IAG SP2 Goes Virtual

edgeaccessblog — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 12:54:00 GMT

My name is John Neystadt and I am an Architect with the Intelligent Application Gateway (IAG) product team.

Why have customers come to love hardware-based appliances?

1. Appliances are very easy to deploy –plug in a few network cables, turn on, go through an initial wizard and you’re ready!

2. Appliances are secure – typically pre-hardened and pre-configured to serve a single purpose.

3. Appliances are easy to manage – they are intended for a single purpose, which means fewer configuration errors or unexpected impact from software that doesn't serve the core appliance purpose.

4. Appliances are easy to troubleshoot and support – vendors provide one-stop support for both hardware and software problems.

However with the great strides that virtualization technology has made in the last few years, we now have the ability to bring together the appliance experience with the benefits of virtualization.

To address these issues, we have come up with a solution that combines the best of all worlds – you can either deploy Intelligent Application Gateway as a hardware appliance from one of our experienced OEM partners, OR you can deploy IAG with SP2 as a virtual machine on a server running Windows Server 2008 with the Hyper-V role enabled or on Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008, Microsoft’s optimized, hypervisor-based virtualization solution.

So what’s new with SP2? First off, the ability to get IAG as a pre-configured virtual machine. In addition, IAG now has a Getting Started Wizard that guides you through all the initial setup steps when booted for the first time. Deploying IAG with SP2 as a virtual machine has many of the combined benefits of software products, virtualization, and hardware appliances:

1. It is pre-configured, so it is very easy to get deploy and get started.

2. It is hardened and secured.

3. It has a single purpose, so it is easy to manage.

4. You can run it on any industry standard server that supports virtualization - and install either the Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V role or Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008.

5. You can create a dedicated test system and move IAG virtual machines between the test system and the production system, by simply copying an image file.

6. Backup and restore is simple – just periodically copy the virtual machine image from the production system to another location.

7. Disaster recovery is easy – just configure a new server and copy the virtual machine images to it.

8. Server consolidation - If IAG doesn’t utilize your entire server (CPU, Memory, I/O), you can run additional virtual workloads, such as load balancing software, on the same physical server.

SP2 introduces a number of additional features in addition to the ability to being deployed as a pre-configured virtual machine.. Features include interoperability for non-Windows environments with support for Firefox, Linux and Mac, new, optimized, application support for Microsoft Dynamics CRM Web and OCS Web client. There is also support for Windows Integrated Authentication and improvements in Kerberos Constraint Delegation Authentication, simplifying user and administrator experience in data center deployments (these features will be the subject of separate blog posts in the coming weeks).

IAG SP2 will be released in the next few weeks. Please register for TechNet Newsflash to be the first to download the trial bits!

Microsoft Forefront Unified Access Gateway Product Team Blog : Virtualization

IAG SP2 Goes Virtual