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Re-blog: Microsoft Site Recovery Solution Launch: I'm re-blogging here. Over at Virt Planet blog, Jim wrote the following: This week Microsoft is launching a comprehensive solution to help customers implement cost effective, end-to-end site recovery programs. Built on proven capabilities in Windows Server 2008 R2 and the System Center management suite, Microsoft is helping IT Professionals leverage Windows Server Hyper-V and Failover Clustering along with tools like Virtual Machine Manager to deliver cost effective site recovery. The Microsoft Site Recovery Solution ecosystem is ramping with a broad range of storage replication partners like Double-Take Software, EMC, HDS, HP delivering solutions that take advantage of the Microsoft Cluster Resource DLL. With cluster integration IT Professionals can deploy streamlined and operationally effective site recovery. You can learn more about the Microsoft Site Recovery Solution by joining the Microsoft team and Enterprise Strategy Group on Thursday, November 5th at 10:30am Pacific for a webcast Building Effective and Highly Available Disaster Recovery Solutions Using Microsoft Virtualization This webcast looks at key drivers for site recovery solutions and reviews practical deployment considerations (you can view the recorded version of the webcast after the 5th). Microsoft and select partners will also be demonstrating Site Recovery Solutions at TechEd, so if you plan to be in Berlin during the week of November 9th, make sure to stop by the Virtualization Solutions kiosk in the Technical Learning Center. Read More...
Posted 04 November 09 07:27 by porourke | 0 Comments
Filed under Hyper-V, Disaster Recovery, System Center Virtual Machine Manager, System Center, virtualization management, Enterprise Strategy Group, Management tools, VMM 2008, High Availability, Live Migration, volume snapshot, events, Windows Server 2008 R2
Virtualization: desktop to datacenter: It's been a while since I've posted a blog ... but that one really caused a stir in the Virt circles in the Bay Area. Hopefully it doesn't mean I can't hit up those people for Sharks tickets. I've stumbled across some interesting items that I wanted to share with you. Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack 2009 R2 is now available. The big thing is support for Windows 7. Read the blog here. Here's an excerpt: On the server side, the latest is from Gartner Symposium in Orlando. Gartner announced their top 10 strategic technologies for 2010. Not surprisingly, virtualization is named or underlying several of the strategic technologies. And speaking of, Gartner also shared data on server virtualization adoption today and forecasted through 2012. Read this article. Here's an excerpt: Along those lines, I had a great email exchange a couple weeks ago with Steve at PoundHost in Maidenhead, UK. I was giving a presentation at IP Expo / VM Expo conference in London, and wanted to highlight PoundHost's business results since switching to Hyper-V and System Center away from VMware tools, and since PoundHost has deployed the Dynamic Datacenter Tookit for hosters. PoundHost has a very compelling story of how technology can really help a business transform itself and create new opportunities. The Microsoft case study doesn't really do it justice. Here's some of what Steve shared with me: Read More...
Posted 20 October 09 10:54 by porourke | 3 Comments
Filed under Hyper-V, Disaster Recovery, System Center Virtual Machine Manager, ESX, VMWare, Microsoft Asset Inventory Service, Application Virtualization, Microsoft Application Virtualization, System Center, Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack, virtualization management, VDI, Management tools, VMM 2008, Cloud Computing, Live Migration, Windows Server 2008 R2
Guest Post: All Eyes on SteelEye with DataKeeper Support for Hyper-V: Hi all, My name is Dave Bermingham and I’m the director of Windows product management for SteelEye Technology, a provider of business continuity and disaster recovery solutions. I’d like to thank Microsoft’s Virtualization team for the opportunity to guest blog on SteelEye’s continued support for Hyper-V as well as exciting new features coming in support of Hyper-V on Windows Server 2008 R2. I can’t believe it is almost a year ago since I demonstrated SteelEye DataKeeper Cluster Edition at the Microsoft Virtualization Launch event in Bellevue, WA. In the past year we have seen the interest in our Hyper-V disaster recovery products increase dramatically and with the recent release of Windows Server 2008 R2, I believe we have just seen the tip of the iceberg! SteelEye’s mission is to “Replicate Any Data, Protect Any Application.” We pride ourselves on our commitment to provide the Windows marketplace with flexible, scalable and cost-effective solutions that are enterprise-grade yet customizable for any size business. Most recently SteelEye identified an opportunity to extend Microsoft’s Windows Server 2008 Failover Clustering (WSFC) by delivering SteelEye DataKeeper Cluster Edition, a real-time data replication solution that integrates seamlessly with WSFC to enable multi-site clusters while eliminating the single point of failure traditionally associated with shared storage resources. A comprehensive and cost-effective disaster recovery solution, DataKeeper Cluster Edition helps supports improved productivity and availability of your Hyper-V VMs. Read More...
Posted 20 August 09 05:10 by porourke | 2 Comments
Filed under Hyper-V, Disaster Recovery, virtualization, Interop, High Availability, Live Migration, VSS, guest blog post, Windows Server 2008 R2
Live Migration and Host Clustering available at no charge in Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2: 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. Read More...
Posted 20 April 09 11:13 by porourke | 20 Comments
Filed under Windows Virtualization, Hyper-V, Disaster Recovery, virtualization, System Center Virtual Machine Manager, System Center, virtualization management, Management tools, VMM 2008, Windows Server 2008, High Availability, Live Migration
Kroll Factual Data: 85% virtualized, 30:1 VM density: You may have never heard of Kroll Factual Data. But ever since personal credit became harder to acquire, lenders held tighter to their money, and interest rates went up/down like a roller coaster, Kroll has been on a wild ride of their own. In short, Read More...
Posted 20 April 09 04:59 by porourke | 1 Comments
Filed under Virtual Server, Hyper-V, Kroll, Disaster Recovery, virtualization, System Center Virtual Machine Manager, Management tools, .NET, Windows Server 2008, Cloud Computing, Visual Studio, events
Series on virtualizing SharePoint: The Microsoft-UK services team recently posted an in-depth virtualizing SharePoint series. It is a culmination of their experiences over the last couple years helping customers successfully host SharePoint in virtualized environments. · Introduction · Optimizing the performance of a virtualized SharePoint environment · SharePoint server role recommendations in the virtualized SharePoint environment · Monitoring and managing a virtualized SharePoint environment · High availability and disaster recovery, deployment best practices, common mistakes and summary This is fantastic guidance for those organisations currently running, or thinking of running SharePoint in virtualized environments. Enjoy! Read More...
Posted 06 April 09 07:20 by porourke | 5 Comments
Filed under Windows Virtualization, Hyper-V, virtual machine, Disaster Recovery, virtualization, Management, System Center, virtualization management, Windows Server 2008, High Availability, Quick Migration
Guest Post: Virtual Eggs in One Virtualization Basket?: Hi, my name is Dave Demlow and I am the Chief Technology Officer at Double-Take Software. Double-Take Software has been a leading provider of data replication and failover technologies for Microsoft Windows Server and applications going all the way back to Windows NT 3.51. So like many of you, we’ve seen many changes in the role that Windows Servers play in the enterprise and in the increased requirements for the availability and protection of Windows-based workloads. Hyper-V will accelerate those changes but at the same time make it much easier and more cost effective than ever to provide those higher levels of availability to an even broader range of workloads. As Jeff Woolsey highlighted so well in his post on Hyper-V Quick Migration, “Virtualization actually creates a major problem: single point of failure.” And if the problem with that isn’t crystal clear,” If that virtualization server goes down and I don’t have a HA solution in place, I will lose my job.” The hypervisor is only one of many possible points of failure to be concerned with. If the shared storage in a Hyper-V cluster is unavailable due to a site failure, power failure or corruption, ALL of your workloads that rely on that storage or site will also be down. Fortunately, Windows Server 2008 provides two enabling technologies, Hyper-V and Failover Clustering, that when used with 3rd party products such as our GeoCluster for Windows or Double-Take for Windows software can create clusters of Hyper-V servers that offer redundancy through replicated storage. Optionally, these can be geographically dispersed to maintain availability of virtualized workloads even when entire sites or datacenters are inoperative also providing for off-site disaster recovery. These are sometimes referred to as “multi-site” or “stretched” clusters and our customers often simply refer to them by our brand name GeoCluster. Read More...
Posted 27 January 09 06:43 by porourke | 1 Comments
Filed under Virtual Server, Windows Virtualization, Hyper-V, virtual machine, Disaster Recovery, virtualization, Management, cross-platform management, Windows Server 2008, High Availability, Quick Migration
DPM for data backup/recovery of virtualized apps and environments: We want to congratulate the Microsoft Storage Solutions team for releasing Service Pack 1 for System Center Data Protection Manager 2007. SP1 for DPM 2007 brings some great new capabilities for protecting Hyper-V environments (as well as ESX Server). Most notably, of course, is the ability to protect guests within Hyper-V environments, often without downtime (for those guests running a Windows operating system that supports VSS). Also new for DPM with SP1 is the ability to run the DPM server on the Hyper-V host itself, so that the DPM server can protect the guests from the host viewpoint, within the same physical server - to disk, to tape and even to the cloud. And unlike other (shall-not-be-named) virtualization platforms’ backup mechanisms, DPM does not require a SAN and does not require 3rd party backup software or add-ons. It’s an all Microsoft backup and recovery solution for Microsoft’s virtualization platform. For more details on the SP1 release for DPM 2007, check out: · Bala’s executive viewpoint on DPM 2007 sp1 Read More...
Posted 13 January 09 05:47 by porourke | 1 Comments
Filed under Windows Virtualization, Hyper-V, Disaster Recovery, virtualization, Management, System Center Virtual Machine Manager, ESX, VMWare, System Center, cross-platform management, integrated virtualization, VMM 2008, Windows Server 2008, Cloud Computing
For $50,000, I could pay someone to move my virtual machines for me: The subject line will make sense in a moment. It's a quote from a customer in Australia ... and pretty funny, too. But before that, a few items crossed my inbox that I thought I'd share: Software vendor AspenTech has a process engineering/manufacturing application called aspenONE. Today they announced that their customer BASF deployed aspenONE using Microsoft App-V. I found this interesting for a few reasons. One, I've participated in conversations about whether enterprise customers would deploy 3rd-party apps running on App-V/SoftGrid without some sort of application certification program/logo for App-V. Second, BASF runs large, complex chemical process simulations - and now they're doing so as a network service. I know these sorts of computer-aided engineering apps often times get computed on HPC clusters; but never did I think they'd then get streamed at sufficient speed to the desktop using application virtualization. Along the lines of App-V, J.C. over at the App-V blog noted some new downloads. Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.5 security configuration wizard. Download here. Microsoft Application Virtualization best practices anayzer. Download here. J.C. wrote last week that App-V 4.5 for Terminal Services license will be available Nov. 1. Read more here. Adam over at TechNet Edge just posted a video interview with the authors of "Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V Unleashed." I mentioned Rand's and Jeff's book a couple weeks ago. I had the opportunity to meet Rand/Jeff last week while they were up here in Redmond. Rand spoke to a bunch of us about Convergent's business, and set us straight that applications (Exchange, Sharepoint) and solutions such as disaster recovery and compliance are driving his customers' infrastructure purchases (e.g., Windows Server, Hyper-V, System Center) ... not the other way around. Here's a link to Jeff's blog. Read More...
Posted 06 October 08 10:47 by porourke | 5 Comments
Filed under Windows Virtualization, Hyper-V, virtual machine, Disaster Recovery, virtualization, ESX, SoftGrid, Application Virtualization, Microsoft Application Virtualization, System Center, BASF, virtualization management, Windows Server 2008
Disaster Recovery – not a nightmare with virtualization: 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. Read More...
Posted 03 April 08 11:53 by porourke | 6 Comments
Filed under Hyper-V, Kroll, virtual machine, Disaster Recovery, virtualization

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