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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...
Posted 15 February 09 09:00 by porourke | 31 Comments
Filed under Windows Virtualization, Hyper-V, Kroll, virtual machine, virtualization, Management, System Center Virtual Machine Manager, SoftGrid, Application Virtualization, System Center, virtualization management, cross-platform management, Management tools, Interop Vendor Alliance, Novell, Windows Server 2008, Red Hat, SVVP
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...
Posted 27 January 09 06:43 by porourke | 1 Comments
Filed under Virtual Server, Windows Virtualization, Hyper-V, virtual machine, Disaster Recovery, virtualization, Management, cross-platform management, Windows Server 2008, High Availability, Quick Migration
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...
Posted 13 January 09 05:47 by porourke | 1 Comments
Filed under Windows Virtualization, Hyper-V, Disaster Recovery, virtualization, Management, System Center Virtual Machine Manager, ESX, VMWare, System Center, cross-platform management, integrated virtualization, VMM 2008, Windows Server 2008, Cloud Computing
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...
Posted 19 November 08 07:28 by porourke | 2 Comments
Filed under Windows Virtualization, Hyper-V, virtual machine, Management, System Center Virtual Machine Manager, System Center, virtualization management, cross-platform management, Management tools, integrated virtualization, VMM 2008, Windows Server 2008

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