Server and Tools Business News Bytes blog : Virtualization

Red Hat and Microsoft Expand Virtualization Interoperability Options

mdingle — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 18:01:00 GMT

Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that customers can now deploy fully supported virtualization environments that combine Microsoft Windows Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. In response to customer demand for interoperability in their IT environments, Red Hat and Microsoft have completed testing and validation for mutual customers using server virtualization. Joint support from Red Hat and Microsoft for these configurations is available today.

For more information about today’s announcement, please visit the Virtualization Team Blog.

Microsoft and Partners Optimize Midsize Business IT With Virtualization and Systems Management

grantkd — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 16:08:00 GMT

Today at VMworld Microsoft announced a new solution for mid-market organizations that are looking to efficiently deploy and manage technology with limited IT resources.

Microsoft and its OEM partners Fujitsu and Lenovo will offer customers a new software license, Microsoft System Center Essentials Management Suite, that includes Microsoft System Center Essentials 2007 and Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008. The suite includes a technology upgrade program in the OEM channel, which ensures that customers who purchase the suite will have rights to Microsoft System Center Essentials 2010 when it is released next year.

This service package will allow customers to reduce server sprawl and associated energy demands, as well as streamline the management of virtual and non-virtual IT assets.

For more information about this announcement, please visit Microsoft PressPass or read more on the Virtualization team blog. Follow Microsoft product and solution experts at VMworld 2009 via Twitter at www.twitter.com/virtualization or #MS_Virt.

Businesses Save Thousands Moving to Microsoft Virtualization

grantkd — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 16:18:00 GMT

Today Microsoft announced that business customers are saving on average $170,000 (U.S.) when they switch to Microsoft virtualization software from VMware software.

Customers are turning to Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and Microsoft System Center management tools to reduce energy consumption, hardware costs, recurring licensing costs, and improve their overall management of virtual and non-virtual applications, servers and computers.

“The light switch has gone on for customers, and they realize they no longer have to pay a virtualization tax with VMware that creates an isolated, virtual island within their IT departments,” said David Greschler, director of virtualization and management marketing, Server and Tools Business, Microsoft Corp.

For more information about this announcement, please visit Microsoft PressPass or the Virtualization team blog. You can also follow this and other Microsoft virtualization news on Twitter.

Frugal Fridays Podcast: Microsoft Technical PM, Kenon Owens

mdingle — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 02:52:00 GMT

Checkout this week's installment of the Frugal Friday's Tech Show podcast with Jason Perlow and Ken Hess featuring Kenon Owens, Technical Product Manager on the Integrated Virtualization Team at Microsoft. Click here and learn about System Center Virtual Machine Manager R2 now.

Core Infrastructure at WPC 2009

grantkd — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 07:26:00 GMT

Today begins Microsoft’s annual Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans, and there’s a lot of buzz around what partners can look forward to in the coming year.

Bob Kelly, corporate vice president of Infrastructure Server Marketing, will be giving updates on some of the upcoming innovations and partner opportunities coming out of Core Infrastructure onsite as part of his keynotes July 13 and 14.

As part of sharing the news, Bob has also guest-authored a blog entry on the Windows Server team blog that gives more detail on some of the exciting highlights.

To keep on top of other Core Infrastructure news announcements throughout the event, please visit the following blogs:

o Windows Server team blog

o Virtualization team blog

o Forefront

o System Center

o Small Business Server

o Essential Business Server

o Windows Home Server

o MAP Toolkit

You can also follow Core Infrastructure via the STB News Bytes Twitter feed, or learn more at the WPC 2009 virtual pressroom and the Infrastructure PressPass site.

Tech•Ed: Microsoft Delivers New Wave of Technologies to Help Businesses Thrive in Today’s Economy

mdingle — Mon, 11 May 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Microsoft Tech•Ed North America 2009 kicked off today with announcements of new technologies that enable IT professionals and developers to help their organizations save money and improve efficiencies during difficult economic times. As part of today’s news, Microsoft Corp. announced that the company is anticipating that the next version of its client operating system, Windows 7, will be available to customers in time for the holiday shopping season. In addition, Windows Server 2008 R2 Release Candidate (RC) is available today with the final product releasing to market in the same timeframe as Windows 7.

The company also announced that SQL Server 2008 R2 (formerly SQL Server ‘Kilimanjaro’) will release the first Community Technology Preview (CTP) in the second half of 2009 and on track to ship SQL Server 2008 R2 in the first half of calendar year 2010, which will include new feature Master Data Services (MDS).

Please visit the Global Tech•Ed Virtual Press Room to view the full press release, as well as the keynote live at 10am PDT/1pm EDT and for a post keynote Q&A session that will be starting at 12:30pm PDT/3:30 EDT as well.

Microsoft comments on VMware vSphere announcement

grantkd — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 21:34:00 GMT

Today, David Greschler, director of Microsoft virtualization and management, commented on the announcement by VMware of their new “Cloud OS,” called vSphere. Greschler outlined Microsoft’s streamlined approach to virtualization - in which virtualization is included as a component of the operating system, as opposed to an additional layer – and how it enables a dynamic datacenter. Greschler said, “you don’t need an extra ‘cloud operating system’ to build a cloud running Windows Server. Just use Windows Server.” To see how Microsoft customer Kroll Factual Data built their own private cloud, and what customer Lionbridge Technologies did with their Virtual Cloud Lab, please visit the virtualization customer case studies site. And Greschler reminded customers to compare costs, stating, “VMware vSphere’s extra layer is approximately three to five times the cost of Microsoft’s solution, while just yesterday Zane Adam announced in this blog that Microsoft Hyper-V Server R2, which includes live migration and high availability, will be free of charge.”

To read the full post from David Greschler, please click here.

Microsoft Virtualization Software Helps Kroll Factual Data Reduce IT Costs and Energy Consumption, and Stay Agile

grantkd — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Kroll Factual Data was able to create a private cloud computing environment to meet stringent customer requirements while it helped reduce costs and energy consumption for its datacenter, Microsoft Corp. announced. Kroll Factual Data was able to create this dynamic datacenter through a combination of virtualization, services-based management tools, and scalable applications and application development tools from Microsoft.

Kroll Factual Data is an information services company, a leading provider of business information to mortgage lenders, consumer lenders, property management firms and other businesses to help them make informed decisions. Kroll Factual Data has experienced tremendous growth during the past five years, primarily through the acquisition of 58 companies. Most recently, in response to changing capital markets, Kroll Factual Data has expanded its products to include a broader array of information on loan applicants so that they can help financial institutions fund accurate, high-quality loans, and ultimately reduce losses due to fraud.

“Our customers’ needs change on a fairly rapid basis. In the mortgage industry, a small change in the interest rates can cause a wild fluctuation in transaction volume. With the sea-changes going on in the financial industry, and policies changing almost daily, we need to be able to react immediately,” said Russ Donnan, chief information officer, Kroll Factual Data. “At Kroll Factual Data, technology is the business. We’re now able to develop, test and deploy new products within three days, and our datacenter has the ability to deploy additional computing resources in less than 15 minutes.”

To view the full release, please click here.

Greater Business Agility and Cost Savings Through Virtualization

mdingle — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 20:49:00 GMT

Microsoft Corp. announced today that Wells’ Dairy Inc., one of the world’s largest family-owned and managed ice cream manufacturer in the United States company, was able to save more than $500,000 (U.S.) on hardware and software licensing costs by deploying Microsoft virtualization and Microsoft System Center management software.

Wells’ Dairy sees a long-term alliance between itself and Microsoft along the virtualization path. “This is in accordance with our business strategy to standardize on technologies that support our needs today and that will grow with us,” says Mike Kooistra, director of information services at Wells’ Dairy. More information on today’s news and how to begin cutting costs, including the Wells’ Dairy case study, can be found on PressPass.

Follow STB News Bytes on Twitter to get the lastest news. http://twitter.com/STBNewsBytes

Reducing Cost and Enhancing Security with Microsoft Virtualization

mdingle — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 20:35:00 GMT

Microsoft Corp. announced today that Lionbridge Technologies Inc., a $461 million (U.S.) translation, development and testing services company, was able to save more than $200,000 last year, enhance security and accelerate the use of customer services by deploying Microsoft virtualization and infrastructure software

Lionbridge uses Microsoft’s server and presentation virtualization software, and systems management tools for centralized control of both physical and virtual assets, and directory and remote desktop computing services for more secure access to internal data and resources. Lionbridge created and deployed Virtual Cloud Lab, a globally accessible datacenter that is shared by engineers in any of the company’s sites, as well as by the company’s independent network of 25,000 partners who are located in more than 100 countries. The virtualized infrastructure and centralized management enables all workers to access vital internal resources, and the 100 percent virtual footprint has completely removed all physical hardware requirements from branch office sites.

More information can be found on PressPass.

Microsoft, Red Hat to Offer Joint Technical Support

mdingle — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 18:30:00 GMT

Microsoft and Red Hat announced this morning that they have signed agreements to test and validate their server operating systems running on one another's hypervisors. In short, this means that customers with valid support agreements will be able to run validated configurations and receive joint technical support for running Windows Server on Red Hat Enterprise virtualization, and for running Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V or Hyper-V Server 2008.

To learn more about this announcement, join the Red Hat webcast with Mike Neil, which will be broadcast live at 11 a.m. ET on February 16, 2009. The webcast will also be available for replay. To join, please sign up here.

Additional information can be found on the press release, Mike Neil's blog entry and Port25.

Other resources:

Windows Server Virtualization Validation Program Web site

Virtualization Saves Microsoft Customers Nearly a Half-Million Dollars Per Year

mdingle — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 17:00:00 GMT

Microsoft today announced that some business customers around the world have saved on average $470,000 (U.S.) per year through IT projects using Microsoft virtualization software. Microsoft’s business customers have been able to use virtualization to help reduce operations and capital expenses via reduced electrical power consumption and cooling within datacenters, reduced hardware acquisition costs, automation of desktop and server management, and centralized application deployment.

For the full press release, please visit: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2009/feb09/02-09VirtualizationSavingsPR.mspx

To read a guest post from David Straede, president Santa Barbara Web Hosting, please visit the Virtualization blog.

Watch this video to see why the economic crunch is leading many businesses to choose Microsoft’s virtualization solution over the competition.

Cost Savings with Microsoft Virtualization

Microsoft Presents "Green IT and Virtualization”

mdingle — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 19:39:00 GMT

Microsoft completed its second monthly “Live and Virtualized” LiveMeeting series Wednesday, January 28^th, 8:00am PST. The LiveMeeting topic was “Green IT and Virtualization” presented by Francois Ajenstat, Director, Environmental Sustainability at Microsoft, Ward Ralston, Group Product Manager Windows Server at Microsoft and Microsoft customer, Chris Steffen, Principal Technical Architect at Kroll Factual Data. If you were unable to attend this month’s Live & Virtualized LiveMeeting, you can access the playback here.

The session covered the importance of Green IT and environmental sustainability efforts for corporations and how Microsoft virtualization technologies, such as Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V, are helping deliver Green and cost savings benefits for customers. Using Hyper-V virtualization, Kroll Factual Data has been able to reduce their power consumption to about 700,000 kWh per year, for a savings of nearly 90%. To read more about the KFD Microsoft customer experience, you can read Chris Steffen’s guest blog on the Virtualization Team Blog.

Microsoft and Marathon Technologies Expand Relationship for Customer Benefit

grantkd — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 19:55:00 GMT

Microsoft and Marathon Technologies Corporation today announced a development agreement designed to address the fault tolerant and high availability computing needs for business customers running Windows Server-based applications in enterprise information technology departments and data centers. The collaboration is focused in three areas:

Help provide customers who deploy Windows Server 2008 and Marathon everRun^® software a seamless path to extend high availability protection to their critical applications.
Help provide Windows Server and Marathon everRun customers with the ability to select the appropriate level of availability, from failover clustering all the way up to system fault tolerance, for each application.
Help customers deploying a future version of Hyper-V, Microsoft’s hypervisor-based virtualization technology, to use Marathon everRun for a fault-tolerant virtual infrastructure.

For more information, please read the Press Release on Microsoft’s PressPass Web site.

Microsoft Presents "Virtualization and Cloud Computing"

grantkd — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 23:17:00 GMT

Microsoft completed its first monthly “Live and Virtualized” LiveMeeting series yesterday, December. 9^th, 8:00am PST. The first LiveMeeting topic was titled “Virtualization and Cloud Computing” presented by Mike Neil, general manager of virtualization strategy, Microsoft, Deepak Patil, general manager of communications and storage, Microsoft Global Foundation Services, which hosts the Azure Services Platform, and Dominic Foster, Chief Technology Officer for MaximumASP. During this initial “Live and Virtualized” session, we heard how Microsoft’s virtualization strategy impacts customers’ on-premises and cloud computing IT strategies and how Microsoft and web hoster MaximumASP use virtualization within their datacenters to power their respective services for consumers and businesses. If you were unable to attend this month’s Live & Virtualized LiveMeeting, you can access the playback here: https://www311.livemeeting.com/cc/lmeventsva/view?id=MSFT13419&pw=ATT1319L568&cn=