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...

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...

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...

You'll want to read Isaac's blog post about the RC milestone of Windows Server 2008 R2. His post focuses on 64 LP support and processor compatibility mode for live migration. Read the post here . Here's an excerpt: 64LP Support We have seen...

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 support Memory overcommit End-to-end management Value Why pay VMWare's virtualization tax? See the video below, or the other 22 videos here. ...

The Microsoft-UK services team recently posted an in-depth virtualizing SharePoint series. It is a culmination of their experiences over the last couple years helping customers successfully host SharePoint in virtualized environments. · Introduction · Optimizing the performance of a virtualized SharePoint environment · SharePoint server role recommendations in the virtualized SharePoint environment · Monitoring and managing a virtualized SharePoint environment · High availability and disaster recovery, deployment best practices, common mistakes and summary This is fantastic guidance for those organisations currently running, or thinking of running SharePoint in virtualized environments. Enjoy! ...

I’ve been to Las Vegas too many times to count and have always left with good stories, but I never thought that my best Vegas story would be work-related. That story of course is about last week’s marketing activity at VMworld. Definitely not your typical day at the office. While I have enjoyed the headlines (My Favorite: Microsoft attacks VMware with Poker Chips), the speculation as to what transpired has been most amusing to me. Unfortunately, I have to disappoint all those Oliver-Stone-like conspiracy theorists out there. Sorry, but Las Vegas Police were never called to the scene. Nor were we escorted out. We didn’t even attract the eye of hotel staff or security. Sorry! More than anything, I am glad that the right tone came through and loved hearing that it was “Great to see”, “Relevant and unexpected”, and “Pretty hilarious”. I couldn’t help but eavesdrop when I saw attendees share the collateral with a friend or hear someone chatting about it during the conference. The street team did a great job, and the marketing effort exceeded expectations (3,800 cards in <90 minutes, 25+ articles/blogs, 15,000+ visits and 175,000+ hits to www.VMwareCostsWayTooMuch.com in 7 days, and multiple tough questions on TCO to Paul Maritz). And, yes, that’s more visits to the site than attendees at VMworld! The site and the on-the-ground activity were part of our marketing/PR efforts at VMworld and designed to cut through the noise (over 200 press announcements in 3 days) with one, simple message: Microsoft offers a better TCO than VMware. ...

Hello fellow virtualization fans, Bryon here again. With all the excitement around the beta release of Windows Server 2008 R2, it’s important to call attention to another important beta release: Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2! To ensure there is no confusion, let me be clear that I’m talking about Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2. Not Hyper-V the feature of Windows Server 2008 R2. Alessandro’s post did a good job showing the differences. Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 is the next generation of the standalone hypervisor based product. ...

The subject line will make sense in a moment. It's a quote from a customer in Australia ... and pretty funny, too. But before that, a few items crossed my inbox that I thought I'd share: Software vendor AspenTech has a process engineering/manufacturing application called aspenONE. Today they announced that their customer BASF deployed aspenONE using Microsoft App-V. I found this interesting for a few reasons. One, I've participated in conversations about whether enterprise customers would deploy 3rd-party apps running on App-V/SoftGrid without some sort of application certification program/logo for App-V. Second, BASF runs large, complex chemical process simulations - and now they're doing so as a network service. I know these sorts of computer-aided engineering apps often times get computed on HPC clusters; but never did I think they'd then get streamed at sufficient speed to the desktop using application virtualization. Along the lines of App-V, J.C. over at the App-V blog noted some new downloads. Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.5 security configuration wizard. Download here. Microsoft Application Virtualization best practices anayzer. Download here. J.C. wrote last week that App-V 4.5 for Terminal Services license will be available Nov. 1. Read more here. Adam over at TechNet Edge just posted a video interview with the authors of "Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V Unleashed." I mentioned Rand's and Jeff's book a couple weeks ago. I had the opportunity to meet Rand/Jeff last week while they were up here in Redmond. Rand spoke to a bunch of us about Convergent's business, and set us straight that applications (Exchange, Sharepoint) and solutions such as disaster recovery and compliance are driving his customers' infrastructure purchases (e.g., Windows Server, Hyper-V, System Center) ... not the other way around. Here's a link to Jeff's blog. ...

In the past few weeks following the Microsoft virtualization launch event in Bellevue the virtualization buzz keeps growing louder and louder. We keep hearing more and more from customers that virtualization is a key component of their IT infrastructure strategy. IT organizations fall across a wide spectrum of virtualization implementation and sophistication. Some have been doing it for quite some time, while others are just starting or even just starting to think about it. One thing that keeps coming up over and over, however, is the notion of using virtualization as an enabling technology, rather than an end in itself. This means aligning your IT strategies to your business strategies. Ultimately it’s not about how many virtual guests you can run on a physical host, or how cool your underlying infrastructure is – it’s about using these technologies to achieve better business outcomes. Whether the specific goal is to use virtualization to save money, reduce data center footprint, gain competitive edge, drive business continuity and availability, or go green by reducing power and cooling, it all comes down to using virtualization as a means to reach these goals. OK, so that makes sense – so how do I do that? One of the key things that HP and Microsoft recognize is that it is the management tools that really enable you to take advantage of the underlying virtualization technologies. Microsoft System Center, especially with System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008, will provide easy to use tools that will allow you to manage your physical and virtual environments from a single pane of glass. This means customers won’t have to use one set of tools to manage their physical infrastructure and another set to manage their virtual environment. ...

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 without VMware's permission violates the VMware EULA about posting benchmarks. Amongst reviewers, this EULA restriction is well-known as serves as a deterrent. Rick Vanover and his editor, Keith Ward, deserve kudos for securing VMware approval for the performance comparison without jeopardizing journalistic integrity. Way to go! OK, back to Rick Vanover's test. His test objectives: All the hypervisors offer essentially the same base functionality. In this series of tests, the objective was to put the same workloads on each one and see how they stack up. The types of workloads tested varied, to simulate a typical environment in which some virtual machines (VMs) are stressed, and some aren't. Each platform was subjected to the same test plan parameters, to give a fair accounting of their performance. Read about the comparison parameters, test environment and caveats. The results will be surprising (in a "man bites dog" sort of way) to many. ...

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 magic bullet to this problem, promising to consolidate a number of low-utilization servers onto a single piece of hardware. But the average number of virtual machines per server is only five, Bailey noted, with that number going to eight by 2012. So much for the vision of consolidating dozens of servers onto one machine. More important, though, was that IDC found that just going from five virtual machines to eight means there will be 100 million new servers by 2012, and "all of them still need to be managed." That's a problem, she said, since the tools to do this are not keeping pace. Our customers have referred to this issue as "islands," referring to the need for different management tools, interfaces, etc. to manage their heterogeneous environment. After all, customers and partners tell us, they're trying to manage services, no matter if the applications run on Windows or non-Windows, physical or virtualized. For those of you in that last camp, like Atlanta Journal Constitution, Mamut and Maxol, you know that Microsoft and some other systems management vendors are creating tools to keep pace with heterogeneous hypervisors and VMs, and as well traditional physical systems and non-virtualized applications. System Center is one such management tool; VMware vCenter isn't (yet, according to Alessandro). To elaborate on this point, check out RakeshM's latest blog post here. ...

Exciting news for Windows Server Hyper-V, System Center, and VMWare customers. The beta of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 is now available on the Microsoft Connect site for download . If you don't already have access to VMM on the Connect...

As the president and COO of a datacenter-based managed server provider, I’m constantly on the hunt for leading edge technology. I peruse every new IT technology announcement for the next cost-effective solution, for both internal needs, and for hosted solutions we can use to help customers. In my previous blog, I talked about how cool Microsoft’s virtualization turned out to be, saving SBWH, and therefore our customers, time and money. I started my virtualization research with VMware, but quickly became a fan of Hyper-V, ultimately deploying it in many production systems. As a result of my experience, I get asked by industry analysts, press, and investors, “Why not VMware?” With Palo Alto’s latest announcement that I can buy an “Internal Cloud” for only $3,495 per CPU, I figured I’d share my thoughts about the real vs. perceived benefits of this new private compute cloud idea. Let me say that the private cloud concept seems to be more marketing than architecture. The private cloud has many of the same load balancing, storage management, and provisioning that virtualization already offers. Based on how the private cloud has been described so far, I have to say that the emperor, although not totally naked, seems somewhat thinly attired. ...

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 ...

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...

Hello, I’m Larry Orecklin, general manager at Microsoft focused on the System Center family of management products and Virtualization. If you picked up a newspaper in the last few weeks, you are more than likely aware that the virtualization industry...

VMworld 2008 officially began Monday with the opening of the Labs, Exhibitor Hall, and VMware’s Partner Day, but yesterday morning really kicked off the start of the conference for many with Paul Maritz giving the Welcome and Opening Keynote and Cisco...

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 ...

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 ...

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...

I hope everyone is enjoying Hyper-V RC1 (yep I just linked to my own post -shamless maybe) but, as promissed here's some more WMI goodness. Title got your attention? Well this is a two part post… First I will show how to use the Shutdown IC to initiate...

I’ll be posting more this week about what you’ll see when you visit the Microsoft booth (#1431) at VMworld 2010 U.S. conference next week. You can read an overview at NetworkWorld . But last week a virtualization industry insider and consultant...

Update in July 2012: This post is applicable only if you on Windows Server "8" Beta. For Windows Server 2012 RC and later, refer to the updated blog post @ http://blogs.technet.com/b/virtualization/archive/2012/07/16/hyper-v-replica-certificate-based...

In March, we had announced the beta release of the Linux Integration Services for Microsoft Hyper-V, which added support for SMP-based virtual machines, timesync, and integrated shutdown. Today we're announcing the release candidate (RC) version of the...