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I recommend anyone who is considering virtualizing MS Exchange read Jim Lucey's blog post and the comments below his post. VMware's HA guidance on virtualizing Exchange could be mis-interpreted, resulting in increased storage costs and placing data at risk. Here's an excerpt: We love that our customers...

My name is Elliott Morris , manager of what's known within Microsoft’s Server and Tools Business as the "War on Cost team." The team’s role is to collect operational data from business and public sector customers to understand their costs for deploying, operating and managing Microsoft server...

Hi - by now you might have read there's 17,000 of us attending VMworld in San Francisco. Huge crowds, just as Rick Vanover predicted . Lots of energy and excitement as you can imagine. This post is designed to bring some of the show to you, assuming you're not attending and queuing up to a session 45...

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...

This post is for all the Microsoft channel partners who read this blog. You'll want to check out our new virtualization partner profitability toolkit ( here ). David Greschler's blog here sums it up better than I could. Here's an excerpt: Every partner knows about the great opportunity to sell virtualization...

Hi, my name is Chris Steffen, architect with Kroll Factual Data. You may have read one of my prior guest posts . Recently, I came across an InformationWeek Analytics Weblog that asserted a bunch of half truths and misinformation about Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtualization solution. Usually, I can...

I'm not sure the retweet tag (RT) also applies to blogs or not, but I thought I'd give it a try. Now to my point. 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...

Update : The folks at IDC asked that I remove this blog post until further notice. That said, do check out Roger Johnson's post . He discusses Dell PowerEdge R910 and his Hyper-V deployment at Crutchfield. I met Roger at VMworld 2009. He's a VCP, having run an ESX Server-based datacenter for some...

It's been a while since I've posted a blog ... but that one really caused a stir in the Virt circles in the Bay Area. Hopefully it doesn't mean I can't hit up those people for Sharks tickets. I've stumbled across some interesting items that I wanted to share with you. Microsoft Desktop Optimization...

This post is for the readers out there that will be attending VMworld, or have colleagues attending VMworld. There’s been some speculative statements made in the press and blogs in the past 24 hours, so I want to try to set the record straight: 1. Microsoft will be exhibiting at VMworld 2009...

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 . Much is being made about the fact that we are...

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 case, then it stands to reason that ESX/ESXi: should...

Virtualization Nation, In my last blog post, 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. I read some posts on the blogosphere that had questions about the methodology...

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 hearing, "This is too good to be true, is Live Migration...

With the recent announcement by Oracle to stop Virtual Iron development and sales, the past few weeks have certainly been eventful for Virtual Iron customers. A related announcement came out from VMware about a program to offer Virtual Iron customers discounts to move over. But a closer look at the VMware...

Hi, I'm Edwin Yuen, a Senior Technical Product Manager at Microsoft's Integrated Virtualization team. This past week, there were two key announcements made, one by Microsoft and one by VMware, that have an impact on how we compare Microsoft and VMware pricing. The first announcement was actually off...

Hi, I’m David Greschler, director of Microsoft virtualization and management. Today VMware announced their new “Cloud OS,” called vSphere. It’s an interesting announcement in that it points out more clearly than ever that VMware adds an extra layer to the computing stack. This extra layer, a virtualization...

Edwin and David recently sat down in front of a video camera to talk about the top 10 myths from VMWare. Here's a quick outline of the topics discussed during the 11 minute video: Live migration clustered shared volumes Hyper-V scalability Hyper-V performance Hyper-V footprint Hardware...

On Tuesday, March 31, Microsoft's Edwin Yuen will be hosting a live web chat 11am-3pm EST. Edwin is a sr. technical product manager. Edwin came to Microsoft with the acquisition of Softricity (and the SoftGrid application virtualization technology). He now also covers Hyper-V and System Center VMM. Sign...

A quick note that a beta of the Hyper-V management pack for System Center Operations Manager (2007, 2007 R2) is available. In combination with SCVMM (for advanced monitoring of VMs across your Hyper-V, ESX and Virtual Server environments), this SCOM management pack enables health/perf monitoring of the...

The threat of virtualization sprawl. That was a theme my colleagues heard last week at IDC's "Directions" conference in San Jose. And true to IDC's form, they backed up their predictions with some numbers. Here's an excerpt from one article : Virtualization has often been seen as something of a...

The other day, Virtualization Review published a comparative performance test of three hypervisors: VMware ESX 3.5, Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer. You can see it here . NOTE - there are few independent, published performance reviews of hypervisors because including ESX in the review...

VMworld Europe's tagline this year is "virtually anything is possible". Kinda reminds me of Mike's blog post on Monday about Red Hat. And for many IT pros, "virtually anything is possible" might apply to the fact that Microsoft is exhibiting at, and sponsoring, VMworld Europe for the second year in a...

Bonjour from Cannes . This is just a quick post about Citrix making public the Essentials for Hyper-V new s . It's been talked about already by Alessandro and others . There's lots of opinions of what this means for the virtualization software vendor landscape. But that's less important really than...

I’m David Straede, president of SBWH.com, a Windows managed server provider. Virtualization using Hyper-V and System Center is the most exciting thing SBWH has been a part of since we started beta testing IIS 4.0 in 1997. SBWH in 1999 Twelve years ago we got 15 servers in a rack. Today, we can...