Windows Virtualization Team Blog

Guest post: Moving VM automation and inventory beyond Excel files

Hi, I’m John Suit, CTO and principal founder of Fortisphere, which is a member of the Microsoft Startup Accelerator Program. In this tough economy, the cost savings of virtualization are driving faster adoption – and the introduction of Microsoft Hyper-V is exposing more companies, large and small, to the benefits of this deceptively simple technology. In fact, from what we’ve seen, the scale of deployments has grown tremendously in the past year. When we did market research a year ago, people were calling their 90-VM environments “large.” Today, similar-sized deployments are “really, not very big.” Today, 300-400 VMs are commonplace, with a mix of Microsoft Hyper-V and others platforms running together. So, the deployment of VMs has become nearly routine. But, with scale, another problem has emerged: management of the environments. Today, we mostly see folks provisioning VMs and mostly ignoring them until someone calls with a problem, at which point they scramble to prove that the virtual infrastructure is not to blame. Inventories of VM are either kept in Excel files or outsourced to teams of inventory-keepers. Change alerting, reclamation of idle VMs, and a whole bunch of other functions are untouched, as most folks are too busy with provisioning and troubleshooting. Read More...

by porourke | 0 Comments

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...

by porourke | 1 Comments

New VDI, Management Technology Announced

A few items to call out. First up is Manlio's post about the renaming of Terminal Services - it'll be known as Remote Desktop Services in Windows Server 2008 R2 -- and the new VDI features. Second, over at the System Center team blog, Paul announced the beta of System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2. Check out the video with Barry Shilmover. Last item is a recent CRN magazine interview with Microsoft GM Mike Neil (who's blogged here before). It's about 6 minutes long. Read More...

by porourke | 2 Comments

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 RTMs and what I’m hearing from customers and partners about Microsoft’s virtualization solutions

I’m Zane Adam, sr. director of virtualization strategy here in Redmond at Microsoft. I’m writing today to announce the exciting news that we’ve released to manufacturing (RTM’d) System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 and to talk a bit about its critical Read More...

by porourke | 16 Comments

Guest post: IU Hoosier virtualizes 75% of workloads - saving time and money with System Center, PowerShell, and Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V

Hi, I’m Janssen Jones, and I’m the Associate Director of Auxiliary IT Infrastructure at Indiana University. Since April, my team has been evaluating the beta of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 (SCVMM) as part of the SCVMM Technology Adoption Read More...

by porourke | 3 Comments

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...

by porourke | 5 Comments

MS Hyper-V Server: in 30 days for $0

The show begins in 10 hours, but the news it out: Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008, a new hypervisor-based server virtualization product (like ESXi), will be released within 30 days and be available at no cost via the Web Microsoft will demonstrate live migration feature of Windows Server 2008 R2. And the next version of Microsoft Hyper-V Server (the one after 2008) will have live migration capabilities. System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 will be released within 30 days [not a surprise], which will manage Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2, Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 or VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3 Microsoft’s global server OEM partners ... report that nearly 100% of their customers who order Windows Server 2008 with hardware are also choosing to have Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V included with their order. Dedicated virtualization lab established within the Microsoft Enterprise Engineering Center. The keynote will be shown here in the morning [noon EDT]: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/events/virtualization/default.mspx Patrick Read More...

by porourke | 5 Comments

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...

by porourke | 2 Comments

Thoughts on today's virtualization licensing and support news

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 Read More...

by porourke | 8 Comments

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 beta has arrived

Hi - this is Hector Linares, I am a Program Manager on the team that built System Center Virtual Machine Manager. I'm happy to report that we released the feature complete public beta of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 (formerly known as vNext) today! We've heard a lot of great feedback from customers and partners since SCVMM 2007 was released last September which we took into account for this beta release. Let's just say, the product has come a long way. With this release, Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) 2008 supports managing Virtual Server 2005 R2, Hyper-V and VMware ESX from a single console. Rakesh hit on a few other features and key themes for VMM 2008 here. Read More...

by porourke | 11 Comments

MS Management Summit sightings - VMware and Kidaro

I arrived into Vegas (baby!) today for 3 days spread across Microsoft Management Summit and Interop Las Vegas 2008. And the conferences couldn't have been timed better as it was pooring rain when I left SeaTac and sunny and hot (for me) upon arrival in Vegas. The highlight so far (the night is young as they say) was the show floor in which I ran into a couple guys from Kidaro working in the Microsoft booth. That's a good sign and hope the acquisition will close soon. I really think Microsoft's desktop presence and understanding, along with SoftGrid, TS with Calista Technologies' built in and the Kidaro technology will really help reshape the desktop virtualization landscape. It'll be interesting to see how it develops. Anyway, here's a shot of the two gents from Kidaro. Welcome aboard! Also on the show floor, and I think this is a first, I saw VMware. I don't recall ever seeing them at a Microsoft show. I'll have to stop by tomorrow as I'm interested to hear more about the Thinstall acquisition and Lifecycle Manager. I didn't have a chance today. Here's a photo. Read More...

by porourke | 2 Comments

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...

by porourke | 0 Comments