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Update: More than recession: IDC's server virtualization tracker report: Update : The folks at IDC asked that I remove this blog post until further notice. That said, do check out Roger Johnson's post . He discusses Dell PowerEdge R910 and his Hyper-V deployment at Crutchfield. I met Roger at VMworld 2009. He's a VCP, having Read More...
Posted 27 October 09 05:24 by porourke | 0 Comments
Filed under Hyper-V, virtualization, ESX, VMWare, System Center, Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack, virtualization management, XenServer, Visual Studio, Windows Server 2008 R2, Microsoft Hyper-V Server
Virtualization Review's hypervisor test: The other day, Virtualization Review published a comparative performance test of three hypervisors: VMware ESX 3.5, Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer. You can see it here. NOTE - there are few independent, published performance reviews of hypervisors because including ESX in the review without VMware's permission violates the VMware EULA about posting benchmarks. Amongst reviewers, this EULA restriction is well-known as serves as a deterrent. Rick Vanover and his editor, Keith Ward, deserve kudos for securing VMware approval for the performance comparison without jeopardizing journalistic integrity. Way to go! OK, back to Rick Vanover's test. His test objectives: All the hypervisors offer essentially the same base functionality. In this series of tests, the objective was to put the same workloads on each one and see how they stack up. The types of workloads tested varied, to simulate a typical environment in which some virtual machines (VMs) are stressed, and some aren't. Each platform was subjected to the same test plan parameters, to give a fair accounting of their performance. Read about the comparison parameters, test environment and caveats. The results will be surprising (in a "man bites dog" sort of way) to many. Read More...
Posted 09 March 09 09:09 by porourke | 5 Comments
Filed under Hyper-V, virtual machine, virtualization, ESX, VMWare, Citrix, XenServer, Windows Server 2008
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...
Posted 21 February 09 06:30 by porourke | 4 Comments
Filed under Hyper-V, virtual machine, virtualization, Management, System Center Virtual Machine Manager, ESX, VMWare, Application Virtualization, Microsoft Application Virtualization, System Center, Interop, virtualization management, VDI, Citrix, Management tools, XenServer, Windows Server 2008, Cloud Computing, Visual Studio, Live Migration, Red Hat, XenApp
The Validated Hypervisor: By now you might have seen that VMware ESX 3.5 update 2 has passed the Microsoft Server Virtualization Validation Program. They announced it here. today announced it has qualified its industry-leading VMware ESX hypervisor under the Microsoft Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP). VMware ESX 3.5 update 2 (ESX 3.5u2) is the first hypervisor to be listed under the program, providing VMware customers who run Windows Server and Microsoft applications with access to cooperative support from Microsoft and VMware. Of course we all read that VMware only agreed to participate in SVVP a couple weeks ago, around the time we announced expanded technical support for 31 server applications running on validated hypervisors. Congrats to them for achieving a validated configuration so quickly. ESX 3.5 update 2 now joins Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V as being validated to run Windows Server and associated Microsoft server applications. And now that ESX 3.5 has passed SVVP, VMware customers will join Novell customers as receiving cooperative technical support (if there's a support policy in place, and the customer is running the validated configuration) for Microsoft software running in/on their virtualization software. I'd expect to see other hypervisors pass the SVVP soon. There are 7 vendors now committed to participate in SVVP, the newest addition being Unisys. Patrick Read More...
Posted 03 September 08 03:00 by porourke | 5 Comments
Filed under Windows Virtualization, Hyper-V, virtual machine, virtualization, ESX, VMWare, Interop, Citrix, XenServer, Sun, Windows Server 2008
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...
Posted 19 August 08 11:01 by porourke | 10 Comments
Filed under Windows Virtualization, Hyper-V, virtual machine, virtualization, Management, ESX, VMWare, Application Virtualization, System Center, Interop, XenServer, Sun, Novell, Windows Server 2008
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...
Posted 28 July 08 11:53 by porourke | 2 Comments
Filed under Virtual Server, Windows Virtualization, Hyper-V, virtual machine, virtualization, Community, ESX, VMWare, Management tools, integrated virtualization, XenServer, Windows Server 2008

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