Greetings! Robb Mapp here again, I’m the analyst relations manager in Server & Tools focused on Integrated Virtualization and System Center management tools. Post-MMS, and leading up to general availability this summer, we’re hearing a lot of great...

Apologies for a lack of a new post on the WMI scripts, look for a new double part post Wednesday morning. I was a bit busy with Hyper-V RC1! As of 2AM PST I am very happy to be the first (I think) to announce Hyper-V RC1 is now available for public...

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...

I am taking a quick break from the WMI PowerShell scripts while I take a short Mothers Day vacation, more WMI scripts when I get back! Unattended Hyper-V installation has been one of the most read TechNet forum posts I wrote and it also seems that a lot...

In part 1 we went over basic scripts and tools for gathering some generic information about virtual machines and in part 2 we went over VHD creation and WMI job’s. In part 3 I am going to cover getting more detailed information about a guest operating...

In part 1 we went over some basic scripts and tools for gathering information about running virtual machines. In part 2 I am going to cover two things, first basic VHD creation and second determining if Hyper-V WMI methods are succeeding or failing and...

Hello out there in blog land… This is Taylor Brown some of you may know me from the Virtualization Deployment Summit or from my posts on the TechNet Forums, for those who don’t know me I am a test lead on the Hyper-V team. One of my team’s responsibilities...

Greetings! My name is Robb Mapp and I’m the analyst relations manager in Server & Tools focused on System Center management tools and Integrated Virtualization. This week at MMS, we had nearly 60 industry analysts participate in a summit focused on...

Hi, my name is Manlio Vecchiet, and I am a group product manager in the Windows Server marketing group at Microsoft. I am on my way back from Interop where I participated in an industry panel about Virtual Desktop Architecture. I was joined by VMware...

I am Gavriella Schuster and I am responsible for the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) within the Windows team. This week I was fortunate enough to participate in a panel discussion at Interop with my peers at Symantec, Citrix, and VMWare discussing...

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...

This week, Microsoft hosted 1,800 tech professionals here in Redmond for the annual MVP Global Summit , and I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to chat with a number of Virtualization MVPs from the community. Since you might not be familiar...

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...

Hello all, my name is Chris Steffen and I am the Principal Technical Architect at Kroll Factual Data. Kroll Factual Data is a company that provides business information to mortgage lenders, consumer lenders, property management firms and other businesses...

Virtualization Nation, The virtualization team is pleased to announce the release of the Linux Integration Components for Hyper-V RC! These components provide compatibility with the recent Hyper-V RC release. You can obtain the Linux Integration Components...

Last week we announced the Hyper-V Release Candidate and a week later, we're back again. This week, we're happy to provide the Hyper-V Manager MMC (RC release as well) for Vista SP1 (x86 & x64). What this allows you to do is install the Hyper-V Manager...

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. ...