We are really excited to announce that Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 is available for download here . It’s been a long an exciting journey bringing this product to our customers. The chart below tells it all, we have listened to our customers and...

Hello, I’m Kevin Knox, VP Worldwide Commercial Business at AMD. Microsoft invited me to do this guest blog post in conjunction with our sponsorship of Microsoft’s “Get Virtual Now” event on Sept. 8. I always find it interesting to hear people singing the praises of x86 virtualization and talking about how this recently introduced technology is already revolutionizing the industry. Fact of the matter is that virtualization technology was originally introduced for the purpose of time sharing on mainframes in the early 1970’s. One could probably trace the roots of x86 virtualization to the early 90’s when IT managers finally realized that people’s desks and wiring closets were probably no place for servers and started to relocate them into the datacenter. The next step in the evolution of x86 virtualization was a few years later when IT managers realized they could safely run multiple applications on a single server simultaneously. And if you are reading this blog, you can probably figure out what came next…..running multiple versions of an OS on a single piece of hardware, or what has affectionately become known as virtualization. While certainly an interesting history, there are two major happenings on the near horizon that I believe will permanently change the face of virtualization. ...

Given the rather compressed schedule of Windows Server 2008 R2, we did not have time to get too ambitious with the UI. However, the UI has been modeled to enable the following 3 scenarios: 1. Export VMs with data 2. Import VMs with data 3. Export...

Hi, I’m Lalithra Fernando, a program manager on the Hyper-V team, working in various areas including clustering and authorization, as well as with our Hyper-V MVPs. In this post, I’ll be talking about resource metering, a new feature in Hyper...

I’m Zane Adam, senior director of virtualization and System Center. It’s been a while since my last post, and wanted to update you on our standalone hypervisor, Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 Last Fall we released Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008, a standalone hypervisor-based virtualization product that is available for free. We continue to add more features and value to this product in the upcoming release, Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2. Our core strategy is to ensure that our customers can virtualize their IT environment in the most cost effective manner, and at the same time, have access to enterprise features like live migration and clustering features for high availability. So in addition to scalability and performance improvements in this version, customers can get live migration and host clustering capabilities and high availability (up to 16 nodes) at no charge. Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 will continue to be free, and now will include live migration and host clustering capabilities. Customers won’t need to pay thousands of dollars for alternate virtualization platforms to get these features. With Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2, customers have a solution for both planned and unplanned downtime and can use it for scenarios like server consolidation, branch server consolidation, high availability, and VDI. ...

The other day the folks at IDC published their worldwide quarterly server virtualization tracker report . You can see the news release here . Some of the main takeaways are: · 18% of all new servers shipped in Q4’09 were virtualized, up 3% year over...

Hello all, I’m Paul Despe and I work as a program manager on the Microsoft Hyper-V team. Until now, Hyper-V administrators using Server Core installs of Windows Server 2008 or Microsoft Hyper-V Server were unable to enable and disable protocol bindings from the parent partition due to the lack of a graphical network control panel only available in full installs of Windows Server. I'm pleased to announce one of our developers on the Hyper-V team, Keith Mange, recently addressed this gap with the release of his (previously Microsoft internal-only) networking tool NVSPBIND.EXE publicly on. See it here. ...

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...

Hyper-V Replica reduces the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) providing the ability to configure the static IP address of the Replica VM before it is failed over. This IP address setting is injected into the failed over VM. This post written by Vinod Atal...

It is great to see InfoWorld acknowledge the significant progress we’ve made with Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 Hyper-V (“ Virtualization shoot-out: Citrix, Microsoft, Red Hat, and VMware ”). We’re excited that the reviewer recognizes...

Continuing from where we left off the last time … Q1: The Replication Health pane has loads of information, how do I interpret these attributes? I thought you would never ask On both the Primary and...

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. ...

Greetings! Jeff Woolsey here from the virtualization team and I've got some big news. Here's the official announcement: Microsoft today announced that it will extend the Open Specification Promise to the hypercall application programmer’s interface...

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. ...

Hey, it's Lalithra again. In the last part , we talked about what resource metering is. Now, we’ll get into how to use it with PowerShell. A quick note: if this is your first foray into PowerShell, here are some resources you may find helpful...

A funny thing happened on the way to work this morning ... the Hyper-V Linux integration components (ICs) appeared in Greg Kroah-Hartman's tree (aka, the Linux Driver Project ) of the Linux community. This is the first time Microsoft is contributing code...

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. ...

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...

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...

As we announced yesterday we are proud to have NetApp and Cisco participating in the Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track program and delivering pre-validated private cloud solutions for customers. The new NetApp Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track with Cisco builds upon...

Hi Isaac Roybal here. I’m a technical product manager on the Windows Server team covering Hyper-V. It’s been over two weeks since the release of Windows Server 2008 Service Pack 2 (SP2) and we’re seeing great adoption. From a Hyper-V point of view, we’re excited because the final Hyper-V release is an integrated feature in SP2 making it easier and faster to deploy Hyper-V. If you recall, when Windows Server 2008 was released, Hyper-V Beta was included. This meant to get the final Hyper-V release, you needed to go to Windows Update, download and go through the update process. With Windows Server 2008 SP2, Hyper-V final bits are included so there’s no need to pull down individual downloads which speeds up deployments. There are also some notable updates in SP2, including scalability enhancements for running on systems with up to 24 logical processors which enables support for up to 192 running virtual machines, update for Hyper-V when managed with System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 and updates for backup/restore of virtual machines with the Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS). ...

Take a look at Bill Laing's blog, Corporate Vice President for Microsoft's Server and Cloud business, to get an overview of the next release of Windows Server codenamed Windows Server 8. Read Bill's post on the Microsoft Server and Cloud Platform blog...

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...

Great news to share with our virtualization blog readers - Gartner published the 2011 Magic Quadrant for x86 Server Virtualization Infrastructure, in which Microsoft is listed among the leaders, along with Citrix and VMware. Microsoft’s Brad...

Virtualization Nation, I thought we were done with this topic yesterday. I really did. If you missed my last article and aren't sure what I'm talking about, it's here . Scott Drummonds, VMware Product Marketing, apparently saw my response and attempted...