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Update: What you won't see at VMworld 2009
This post is for the readers out there that will be attending VMworld, or have colleagues attending VMworld. There’s been some speculative statements made in the press and blogs in the past 24 hours, so I want to try to set the record straight: 1. Microsoft Read More...
Online sessions, book and more
Admittedly this post is a stew and not a meal (if that metaphor works). But you might be interested in the following items. I'll keep it short: John Kelbley will host a webcast on Friday, May 8 at 8:00am PDT titled, "Running Linux on Hyper-V." The session will discuss install, configure, run, backup and monitor non-Windows systems. See here. On May 14, 8am-noon PDT, Edwin Yuen will host a live chat on TechTarget. He'll answer questions about our virt products, be it datacenter, desktop or managemment. See more here. Wondering what to read when you're flying to TechEd, or your next trip? The Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V Resource Kit book is it. One of the authors, Robert Larson, architect in MS Services and TechNet blogger, told me that the book is in final formatting and some sample chapters are available to download (here). The book will be available via Amazon and Barnes and Noble in June. Read more from one of the authors here. Enjoy. Read More...
Beta of standalone hypervisor: Hyper-V Server 2008 R2
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. Read More...
Visual Studio 2010 lab management uses virtualization
There are 4 million .NET developers in the world, so I figure one or two might read this blog, or you might know someone. A couple weeks ago at the Professional Developers Conference, we began discussing, and announced a CTP, of Visual Studio 10. One of the many features of VS10 is lab management, which leverages virtualization to enable software development and test teams to build higer quality apps. Lab management accelerates setup/tear down time and elimiates no-repro bugs by creating better integration across dev and test teams throughout the application lifecycle. Read More...
Bare metal hypervisor is here, along with new training, services
"Bare metal" was my attempt at being dramatic ;-) Anyway, I really wanted you to know that the standalone hypervisor, Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008, was released today for download. This is the no-cost, bare metal hypervisor. Think ESXi, but with Windows and not Linux. More on this in a bit. Today we also announced new virtualization training and certification program. You're qualified to take this training if you have Windows Server experience. Get more info here; I'm told the cost for training is dependent on the country, but generally ranges from US $90-$130. Click here if you need the currency conversion rate. Before I get back to Hyper-V Server 2008 (and yes, it's different than Windows Server 2008 server core with Hyper-V), today's announcement also said that System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 will be released in a few weeks. The word is: "by end of October", and "there's still some more fine tuning and quality checks to do with early adopter customers." So net-net, SCVMM won't be released next week as announced here, but a couple weeks after. So what exactly is Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008? Following are some bits I've collected that you might not Read More...
VMworld is over, but the facts remain
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. Read More...
Guest Post: Virtualization and Cloud Computing
Hello, my name is Karl Schulmeisters, director of alliance technology and architecture for the Microsoft Global Alliance at Unisys. We are a global systems integrator that focuses on large scale-up solutions particularly in the public sector, financial services, federal government and pharmaceuticals industries. I watched Monday’s mid-day keynote at the Virtualization Launch in Bellevue, in which Senior VP of Server and Tools, Bob Muglia, spoke and brought a Gartner analyst on stage for an industry view. The traditional viewpoint of virtualization is that it is driven by cost savings, Green IT and operational efficiency. But according to Gartner, those are tactical considerations. Gartner believes that virtualization unlocks Cloud Computing, which in turn fundamentally transforms how IT is run. I’m not sure that virtualization itself unlocks Cloud Computing. Pervasive connectivity and standardized data protocols, like XML, are more crucial to this. What virtualization lets you do though is to get rid of the issues of app conflicts that have grown out of the PC industry’s history of using dedicated machines for a particular server type. Essentially it lets you isolate the various application servers as though they were on a separate physical box without having to assume the cost of that separation. Read More...
Virtualization Feed for Your RSS Reader
With a "tip of the cap" to creators of Planet V12n blog, we've just launched a blog and Twitter aggregator for virtualization. It's called VirtualizationFeed. Like Planet V12n, this site aggregates virtualization blogs from lots of sources. In this case, 18 independent bloggers and 14 Microsoft bloggers on either TechNet or MSDN. I'm sure you'll recognize many of the names/blogs ... and maybe you'll discover new ones. For example: Tarry Singh (Netherlands) Andrew Dudgell (Australia) Kevin Fogarty (CIO.com) Allesandro Perilli (Italy) David Marshall (U.S.) Mark Bowker (ESG - analyst firm) Ben Armstrong (aka, Virtual PC Guy) Rakesh Malhotra (VM management blog) The App-V team blog Tony Soper's blog The blog aggregator will show a short (200-character) excerpt from the blog and point you to the blogger's site for the full post. In addition to blogs, you'll see a tab for Tweets. VirtualizationFeed.com is also a Twitter aggregator (in case you're not using Twitter's useful search tool) that pulls all virtualization-related tweets. Read More...
Guest Post: Virtualization; Something Old, Someone New and Some Really Big Cost Savings
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. Read More...
Guest Post: Why Microsoft and Hyper-V for HostBasket
Hi, my name is Bert Van Pottelberghe, business unit manager at Hostbasket, which is the leading hosting company and SaaS-provider in Belgium with over 30,000 SMB customers. In a recent survey of our datacenter with over 1,000 servers, we saw that the average CPU-usage was only 12%. On the other hand, investments in new server hardware, datacenter space and the cost of power and cooling – now at an all time high - keep prices for dedicated servers high. The hosting industry is a very competitive industry, so we needed to come up with an answer. We have been investigating virtualization technologies such as Xen, VMWare and Virtuozzo, but always found problems (such as security-issues, complex and expensive licensing, stability or scalability) that kept us from creating a virtual machine-offer. Read More...
Hosting Virtualization MVPs
This week, Microsoft hosted 1,800 tech professionals here in Redmond for the annual MVP Global Summit , and I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to chat with a number of Virtualization MVPs from the community. Since you might not be familiar Read More...

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