June, 2010

At HP's Tech Forum conference, HP started to market a VDI reference architecture, and deployment offer, with us and Citrix. The brochure can be seen here. The VDI offer can be seen here.

The nuts and bolts of the architecture includes:

• HP ProLiant BL460c server blades
• HP StorageWorks P4800 SAN
• HP Insight Control for System Center
• Citrix XenDesktop 4.0 enterprise edition
• Hyper-V R2

There are new HP infrastructure services for VDI to help you get started. HP's Dave Donatelli spoke of this VDI architecture (and more) toward the end of his keynote today. It starts around 1:08:00 of Donatelli's keynote.

Patrick

One of the fun parts of being in a team that develops Hyper-V is seeing it in action. Here at TechEd 2010 in New Orleans, Hyper-V and the System Center Suite are running the Hands-On-Lab infrastructure. Powering the labs for the 11,000 people here at TechEd are 25 x HP380G6’s. The detailed specs of each server is

·        HP DL 380G6

·        128 GB RAM

·        1.0 TB HDD

·        2 x Intel Xeon E5504, 2 Ghz

The attendees are accessing labs (running as virtual machines) from 350 workstations. There are a total of 192 labs running and on an average each lab takes just over 2 virtual machines. By the first day and a half of the conference, just over 1800 labs were launched leading to 3750 virtual machines being created and destroyed!!. By the way HOL11, Web Development in Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 is the most popular lab so far.

The infrastructure workloads, all running virtual machines, includes SQL Server 2008 SP1 for usage and performance statistics, Domain controller and DHCP for the lab domain, Web server for publishing the labs, System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 for monitoring the health of the infrastructure, System Center Configuration Manager 2007 R2 for compliance monitoring and running scripted actions and System Center Data Protection Manager for backing up SQL and Hyper-V configurations.

I’d encourage folks who are here at TechEd to stop by this mini datacenter in Ballroom C and chat with folks there to get more details on the setup. Below are a few pictures of the setup. Enjoy!!

That's all it takes these days:).

System Center Operations Manager, reporting at work

Vijay Tewari

Principal Program Manager, Windows Server Virtualization

Every now and again, we like to use this forum to provide commentary and context on happenings in the industry. Today’s news from Waltham, Mass. and Palo Alto, Calif. is a good example. On the one hand, there’s a Microsoft competitor. On the other hand, there’s a Microsoft partner (see today’s joint webcast). And if there’s such a thing as a third hand, there are implications for Red Hat, perhaps even IBM.

So what’s our take?

First, the Microsoft and Novell alliance has been very successful. It’s been 3.5 years since the big announcement with Novell, and we have more than 475 customers who’ve chosen to work with Microsoft and Novell. We’ll continue to work with Novell around technical support and interoperability. The joint interoperability lab in Cambridge is very active, and we recently announced work together in high-performance computing. Oh, and did I mention today’s joint webcast on heterogeneous datacenter ;-)

Second, the vFolks in Palo Alto are further isolating themselves within the industry. Microsoft’s interop efforts have provided more choice and flexibility for customers, including our work with Novell. We’re seeing VMWare go down an alternate path. As one of many examples of our work with open source communities, we’re adding functionality to the Linux Integration Services for Hyper-V. In fact, we have an RC version of the Linux Integration Services, which support Linux virtual machines with up to 4 virtual CPUs. In fact, we’ll talk more of this on June 25 at Red Hat Summit. For more meat, see Matthew’s post about what you need to know about Linux on Hyper-V. And if you’re talking about technical support, let’s not forget the Server Virtualization Validation Program, which includes Red Hat, VMWare, Novell, Cisco and others.

Third, looks like VMWare finally determined that virtualization is a server OS feature. I’m sure we’ve said that once or twice over the years ;-). The vFolks now plan to ship a full version of a server OS with vSphere, and support it, to fulfill their application development and application deployment plans.

Fourth, this is a bad deal for customers as they’re getting locked into an inflexible offer. Check out the terms and conditions. For example: “Customers may run SLES with the accompanying patches and updates subscription entitled by a VMware purchase only in virtual machines running on VMWare vSphere 4.0 and 4.1 hosts that have active vSphere SnS with VMware.” So be sure not to drop support or you’ll invalidate your license. Or maybe just stick with small deployments.

Last, the vFolks have no public cloud offering, like Windows Azure, like Amazon EC2. While we’re demoing and building capabilities so customers have a common and flexible application and management model across on-premises and cloud computing, they’re stitching together virtual appliances to fill the void. Don’t forget – the next version of System Center Virtual Machine Manager will configure VMs from VMWare and Citrix.

What are your thoughts?

Patrick O’Rourke, director of communications, Server and Tools Business

Wow, 11,000 attendees, press, analysts and speakers here at TechEd. That’s a testimony to the passion, and excitement that this generates amongst our customers and partners.

Day 1 got off to a flying start with Bob Muglia and his inimitable style.  For those who did not get a chance to view the keynote you can catch the recording at

I was at the booth for almost the entire day and the traffic was great. We had lots of customers who came over and had great detailed technical conversations on their deployments with Hyper-V and SCVMM. Quote of the day “I love Hyper-V and am moving over 1800-2000 servers running VMware”.

There were a few questions from customers on network failover and load balancing. I want to take this opportunity to point out that our partners such as

The bummer was when we lost Internet connectivity for a while at the convention center. Thankfully it was restored before the end of the day and we could return to a sense of digital comfort and connectivity.

Day 2 has a plethora of sessions on Virtualization and Management. Below is what we have in store for you today. Today’s is the big day for details on Dynamic Memory and RemoteFX.

Best schwag of the day, the brown Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 teddy. Yes, I am biasedJ.

Come and see us at the Virtualization booths over on the left side of the expo hall under the RED Microsoft learning center.

Vijay Tewari

Principal Program Manager, Windows Server Virtualization

Hi, as I type this post while flying over the country, it just amazes me how far we have come from the days of original computing machines. There is something surreal in being able to blog from an aircraft at 37,000 feet.

I will be at TechEd in New Orleans starting this Monday Jun 7, 2010. We are really excited with the content that we have available for our customers. Besides the two big announcements on RemoteFX and Dynamic Memory there are a host of other sessions that we have for you. Below you will find a list of breakout sessions that are relevant to folks interested in delving into Server Virtualization and Management. Don’t forget that we also have some great hands-on labs and sessions on App-V, MED-V and a host of other technologies and solutions as well. Note that session times sometime change due to unavoidable circumstances so please check the latest schedules at the venue.

Looking forward to seeing you all at TechEd.

Vijay Tewari

Principal Program Manager, Windows Server Virtualization

For those of you who think about desktop management strategies, and how virtualization might fit, I'd recommend reading Edwin Yuen's new blog post. Some of you may know Edwin as he's contributed to this blog, now blogs at Virtualization Planet, and has done lots of demos during keynotes.

Edwin's latest post describes our approach to desktop virtualization, the partners we work with on desktop virtualization solutions, a brief video with customers Expedia, Holland America and Group Health. Edwin's conclusion is:

 I would recommend working on developing your desktop virtualization strategy today.  This means researching and understanding what impacts virtualization can have on your desktops and what the advantages and disadvantages of each solution can be.  Click on the thumbnail below to explore the Microsoft Desktop Virtualization Hour Web site.  And if you are ready to get started with Desktop Virtualization or even if you are already deployed with Desktop Virtualization, you should take advantage of some special, limited-time offers from Microsoft to kick start your VDI implementation or replace your VMware VDI licenses.

If you're looking for something more meaty, such as planning and deploying VDI, then I recommend this on-demand webcast (registration required) by Michael Kleef. Here's the abstract:

In this webcast, we drill down into the architecture of the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and determine what key questions need to be asked and answered around required components, networking, capacity, and end-user experience. We also discuss how this can also fit within a Remote Desktop Services deployment.

Patrick

Hi, I'm Adrian Simays, Hyper-V technical architect at EMC.

EMC and Microsoft have been thinking big lately.  How big?  We’ve set out to build and test one of the largest Hyper-V environments in the world. 

And why not?  With the release of Windows Server 2008 R2, Microsoft introduced features such as clustered shared volumes (CSVs) for storing multiple VHDs on a single LUN, more efficient processing of networking traffic, as well as improved memory management and support for 256 logical processors.  Meanwhile EMC’s storage arrays are known for delivering unprecedented levels of scalability, availability and performance.  In particular, EMC’s Virtual Provisioning technology saves space and provides high levels of performance, which is something that solutions that tend to use CSVs can benefit from.  Combined, Windows Hyper-V and EMC storage platforms can easily support a large-scale, highly available virtualized configuration.  Plus, here at EMC, we continue to see wide adoption of Hyper-V including large scale deployments (this includes one of our customers who is currently running seven 16-node Hyper-V clusters on one EMC Symmetrix VMAX!).

So we set out to build a large scale Hyper-V cluster to capture the performance benefits of these new features. The goal of this test is to demonstrate how the environment scales using features made available with Windows Server 2008 R2 and EMC’s Symmetrix VMAX Enterprise Storage Platform.  Objectives for this test were fairly aggressive due to the size and scale of the configuration. We wanted to create 16 nodes in a Windows Failover Cluster with each parent node containing 64 child virtual machines for a total of 1024 virtual machines.  We set out to achieve 100,000 total IOPS and document the hardware layout as well as capture best practices.

So what have we found so far?  Well we found that we could exceed our total I/O goal with just 4 parent nodes containing a total of 256 VMs.  By using Live Migration we spread VMs across the parent nodes while leaving the physical data on the CSV volume.  This verified that the underlying storage platform, when appropriately configured can scale as we provide parallel access from multiple nodes in the Active/Active configuration provided with CSV.  We are continuing to collect performance data as we increase the number of parent servers and VMs in the environment.

Another key finding included some efficiencies in deploying an environment of this size.  We found that scripting the deployment of VMs using a SCVMM template was extremely easy and took about 15 minutes to deploy 5 VMs over the network (using two 1Gbit network links).  This is great for most environments but for 1024 VMs this would take 52 hours to complete.  By using EMC’s TimeFinder technology and using snapshots, the entire processing time could be significantly reduced to just a few minutes.  A volume was provisioned with Windows images that were configured via SYSPREP.  These images (aka templates) also included required applications.  By creating snapshot copies of the master volume and then importing these replicas as CSVs and finally instantiating the VMs we could reduce the time to create the VMs to a matter of minutes for each parent server.

Interested to learn more?  Come join us at Microsoft TechEd 2010 where EMC will present on this solution and the key findings during one of the Breakout Sessions (VIR207: Advanced Storage Infrastructure Best Practices to Enable Ultimate Hyper-V Scalability) as well as a joint whitepaper to be published shortly.  For more information, please visit: www.emc.com/microsoftvirtualization.

 Adrian