Windows Virtualization Team Blog

RT: Happy Data Privacy Day from System Center

porourke — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 18:45:00 GMT

As many of you are using Hyper-V to host Exchange, SQL and Sharepoint, I'm sure many of you think about backup and recovery of those workloads. If you do, then you'll be interested to read Jason's blog post in honor of Data Privacy Day, which is today if you didn't already have parties planned ;-). Jason's post asks the question "how private is your backup?" and the ways System Center Data Protection Manager 2010 can help. Here's an excerpt:

Is your data protected on Tape? Are the tapes encrypted?

It seems like a simple question, and the process is straightforward. You check the box that says “Encrypt Tapes”. But so many folks forget or choose not to. Sometimes, these kinds of settings are mandated at corporate, but seem to be forgotten by the time that the backup administrator actually is clicking the boxes.

Thankfully, DPM 2007 and DPM 2010 are PowerShell controllable. So, consider running a PowerShell script that reaches out to the list of DPM servers and setting the “Encrypt Tape” option after the fact. This way, no matter how the initial jobs are done, you can push out corporate policies to ensure that your backup tapes are private.

We covered this and several other easy PowerShell DPM management scenarios in a webcast quite a while ago at http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032353820

Patrick

SQL Server is a Great Workload to Consolidate on Microsoft Virtualization

SystemCenterTeam — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 13:51:00 GMT

Yesterday, Vipul Shah, a Senior Product Manager with the Virtualization Team, guest posted on Virtualization Planet about how Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and System Center is a great platform for running SQL Server consolidated workloads. He pointed to a newly released video by Ted Kummert, Senior Vice President, Microsoft Business Platform Division that outlines how virtualization enables consolidation.

This is exciting as we ran some performance tests against a complex stock trading application using a machine with Second Level Address Translation (SLAT) and saw good performance throughout the tests. We recently discussed in the Best Practices for SQL Server Virtualization webcast (click here) and in the SQL Server Consolidation Guidance (click here) the results of those tests, and guidance on running SQL as a virtual machine.

Take a look at the post for more details.

Kenon Owens

Product Marketing Manager

Integrated Virtualization

Hyper-V Network Command Line Tool NVSPBIND Now Available Externally

porourke — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 00:51:00 GMT

Hello all,

I’m Paul Despe and I work as a program manager on the Microsoft Hyper-V team.

Until now, Hyper-V administrators using Server Core installs of Windows Server 2008 or Microsoft Hyper-V Server were unable to enable and disable protocol bindings from the parent partition due to the lack of a graphical network control panel only available in full installs of Windows Server.

I'm pleased to announce one of our developers on the Hyper-V team, Keith Mange, recently addressed this gap with the release of his (previously Microsoft internal-only) networking tool NVSPBIND.EXE publicly on. See it here.

This command line tool gives users easier granular control over network items they want enabled for their physical NICs and helps fills a gap in troubleshooting, optimizing and hardening networking configurations on Server Core installs or Hyper-V Server.

See John Howard’s blog [here] for more details:

Paul Despe

Guest post: "Setting the Record Straight - 9 Reasons Why Hyper-V is a Great Choice for Enterprises"

porourke — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 21:21:00 GMT

Hi, my name is Chris Steffen, architect with Kroll Factual Data. You may have read one of my prior guest posts.

Recently, I came across an InformationWeek Analytics Weblog that asserted a bunch of half truths and misinformation about Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtualization solution. Usually, I can just let it go (everyone’s entitled to their own opinion, right?), but in this case, the article was so skewed and so misleading that I felt that I needed to respond.

Full disclosure – I am a Microsoft MVP for virtualization and a very happy Microsoft Hyper-V customer. Over the years, I have written about and presented many times on the topic of virtualization in general (including Hyper-V, ESX and Xen), and the benefits my company has experienced implementing the of the Microsoft virtualization solution. I certainly recognize my particular biases, but my biases originate from the ability of Microsoft’s virtualization solutions working in my enterprise environment.

In my position as a technology architect, I try to stay on top of all of the latest advances in technologies that could benefit our business. As my company is heavily invested in virtualization, I am keenly aware of the constantly changing virtualization platforms and their continued claims of superiority over each other. But some of these arguments from VMWare are just getting old. I will try to separate some of the “myths” from the reality of the debate.

1. Breadth of OS support

Myth: Hyper-V has no support / limited support for Linux.

Reality: Microsoft supports more than just the Windows server platforms, including versions of Linux from Red Hat and Novell.

VMWare claims to support 4x more OSes that Hyper-V, but what does that really mean? When Microsoft lists an OS as supported, they COMPLETELY support the actual OS installation in the VM and you can call Microsoft support on that OS. Microsoft has support agreements with Red Hat and Novell specifically for this purpose. VMware provides no support for the actual OS, telling customer to refer to the vendor. Also, many of the OSes that VMWare claims to support are only supported by the Linux community - not taking a shot at the Linux community here, but most do not have a formal support organization. This leads me to question why they would be used in an enterprise environment. Also, those Linux distributions can be run under Hyper-V, using the Linux Integration Components Microsoft has available for download and the drivers which are in the 2.6.32 Linux kernel release. In this case, customers wouldn’t be able to call Microsoft for support for the OS, but would work with the Linux community, just as they would with VMware.

2. Memory management

Myth: VMWare allows for memory over subscription and this is a good thing.

Reality: The Microsoft solution does not allow for over subscription of critical resources, but you shouldn’t do it anyway.

First, there is nothing poor about the way that Hyper-V manages memory – it works exactly as designed. It was designed with system performance and stability as the paramount priorities, whereas the VMWare solution appears to have been designed to allow a customer to cram as many instances on to the VM host as possible, regardless of the consequences.

The core of the VMWare argument is that you can somehow get “something for nothing” – that there is some kind of magic that comes with the over subscription of RAM using VMWare that is the silver bullet regarding memory management. To leverage memory management in ESX to the fullest, one would have to fully burden the host beyond the physical memory. If you don’t, you really aren’t using memory overcommit. If you do, one of the most risky uses is the disaster recovery scenario. Relying on a host to overcommit memory to support failover hosts is potentially dangerous and incorrect oversubscription leads to all VMs suffering from performance.

I would also contend that there are some instances where a company might choose to use over subscription for noncritical environments, such as a test or a dev lab. But I would not classify disaster recovery as one of those environments, and I would never over commit my VM hosts in production.

3. Security

Myth: The design of Hyper-V makes it somehow unsecure.

Reality: Hyper-V is more stable than and at least as secure as VMWare.

One of the oldest arguments in the book – one that VMWare evangelists continually bring up – is the scare tactic that there are millions of hackers trying to hack the latest version of any Windows operating systems, therefore, VMWare (or any other operating system or application) is more secure than any offering by Microsoft. While it may be true that there are versions of Windows everywhere, it is also true that no other commercially available operating systems or applications are more forthcoming about their flaws and their efforts to fix them. As far as install footprint is concerned, the total size for ESX systems after all the patches have been downloaded and applied was 45 times greater (4.0GB compared to 73 MB) than the size of the patches for a Windows Server Core system during an 18 month period. Further, if the actual number of patches is more relevant to you (as it is to me), ESX 3.5 had 168 total patches, compared to 19 for Windows Server Core (34 if you are using the complete install of Windows Server). Either way – which is more stable?

4. Live Migration

Myth: Hyper-V does not have a live migration feature.

Reality: Live migration of virtual machines was released with Hyper-V R2

One of the largest pieces of misinformation that continues to pass around the virtualization circles is that Microsoft does not have a live migration feature. Literally, at a recent VMWorld event, I stopped counting at 200 different folks who believed (or were told by someone) that this was the case. To be absolutely clear:

Microsoft Hyper-V R2 has a live migration feature!

Most of the folks from VMWare have come to accept this, so now they are touting that their LM solution is better because you can migrate multiple VMs simultaneously. While it is true that the VMWare solution can migrate multiple VMs at the same time, is this actually better?

Let’s go back to Basic Computer Architecture 101, and the example of the water pipe. There are limits to how much water you can push through a pipe at any given time, and the more taps that you add to the pipe, the longer it will take to fill up a bucket at each of the pipes. Hyper-V uses the best practice of moving a single VM as quickly as possible, using the entire bandwidth available to complete the transfer. Also, it is important to point out that without a modification of the host setting, VMWare would limit the migration to 4 VMs at a time (presumably for the same bandwidth considerations). The idea of moving 40 VMs all at the same time (as mentioned in the article) is not something that would be recommended, ever, regardless of platform.

5. VM Priority Restarts

Myth: Hyper-V does not start VMs and VM Hosts in specific order.

Reality: Hyper-V can be configured to restart with specific delay and specific order.

Some analysts are quick to point out the major differences between the virtualization solutions. This is hardly on that I would call a major difference, but this is something that Hyper-V does not have an automatic, automated solution for. That said, in practical use, Hyper-V VMs can be configured to restart on specific hosts, with specific delays allowing for prioritization (and even non-automatic restarts, for less important VMs). Also keep in mind that using the System Center suite, the Microsoft solution can Live Migrate VMs to other hosts due to situations that VMware servers cannot even monitor, such as CPU Power, Power Supply Failures, and Fibre Channel congestion.

6. Fault Tolerance.

Myth: vSphere is THE solution for high availability systems.

Reality: Read the label…

Again, this sounded a little too good to be true. First, vSphere is limited to a very small subset of the CPUs available, therefore limiting the different kind of hosts that are able to use this technology. Then, there are limits to the kind of virtual machines that can be created in vSphere to use this technology (uniprocessor VMs, limited thin disks). Then, you would need to create a second complete infrastructure for the fault tolerant environment.

There are certainly applications that you might consider putting into this kind of fault tolerant environment (Exchange and SQL Server come to mind). But you would never want these as network limited, processor starved virtual machines.

7. Hot-Adds

Myth: VMWare has Hot Add capabilities.

Reality: Hyper-V does have some hot-add support, and the VMWare solution has some limits as well.

While VMware vSphere has hot-add, it is not that ANY VM can perform Hot-Add. While you can perform a Hot Add to the VM, it is only actually useful if the Guest OS supports Hot Add to recognize the new hardware. If not, you would need to reboot the VM see the Hot Add devices, which is almost the same as simply shutting down the VM and adding it cold. Many do not, especially with Hot Add CPU and Hot Add Memory. Also, Hyper-V does support Hot-Add disk in supported VMs.

8. Third Party Vendor Support

Myth: Hyper-V lags behind VMWare for third party tools support.

Reality: Hyper-V gains third party support every day.

Which solution offers the greater support? Obviously, this is a very subjective matter. In this particular instance, there are many third party tools out there that support the VMWare solution. But those same third party companies are jumping onto the Hyper-V bandwagon every day. While VMWare may lead in quantity, it has been my personal experience that the support for the Hyper-V solution is world class, and one of the top priorities for Microsoft.

9. Maturity.

Myth: VMWare is more "mature" than Hyper-V.

Reality: vSphere is just as new as Hyper-V, and Hyper-V is very much ready for prime time.

There is really no evidence that Hyper-V is any less mature than vSphere. Regardless of the virtualization solution, an enterprise IT department will need to properly evaluate both solutions. When they do, they will find that this "maturity" issue is really a bunch of bunk, and that the solutions should be judged on their merits. Literally hundreds of companies (including mine) have embraced the Microsoft virtualization solution for our enterprise environments. No amount of disinformation from will change the fact that Hyper-V works, works well, and is a top tier (if not the top tier) virtualization solution for enterprise class environments.

10. Costs

Myth: Hyper-V is cheaper, but a lesser product.

Reality: Hyper-V IS cheaper, and is a stable, cost effective, robust and competitive virtualization solution.

Sometimes, it does come down to cost. The folks at VMWare would like you to think that you get additional bang for your buck by selecting the VMWare virtualization solution. But that is just not the case. As we have discussed with the previous 9 points, the Microsoft solution matches up with VMWare point for point. And the differences that exist between the two solutions are often a matter of interpretation of subjective analysis, not concrete facts. But despite any facts or points that you may or may not believe, even the folks at VMWare will admit (grudgingly) that the Microsoft virtualization solution and management systems cost less than the comparable VMWare solution.

Overall, it has always been one of my goals for companies to look at the benefits that a virtualization solution would bring to their enterprise environments, and there are many good solutions to choose from. I have no particular animus towards VMWare or any of the other virtualization vendors out there – quite the opposite, in fact. I believe that the competition between Microsoft, VMWare and the others makes a better end product for everyone. But I also do not believe that it makes sense to discount the abilities of any one of these vendors over the other.

As I have stated in numerous blogs previously, the best way to evaluate a virtualization solution is to get it into your environment and take it for a spin. Give Hyper-V a chance, and I think you will find that it can be a great choice for your enterprise virtualization needs.

Thanks…

Chris Steffen

Big news: Microsoft and HP team up to move IT forward

porourke — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 16:11:00 GMT

This morning Microsoft and HP announced a three-year, $250 million agreement to jointly deliver a new infrastructure-to-application model, advance cloud computing and generally reduce the costs and complexities of IT.

The press release, executive videos and other information about the agreement are available here.

This is a big commitment on the part of both companies, representing the industry’s most comprehensive technology stack integration to date. There are three main components to the agreement:

· A shared engineering roadmap to ensure strong integration between hardware and software - both on premises and in the cloud.

· Joint solutions to optimize and simplify the deployment, management and health of the datacenter.

· Investment in joint sales, service and channel partner programs

Virtualization is (of course) at the center of the partnership. New solutions based on HP Converged Infrastructure with Microsoft Hyper-V and applications will enable customers to speed up implementation time, reduce unplanned downtime, and lower network/cabling infrastructure costs. And they will help customers deliver service-based infrastructure and the foundation for cloud computing.

Together we’ll provide heterogeneous data center management solutions for virtualized environments through deep integration of HP’s Insight Software and Business Technology Optimization software with the System Center suite. You will be able to automate the provisioning, monitoring and ongoing maintenance of virtualized IT services in a mixed datacenter. We’ll simplify initial deployment, hardware monitoring and power management while providing performance optimization of HP ProLiant servers and HP BladeSystem infrastructure.

We’ll also deliver HP Virtualization Smart Bundles with Hyper-V for small- to midsize businesses that simplify the purchase, setup and maintenance of a virtualized infrastructure. These will be based on HP server, storage and networking solutions, coupled with Microsoft Windows Server and HP Insight Software. You will also be able to add System Center Essentials and HP Operations Center solutions to unify the management of hardware, OS and applications.

Over the course of the next three years the two companies will work together on joint technology to:

· Ensure storage is an integrated part of the virtual infrastructure, via in-depth management of HP storage within System Center environments.

· Enable faster virtualization deployments by repurposing direct-attached server storage into shared storage resources with the HP Virtual SAN Appliance for Hyper-V.

· Help customers implement private cloud by combining HP’s virtualization infrastructure expertise with the Microsoft Dynamic Datacenter Toolkit.

· Help mid-market customers to take control of their server, storage, networking and client devices - as well as OS and applications - from a single console. We’ll integrate core HP ProLiant management with HP Operations Center and Microsoft System Center Essentials.

· Facilitate dynamic management of virtual and physical networks by delivering support of HP Flex Fabric within Microsoft virtualization and System Center.

A big day for both companies…and for our customers and partners! Let us know what you think!

Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V iSCSI Performance Webcast

SystemCenterTeam — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 03:20:00 GMT

My friend and teammate Jim Schwartz on our Virtualization Solutions Marketing Team has asked me to post this entry about a very exciting webcast coming up, but he can describe it much better than me...

Hi, I’m Jim Schwartz, a director of virtualization solutions marketing with Microsoft in Redmond.

Over the past year we’ve seen more customers moving from basic deployment scenarios like dev/test and consolidation into more advanced deployments that take full advantage of VM mobility for high availability and site recovery. Deployment of critical business workloads shows how virtualization features like Live Migration are driving IT agility. Shared storage offers significant benefits for storage consolidation including centralized backup, ease of management, and scalability. Combining these benefits with Microsoft server virtualization delivers a powerful solution for IT customers to maximize hardware utilization in their datacenters.

In evaluation of SAN alternatives, IT Pros are increasingly finding that iSCSI meets their requirements offering a cost effective alternative to Fibre Channel. According to the Q3 09 IDC Storage Tracker, shipments of iSCSI targets are growing at 50% a year.

So advanced virtualization deployments on iSCSI shared storage provide a cost effective option to realize the benefits of virtualization. Here are the practical implications:

Windows Server 2008 R2 includes Hyper-V which means virtualization is built in as a role in the operating system. Hyper-V takes advantage of the mature protocol and driver architecture in Windows Server. The Microsoft iSCSI Software Initiator in Windows Server is a foundation for unified fabrics that use existing Ethernet infrastructure and management tools. Because the Hyper-V driver model and verification is based on Windows Server, any partner who develops and certifies iSCSI solutions for Windows Server also has products that work seamlessly with Hyper-V.

How is that working out? There is a strong ecosystem of partners who have delivered iSCSI targets that are certified with Windows Server including HP, Dell, EMC, NetApp, IBM and Hitachi Data Systems. This translates into a full range of solutions for Hyper-V delivering scale, performance and broad interoperability.

In addition to iSCSI storage target providers, advances in CPU and network acceleration from our key ecosystem partners help deliver maximum CPU efficiency. For example, the Intel Xeon 5500 processor is optimized for multi-core implementation to scale iSCSi performance. The Intel Ethernet adapter line offers advanced iSCSI and transport acceleration while using the Windows trusted iSCSI software initiator and TCP stack. Intel is also delivering industry leading 10G server adapters that support and enhance iSCSI translating into greater ease of use for Hyper-V customers.

If you’re interested in hearing more about Windows Server R2 Hyper-V, the iSCSI initiator and Intel’s iSCSI enhancements, join us for a webcast on 1/14—the speakers will provide a deep dive into the technologies and cover practical considerations. Microsoft and Intel will announce physical and virtual throughput and IOP performance numbers developed as a result of collaborative engineering efforts during the Windows Server 2008 R2 release cycle...you may be surprised at the results! Register for the webcast here.

Thank you for reading

Kenon Owens

Product Marketing Manager

Integrated Virtualization

Live Meeting for Influencers, 1.12.10 at 10:00 am PST: Moving from VMware to Microsoft

SystemCenterTeam — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 02:19:08 GMT

On Tuesday, January 12, 2010 10:00 AM-11:00 AM., we are hosting a Live Meeting presentation for System Center influencers entitled, “So you Want To Move from a VMware Infrastructure to Microsoft,” presented by Kenon Owens, Microsoft Virtualization product manager.

Please note:

This Live Meeting presentation is exclusive to members of the System Center Influencers Program. Not a member? Visit the program information page on TechNet to learn more and apply to join.
Join information is available on the System Center Influencers Program portal. Members of the program will need to log into the Connect site to access the Live Meeting join information.

Abstract:

Many customers are making the decision every day to move away from their high-priced VMware Infrastructure to a dynamic infrastructure using Microsoft’s virtualization technology. They know the quality and capabilities of Microsoft Virtualization give them the platform they need, they just don’t know how to do it. There is a way to migrate from VMware, and a coexistence strategy during the transition is essential. Hear Microsoft’s vision and guidance when moving from a VMware infrastructure to Microsoft Virtualization, and in a real-time demo, watch how Microsoft can assist you in managing both your VMware and Microsoft environments. This session is also designed to hear your feedback and get your ideas on this popular topic.

- dave //

RT "Cutting through the FUD: Facts you should know about Hyper-V and System Center"

porourke — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 07:30:00 GMT

I'm not sure the retweet tag (RT) also applies to blogs or not, but I thought I'd give it a try.

Now to my point. Edwin posted a good blog this evening about re-occurring Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt the spreads via traditional journalism or blogs. I don't know for sure, but I suspect his post had something to do with an InformationWeek blog posted by an SI partner of VMware.

I recommend reading Edwin's post. Here's a summary of his points:

You do not need to remove or replace your existing VMware installation to deploy Hyper-V
Hyper-V and the rest of Microsoft Virtualization is “Enterprise ready” for hundreds of companies today.
Virtual Machine Manager is not a replacement for vCenter
Hyper-V is a mature, safe, secure hypervisor

Have a great holiday.

Patrick

UPDATE: James also blogged about this topic, with video and picture too.

Microsoft Acquires Opalis Software

porourke — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 15:29:00 GMT

Good news for a Friday. Brad's post (with video interview) announces the acquisition of Opalis Software. Why is this important to virtualization projects? Thoughts below, but first some background on the business.

Microsoft’s Server and Tools Business (STB) is a $14.1 billion business.

Within STB, the Management and Services Division is focused on reducing customers' costs and improve IT efficiency to drive businesses forward with a suite of products and services built around the System Center brand. In August 2009, Microsoft reported that the Management and Services Division revenues grew more than 30% from 2008 to 2009, and is now at approximately $1 billion in annual sales.

Financial terms of the acquisition won’t be disclosed. Opalis recently reported 104% increase in new license bookings for calendar Q3 (compared to Q3 2008), selling to enterprise and managed service provider customers.

So how is Opalis Software used? Here's some examples:

• Incident response standardize and automate triage, diagnose and repair processes to reduce the number of incidents.

• Provisioning orchestrate datacenter tools to configure, deploy, and verify IT services in response to an incident or change request. Provision server, storage, or network resources across physical, virtual or cloud environments.

• Virtual service management automate virtual lifecycle management to control server sprawl and extend management best practices, such as incident management and provisioning, to your virtual environments.

• Run book procedures automate re-occurring maintenance and administrative tasks, such as data and file handling, database and application support.

• Cloud Computing automate cloud lifecycle management, to request, provision, release and track costs of cloud resources.

So there's a summary. Brad says much more in his video interview. An analyst at Gartner forecasted that, by end of 2010, at least 50% of the automation and workflow management tasks in support of virtual server infrastructures will be supported by next-gen Run Book Automation-based tools. That's exactly what Opalis has created, and will become part of System Center.

As the CEO of Opalis wrote in his blog post today:

I believe, with the Opalis technology, Microsoft will have the most complete virtualization stack available from any single vendor.

Indeed, a good Friday.

Patrick

Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool v2.1

porourke — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 15:20:00 GMT

Virtualization affects how we plan, build, deploy, operate, and service workloads. Customers are creating large libraries of virtual machines containing various configurations. The patch-state of these virtual machines are not always known. Ensuring that offline virtual machines are properly patched and won’t become vulnerable the instant they come online is critical.

I am therefore very pleased to state that the Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool v2.1 has now been released!

Congratulations to the Solution Accelerator team for this release!

The Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool 2.1 has free, tested guidance and automated tools to help customers keep their virtualized machines updated, without introducing vulnerabilities into their IT infrastructure.

The tool combines the Windows Workflow programming model with the Windows PowerShell interface to automatically bring groups of virtual machines online, service them with the latest security updates, and return them to an offline state.

What’s New?

Release 2.1 is a direct response to customer and Microsoft field requests to support the R2 wave. Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool 2.1 now supports the following products:

· Hyper-V-R2

· VMM 2008 R2

· SCCM 2007 SP2

· WSUS 3.0 SP2

· OVMST 2.1 also supports updates to Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 virtual machines.

Bryon Surace

Senior Program Manager

Hyper-V

More on today's announcement with NetApp

porourke — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 06:06:00 GMT

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).

Above and beyond this, examples of technical integration include

the creation of NetApp's SnapManager for Hyper-V, which integrates their storage with Hyper-V and supports CSV.
NetApp management pack for System Center Operations Manager

In addition, NetApp is working with the Dynamic Datacenter Toolkit for enterprises and Powershell commandlets to rapidly provision VMs as the foundation for private cloud computing environments.

Patrick O'Rourke

City of Frisco (Texas) saves big with Hyper-V and NetApp

porourke — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 23:52:00 GMT

Hi, I'm Jim Schwartz, a director of virtualization solutions marketing in Redmond.

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. You will have the opportunity to submit live questions to Microsoft and NetApp experts during the webcast.

Thanks,

Jim

LiveMeeting on Microsoft’s Integrated Virtualization Strategy: Thursday, Nov. 19, 8:00 AM PST

SystemCenterTeam — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 22:44:48 GMT

Join us Thursday, November 19, 8:00 AM PST for a LiveMeeting session on “Microsoft’s Integrated Virtualization Strategy, Products and Solutions” presented by Kenon Owens, Technical Product Manager.

This LiveMeeting is exclusive to members of the System Center Influencers Program (which is also open to virtualization enthusiasts). Not a member? Visit the program overview on TechNet to learn more about the program and how to join.

Join Information Available on Influencer Portal. Members of the program will need to log into the Connect site to access the LiveMeeting join information.

Abstract: Through this 200 Level presentation, learn about the Microsoft virtualization strategy from the client, to the datacenter, to the cloud--and how it will help you cut costs and build value. In this session we review Microsoft virtualization products and discuss how you can use them to solve today's IT issues (cost cutting, consolidation, business continuity, green IT), develop new computing solutions (VDI) and build a foundation for a more dynamic IT environment, including cloud computing. This session reviews all of the latest Microsoft virtualization products, including Application Virtualization (App-V), Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MED-V), Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V, and Microsoft Hyper-V Server, as well as the System Center management platform (including Virtual Machine Manager 2008). Learn about the innovative pricing and licensing structure that allows further savings to lower both acquisition and ongoing ownership costs. Learn how you can enable IT to become a cost cutting mechanism with Microsoft virtualization and management technologies.

- dave //

Visual Studio Lab Management 2010 beta 2

porourke — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 06:20:00 GMT

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!

Beta 2 Improvements:

§ Simplified Virtual Environment creation

§ Lab Environment Viewer with full-screen capability

§ Manual and automated testing in virtual environment

§ Build-deploy-test workflow for virtual environments

§ Enhanced workflow process parameters UI and report

§ Network isolation with support for domain controller VMs

§ Setup & Config – verification and auto provisioning of accounts

§ Virtual Machine templates

§ “In-Use” support for shared environments

The main features of Lab Management are:

Easily manage more complex test configurations

Lab environment as a first class entity for managing multi-machine test environments
Setup multiple configurations for testing quickly
Consistent, reliable access to test environments
Create multiple copies of test environments for parallel testing

New “clean” environment in minutes

Environment snapshot: lightweight and efficient
Facilitates exploratory testing

Scheduled build/test cycle on steroids

Snapshot to clean environment
Build triggered app deployment
Testing in more realistic environment

Rich bugs with environment snapshot

reduce the number of no-repro bugs

Visual Studio Download Page – you can download all the required components from there. This video can guide you through the download and installation process of TFS. And check out the Lab Management blog.

Thank you,

Bryon Surace

Re-blog: Microsoft Site Recovery Solution Launch

porourke — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 07:27:00 GMT

I'm re-blogging here. Over at Virt Planet blog, Jim wrote the following:

This week Microsoft is launching a comprehensive solution to help customers implement cost effective, end-to-end site recovery programs. Built on proven capabilities in Windows Server 2008 R2 and the System Center management suite, Microsoft is helping IT Professionals leverage Windows Server Hyper-V and Failover Clustering along with tools like Virtual Machine Manager to deliver cost effective site recovery.

The Microsoft Site Recovery Solution ecosystem is ramping with a broad range of storage replication partners like Double-Take Software, EMC, HDS, HP delivering solutions that take advantage of the Microsoft Cluster Resource DLL. With cluster integration IT Professionals can deploy streamlined and operationally effective site recovery.

You can learn more about the Microsoft Site Recovery Solution by joining the Microsoft team and Enterprise Strategy Group on Thursday, November 5^th at 10:30am Pacific for a webcast Building Effective and Highly Available Disaster Recovery Solutions Using Microsoft Virtualization This webcast looks at key drivers for site recovery solutions and reviews practical deployment considerations (you can view the recorded version of the webcast after the 5^th). Microsoft and select partners will also be demonstrating Site Recovery Solutions at TechEd, so if you plan to be in Berlin during the week of November 9^th, make sure to stop by the Virtualization Solutions kiosk in the Technical Learning Center.

Patrick