blog posted by an SI partner of VMware. I recommend reading Edwin's post. Here's a summary of his points: You do not need to remove or replace your existing VMware installation to deploy Hyper-V Hyper-V and the rest of Microsoft Virtualization is “Enterprise ready” for hundreds of companies today. Virtual Machine Manager is not a replacement for vCenter Hyper-V is a mature, safe, secure hypervisor ...

Good news for a Friday. Brad's post (with video interview) announces the acquisition of Opalis Software. Why is this important to virtualization projects? Thoughts below, but first some background on the business...

Virtualization affects how we plan, build, deploy, operate, and service workloads. Customers are creating large libraries of virtual machines containing various configurations. The patch-state of these virtual machines are not always known. Ensuring that offline virtual machines are properly patched and won’t become vulnerable the instant they come online is critical. I am therefore very pleased to state that the Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool v2.1 has now been released! Congratulations to the Solution Accelerator team for this release! ...

We published some news today with NetApp; see here. In short, Microsoft and NetApp... today announced a new three-year agreement that deepens product collaboration and technical integration, and extends joint sales and marketing activities to customers worldwide. Under the new agreement, the two companies will collaborate and deliver technology solutions that span virtualization, private cloud computing, and storage and data management, enabling customers to increase data center management efficiencies, reduce costs, and improve business agility. As NetApp's partner site states, we'll work with NetApp to sell/market disaster recovery solutions using NetApp HA and DR storage with Hyper-V and System Center. There's a sample customer blueprint (.pdf) here with datacenter configs. And there's datacenter consolidation solutions, which are discussed in this white paper (here). ...

A great example of why companies are adopting virtualization and the resulting benefits can be seen in Texas, at the City of Frisco. The city, one of the fastest growing in America, needed to scale a siloed IT infrastructure to accommodate data growth of 200-300% year. Check out this NetApp blog to learn how the City’s move toward virtualization resulted in substantial savings and maximized uptime for Exchange, SharePoint, and other apps. Also don’t miss the Microsoft and NetApp live webcast on Thursday, December 3 at 11am Pacific/2pm Eastern: Virtualize with Microsoft and NetApp: Consolidate and Increase Uptime with Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and NetApp. City of Frisco Enterprise Technology Manager Tim Yarbrough will join the discussion to talk about his environment and Windows Server 2008 R2 upgrade. ...