Windows Virtualization

In the first two parts of this 3-part series, you learnt about Test Failover (TFO) and Planned Failover (PFO). In this closing part of the series, I will talk about unplanned failover and summarize the differences of these 3. 1. What is Unplanned Failover...

If you are wondering “ I have enabled replication and it looks like everything is in progress, but how do I know that I am truly protected ”, then keep reading the next few posts as we walk you through the various types of failover, how and when to use...

There’s a lot of hype around the evolution of virtualization and management, and the emergence of cloud computing. One thing that everyone can agree upon however is that most customers want to take virtualization and management to the next level...

Virtualization Nation, Intel has recently released their new “Sandy Bridge” processors which is the second generation of the Core i3/i5/i7 processors. Most of these new processors hitting the market with the first wave of product released...

  With the release of Beta of Service Pack 1 for Windows Server 2008 R2 a number of you have asked about Service Pack 1 for the standalone Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 , and whether the new capabilities of Dynamic Memory and RemoteFX will be...

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...

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...

===================================================================== Preamble: The point of this series, and the spirit in which it is written, is to take a holistic approach at the issues facing our customers, discuss the complexities with regard...

====================================================== Preamble: The point of this series, and the spirit in which it is written, is to take a holistic approach at the issues facing our customers, discuss the complexities with regard to memory management...

====================================================== Preamble: The point of this series, and the spirit in which it is written, is to take a holistic approach at the issues facing our customers, discuss the complexities with regard to memory management...

Virtualization Nation, I’ve had the pleasure of talking with customers in the last few months and the Hyper-V R2 reception has been nothing but unequivocally positive. Whether it’s been folks in small, medium or the enterprise, they appreciate the...

Yesterday, Vipul Shah, a Senior Product Manager with the Virtualization Team, guest posted on Virtualization Planet about how Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and System Center is a great platform for running SQL Server consolidated workloads. He pointed...

This morning Microsoft and HP announced a three-year, $250 million agreement to jointly deliver a new infrastructure-to-application model, advance cloud computing and generally reduce the costs and complexities of IT. The press release, executive...

My friend and teammate Jim Schwartz on our Virtualization Solutions Marketing Team has asked me to post this entry about a very exciting webcast coming up, but he can describe it much better than me... Hi, I’m Jim Schwartz, a director of virtualization...

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! ...

Hello, this is Bryon Surace again. I’m a senior program manager on the Windows virtualization team at Microsoft. Recently, the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 beta 2 became available for public download. Part of this release is the Beta 2 version of Visual Studio Team System 2010 Lab Management; an integrated solution to give you all the benefits of virtualization for application lifecycle management. Congratulations to the Visual Studio Lab Management team for reaching this milestone! ...

We’ve got some great webcasts coming up in the next few weeks to discuss recommendations for virtualizing MS server applications and the benefits of choosing hyper-V + System Center as your virtualization solution. Each technical webcast will focus on...

Microsoft has a comprehensive portfolio of technologies when it comes to Virtualization ranging from Presentation Virtualization with Remote Desktop Services to Server Virtualization using Hyper-V with many more in between as below. · Server Hardware...

I have been inundated by people here at VMworld 2009 with tons of questions on Hyper-V and who want to see demos of Hyper-V. This blog post attempts to put together a list material for folks. Given the large amount of material this list is only a snapshot...

Hello, I’m Zane Adam, general manager of Virtualization and Systems Management. As more and more customers are looking at virtualization to help reduce cost and decrease complexity in their infrastructure, we are seeing lots of questions around virtualizing MS server applications such as Exchange, SQL and SharePoint. What benefits should I expect to see? What do I need to consider when virtualizing these mission critical business application? Should I virtualize all roles within a server application? We have worked across MS application groups to test our products with hyper-v and we believe that MS virtualization is the best choice for MS server applications. First, MS server applications are built for Windows Server, and because hyper-v is part of the operating system, there is no need to add complexity of support and interoperability by adding a 3rd party virtualization layer. This means there is just one stop for all of your support needs and also assurance that the stack of applications and hypervisor works well together. Second, to help ensure optimal performance Microsoft has specific deployment guidance for virtualizing MS server applications which results in a mixed physical and virtual environment. System Center is the management solution that allows you to view both physical and virtual instances from one console. Third, as you know MS virtualization is up to six times less expensive than other virtualization solutions in the market, which makes running your server applications even that more affordable. ...

Day 1 at VMworld was mostly about Labs and content which builds up to the main event starting with the keynote on Tuesday morning. Looking forward to today. In the meanwhile I have been hearing about a concept being put forth that the virtualization...

I now have the final list of sessions that I will be attending at VMworld. As I noted last time I had a lot of waitlists which it now appears I have not made the cut for most of the sessions. That means I will be at our booth (#2422) almost all of today...

Hi, I am Vijay Tewari a program manager with the Virtualization team here at Microsoft. Having spent the last 15 months or so deeply involved in the development of Hyper-V I am really looking forward to meeting customers and partners at VMworld 2009 ...

Virtualization Nation, In my last blog, I discussed the importance of a Security Development Lifecycle and how we're making resources available to our customers and partners. Today, I want to discuss a more resources Microsoft provides our partners...

In my last two blog posts ( Part 1 & Part 2 ), I started an in depth analysis tackling VMware's claims head on that because their disk footprint is smaller and ESX/ESXi are single purpose hypervisors, they are therefore more secure. If that's the...