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Microsoft’s new VDI licensing: VDI Suites
Hi, my name is Manlio Vecchiet, and I am a director of product management on the Windows Server marketing team. I'm in New Orleans right now attending the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) , and wanted to update you on new licenses we’ll offer Read More...
Microsoft at VMworld Europe 2009
VMworld Europe's tagline this year is "virtually anything is possible". Kinda reminds me of Mike's blog post on Monday about Red Hat. And for many IT pros, "virtually anything is possible" might apply to the fact that Microsoft is exhibiting at, and sponsoring, VMworld Europe for the second year in a row. Tres bien, as they say in Cannes. So if you're one of the 3,000 paid attendees expected at VMworld Europe 2009, below's a sneak peak at what you'll find inside booth #133. If you're not attending, I'm going to attempt to post some pix ... maybe video if I'm lucky ... from the booth so you can see the action. No doubt there will be plenty of other blogs coming from VMworld Europe. You can see most of them at the Virt blog aggregator. So what am I expecting to see in Cannes? Outside of the Microsoft booth, I'd expect to see early versions of client hypervisors, interop announcements, new product packaging, cloud computing announcements, and likely an update about VMsafe. Should be a busy week. Read More...
The Virtualization Essentials from Citrix
Bonjour from Cannes. This is just a quick post about Citrix making public the Essentials for Hyper-V news. It's been talked about already by Alessandro and others. Read More...
Guest post: virtualization requires the proper perspective
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. Read More...
Before we get to VMworld Vegas
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 Read More...
VM standards, offline patching tools
Quick post here on two items. Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool can be downloaded here. As blogged about at by the System Center team blog, Virtualization.info, and InfoWorld blog. This product allows the update of large-scale deployments of virtual machines, leveraging PowerShell, System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2007 and WSUS 3.0 (or Configuration Manager 2007). As Alessandro pointed out, "It just automates the VM power-on, updates deploying through virtual network access, and VM shutdown." You can use this Solution Accelerator to help you with business scenarios such as these: Your IT organization is converting physical servers to virtual machines to reduce costs, including administrative overhead. How can you regularly update offline virtual machines while minimizing administrative costs? Your IT organization has thousands of virtual machines stored for months at a time in a number of libraries. How do you keep the virtual machines reliably up to date? Second, today Citrix issued an announcement about "Project Kensho", which is described as: Read More...
Virtualization wrap from TechEd IT Pro
I'm NOT in Orlando this week attending TechEd IT Pro conference. That means I get to enjoy Redmond's "wintery" spring weather and not Orlando's hot/humid thunderstorms. For those of you also NOT in Orlando, you can follow along with the happenings at a few spots: Scott Lowe's blog, focus on virtualization (and expect comparisons to VMware's tools) Margie Semilof from Techtarget will be publishing articles Go here for blog roll and a bunch of news sources from the conference I'll point out a few cool items from today's keynote: You can now get cooperative technical support from Microsoft and four (initial) vendors [Citrix, Novell, Sun, Virtual Iron] when running Windows Server 2008 (or 2003, or 2000). How so? Microsoft's Server Virtualization Validation Program is now operational and vendors have begun validating their configs. So you'll soon see additional vendor names added to KB article 944987. This program is only intended for the dozen or so vendors that make/sell their own Type 1 or Type 2 hypervisor, and want their customers to receive technical support from them and Microsoft. MS Application Virtualization (formerly SoftGrid) 4.5 Release Candidate will be available by the end of June. And interestingly enough it's been almost 2 years since the Softricity acquisition. Tim Mangan blogged about this over at BrianMadden.com. Double-Take, an ISV partner, announced that their GeoCluster technology will run on Hyper-V once the latter is released. GeoCluster works with Windows Server 2008 failover clustering, and offers somethign that VMware can't. Forefront Client Security is adding host and guest VM support for Hyper-V upon its release. See more here. Enjoy, Patrick Read More...
Rationalizing a Virtual Desktop Architecture
Hi, my name is Manlio Vecchiet, and I am a group product manager in the Windows Server marketing group at Microsoft. I am on my way back from Interop where I participated in an industry panel about Virtual Desktop Architecture. I was joined by VMware, Read More...

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