Windows Virtualization Team Blog : .NET

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

Check out the Visual Studio Team System blog

porourke — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 20:54:00 GMT

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 is a nod to "that darn reality" post at SharkTank.

So check the VSTS Lab Management team blog.

Kroll Factual Data: 85% virtualized, 30:1 VM density

porourke — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 18:59:00 GMT

You may have never heard of Kroll Factual Data. But ever since personal credit became harder to acquire, lenders held tighter to their money, and interest rates went up/down like a roller coaster, Kroll has been on a wild ride of their own. In short, Kroll Factual Data offers business information to mortgage lenders, consumer lenders, property management firms and the federal government. So when Ben Bernanke of the Federal Reserve speaks, Kroll often sees the volume of demand for their services increase or decrease.

Chris Steffen of Kroll has posted guest blogs to this site before, and will be speaking on an webcast April 28 (register here). I first met Chris at VMworld 2007 in San Francisco. At the time he was using MS Virtual Server, SCVMM v1 wasn't fully deployed yet and he was waiting for Hyper-V to be released. At the time (Sept 2007), Kroll had 75% of their production servers virtualized, were processing 200,000-250,000 transactions a day, and were managing 1,400 virtual machines. That was amazing at that time. But nothing compared to what Kroll does today.

See the news release here about Kroll Factual Data. A few highlights:

acquired 58 companies in 5 years
"We’re now able to develop, test and deploy new products within three days"
"our datacenter has the ability to deploy additional computing resources in less than 15 minutes.”
a datacenter that is 85 percent virtualized
consolidate its physical server holdings from 650 systems to 22 systems, each server running 30 virtual machines
100 percent wind-generated power for the entire facility
“We’re required to provide 100 percent availability not only to our customer-facing products, but also to the operations inside our facility,”

There are 6 new videos of Kroll Factual Data posted here. You'll see/hear from Russ Donnan, CIO of Kroll Factual Data, and Chris Steffen. Here's my favorite

Patrick

Visual Studio 2010 lab management uses virtualization

porourke — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 08:10:00 GMT

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.

You (or the someone you know) may be asking yourself - why is this a good thing? Here's what the Visual Studio guys told me:

30% of testing time is spent in setting up machines and labs
Under 30% utilization of test and dev assets
“No Repro” bugs often slip into production impacting project success

The guys also told me:

Unlike other tools, Microsoft’s capabilities around lab management are fully integrated to Visual Studio Team System allowing teams to collaborate more effectively and not have to deal with disparate tools. Lab management is fully integrated with the testing capabilities allowing generalists testers to take quick checkpoints on failures & record rich bugs with links to the environment in the bug that the developer can then open. It is also integrated into the build process allowing customers to automatically trigger a virtual environment provisioning, build deployment & testing of the build.

Lab Management leverages virtualization and allows multiple checkpoints to be created across lab environments (consisting of multiple VMs). Since the checkpoints are part of the same image as opposed to having to clone at every state snapshot, that reduces the proliferation. In addition, lab management ties the environments to the notion of a project which allows the lab administrator to clean up the images as projects are completed.

Lab Management is built on top of System Center Virtual Machine Manager, and supports Hyper-V out of the box.

Since it’s built on SCVMM, lab management allows developers to:

• Manage groups of VMs as single entity

• Allows rapidly clone VMs using network fencing and other technologies

• Integrates with ALM tools to create tighter interaction between development/test & operations

• Patch virtual machines that are stored in a library by deploying the VMs on a dedicated resource pool (hardware) patching them and moving them back to the library.

If you want to learn more about Visual Studio 10 lab management, check out the Channel 9 video interview here and the PDC 2008 Lab presentation video here.

Patrick

Achtung! 3,500 BMW dealerships going virtual

porourke — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 09:00:00 GMT

Continuing with yesterday's theme... on the first day of "Virt-Mas" my true love brought to me - 3,500 BMW dealerships that will be deploying Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V later this year.

Before sharing BMW's story, I first wanted to say "thanks" to Mark and Dugie for their comments to me today. And Frank at QLogic launched a Web page today where you can learn more about their benchmark measuring QLogic HBA and Hyper-V performance. Their results surpass VMware's May 2008 test, which may surprise some people. Now onto BMW ...

Unless you read German and troll the German newswires, you probably missed Microsoft's news release on a project that BMW is deploying to 3,500 dealerships around the world built on the Windows platform. I don't speak German ["Ich spreche nicht Deutsch"], but a colleague in MS-Germany translated the announcement for me. Following is a translation of some of the news release:

Microsoft Consulting Services has developed a retail server platform based on Windows Server 2003 and Virtual Server 2005 for a globally operating automobile manufacturer. The solution permits the rollout of new applications and services in a typical branch office infrastructure, while ensuring a high degree of standardization, a minimum of operating effort, and the necessary system security. These requirements count among the major challenges in the contract dealer and franchise environments, where operators traditionally tend to operate more independently. Dealers’ customers – and their own employees – profit from optimized advisory procedures, shorter waiting times, and improved quality of advice.

The use of virtualization technology allows the corresponding multiprocessor hardware to be utilized flexibly. It also guarantees a high degree of security against failure, while at the same time reducing the amount of testing necessary for simultaneous use of different applications. With the help of Microsoft Forefront Intelligent Application Gateway 2007, a remote access solution has been implemented that allows access to 3rd level support in the heterogeneous network structures of the workshops while taking into account the high data protection requirements of the dealers.

The BMW group is relying on the Microsoft server platform to underpin its rollout of a new hardware and application infrastructure for its more than 3,500 service operations worldwide. This infrastructure is known as the Integrated Service Infrastructure Server (ISIS). Based on the platform, premium aftersales services will be offered that are standardized across the globe. This rollout will be completed in the first quarter of 2008.

An upgrade to the 64-bit Windows Server 2008 with Microsoft's new Hyper-V virtualization technology is already planned, in order to utilize the performance capabilities of the hardware to an even greater extent. BMW also plans to roll out the SQL Server and BizTalk Server in the course of this migration. SQL Server 2005 allows the platform to be laid out in a more homogeneous fashion, while the use of BizTalk Server 2006 represents a significant steps towards a uniform modular front-end, including the optimization of processes and the integration of various backends.

In short, BMW's Integrated Service Infrastrructure Server will be the technology architecture for after-sales service at 3,500 BMW dealerships around the world. I do recall seeing a slogan that BMW uses/used with this project. It was something like, "the first car was sold my marketing; the second by services." Here's a few other details that didn't make the news release:

On average, dealers will have 2 servers and roughly 20 client devices per location, which they will use for everything from sourcing spare parts to accessing diagnostic manuals and consulting customer service policies.
BMW is initially using Virtual Server 2005 R2 (on Windows Server 2003 EE) to consolidate and run .NET-based applications, business process integration and other applications on each server.
BMW is using System Center Operations Manager; no word if they'll use SCVMM 2007/2008.

So what's my point? Why does anyone care about a deployment using Virtual Server the day AFTER we released Hyper-V? I'm interested to hear your thoughts. Here are mine:

if you're a Virtual Server customer, now you know that there's someone else who has plans to move a large # of Virtual Server-based VHDs to Hyper-V
server virtualization (be it Type 1 or Type 2) is great, but it's just part of the architecture needed to deploy their new after-sales service. As a colleague always tells me, "a hypervisor by itself can't even run calculator; you need apps and an OS to do something." For BMW, it's handy that the hypervisor can come from the same vendor as the applications, dev tools, management tools and OS.
if you're an SI partner (perhaps going to WW Partner Conference next month), it represents a services opportunity to help customers design their architectures, virtualize packaged and custom apps, and integrate those with other systems.
If you're a VMW shareholder, that's approx. 28,000 VMs that will be running on Hyper-V in the near future ;-)

11 more days until Hyper-V available via Windows Update (WU). Have a good weekend.

Patrick

Virtualization and Interoperability

porourke — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 20:14:00 GMT

Two weeks ago three members of the interoperability Vendor Alliance were in Redmond to test the interoperability capabilities of their virtualization technologies. Citrix, Novell and Sun tested some interoperability scenarios with us here at Microsoft that aim to prove how interoperability is possible on heterogeneous environments where customers are running virtualized environment on multiple platforms.

The first part of the lab was about setting up all the machines, we installed Citrix XenServer, Novell XEN Virtual Server, Sun XVM and Microsoft new Hyper-V RC1 virtualization technologies on several machines in the Microsoft Partner lab. The goal now is to test some interoperability scenarios where applications and services are running on different platforms. For the next phase we decided to use the StockTrader application because it is a ready to use app that runs on IBM WebSphere and on .NET. The .NET implementation is compatible with the original WebSphere implementation so it is possible to use, for instance, a DB2 database running on a SUSE Linux machine from the Front end part of the app based on ASP.NET. In this way we will be able to mix and match the different virtualization environments to test cross-platform interoperability from both virtualization and application point of view. In the next couple of weeks we are going to complete the installation of the StockTrader application and test all the scenarios.

This is only the first of a series of labs that will focus on Virtualization, in the next months we will continue to build more complex scenarios on top of the one we use for the first lab, we will add additional aspects such as Authentication and Authorization and system management so there is more to come. I’ll be sure to post updates along the way.

- Claudio Caldato (Senior Program Manager, US Corp Interoperability)