Windows Virtualization

The show begins in 10 hours, but the news it out: Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008, a new hypervisor-based server virtualization product (like ESXi), will be released within 30 days and be available at no cost via the Web Microsoft will demonstrate live migration feature of Windows Server 2008 R2. And the next version of Microsoft Hyper-V Server (the one after 2008) will have live migration capabilities. System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 will be released within 30 days [not a surprise], which will manage Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2, Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 or VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3 Microsoft’s global server OEM partners ... report that nearly 100% of their customers who order Windows Server 2008 with hardware are also choosing to have Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V included with their order. Dedicated virtualization lab established within the Microsoft Enterprise Engineering Center. The keynote will be shown here in the morning [noon EDT]: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/events/virtualization/default.mspx Patrick ...

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. Patrick ...

Hello, I’m Kevin Knox, VP Worldwide Commercial Business at AMD. Microsoft invited me to do this guest blog post in conjunction with our sponsorship of Microsoft’s “Get Virtual Now” event on Sept. 8. I always find it interesting to hear people singing the praises of x86 virtualization and talking about how this recently introduced technology is already revolutionizing the industry. Fact of the matter is that virtualization technology was originally introduced for the purpose of time sharing on mainframes in the early 1970’s. One could probably trace the roots of x86 virtualization to the early 90’s when IT managers finally realized that people’s desks and wiring closets were probably no place for servers and started to relocate them into the datacenter. The next step in the evolution of x86 virtualization was a few years later when IT managers realized they could safely run multiple applications on a single server simultaneously. And if you are reading this blog, you can probably figure out what came next…..running multiple versions of an OS on a single piece of hardware, or what has affectionately become known as virtualization. While certainly an interesting history, there are two major happenings on the near horizon that I believe will permanently change the face of virtualization. ...

Today we announced some changes to server application licensing and support policies related to running MS server apps on top of anyone's hypervisor. Several folks have written or blogged about it, here are some: Chris Wolf (Burton Group) Virtualization.info NetworkWorld Windows IT Pro Thoughts on application mobility licensing ...

Hi, my name is Bert Van Pottelberghe, business unit manager at Hostbasket, which is the leading hosting company and SaaS-provider in Belgium with over 30,000 SMB customers. In a recent survey of our datacenter with over 1,000 servers, we saw that the average CPU-usage was only 12%. On the other hand, investments in new server hardware, datacenter space and the cost of power and cooling – now at an all time high - keep prices for dedicated servers high. The hosting industry is a very competitive industry, so we needed to come up with an answer. We have been investigating virtualization technologies such as Xen, VMWare and Virtuozzo, but always found problems (such as security-issues, complex and expensive licensing, stability or scalability) that kept us from creating a virtual machine-offer. ...

Hi, my name is Stephen Nichols, VP of sales and marketing for SoftCom Technology Consulting, which is the company behind MyHosting.com, a leading global provider of affordable web, email and application hosting. We have been actively engaged with Microsoft technologies since we began in the hosting industry back in 1997. We are part of Gold Certified Partner program with competencies in Data Management Solutions, Information Worker Solutions, Mobility Solutions and Networking Infrastructure Solutions. Based on our strength and experience in shared hosting we see the greatest opportunity for growth is to build new solutions on this foundation. The development of these solutions will be customer requirement driven and need to be delivered cost effectively and on demand. The best prospect for future profits is to move beyond commoditized hosting of simple websites sold on large amounts of storage, bandwidth and email addresses. To future proof our business we have begun to offer unique solutions backed by exceptional support. As part of our process to find and develop tools and strategies to differentiate our services in the market, our entire organization was keen to implement some form of Virtual Server Hosting. In the words of our Operations Manager: “Modern computer systems are extremely powerful, 4 socket, quad core CPUs, these systems are able to support many gigabytes of memory and storage. Running one operating system and a single application on these type of machines would be inefficient. By using virtualization technology, we can consolidate multiple physical servers onto one physical machine.” We have already implemented virtualization technology within our infrastructure for our internal server needs and saw that server consolidation allows us to have smaller footprint and a lower cost of ownership. Fewer physical servers reduce power consumption both by servers and by the cooling infrastructure, lowering costs and at the same time making our solution “greener”. The next step was to build hosting solution that could take advantage of virtualization technology to provide our customers the tools they need to run their businesses. As not all virtualization platforms are created equally we took our time to find the best fit. At the end of the day the clear choice for us was to go with Microsoft’s Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V platform. Some of the key factors we evaluated include the following. ...

Quick note: The update will be classified as a "recommended update", which means it will flow down automatically according to the settings you’ve selected if you’re running Windows Server 2008. It’s also being released to Windows Server Update Services. ...

Daniel asked about the Linux integration components for Hyper-V. They've now reached RC2 status according to Mike Sterling, and are available from http://connect.microsoft.com/ Hang on – did you say RC2? Due to customer feedback from the beta version, we added a couple of additional features. · Mouse Support: Support for the synthetic mouse device has been added in beta. This new mouse support allows the mouse to move in and out of the window without having to use the CTRL-ALT-LEFTARROW key command to break out. · Fastpath Boot Support: Support for faster single disk configurations has been added to the RC2 release. Boot devices now take advantage of the storage VSC to provide enhanced performance. We’ve reached RTM on the hypercall adapter, Linux implementation of VMBus, and the network and storage VSC. Patrick...

Virtualization Nation, Greetings! Quick note today. :-) If you are looking for some good performance oriented information on Hyper-V please check out Tony Voellm's blog. Tony is the Hyper-V Performance Team Lead, Performance Architect, Performance Nut...

I'm NOT in Orlando this week attending TechEd IT Pro conference. That means I get to enjoy Redmond's "wintery" spring weather and not Orlando's hot/humid thunderstorms. For those of you also NOT in Orlando, you can follow along with the happenings at a few spots: Scott Lowe's blog, focus on virtualization (and expect comparisons to VMware's tools) Margie Semilof from Techtarget will be publishing articles Go here for blog roll and a bunch of news sources from the conference I'll point out a few cool items from today's keynote: You can now get cooperative technical support from Microsoft and four (initial) vendors [Citrix, Novell, Sun, Virtual Iron] when running Windows Server 2008 (or 2003, or 2000). How so? Microsoft's Server Virtualization Validation Program is now operational and vendors have begun validating their configs. So you'll soon see additional vendor names added to KB article 944987. This program is only intended for the dozen or so vendors that make/sell their own Type 1 or Type 2 hypervisor, and want their customers to receive technical support from them and Microsoft. MS Application Virtualization (formerly SoftGrid) 4.5 Release Candidate will be available by the end of June. And interestingly enough it's been almost 2 years since the Softricity acquisition. Tim Mangan blogged about this over at BrianMadden.com. Double-Take, an ISV partner, announced that their GeoCluster technology will run on Hyper-V once the latter is released. GeoCluster works with Windows Server 2008 failover clustering, and offers somethign that VMware can't. Forefront Client Security is adding host and guest VM support for Hyper-V upon its release. See more here. Enjoy, Patrick ...

Hi—I am Rob Emanuel from the Microsoft.com Operations team. For those of you who may not know what we do, our group designs, deploys, manages and sustains highly available, highly scalable Web and SQL systems for Microsoft for some of the largest corporate...

Hi - this is Hector Linares, I am a Program Manager on the team that built System Center Virtual Machine Manager. I'm happy to report that we released the feature complete public beta of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 (formerly known as vNext) today! We've heard a lot of great feedback from customers and partners since SCVMM 2007 was released last September which we took into account for this beta release. Let's just say, the product has come a long way. With this release, Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) 2008 supports managing Virtual Server 2005 R2, Hyper-V and VMware ESX from a single console. Rakesh hit on a few other features and key themes for VMM 2008 here. ...

I arrived into Vegas (baby!) today for 3 days spread across Microsoft Management Summit and Interop Las Vegas 2008. And the conferences couldn't have been timed better as it was pooring rain when I left SeaTac and sunny and hot (for me) upon arrival in Vegas. The highlight so far (the night is young as they say) was the show floor in which I ran into a couple guys from Kidaro working in the Microsoft booth. That's a good sign and hope the acquisition will close soon. I really think Microsoft's desktop presence and understanding, along with SoftGrid, TS with Calista Technologies' built in and the Kidaro technology will really help reshape the desktop virtualization landscape. It'll be interesting to see how it develops. Anyway, here's a shot of the two gents from Kidaro. Welcome aboard! Also on the show floor, and I think this is a first, I saw VMware. I don't recall ever seeing them at a Microsoft show. I'll have to stop by tomorrow as I'm interested to hear more about the Thinstall acquisition and Lifecycle Manager. I didn't have a chance today. Here's a photo. ...

Virtualization Nation, In the last two blogs, I discussed the importance of HA for unplanned host downtime. Today, let’s talk about planned downtime, Quick Migration and Live Migration. Let’s start by understanding the primary usage scenario. Specifically...

Virtualization Nation, Last week, I blogged about the importance of HA for unplanned host downtime. By the number of responses, this is clearly a hot topic. Today, I was going to discuss planned downtime, specifically, the differences between Quick...

Virtualization Nation, Generally speaking, I like to focus my blogs on what we’re doing at Microsoft regarding Hyper-V virtualization and pretend the rest of the Internet doesn't exist. However, there’s some buzz on the web about a topic that I feel...

Our resident VM security dev lead, Brandon Baker, posted a blog today about isolation of VMs. Brandon shares his thoughts on VM security, many of which he also shared to attendees of the BlackHat security conferences in U.S. and Japan last year. Brandon...

Virtualization Nation, Things are really busy at Microsoft with regard to virtualization. In just a few months, we've released the Hyper-V Beta, announced the Calista acquisition in January, announced the Kidaro acquisition in March, and we're back...

So we just announced the intent to acquire Kidaro, a desktop virtualization vendor based in Silicon Valley and with R&D in Israel. Kidaro entered the desktop virtualization management market nearly 17 months ago with their Kidaro Managed Workspace product. With this acquisition, Kidaro's product will lead to new capabilities within Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack for customers with Software Assurance. We'll be shipping this solution under the name Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization within MDOP - the timing wasn't disclosed. Kidaro's Managed Workspace product allows enterprise data and applicatiosn to run within a "transparent virtual machine wrapper." Kidaro's product is built upon Microsoft Virtual PC, and the wrapper provides "enterprise class" management, deployment and a clean user experience. You can read more on Kidaro's site. With this acquisition, the wrapper becomes Microsoft Virtual PC. I know ... it's been a while since we've blogged about Virtual PC on this site - but Ben is the definitive source for Virtual PC blogs. I'm told that the three founders of Kidaro will be joining Microsoft and play similar roles here, and that the plan is to keep Kidaro's R&D team in Israel. That makes sense since Microsoft already has an R&D center in Israel. So if you're keeping track, this acquisition is roughly 45 days after we announced the acqusition of Calista Technologies. Here's how Neal explained Calista's software: I am sure by now, you are wondering, “who is Calista Technologies, and what exactly do they do?” Well, think of us as the people that have set out to create technology which, when IT departments deploy centralized desktops and applications, ensures that users will enjoy the same rich user experience as with a locally executing desktop: Full 3D graphics with support for DirectX, Vista Aero and WPF applications, full frame rate video with 100% coverage for all media types, and fully synchronized audio. Except that “their” desktop is actually running in the data center, and they are accessing it remotely using Microsoft’s remote desktop protocol (RDP). We haven't said how Calista's software will be packaged, but there's expectations for improvements to Terminal Services and presentation virtualization capabilities in Windows Server. But no word yet. And roughly 20 months ago we acquired Softricity, which has resulted in somewhere around 4.5 million seats of SoftGrid application virtualization being adopted by customers. Added together (and reading tea leaves) we're seeing changes to how customers want to adopt/deploy client apps and client computing, and virtualization will play a key role. See Shanen's post from Jan. 22 for more perspective. Patrick ...

Day 2 began with Dr. Mendel Rosenblum's keynote, which Alessandro outlined here. And the security pat-down to get through the door foreshadowed the latter portion of Mendel's keynote, which focused on a new security initiative by VMware. Called VMsafe, this initiative allows security software vendors (like McAfee - maybe even Microsoft Forefront) to write their anti-malware and other security software to ESX Server hypervisor API. So how is this different? Well, it's not really from a functional point of view. It is different in that it's for VI3 and assumes all end users will ditch operating systems and run virtual appliances (OS with apps) on VMware's virtual infrastructure. But to be fair, Mendel spoke of this initiative within the context of the future of virtualization ... he called it virtualization 2.0. The demo was less than futuristic, however. Alessandro described it in his post: After another shameless plug about the availability of McAfee products as virtual appliance, a demo of VMsafe interoperability is finally shown. A Windows XP virtual machine gets attacked with a malicious code that copies away corporate documents but another virtual machine with security engine is able to transparently recognize (a virtual memory scan through VMsafe APis access) the threat and stop it before it compromises the guest OS. ...

This is the 4th VMworld conference that I'm attending representing Microsoft. And it's the first time I've heard/seen the slighest acknowledgment from VMware that if virtualization isn't everywhere (which it's not) then management of the non-VM layer is important. This acknowledgement came via HP and their participation in the keynote. Clearly VMware realizes that a highly instrumented and automated VM layer (only) isn't the path to the evolving datacenter (or even server room). There will be apps that need to be monitored, configured, deployed and backed-up. There will be operating systems to run those apps and ISVs are going to keep coding their apps for operating systems for some time now. There will be power supplies, fans, etc., that require monitoring - even in an IT shop that's 100% virtualized (Diane's dream). And so HP talked about HP Insight Manager working in parallel to Virtual Center. Interestingly enough, the topic of physical and virtual management came up in the booth today, too. A couple gentlemen from a systems integrator asked me about plans to work with VMware and they asked about our product roadmap. Much of our work with VMware has been to define and develop specs for industry standards, primarily in the DMTF. This is important work to ensure interop and portability. But we're also an ISV partner of VMware, in that we've licensed VI3/Virtual Center APIs in order to manage ESX Server in the next version of System Center Virtual Machine Manager. And by manage, I also do mean Vmotion. A customer with Virtual Center and Vmotion will be able to consolidate their management tools (and views) into System Center so they have a single pane of glass. Customers feel a pain (financial, admin, etc) having many different management consoles. Rakesh blogged about our plans for managing ESX Server here. I'm looking forward to Mendel's day 2 keynote. Patrick...

We'll be a gold sponsor at VMworld Europe next week. I'm part of the crew headed to Cannes (along with Jeff Woolsey and Mike Neil and others) to meet with customers, partners, bloggers. We'll demo Hyper-V beta, SCVMM 2007, Terminal Services (Windows Server 2008 has RTM'd after all) and SoftGrid app virtualization. If you're attending the show, stop by booth #57. And if you're attending from the U.S., I'm sure you're well aware of the exchange rate and prices in Cannes. The dollar is worth 0.67 Euros and Cannes (I'm told) is high rent district.But that's not the only cost discussion that will be echoing through the halls of Palais de Festivals. It's interesting timing that The Yankee Group decided today was the time to publish a new report titled, "Virtualization Price War: VMware's Little Big Horn?" On the eve of VMworld Europe, Laura DiDio's 20-page report goes into detail about the pricing benefits customers will accrue from greater competition around virtualization software. Below is a summary of the report, and an excerpt from the report: Rapid commoditization and intensified competition in virtualization technology has precipitated a price war, which is a key element of emerging Anywhere Applications environment. This war is a boon for corporate enterprises who can pick and choose from a wide array of products at discounted prices. No one feels the pressure more than market leader VMware, which has approximately 70% of the installed base, a best-of-breed product and a 2-year lead on its rivals. VMware’s position is similar to General George Custer. One minute he and the 7th Cavalry had the vast Montana plains all to themselves; the next they were surrounded and vastly outnumbered by the Sioux. In VMware’s case, it’s surrounded by rival vendors lusting for its business. Just as Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Gall and their warriors besieged Custer and the 7th Cavalry at the Little Big Horn, VMware’s competitors led by Microsoft, Citrix (which purchased virtualization vendor XenSource in August 2007), Novell and Red Hat are on the war path. They are ready to count coups and lure VMware customers, touting the fact that their products are significantly less expensive. For example, Microsoft Virtual Server offerings are from 40% to 75% less than comparable VMware offerings, depending on specific configuration, volume and licensing factors. Similarly, Citrix’s retail pricing is 66% lower than VMware solutions. Or to use another more specific metric, in the past year, all the virtualization vendors charged between $700 and $800 per socket for their commercial server products while VMware’s product retailed for a whopping $3,000 per socket, a 75% premium. Yankee Group believes that server operating system vendors such as Microsoft and Novell have a distinct feature and performance edge in their respective management offerings because they have been in this end of the business far longer than VMware. By contrast, operating system vendors such as Microsoft, Novell and Red Hat provide full management of the baseline OS, virtual machines and hypervisor. Microsoft’s Configuration Manager can patch and deploy software to virtual and physical instances of the Windows OS and hypervisor. VMware still requires a separate infrastructure product to patch its ESX Server. ...

Hi, my name is Neal Margulis, and I am the founder of Calista Technologies, the developers of a unique desktop virtualization solution that dramatically enhances the end user experience with virtualized desktops. Today is an exciting day for me as we are announcing the company’s joining forces with Microsoft. My personal background is years of experience with CPUs, advanced graphics and multimedia technologies; earlier in my career, at S3, a pioneer in the development of graphics chips, I was in charge of the development of a graphics accelerator chip and software stack that later became synonymous with Windows acceleration. So, at a personal level, I am very excited about today’s announcement because being part of Microsoft will allow my vision for a local-desktop-like, media-rich user experience with server-hosted Windows desktops to be fully realized. And I am also excited because as part of the Microsoft platform, Calista’s technologies will have the chance of receiving very broad adoption across a diverse set of platforms (eventually including mobile and consumer electronics devices), and hence the potential to impact the experience of millions of users. Of course, the entire Calista team also loves the fact that as part of Microsoft we now have access to much broader knowledge, technology and resources available at Microsoft. ...

If you haven't already, I recommend reading Rakesh's post on why the System Center team decided to build out V2 of SCVMM so that customers can manage VMware ESX Server and VI3. Here's an excerpt: Flexibility in Hypervisors with a single management solution - As I said above, we feel very confident that our hypervisor provides the best platform in the vast majority of customer use cases (that's for you to decide of course) but regardless, customers want to use a single management tool in mixed environments. You'll also be able to automate across hypervisors using a single Powershell interface that we provide. VMM will abstract the difference in hypervisor APIs for you. You simply run the "Stop-VM" cmdlet and we make sure that regardless of the hypervisor platform, the VM is stopped. No more code blocks that read "If (VMware)....elseif (VirtualServer)......elseif (Hyper-V)......" Finally, I want to emphasize that when we say "manage VMware", we mean that day to day, you'll be able to use our console and command line interface to fully manage your Virtual Infrastructure environment (including live migration), Virtual Server and Hyper-V environments seamlessly. In addition, we'll be able to extend the management capabilities that VMware offers today so you'll get an enhanced solution even on a non-Windows OS. Cheers, Patrick O'Rourke ...

Greetings! Jeff Woolsey here from the virtualization team and I've got some big news. Here's the official announcement: Microsoft today announced that it will extend the Open Specification Promise to the hypercall application programmer’s interface...