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By now you might have seen that VMware ESX 3.5 update 2 has passed the Microsoft Server Virtualization Validation Program. They announced it here.
today announced it has qualified its industry-leading VMware ESX hypervisor under the Microsoft Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP). VMware ESX 3.5 update 2 (ESX 3.5u2) is the first hypervisor to be listed under the program, providing VMware customers who run Windows Server and Microsoft applications with access to cooperative support from Microsoft and VMware.
Of course we all read that VMware only agreed to participate in SVVP a couple weeks ago, around the time we announced expanded technical support for 31 server applications running on validated hypervisors. Congrats to them for achieving a validated configuration so quickly. ESX 3.5 update 2 now joins Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V as being validated to run Windows Server and associated Microsoft server applications. And now that ESX 3.5 has passed SVVP, VMware customers will join Novell customers as receiving cooperative technical support (if there's a support policy in place, and the customer is running the validated configuration) for Microsoft software running in/on their virtualization software.
I'd expect to see other hypervisors pass the SVVP soon. There are 7 vendors now committed to participate in SVVP, the newest addition being Unisys.
Patrick
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Filed under: Citrix, ESX, Hyper-V, Interop, virtual machine, virtualization, VMWare, Windows Server 2008, Windows Virtualization, XEN Virtual Server, Sun
Today’s post is from Kathy Davies one of the excellent Hyper-V technical writers. Enjoy! Here is some preliminary documentation on planning for backing up Hyper-V VMs. It will eventually be made part of our Planning and Deployment guide on
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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.
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Filed under: Application Virtualization, Community, Enterprise Strategy Group, Hyper-V, Management, Management tools, Mark Bowker, Microsoft Application Virtualization, SoftGrid, System Center, virtual machine, Virtual PC, virtualization, virtualization management, VMM 2008, System Center Virtual Machine Manager, integrated virtualization
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.
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Today we announced some changes to server application licensing and support policies related to running MS server apps on top of anyone's hypervisor. Several folks have written or blogged about it, here are some:
Chris Wolf (Burton Group)
Virtualization.info
NetworkWorld
Windows IT Pro
Thoughts on application mobility licensing
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Filed under: Application Virtualization, ESX, Hyper-V, Interop, Management, Novell, System Center, virtual machine, virtualization, VMWare, Windows Server 2008, Windows Virtualization, XEN Virtual Server, Sun
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.
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Filed under: Community, ESX, Hyper-V, Management tools, virtual machine, virtualization, VMWare, Windows Server 2008, Windows Virtualization, XEN Virtual Server, Virtual Server, integrated virtualization
Hi, my name is Stephen Nichols, VP of sales and marketing for SoftCom Technology Consulting, which is the company behind MyHosting.com, a leading global provider of affordable web, email and application hosting. We have been actively engaged with Microsoft technologies since we began in the hosting industry back in 1997. We are part of Gold Certified Partner program with competencies in Data Management Solutions, Information Worker Solutions, Mobility Solutions and Networking Infrastructure Solutions. Based on our strength and experience in shared hosting we see the greatest opportunity for growth is to build new solutions on this foundation. The development of these solutions will be customer requirement driven and need to be delivered cost effectively and on demand.
The best prospect for future profits is to move beyond commoditized hosting of simple websites sold on large amounts of storage, bandwidth and email addresses. To future proof our business we have begun to offer unique solutions backed by exceptional support. As part of our process to find and develop tools and strategies to differentiate our services in the market, our entire organization was keen to implement some form of Virtual Server Hosting.
In the words of our Operations Manager: “Modern computer systems are extremely powerful, 4 socket, quad core CPUs, these systems are able to support many gigabytes of memory and storage. Running one operating system and a single application on these type of machines would be inefficient. By using virtualization technology, we can consolidate multiple physical servers onto one physical machine.”
We have already implemented virtualization technology within our infrastructure for our internal server needs and saw that server consolidation allows us to have smaller footprint and a lower cost of ownership. Fewer physical servers reduce power consumption both by servers and by the cooling infrastructure, lowering costs and at the same time making our solution “greener”. The next step was to build hosting solution that could take advantage of virtualization technology to provide our customers the tools they need to run their businesses. As not all virtualization platforms are created equally we took our time to find the best fit.
At the end of the day the clear choice for us was to go with Microsoft’s Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V platform. Some of the key factors we evaluated include the following.
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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:
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Filed under: Citrix, ESX, Hyper-V, Interop, Management tools, Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Tool, System Center, virtual machine, virtualization management, Virtuallization Solution Accelerators, VMM 2008, VMWare, Windows Server 2008, System Center Virtual Machine Manager
Greetings! Chris Steffen here again from Kroll Factual Data. I want to share some thoughts on what I have heard about Microsoft virtualization in the enterprise data center. I will also be the first to admit that I am not the average user of Microsoft’s
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Quick note: The update will be classified as a "recommended update", which means it will flow down automatically according to the settings you’ve selected if you’re running Windows Server 2008. It’s also being released to Windows Server Update Services.
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Daniel asked about the Linux integration components for Hyper-V. They've now reached RC2 status according to Mike Sterling, and are available from http://connect.microsoft.com/
Hang on – did you say RC2?
Due to customer feedback from the beta version, we added a couple of additional features.
· Mouse Support: Support for the synthetic mouse device has been added in beta. This new mouse support allows the mouse to move in and out of the window without having to use the CTRL-ALT-LEFTARROW key command to break out.
· Fastpath Boot Support: Support for faster single disk configurations has been added to the RC2 release. Boot devices now take advantage of the storage VSC to provide enhanced performance.
We’ve reached RTM on the hypercall adapter, Linux implementation of VMBus, and the network and storage VSC.
Patrick
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As many of you know, the much-anticipated Hyper-V hypervisor feature was just released last week. Many of the IT professionals like you have now began to use Hyper-V server virtualization technology to take back the control of your datacenter. With energy
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My name is Ronald Beekelaar. I'm a Microsoft MVP of Virtual Machine Technology, based in Amsterdam. I have my own consultancy firm, and since 2002 I focus on virtualization. At first, this was strictly VMware-oriented, but a few years later this included Microsoft's virtualization products as well.
Since the first public beta of Hyper-V more than a year ago, I have done many presentations about Hyper-V at various events, and talked to a lot of customers about transitioning to Hyper-V. The people I talk to can be divided into two groups: they either have experience with Microsoft Virtual PC and Virtual Server, or they only know the VMware products and are just now looking into Hyper-V. However, for both groups, and despite very different opinions, there are five topics that always come up in discussions. Below is my list of the top-5 things you should know and understand about Hyper-V.
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Filed under: MVP Summit, Application Virtualization, ESX, Hyper-V, Management tools, Microsoft Application Virtualization, System Center, virtual machine, virtualization, virtualization management, VMM 2008, VMWare, Windows Server 2008, System Center Virtual Machine Manager
Continuing with yesterday's theme... on the first day of "Virt-Mas" my true love brought to me - 3,500 BMW dealerships that will be deploying Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V later this year.
Before sharing BMW's story, I first wanted to say "thanks" to Mark and Dugie for their comments to me today. And Frank at QLogic launched a Web page today where you can learn more about their benchmark measuring QLogic HBA and Hyper-V performance. Their results surpass VMware's May 2008 test, which may surprise some people. Now onto BMW ...
Unless you read German and troll the German newswires, you probably missed Microsoft's news release on a project that BMW is deploying to 3,500 dealerships around the world built on the Windows platform. I don't speak German ["Ich spreche nicht Deutsch"], but a colleague in MS-Germany translated the announcement for me. Following is a translation of some of the news release:
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It’s Christmas in July… As you may have heard, Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V was released today, and is now available to download . July 8 th will mark Hyper-V’s Release to Windows Update . You may remember when we released the first Hyper-V beta , it was
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