Hello from San Francisco, host city of Citrix Synergy, where I will be joining Citrix’s CEO, Mark Templeton, for a keynote on desktop virtualization, Microsoft’s vision for the datacenter, and how we will extend our partnership to help you in the cloud. Helping business and IT manage across shifting conditions has been a shared focus between Microsoft and Citrix. It was just a little over a year ago that I penned an internal memorandum that talked about Microsoft’s user centric computing vision, which I also shared with the executive team at Citrix. At the Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) in April, we discussed how this vision embodies a new approach to client management services, which helps IT respond to the demands of a new mobile workforce and a new IT environment. By shifting management from the device to enabling the end user, we’re able to deliver services that are tailored to users’ specific conditions -- regardless of device or location. You can take advantage of this approach with the same Windows platform and management environment you use today. You can watch a demo of the next version of System Center Configuration Manager here. Citrix and Microsoft are working together across engineering, sales and marketing on desktop virtualization to offer you unmatched value. We’ll keep investing in our virtualization products, such as Hyper-V, App-V and Citrix XenDesktop, to bring you comprehensive and cost-effective solutions with the best user experience. In addition, with the work we are doing with partners like HP and Dell, we will help organizations integrate VDI into their overall desktop management strategy. We are working to integrate all forms of virtualization on the desktop for the admin and the end user. ...

Since there was interest in the previous post about the UK services team's series on virtualizing SharePoint, I wanted to recommend the following video from October 2008. The interview is with Michael Noel of Convergent Computing. Michael is also a SharePoint MVP. In this video (6 minutes long), Michael talks about using System Center Virtual Machine Manager to deploy SharePoint. He also talks about disaster recovery and quickly provisioning a SharePoint farm. There's a high interest amongst our customers to adopt SharePoint, and to run it within a virtual machine. Mark at Enterprise Strategy Group [his blog] shared the following data with me [from a Dec 2008 research brief by ESG], that partially explains why: In a recent survey of 1,191 IT and business managers, ESG found that one in three (33%) North American and Western European midmarket and enterprise companies are currently using Microsoft’s SharePoint suite of collaboration and content management tools. As adoption becomes more widespread, SharePoint is quickly becoming an organization-wide, critical business resource. As shown in Figure 1, 29% of current SharePoint users rate the implementation of SharePoint as one of their top three IT initiatives over the past 12-24 months and 82% place it in their top ten initiatives. ESG’s research also reveals that SharePoint is viewed very favorably by current users, with 69% of current adopters saying they would recommend that organizations similar to their own implement SharePoint broadly. ...

Big happenings in NYC yesterday as SteveB and EMC's CEO Joe Tucci met with a room-full of IT execs to talk about an extended 3-year alliance. The announcement is here. In short, the companies are going to work more closely together in the areas of data loss prevention, collaboration and virtualization. What's that you say? EMC - 80% owner of VMware - working more closely with Microsoft around virtualization? Here's an excerpt from the joint announcement: Microsoft offers one of the fastest-growing and most cost-effective virtualization solutions from the desktop to the datacenter, including the ability to manage both physical and virtual environments from a centralized management console. EMC’s technology solutions enable storage, protection and management of information in Microsoft virtualized environments including Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Microsoft System Center, and jointly supported mission-critical workloads such as Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft SharePoint Server. EMC Consulting’s Application Practice, a thousand-person strong team with deep Microsoft knowledge, provides expertise in assessing, planning and implementing Microsoft’s technologies in a wide array of virtualization solutions. That's all well and good - 1,000 EMC consultants trained on WS08 Hyper-V, System Center and key Microsoft applications that will be virtualized. But can those 1,000 consultants really look past VMware? ...

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 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...

My ears are still ringing from Monday's virtualization event in Bellevue. Not necessarily from the keynotes or demos, but mainly from being 10 feet away from the stage as the band Live played a 60+ minute set during the party. Here's a photo I snapped...

On Tuesday, June 23rd from 10:30am – 11:00am (PDT), you're invited to join a teleconference with Bob Kelly, corporate VP of Infrastructure Server Marketing. Bob will talk about the state of IT within the context of results from a new Harris Interactive study. The study, of 1,200 IT professionals from the U.S., United Kingdom, Japan and Germany, was commissioned by Microsoft’s Server & Tools Business. There will be time for your questions following the brief presentation. Submit questions over the phone or you can submit them at any time leading up to, or during, the teleconference by tweeting with the Twitter hashtag, #qs4ms. If you are interested in attending, please REGISTER NOW. Once you open the invite box, you can save and close to your calendar. ...

You may have never heard of Kroll Factual Data. But ever since personal credit became harder to acquire, lenders held tighter to their money, and interest rates went up/down like a roller coaster, Kroll has been on a wild ride of their own. In short,...

Join us Thursday, November 19, 8:00 AM PST for a LiveMeeting session on “Microsoft’s Integrated Virtualization Strategy, Products and Solutions” presented by Kenon Owens, Technical Product Manager. This LiveMeeting is exclusive to members of the System...

From the sold-out Microsoft Management Summit in Las Vegas, Brad Anderson posts about empowering our customers with Private Cloud computing. This post comes directly from the Official Microsoft Blog . View the related press release here . Private Cloud...

MMS 2013 Hands On Labs Virtualization Nation, A few weeks ago we held the annual 2013 Microsoft Management Summit in Las Vegas. As in years past, the event sold out quickly and it was a very busy week. To everyone that attended, our sincere thanks...

Admittedly this post is a stew and not a meal (if that metaphor works). But you might be interested in the following items. I'll keep it short: John Kelbley will host a webcast on Friday, May 8 at 8:00am PDT titled, "Running Linux on Hyper-V." The session will discuss install, configure, run, backup and monitor non-Windows systems. See here. On May 14, 8am-noon PDT, Edwin Yuen will host a live chat on TechTarget. He'll answer questions about our virt products, be it datacenter, desktop or managemment. See more here. Wondering what to read when you're flying to TechEd, or your next trip? The Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V Resource Kit book is it. One of the authors, Robert Larson, architect in MS Services and TechNet blogger, told me that the book is in final formatting and some sample chapters are available to download (here). The book will be available via Amazon and Barnes and Noble in June. Read more from one of the authors here. Enjoy. ...

I’d like to start this post by saying thank you to our friends at Microsoft for running my blog post here. As we’re mid-way through Virtualization Ecosystem Month (VEM), it has been exciting to see the partner support around the topic of virtualization and I encourage you to check out Microsoft’s guest post on my blog. Both AMD and Microsoft are continually asked if virtualization can really become a sustainable technology in the mainstream computing market. Skeptics are quick to point out that the technology world is littered with products that have never made it beyond the early adopter edge of the market. Names like Apple Newton, Betamax, Sega Dreamcast, and OS/2 come up in various articles and discussions about technologies that didn’t become widespread market successes. Will virtualization suffer this same fate? Is it destined to stay on the fringe? In my opinion, all indications are that virtualization is jumping the technology chasm between early adopters and the mainstream market. Recent survey results from Forrester demonstrate that firms (both large and small) are in the midst of rethinking and overhauling IT infrastructure and client systems. Virtualization is one of technologies at the center of these efforts with Forrester reporting that 54% of the enterprises and 53% of the SMBs surveyed have either implemented x86 server virtualization or plan to do so within the next 12 months—which is significant in today’s current economy. ...

Hi, my name is Matt Lavallee and I am the Director of Technology at MLS Property Information Network, Inc., based in Massachusetts. Although you may not recognize the company name, we are one of the 700+ multiple listing service (MLS) companies that provide data warehousing for the Real Estate industry in the U.S. As my company took the early step to virtualizing our environment on Hyper-V last year, Microsoft asked me to share my opinion on the results of its recent survey on the state of IT infrastructure investments, conducted by Harris Interactive. One point that stands out on the survey — and should surprise no one — is the shift to belt-tightening in IT: 84% of US respondents cited improving business efficiency (51%) and reducing IT costs (33%) as their priorities in light of the economic downturn. However, I personally disagree that this new mindset is a direct reaction to the economy or that the decreased allocation of IT budget to innovation (29% in the US) are necessarily bad things. First, let us consider that the IT budget is a relatively fixed value year over year — while it may respond to inflation and some cyclical purchases, the vast majority of budget is spent on payroll, annualized licensing, backups, ISP costs, and the regular refresh of equipment. To me, this eliminates a significant stratum of budget from consideration for “innovation” unless you just built your environment last year on five-year-old technology. Second, the actual varying allocation of budget goes to “special projects”, which, for lack of a better term, includes “innovation”. Here is where the survey findings drew too many conclusions and where I feel the indication is astray from real trends. ...

Many of you will be interested to learn more about forthcoming lab management capabilities in Visual Studio Team System 2010. Or you may have lunch or meetings with a dev who you want to know more about VSTS 2010 Lab Management. That last part if a nod to "that darn reality" post at SharkTank. So check the VSTS Lab Management team blog. Recent posts include: Creating and working in virtual environments Application build, deploy and test automation in Lab Management Enable lab management features for existing team projects VSTS 2010 beta 1 is released Patrick ...

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...

It comes as no surprise to the regular readers of this blog, that a key tenant of Microsoft’s virtualization strategy is that customers should be able to manage their physical and virtual IT resources from the same set of easy to use tools. It seems that...

Today Microsoft announces new IT solutions to streamline PC and device management, empower productivity and enable the modern enterprise, highlighting the release of Windows Intune, System Center Configuration Manager 2012 Beta 2 and the next version...

Hi readers, Due to the planned MSDN/TechNet blog upgrade, we have to re-post blogs posted during the week of May 17. We wanted you to know you'll be seeing 2-3 posts again. Thanks for your patience with us. Patrick

Customers have frequently asked us for capacity planning guidance before deploying Hyper-V Replica – e.g.: “How much network bandwidth is required between the primary and replica site”, “How much storage is required on the primary and replica site”, ...

SMB is getting a lot of attention with Windows Server 2012, and we’ve had questions from a few customers regarding the inter-play between SMB shares and Hyper-V Replica. In this post we’ll share our experience around setting up and using various configurations...

On Tuesday, April 28 at 11:00am PDT, Microsoft will continue its webcast series on 'How to Invest in the IT Infrastructure You Have While Preparing for Tomorrow' with Part 2 : "Is There a Cloud in Your Future?" Register here Join Zane Adam, Microsoft...