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More on today's announcement with NetApp
We published some news today with NetApp; see here. In short, Microsoft and NetApp... today announced a new three-year agreement that deepens product collaboration and technical integration, and extends joint sales and marketing activities to customers worldwide. Under the new agreement, the two companies will collaborate and deliver technology solutions that span virtualization, private cloud computing, and storage and data management, enabling customers to increase data center management efficiencies, reduce costs, and improve business agility. As NetApp's partner site states, we'll work with NetApp to sell/market disaster recovery solutions using NetApp HA and DR storage with Hyper-V and System Center. There's a sample customer blueprint (.pdf) here with datacenter configs. And there's datacenter consolidation solutions, which are discussed in this white paper (here). Read More...
City of Frisco (Texas) saves big with Hyper-V and NetApp
A great example of why companies are adopting virtualization and the resulting benefits can be seen in Texas, at the City of Frisco. The city, one of the fastest growing in America, needed to scale a siloed IT infrastructure to accommodate data growth of 200-300% year. Check out this NetApp blog to learn how the City’s move toward virtualization resulted in substantial savings and maximized uptime for Exchange, SharePoint, and other apps. Also don’t miss the Microsoft and NetApp live webcast on Thursday, December 3 at 11am Pacific/2pm Eastern: Virtualize with Microsoft and NetApp: Consolidate and Increase Uptime with Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and NetApp. City of Frisco Enterprise Technology Manager Tim Yarbrough will join the discussion to talk about his environment and Windows Server 2008 R2 upgrade. Read More...
Visual Studio Lab Management 2010 beta 2
Hello, this is Bryon Surace again. I’m a senior program manager on the Windows virtualization team at Microsoft. Recently, the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 beta 2 became available for public download. Part of this release is the Beta 2 version of Visual Studio Team System 2010 Lab Management; an integrated solution to give you all the benefits of virtualization for application lifecycle management. Congratulations to the Visual Studio Lab Management team for reaching this milestone! 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...
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...
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...
Re: Windows Server 2008 SP2 Hyper-V
Hi Isaac Roybal here. I’m a technical product manager on the Windows Server team covering Hyper-V. It’s been over two weeks since the release of Windows Server 2008 Service Pack 2 (SP2) and we’re seeing great adoption. From a Hyper-V point of view, we’re excited because the final Hyper-V release is an integrated feature in SP2 making it easier and faster to deploy Hyper-V. If you recall, when Windows Server 2008 was released, Hyper-V Beta was included. This meant to get the final Hyper-V release, you needed to go to Windows Update, download and go through the update process. With Windows Server 2008 SP2, Hyper-V final bits are included so there’s no need to pull down individual downloads which speeds up deployments. There are also some notable updates in SP2, including scalability enhancements for running on systems with up to 24 logical processors which enables support for up to 192 running virtual machines, update for Hyper-V when managed with System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 and updates for backup/restore of virtual machines with the Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS). Read More...
Check out the Visual Studio Team System blog
Many of you will be interested to learn more about forthcoming lab management capabilities in Visual Studio Team System 2010. Or you may have lunch or meetings with a dev who you want to know more about VSTS 2010 Lab Management. That last part if a nod to "that darn reality" post at SharkTank. So check the VSTS Lab Management team blog. Recent posts include: Creating and working in virtual environments Application build, deploy and test automation in Lab Management Enable lab management features for existing team projects VSTS 2010 beta 1 is released Patrick Read More...
HP releases Insight Control suite for Microsoft System Center
Hello - I’m Zane Adam, senior director of System Center and Virtualization marketing at Microsoft. I wanted to share some exciting news related to Microsoft’s virtualization and System Center offerings and HP’s Insight Control Suite for System Center. Read More...
VMware vSphere pricing - Meet the new price; same as the old price, only more
Hi, I'm Edwin Yuen, a Senior Technical Product Manager at Microsoft's Integrated Virtualization team. This past week, there were two key announcements made, one by Microsoft and one by VMware, that have an impact on how we compare Microsoft and VMware Read More...
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...
More on virtualizing SharePoint
Since there was interest in the previous post about the UK services team's series on virtualizing SharePoint, I wanted to recommend the following video from October 2008. The interview is with Michael Noel of Convergent Computing. Michael is also a SharePoint MVP. In this video (6 minutes long), Michael talks about using System Center Virtual Machine Manager to deploy SharePoint. He also talks about disaster recovery and quickly provisioning a SharePoint farm. There's a high interest amongst our customers to adopt SharePoint, and to run it within a virtual machine. Mark at Enterprise Strategy Group [his blog] shared the following data with me [from a Dec 2008 research brief by ESG], that partially explains why: In a recent survey of 1,191 IT and business managers, ESG found that one in three (33%) North American and Western European midmarket and enterprise companies are currently using Microsoft’s SharePoint suite of collaboration and content management tools. As adoption becomes more widespread, SharePoint is quickly becoming an organization-wide, critical business resource. As shown in Figure 1, 29% of current SharePoint users rate the implementation of SharePoint as one of their top three IT initiatives over the past 12-24 months and 82% place it in their top ten initiatives. ESG’s research also reveals that SharePoint is viewed very favorably by current users, with 69% of current adopters saying they would recommend that organizations similar to their own implement SharePoint broadly. Read More...
March 31 live web chat
On Tuesday, March 31, Microsoft's Edwin Yuen will be hosting a live web chat 11am-3pm EST. Edwin is a sr. technical product manager. Edwin came to Microsoft with the acquisition of Softricity (and the SoftGrid application virtualization technology). He now also covers Hyper-V and System Center VMM. Sign up here. Read More...
Guest post: Moving Virtualization into the Mainstream
I’d like to start this post by saying thank you to our friends at Microsoft for running my blog post here. As we’re mid-way through Virtualization Ecosystem Month (VEM), it has been exciting to see the partner support around the topic of virtualization and I encourage you to check out Microsoft’s guest post on my blog. Both AMD and Microsoft are continually asked if virtualization can really become a sustainable technology in the mainstream computing market. Skeptics are quick to point out that the technology world is littered with products that have never made it beyond the early adopter edge of the market. Names like Apple Newton, Betamax, Sega Dreamcast, and OS/2 come up in various articles and discussions about technologies that didn’t become widespread market successes. Will virtualization suffer this same fate? Is it destined to stay on the fringe? In my opinion, all indications are that virtualization is jumping the technology chasm between early adopters and the mainstream market. Recent survey results from Forrester demonstrate that firms (both large and small) are in the midst of rethinking and overhauling IT infrastructure and client systems. Virtualization is one of technologies at the center of these efforts with Forrester reporting that 54% of the enterprises and 53% of the SMBs surveyed have either implemented x86 server virtualization or plan to do so within the next 12 months—which is significant in today’s current economy. 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...
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