Windows Virtualization

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...

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 [live and archived] discussing this news. ...

Virtualization Nation, Today is a really big day at Microsoft and more importantly for our customers . Both Windows Server 2008 R2 and Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 (our FREE standalone Hyper-V Server) have both been Released To Manufacturing (RTM...

Virtualization Nation, It's been very busy in the world of Windows Server. With the launch of Windows Server 2008 R2 Release Candidate, Tech Ed and the announcement of several new Hyper-V R2 capabilities such as 64 logical processor support and processor...

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...

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...

====================================================== 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, 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...

  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...

In my first couple of blogs, I wanted to remind everyone of the recent release of Virtual PC 2007 and Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1. I received feedback asking about some of the differences between the two and compatibility of virtual machines between the...

===================================================================== 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...

Hi - this is Chris Stirrat and I run the team that built System Center Virtual Machine Manager (also known as SCVMM or “Carmine”). I very excited to share a couple of HUGE announcements with everyone around virtualization and SCVMM. First - I am extremely...

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...

"Bare metal" was my attempt at being dramatic ;-) Anyway, I really wanted you to know that the standalone hypervisor, Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008, was released today for download. This is the no-cost, bare metal hypervisor. Think ESXi, but with Windows and not Linux. More on this in a bit. Today we also announced new virtualization training and certification program. You're qualified to take this training if you have Windows Server experience. Get more info here; I'm told the cost for training is dependent on the country, but generally ranges from US $90-$130. Click here if you need the currency conversion rate. Before I get back to Hyper-V Server 2008 (and yes, it's different than Windows Server 2008 server core with Hyper-V), today's announcement also said that System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 will be released in a few weeks. The word is: "by end of October", and "there's still some more fine tuning and quality checks to do with early adopter customers." So net-net, SCVMM won't be released next week as announced here, but a couple weeks after. So what exactly is Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008? Following are some bits I've collected that you might not ...

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...

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. ...

Virtualization Nation, We'd like to again offer congratulations to AMD on the release of their new 6-core Opteron ("Istanbul") processors . As Bryon mentioned , Hyper-V R2 goes hand in hand with these new processors with support for AMD's Rapid Virtualization...

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...

Greeting folks, Jeff Woolsey here from the Virtualization team. It’s been a busy week at Microsoft and the Windows Server 2008 RC0 release is off to a great start! If you haven’t downloaded it yet, you can find it here: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008...

Greeting Folks, Jeff Woolsey here from the Microsoft Virtualization Team. It’s a great week here at Microsoft and there’s a lot going on… First, I HAVE to mention Halo 3 . :-) Every review I’ve read as been extremely positive and it looks like the...

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 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. ...

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...

Virtualization Nation, After my recent blog discussing the release of Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 , we received overwhelmingly positive feedback. At the same time, there's still some skepticism about free Live Migration and almost daily we keep...

====================================================== 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...