Windows Virtualization Team Blog

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

Bare metal hypervisor is here, along with new training, services

"Bare metal" was my attempt at being dramatic ;-) Anyway, I really wanted you to know that the standalone hypervisor, Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008, was released today for download. This is the no-cost, bare metal hypervisor. Think ESXi, but with Windows and not Linux. More on this in a bit. Today we also announced new virtualization training and certification program. You're qualified to take this training if you have Windows Server experience. Get more info here; I'm told the cost for training is dependent on the country, but generally ranges from US $90-$130. Click here if you need the currency conversion rate. Before I get back to Hyper-V Server 2008 (and yes, it's different than Windows Server 2008 server core with Hyper-V), today's announcement also said that System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 will be released in a few weeks. The word is: "by end of October", and "there's still some more fine tuning and quality checks to do with early adopter customers." So net-net, SCVMM won't be released next week as announced here, but a couple weeks after. So what exactly is Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008? Following are some bits I've collected that you might not Read More...

by porourke | 11 Comments

VMworld is over, but the facts remain

I’ve been to Las Vegas too many times to count and have always left with good stories, but I never thought that my best Vegas story would be work-related. That story of course is about last week’s marketing activity at VMworld. Definitely not your typical day at the office. While I have enjoyed the headlines (My Favorite: Microsoft attacks VMware with Poker Chips), the speculation as to what transpired has been most amusing to me. Unfortunately, I have to disappoint all those Oliver-Stone-like conspiracy theorists out there. Sorry, but Las Vegas Police were never called to the scene. Nor were we escorted out. We didn’t even attract the eye of hotel staff or security. Sorry! More than anything, I am glad that the right tone came through and loved hearing that it was “Great to see”, “Relevant and unexpected”, and “Pretty hilarious”. I couldn’t help but eavesdrop when I saw attendees share the collateral with a friend or hear someone chatting about it during the conference. The street team did a great job, and the marketing effort exceeded expectations (3,800 cards in <90 minutes, 25+ articles/blogs, 15,000+ visits and 175,000+ hits to www.VMwareCostsWayTooMuch.com in 7 days, and multiple tough questions on TCO to Paul Maritz). And, yes, that’s more visits to the site than attendees at VMworld! The site and the on-the-ground activity were part of our marketing/PR efforts at VMworld and designed to cut through the noise (over 200 press announcements in 3 days) with one, simple message: Microsoft offers a better TCO than VMware. Read More...

by porourke | 4 Comments

Guest Post: Why Microsoft and Hyper-V for HostBasket

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. Read More...

by porourke | 2 Comments