Windows Virtualization Team Blog : Citrix

Microsoft’s new VDI licensing: VDI Suites

porourke — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 00:48:00 GMT

Hi, my name is Manlio Vecchiet, and I am a director of product management on the Windows Server marketing team. I'm in New Orleans right now attending the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC), and wanted to update you on new licenses we’ll offer for hosted virtual desktops, or virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).

When deciding whether to implement or even pilot VDI, most customers look for technical integration of the key VDI building blocks:

· the hypervisor,

· management of the virtual machines and the (physical) VDI host,

· a brokering and remoting infrastructure, and

· an application delivery technology for dynamic provisioning of applications to virtual desktops.

But customers also look for a simple and cost-effective way to license this scenario, as they will compare the technical and business benefits of VDI with more traditional desktop deployment options, such as session-based desktops and rich clients. Today we introduced two new licenses for VDI – the Microsoft Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Standard Suite and the Microsoft Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Premium Suite. These licenses make it simple for customers to purchase the comprehensive Microsoft VDI technologies while providing excellent value compared with competing VDI offerings. The new VDI suite licenses will be available via Microsoft volume licensing in calendar Q4.

This is a pretty big deal, so let me explain what we mean by comprehensive, simple and excellent value. First, both new offerings include licenses for all the key technology components mentioned above when used in a VDI scenario: Hyper-V Server, System Center Virtual Machine Manager, System Center Configuration Manager, System Center Operations Manager, Remote Desktop Services (CAL) and MDOP. The Premium VDI Suite even includes additional use rights for Remote Desktop Services (RDS) as well as App-V for RDS, to enable mixed environments with not only VM-based remote desktops, but also session-based desktops and applications. With these two new offerings, the only additional license you will need to correctly license a VDI environment from Microsoft is Virtual Enterprise Centralized Desktop or VECD (you will need VECD even to deploy VDI on a non-Microsoft platform)

By now, you are probably wondering how the licensing of these new VDI Suites will work given their standalone components have very different license schemes. The two new VDI Suites are designed to match the VECD license (which is a device subscription), so the math has become very simple now: As with VECD, the number of VDI Suite licenses equals the total number of client devices that accesses the VDI environment. The subscription-based license will ensure that customers always have access to the latest versions of the software.

But now comes actually the best part. At only $21 per year per device, the VDI Standard Suite is about one-third the cost of a corresponding VMware View edition (the comparison is based on the cost of licenses and software maintenance over a five-year period, which many customers tell me that’s what they base their desktop infrastructure investments on). Similarly, our VDI Premium Suite is about half the price of the premier VMware VDI offering, and it also offers the capability to deploy session-based desktops and applications, in addition to VM-based desktops. And for those customers who are still missing a feature or need an enterprise-ready solution, you can add a 3^rd party connection broker for Hyper-V such as Citrix XenDesktop - and most likely still pay less than if you chose to deploy VMware. In fact, Citrix today announced continued alliance in the area of desktop virtualization.

If you would like to see a demo of Microsoft VDI solution running on Windows Server 2008 R2, please come to the Microsoft booth at WPC if you’re attending the conference. For all others, please post your comments in the section below.

Manlio

UPDATE: to answer morriswj's question. I'm excited, too, about this new single licensing for VDI’s server infrastructure, which will complement VECD for a VDI deployment. Regarding High Availability, it is included in MS Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 (the no-cost, standalone hypervisor) and will therefore be available as part of the VDI Suite offering. No other license other than VDI Suite (Standard or Premium) and VECD will be required for a highly available VDI deployment.

UPDATE 2: I'm responding to the question from cstalhood, and the similar question in Brian Madden's post today. For session virtualization using WS08 R2 Remote Desktop Services (RDS), you don’t need the VECD license. The Premium VDI Suite license includes full rights of the RDS CAL, in addition to the other components for a VDI solution. The Premium VDI Suite license, when available in Q4, will be available as a device subscription, while RDS CAL (the new name for TS CAL) is available as a perpetual user or device license. After all, some customers don’t want to buy on a subscription basis.

Virtualization Review's hypervisor test

porourke — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 23:09:00 GMT

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. VMark doesn't count as independent. Amongst reviewers, this EULA restriction is well-known and am told serves as a deterrent to try to do performance comparatives. 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. Keith wrote:

The results, from writer/online columnist Rick Vanover, were startling, to say the least. The Porsche of hypervisors? XenServer. Raise your hand if you saw that coming. It outperformed Hyper-V and ESX in most categories. The pokiest? ESX. Again, not at all what I expected. In fact, even in the few tests ESX came out on top, it barely edged out the competition. Microsoft did well across the board, and is definitely a fine product.

We're pleased to see Hyper-V won 4 of the 11 tests (the others going to XenServer by a less than a horse length). For example, test 2 focused on a large number of heavy workload systems: 1 database server running one midsize database and 12 VMs with a heavy workload of CPU, memory and disk operations. Key takeaways from this test:

· Hyper-V completed SQLjob 52% faster than ESX.

· Hyper-V is 2.3 times faster than VMware ESX in CPU oVirtualization Review's hypervisor testperations.

· Hyper-V is 3 times faster than VMware ESX in test for average RAM operations.

At the end of the article, Rick ran one set of tests with 3 GB overcommit for ESX 3.5. Rick pointed out that this feature is useful to many in the data center, it does come at the expense of performance. The test showed that with ESX overcommit enabled:

· Average CPU Operations per VM were 3x slower

· Average Disk Operations per VM with 4.5x slower

· Average SQLjob Completion Time was 33% slower

As Rick wrote:

Results showed that while you can load more guests onto the host, there's no free lunch. There was a dip in performance and database response time.

Patrick

Microsoft at VMworld Europe 2009

porourke — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 09:30:00 GMT

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.

As for Microsoft, of course we'll be showcasing our server virtualization platform - Hyper-V. (Citrix might do a little bit of that, too). We'll have a total of 4 demos in the booth:

Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V running Live Migration
System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 showing management of VMware ESX Server and a Citrix PRO pack demo. Not sure if this will be a sneak peak of the next version or not of SCVMM.
Desktop virtualization with App-V 4.5 and beta of MED-V 1.0.
a VDI demo with Citrix XenApp and WS08 r2 remote desktop services.

I was hoping we'd be demoing the lab manager functions in Visual Studio 10, or the integration to System Center DPM 2007 sp1 and Iron Mountain cloud backup. Oh well, maybe next show. I know we will be there to answer all your licensing questions about the above scenarios. I do recall about 33%-50% of all the people I met in the booth last year had licensing questions. Thankfully Chris Wolf (Burton Group analyst) will have a session on that topic Feb. 24 at 3:15pm. Check it out.

The Microsoft-presented session (comes with the sponsorship) is Feb. 25 at 2pm in Les Ambassadors 2/3. I know Jeff and Edwin have some good demos for this session.

This will also be the first time Paul Maritz takes the stage in front of his European customers and partners. Let's just hope he can pronounce Cannes better than Diane did last year [hint: it's not pronounced like "canz"].

Now it's off to Cannes, and the beautiful promenade with lots of well-dressed locals walking their tiny little dogs. A memory I won't forget. No doubt the poodles will offer a better welcome than we did in Vegas ;-).

Patrick

The Virtualization Essentials from Citrix

porourke — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 08:10:00 GMT

Bonjour from Cannes. This is just a quick post about Citrix making public the Essentials for Hyper-V news. It's been talked about already by Alessandro and others.

There's lots of opinions of what this means for the virtualization software vendor landscape. But that's less important really than what it means for IT pros and developers. They're now getting much broader access to the benefits of a hypervisor platform, one that's interoperable with other hypervisors, and one that will have a common management interface. It's a reminder that virtualization is just another means to an end (obviously a great one, otherwise I wouldn't blog here). The value has become management, automation, processes, and the like.

That's enough from me. Here's a video with Simon Crosby, CTO of Citrix, and Mike Neil, GM of virtualization, talking about Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V. Enjoy,

Patrick

[update: Two items. First, the real-world clock on our blog is out of sorts. I hit publish on this blog on Feb. 23, not Feb. 20. Just in case someone out there was wondering. I'll try to fix this issue. Second, Barry at Citrix blogged about Essentials for Hyper-V, too, and included demo. Check it out].

Guest post: virtualization requires the proper perspective

porourke — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 08:09:00 GMT

Hi, I’m Doug de Werd, technical marketing manager for Windows Virtualization at Hewlett-Packard.

In the past few weeks following the Microsoft virtualization launch event in Bellevue the virtualization buzz keeps growing louder and louder. We keep hearing more and more from customers that virtualization is a key component of their IT infrastructure strategy. IT organizations fall across a wide spectrum of virtualization implementation and sophistication. Some have been doing it for quite some time, while others are just starting or even just starting to think about it.

One thing that keeps coming up over and over, however, is the notion of using virtualization as an enabling technology, rather than an end in itself. This means aligning your IT strategies to your business strategies. Ultimately it’s not about how many virtual guests you can run on a physical host, or how cool your underlying infrastructure is – it’s about using these technologies to achieve better business outcomes. Whether the specific goal is to use virtualization to save money, reduce data center footprint, gain competitive edge, drive business continuity and availability, or go green by reducing power and cooling, it all comes down to using virtualization as a means to reach these goals.

OK, so that makes sense – so how do I do that? One of the key things that HP and Microsoft recognize is that it is the management tools that really enable you to take advantage of the underlying virtualization technologies. Microsoft System Center, especially with System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008, will provide easy to use tools that will allow you to manage your physical and virtual environments from a single pane of glass. This means customers won’t have to use one set of tools to manage their physical infrastructure and another set to manage their virtual environment.

HP has also recognized that management of virtual environments is quickly becoming a customer top priority, and is working to integrate HP management tools to both extend and complement the functionality of System Center.

HP is taking a two-fold approach to this. First, our HP ProLiant and BladeSystem servers are management enabled for System Center. HP provides Management Packs that integrate with System Center Operations Manager and Configuration Manager, as well as an upcoming HP PRO Pack for Virtual Machine Manager. These HP Management Packs enhance the customer experience by providing detailed HP-specific information to System Center. The PRO Pack will enable dynamic allocation of virtualized compute resources based on predefined set of rules and policies. This means that predictive hardware alerts can be used to migrate virtual machines to alternate hosts before a failure causes downtime.

The second is that HP Insight Software complements Microsoft System Center to provide comprehensive physical and virtual systems management. HP management tools such as Systems Insight Manager and Insight Control Environment will comprehend virtualized environments using Hyper-V in the same manner and console as non-virtualized physical host environments. HP Insight Dynamics – VSE enables administrators to manage physical and virtual resources in the same way and includes a foundation for management of virtual machines, capacity planning, virtual machine migration, and remote control.

Microsoft and HP are also working closely with Citrix in the area of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure. VDI is a flexible desktop replacement solution that increases security, decreases cost and delivers higher availability for the desktop while continuing to provide end-users with the functionality of a standalone desktop. The VDI stack incorporates Microsoft components such as Vista and Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack, along with Citrix XenDesktop, all running on Hyper-V and managed by System Center. HP Consulting and Integration Services provides the end-to-end solution, including servers, storage, access devices, networking devices and printers as well as the software and services to bring it all together.

HP and Microsoft have been closely collaborating for over 20 years as part of the HP-Microsoft Frontline Partnership. The strength of this work is evident in the strong management tool integration that both extends and complements Microsoft System Center. Working together, HP and Microsoft can help customers realize the tangible benefits of virtualization today.

Doug de Werd

Oct. 16, 2008 update: Here's Doug's response to JRedmond's comment/queston.

There's really 2 parts to the HP integration with Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V. The first is that HP will be providing support for Hyper-V in the HP management tools that address virtualization. So things like Insight Dynamics - VSE, HP Insight Control Environment, HP Server Migration Pack, and HP Virtual Machine Manager will all support Hyper-V hosts and guests. For example, in HP Systems Insight Manager, you will be able to see physical Hyper-V hosts as well as the virtual machines running on them.

From the System Center side, HP already provides management packs that integrate with SC Operations Manager and SC Configuration Manager. These management packs push HP ProLiant and BladeSystem specific information into SCOM and SCCM to provide more detail about what is being managed. To further extend the functionality of System Center Virtual Machine Manager, HP will provide a PRO Pack. This works in conjunction with the HP management packs to send HP server management agent information to SCOM. The PRO Pack provides additional HP information and suggestions, allowing SCOM to make recommendations via SCVMM. As an example, a server could experience a high rate of correctable memory errors. Once a threshold has been reached, an alert is sent through the HP management pack to SCOM. OM then works with the HP PRO Pack and SCVMM to make a recommendation as to where to proactively move the virtual machines from the affected system. Using SCVMM and Quick Migration, you can then quickly move the affected VMs to other servers and diagnose and fix the original server, preventing downtime.

Before we get to VMworld Vegas

porourke — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 19:26:00 GMT

My ears are still ringing from Monday's virtualization event in Bellevue. Not necessarily from the keynotes or demos, but mainly from being 10 feet away from the stage as the band Live played a 60+ minute set during the party. Here's a photo I snapped with my T-Mobile Dash.

I was fortunate enough to meet and speak with several customers and partners (and the members of Live). It was great to meet Matt at MLS Network of New England (who requested greater coordination with OEMs around NIC teaming for Hyper-V), Michael from Heidelberg in Germany (who's using Windows mobile phones and MS Dynamics to provide mobile access to internal data), and Howard from Heidelberg ... who has more PIMs than goals in his adult hockey league ;-)

Next week many of us will be in Vegas. I'm looking forward to my 4th straight year attending VMworld (despite having to go to Vegas). It appears this year's conference will be much larger than last year, and I'm looking forward to hear Paul Maritiz speak. Who knows, maybe Paul will mention Microsoft in his keynote and create greater interest to visit our booth.

For those of you who will be there, stop by our booth (#1120) to see demos of WS08 Hyper-V, SCVMM 2008, Windows Server terminal services, MS Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (from the Kidaro acquisition) and VDI using Vista/Citrix XenDesktop. And I think there's a customized laptop and "Gears of War 2" XBox giveaway.

You might also be interested to know that Microsoft is participating in a couple sessions. On Thursday (9/18) at 9am, we'll co-present a breakout session (EA4460) with VMware on Microsoft's Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP). On the same day, but at 2pm, several folks will present our strategy and demo Microsoft's desktop and server products.

A few other things to know:

Read Mike Sterling's post about the Linux ICs for WS08 Hyper-V. They're now available on MS Connect [note: you may need to browse the Connection directory, then log in to Connect and then find the Linux Integration Components program.
For those readers in Western Europe, you should consider attending the Virtualization Congress in mid-October in London. Alessandro has assembled quite a lineup of speakers from around the industry, to include our own Mark Russinovich. The coolest thing ... no slides from them, just technology. And several noteworthy bloggers and independent voices will attend.
Rand Morimoto and Jeff Guillet, consultants with Convergent Computing, just published a book titled, "Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V Unleashed." List price is $39.99 for 430 pages. You can see the Table of Contents at the link provided. They also cover SCVMM 2008.

Hope to see you next week at Microsoft's booth at VMworld.

Patrick

The Validated Hypervisor

porourke — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 17:00:00 GMT

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.

And given today's news, it's a good time to review the details on Microsoft's support policy for Microsoft software running in non-Microsoft virtualization software, read KB article 897615. Here's an excerpt:

for vendors with whom Microsoft has established a support relationship that covers virtualization solutions, or for vendors who have Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP) validated solutions, Microsoft will support server operating systems subject to the Microsoft Support Lifecycle policy for its customers who have support agreements when the operating system runs virtualized on non-Microsoft hardware virtualization software. This support will include coordinating with the vendor to jointly investigate support issues. As part of the investigation, Microsoft may still require the issue to be reproduced independently from the non-Microsoft hardware virtualization software. Where issues are confirmed to be unrelated to the non-Microsoft hardware virtualization software, Microsoft will support its software in a manner that is consistent with support provided when that software is not running together with non-Microsoft hardware virtualization software.

Patrick

UPDATE on Sept. 9 - I incorrectly noted that vendors who pass SVVP will be noted in a KB article. Wrong. I'm told the vendors will be listed in the Windows Server catalog. You'll see three vendors' products listed there now. And if you're attending VMworld 2008 next week, there's a new session being added so that you can learn more about SVVP from Microsoft and VMware. See session EA4460

VM standards, offline patching tools

porourke — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 08:58:00 GMT

Quick post here on two items.

Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool can be downloaded here. As blogged about at by the System Center team blog, Virtualization.info, and InfoWorld blog.

This product allows the update of large-scale deployments of virtual machines, leveraging PowerShell, System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2007 and WSUS 3.0 (or Configuration Manager 2007). As Alessandro pointed out, "It just automates the VM power-on, updates deploying through virtual network access, and VM shutdown." You can use this Solution Accelerator to help you with business scenarios such as these:

Your IT organization is converting physical servers to virtual machines to reduce costs, including administrative overhead. How can you regularly update offline virtual machines while minimizing administrative costs?
Your IT organization has thousands of virtual machines stored for months at a time in a number of libraries. How do you keep the virtual machines reliably up to date?

Second, today Citrix issued an announcement about "Project Kensho", which is described as:

will deliver Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF) tools that, for the first time, allow independent software vendors (ISVs) and enterprise IT managers to easily create hypervisor-independent, portable enterprise application workloads. These tools will allow application workloads to be imported and run across Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and VMware ESX virtual environments

While you can read ComputerWorld's article or Alessandro's blog on the announcement, I think the most interesting perspective comes from Simon Crosby's June 27 post. Here's an excerpt from his post:

Kensho showcases our commitment to open standards based virtual infrastructure management using DMTF CIM based interfaces, and will in the not too distant future allow Microsoft System Center VMM to manage XenServer. It also allows users to quickly and easily export their virtualized workloads to and import them from the new industry standard portable virtual machine format, OVF. You'll be hearing much more about Kensho and its features in the near future.

The OVF standard, which I was fortunate to be able to help to develop offers ISVs and enterprise IT staff a hypervisor-independent portable virtual machine format that packages a complete application workload with its resource requirements, configuration and customization parameters, licebnsand signatures to facilitate appliance integrity and security checking, as an open standard. Virtualized data center workloads captured in OVF format can be installed and run on any DMTF compliant virtualization platform. OVF also supports software license checking for the enclosed VMs, and allows an installed VM to localize the applications it contains and optimize its performance for a given virtualization environment.At the DMTF interoperability event, we used Project Kensho to create VMs from VMware, Hyper-V & XenServer in the OVF format. We also used Kensho to import and run OVF virtual appliances on XenServer and Hyper-V. Kensho will allow application vendors and IT users to produce virtual appliances once as "golden application templates", independent of the virtualization platform used to deploy them - and is a clear demonstration of how Citrix will add value to Hyper-V.

The Citrix news release says Kensho will be available as a download in September.

As for Microsoft, we support the OVF standards work, which isn't complete yet. There's no public schedule for when OVF will be supported in our products, such as Hyper-V or SCVMM, but it's on the board. It's great to see partners like Citrix doing converts for interop based on our DMTF standard interface. And we'll continue to work with Citrix, Novell and Sun on interoperability, in addition to making technology (like VHD image, Hypercall API) available via Open Specification Promise.

Patrick O'Rourke

Virtualization wrap from TechEd IT Pro

porourke — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 19:10:00 GMT

I'm NOT in Orlando this week attending TechEd IT Pro conference. That means I get to enjoy Redmond's "wintery" spring weather and not Orlando's hot/humid thunderstorms. For those of you also NOT in Orlando, you can follow along with the happenings at a few spots:

Scott Lowe's blog, focus on virtualization (and expect comparisons to VMware's tools)
Margie Semilof from Techtarget will be publishing articles
Go here for blog roll and a bunch of news sources from the conference

I'll point out a few cool items from today's keynote:

You can now get cooperative technical support from Microsoft and four (initial) vendors [Citrix, Novell, Sun, Virtual Iron] when running Windows Server 2008 (or 2003, or 2000). How so? Microsoft's Server Virtualization Validation Program is now operational and vendors have begun validating their configs. So you'll soon see additional vendor names added to KB article 944987. This program is only intended for the dozen or so vendors that make/sell their own Type 1 or Type 2 hypervisor, and want their customers to receive technical support from them and Microsoft.
MS Application Virtualization (formerly SoftGrid) 4.5 Release Candidate will be available by the end of June. And interestingly enough it's been almost 2 years since the Softricity acquisition. Tim Mangan blogged about this over at BrianMadden.com.
Double-Take, an ISV partner, announced that their GeoCluster technology will run on Hyper-V once the latter is released. GeoCluster works with Windows Server 2008 failover clustering, and offers somethign that VMware can't.
Forefront Client Security is adding host and guest VM support for Hyper-V upon its release. See more here.

Enjoy,

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)

Rationalizing a Virtual Desktop Architecture

porourke — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Hi, my name is Manlio Vecchiet, and I am a group product manager in the Windows Server marketing group at Microsoft.

I am on my way back from Interop where I participated in an industry panel about Virtual Desktop Architecture. I was joined by VMware, Citrix and Qumranet. I enjoyed discussing Microsoft’s approach and all the great work we are doing on this scenario.

Just as a level-setting since the taxonomy and terminology is still emerging in the space, Virtual Desktop Architecture was defined as the storage and execution of a desktop workload (OS, apps, data) on a virtual machine in the datacenter and the presentation of the UI via a remote desktop protocol (such as RDP) to user devices such as thin and rich clients. Other terms used in the industry are VDI, server-hosted desktop virtualization and desktop delivery. Yes… we really need to come to some agreement in the industryJ.

First of all, server-based client computing and centralized desktops are of course not new to Microsoft – Windows Terminal Services has been delivering centralized desktops and applications for more than twelve years, and many IT departments today are enjoying the proven benefits of this mature technology.

What is new, however, is the unprecedented interest in server-based client computing, and the availability of a new virtualization infrastructure that creates different technical implementation possibilities. Advances in all forms of virtualization as well as specific business problems, such as ensuring greater levels of data privacy, reducing the cost of desktop management and improving disaster recovery processes, are driving the interest in new models of client computing within the enterprise.

Deciding on the right desktop delivery strategy and the right technologies and tools to implement is not an easy task. Enterprise IT departments need to be able to respond to the various computing needs of their entire user base, and so they have to be able to choose from a full spectrum of client computing options from full rich PCs to thin clients and centralized Windows Vista/XP, and everything in between. There is no “one size fits all” model for optimizing the delivery of a modern enterprise desktop to a broad variety of information workers.

Companies with a centralized desktop strategy effectively have a choice between a terminal server-based architecture and a hypervisor-based (VDI) architecture to deliver data center-hosted enterprise desktops. Terminal services is an integrated part of Windows Server that takes advantage of the multi-user capabilities of the OS allowing IT to create multiple, locked-down user sessions sharing a single image of the server OS. VDI is actually quite similar to terminal services except that a full client environment is virtualized within a server-based hypervisor instead of a light-weight session. In either case, the desktop is accessed by the end user via a remote desktop protocol such as RDP.

While the terminal services model is proven, mature, extremely scalable and cost-effective, not all applications are compatible with the session concept. Furthermore, many users demand higher levels of desktop customizability than terminal services supports. In contrast, with VDI users are able to get a complete desktop experience (including full admin rights), and applications will run just fine as they are running on top of a standard client OS. However, VDI is still an emerging technology which is less scalable, requires more server hardware resources and introduces additional management complexity compared with a terminal services approach.

I should point out here that Microsoft’s offering for VDI includes a management solution with System Center Virtual Machine Manager, which complements Hyper-V as the hypervisor and RDP as the remoting technology for VDI. And for optimal manageability of a virtual desktop, applications can be provisioned and updated either by streaming applications to the virtual desktop on-demand (with Microsoft Application Virtualization), or with the Terminal Services RemoteApp feature which remotes specific applications to the virtual desktop via RDP.

Partners are also building on this infrastructure delivering end to end customer value. While I was speaking in the Interop panel, on the other side of the Las Vegas strip at Microsoft Management Summit, Citrix demoed a version of XenDesktop (their VDI product) running on Hyper-V and SCVMM. I am very excited that, with our Citrix partnership, we can offer a leading end-to-end VDI solution based on the Microsoft Hyper-V infrastructure, with common management for physical and virtual environments alike through the System Center line of products.

Centralized desktops, including virtual desktop architectures have a firm place in the ‘arsenal of weapons’ enterprise IT can choose from to best respond to the needs of specific users. At the same time we probably won’t see large production deployments of virtual desktops until some of the hard problems such as the provisioning of personalized virtual desktop images and the user experience over a remote protocol are addressed. In fact, I believe that Microsoft’s recent acquisition of Calista Technologies is proof that investments into areas such as improving the remote user experience are both necessary and instrumental in accelerating broad adoption of virtual desktops.

Virtual desktop architectures have caught the eye of corporate IT, and for a good reason. The technology is only emerging, and there are still many challenges around implementing and managing a virtual desktop environment. But the promise of VDI is real, and the payoffs of a rationalized implementation are potentially huge. So let’s enjoy the ride!

-Manlio Vecchiet