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Upcoming Webcasts on Best Practices for Virtualizing MS Server Applications
We’ve got some great webcasts coming up in the next few weeks to discuss recommendations for virtualizing MS server applications and the benefits of choosing hyper-V + System Center as your virtualization solution. Each technical webcast will focus on Read More...
Announcing the availability of the updated Infrastructure Planning and Design Guides for Virtualization and System Center
Microsoft has a comprehensive portfolio of technologies when it comes to Virtualization ranging from Presentation Virtualization with Remote Desktop Services to Server Virtualization using Hyper-V with many more in between as below. · Server Hardware Read More...
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...
Windows Server 2008 R2 Core: Introducing SCONFIG.
Virtualization Nation, It's been very busy in the world of Windows Server. With the launch of Windows Server 2008 R2 Release Candidate, Tech Ed and the announcement of several new Hyper-V R2 capabilities such as 64 logical processor support and processor Read More...
Server & Tools Business Exec to discuss state of IT, answer your questions on June 23
On Tuesday, June 23rd from 10:30am – 11:00am (PDT), you're invited to join a teleconference with Bob Kelly, corporate VP of Infrastructure Server Marketing. Bob will talk about the state of IT within the context of results from a new Harris Interactive study. The study, of 1,200 IT professionals from the U.S., United Kingdom, Japan and Germany, was commissioned by Microsoft’s Server & Tools Business. There will be time for your questions following the brief presentation. Submit questions over the phone or you can submit them at any time leading up to, or during, the teleconference by tweeting with the Twitter hashtag, #qs4ms. If you are interested in attending, please REGISTER NOW. Once you open the invite box, you can save and close to your calendar. Read More...
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...
System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 beta available
Exciting news for Windows Server Hyper-V, System Center, and VMWare customers. The beta of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 is now available on the Microsoft Connect site for download . If you don't already have access to VMM on the Connect Read More...
System Center Ops Manager management pack for Hyper-V
A quick note that a beta of the Hyper-V management pack for System Center Operations Manager (2007, 2007 R2) is available. In combination with SCVMM (for advanced monitoring of VMs across your Hyper-V, ESX and Virtual Server environments), this SCOM management pack enables health/perf monitoring of the Hyper-V host. The management pack includes health diagram view of virtual machines, virtual components roll-up per host, critical Hyper-V Service monitoring, disk space threshold monitoring. This beta management pack supports the following OS only (for now): § Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition (Full Installation with Hyper-V Role enabled) § Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition (Full Installation with Hyper-V Role enabled) § Windows Server 2008 Datacenter Edition (Full Installation with Hyper-V Role enabled) To request an invitation to access this beta, you can send a message to the following address: MPCC@microsoft.com Read More...
Microsoft customers showcased at VMworld Europe 2009
This week at VMworld Europe 2009 we're showcasing a number of European customers who have deployed Windows Server Hyper-V, System Center and App-v 4.5. You can watch two videos below. One is of Bouygues Construction based in France. Bouygues does civil engineering, electrical contracting, and maintenance, employs 51,100 people and operates in more than 80 countries. This video is in French with English subtitles, and includes discussion of their Hyper-V and SCVMM deployment on Dell servers with EMC storage. 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...
Microsoft and Red Hat Cooperative Technical Support
Hi, I’m Mike Neil, general manager of virtualization at Microsoft. It’s been a while since I’ve blogged here, but today’s post is worth a read. Ever since we released Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and Terminal Services, System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 and Microsoft App-V 4.5 last year, customers and partners have been getting huge value from server consolidation projects, have been able to increase business continuity at much lower costs than with VMware, and have decreased the time and cost required to deliver applications to end users. And while doing this, they’ve been able to use a familiar set of system management tools for both their virtualized and non-virtualized systems and applications across the datacenter and desktops. In fact, Chris from Kroll Factual Data wrote about his DR project on this blog last year. So in many ways I’m pleased that we’ve been able to help so many customers and partners break down the barriers to enterprise-wide virtualization. But until today there’s been one barrier, not product related, that we haven’t been able to overcome to meet customer and partner demand: the ability to run and support Red Hat Enterprise Linux within a guest VM on WS08 Hyper-V and Hyper-V Server 2008. For all of those who have emailed me, my colleagues and your Microsoft account teams and partners, I’m pleased to say that today is the first big step to delivering that support. Microsoft and Red Hat recently signed agreements to test and validate our server operating systems running on each other’s hypervisors. Customers with valid support agreements will be able to run these 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. You can see Red Hat’s news release here, and watch a public webcast [live and archived] discussing this news. Read More...
Microsoft and EMC renew their (virtualization) vows
Big happenings in NYC yesterday as SteveB and EMC's CEO Joe Tucci met with a room-full of IT execs to talk about an extended 3-year alliance. The announcement is here. In short, the companies are going to work more closely together in the areas of data loss prevention, collaboration and virtualization. What's that you say? EMC - 80% owner of VMware - working more closely with Microsoft around virtualization? Here's an excerpt from the joint announcement: Microsoft offers one of the fastest-growing and most cost-effective virtualization solutions from the desktop to the datacenter, including the ability to manage both physical and virtual environments from a centralized management console. EMC’s technology solutions enable storage, protection and management of information in Microsoft virtualized environments including Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Microsoft System Center, and jointly supported mission-critical workloads such as Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft SharePoint Server. EMC Consulting’s Application Practice, a thousand-person strong team with deep Microsoft knowledge, provides expertise in assessing, planning and implementing Microsoft’s technologies in a wide array of virtualization solutions. That's all well and good - 1,000 EMC consultants trained on WS08 Hyper-V, System Center and key Microsoft applications that will be virtualized. But can those 1,000 consultants really look past VMware? Read More...
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...
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...
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