Windows Virtualization Team Blog : Cloud Computing

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 //

Virtualization: desktop to datacenter

porourke — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 21:54:00 GMT

It's been a while since I've posted a blog ... but that one really caused a stir in the Virt circles in the Bay Area. Hopefully it doesn't mean I can't hit up those people for Sharks tickets.

I've stumbled across some interesting items that I wanted to share with you.

Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack 2009 R2 is now available. The big thing is support for Windows 7. Read the blog here. Here's an excerpt:

If you are an MDOP customer, you can download MDOP 2009 R2 through Microsoft Volume Licensing Site (MVLS). For others who wish to evaluate MDOP products, the MDOP software is available at MSDN and TechNet (in accordance with your MSDN or TechNet agreements, except for AIS).

MDOP has been licensed for over 21 million desktops worldwide! In a recent survey completed for Microsoft by Answers Research, and including 1000 IT professionals across five countries, we learned several interesting facts:

66% of MDOP customers deployed three or more of the MDOP products

52% of them deployed MDOP across more than half of their PCs

94% of MDOP customers said they would recommend MDOP to a colleague

When comparing MDOP and non-MDOP customers, customer satisfaction with Software Assurance increases by 25%

Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MED-V) V 1.0 SP1 - This updated tool will support Windows 7 and enable enterprise deployment of virtual Windows XP environments to support incompatible applications. A Beta version of MED-V 1.0 SP1 will be available by the end of 2009 and final release is scheduled for the first quarter of calendar year 2010.

On the server side, the latest is from Gartner Symposium in Orlando. Gartner announced their top 10 strategic technologies for 2010. Not surprisingly, virtualization is named or underlying several of the strategic technologies. And speaking of, Gartner also shared data on server virtualization adoption today and forecasted through 2012. Read this article. Here's an excerpt:

According to Gartner, 18% of server workloads this year run on virtualized servers; that share will grow to 28% next year and reach almost half by 2012. But growth is anticipated among the small-to-midsize businesses (SMB), and it's in this segment that Microsoft has a good chance to build a customer base. By 2012, VMware's share is expected to shrink to 65% but the base of VMs will have grown to 58 million, a 10-fold leap. By that time, Gartner believes, Microsoft will hold 27% share, Citrix 6%, Red Hat 2% and others about 1%.

Along those lines, I had a great email exchange a couple weeks ago with Steve at PoundHost in Maidenhead, UK. I was giving a presentation at IP Expo / VM Expo conference in London, and wanted to highlight PoundHost's business results since switching to Hyper-V and System Center away from VMware tools, and since PoundHost has deployed the Dynamic Datacenter Tookit for hosters. PoundHost has a very compelling story of how technology can really help a business transform itself and create new opportunities. The Microsoft case study doesn't really do it justice. Here's some of what Steve shared with me:

Cost. "It meant we could offer Linux and Windows at the same price (when we went live with the beta of R2 we had Linux guests but we don’t now). It means we can offer low cost VMs on high quality (and cost!) host servers which ultimately give the end user a better experience. [It] works out about £1.00 per guest assuming 60 guests per host."
Common management tools. "We were also very impressed with a demo we had seen of System Center Virtual Machine Manager and Ops Manager so we now use both in our infrastructure."
Choice. "I’m a VCP and have a lot of experience with ESX but I’d never use it again now I’ve used Hyper-V under R2"
Grow business. "[We've] expanded our Hyper-V/System Center offerings into our managed services company Server Arcade "
Grow business: profitability boost by 55%
Customer service. "We’re also doing the customer control panel now for Poundhost which is based on the Dynamic Datacenter Toolkit."

Check out more about the Dynamic Datacenter toolkits and partner alliance at their blog.

Patrick O'Rourke

VMworld 2009 an oppurtunity to meet our customers

vtango — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 19:09:00 GMT

Hi, I am Vijay Tewari a program manager with the Virtualization team here at Microsoft. Having spent the last 15 months or so deeply involved in the development of Hyper-V I am really looking forward to meeting customers and partners at VMworld 2009.

Much is being made about the fact that we are not showing Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager at this event due to the show policies. I will stay away from that debate although coming on the heels of our RTM I would have loved to show the product. However, a lot of us will be there at the event and are really looking forward to interacting with customers. At the end of the day the product is only useful if it meets our customers’ demands and there is nothing like having a face to face interaction with our customers to hear firsthand what they like and hate about the product.

Below is my tentative schedule for VMworld. As you can see a lot of wait lists, but I am hoping that I can squeeze in. Would like your feedback if there are sessions you would like to see covered.

We will be tweeting (follow vtango on Twitter) and blogging all through the event, so follow along.

Looking forward to seeing you!!

Vijay

Vijay Tewari, Principal Program Manager, Virtualization

Personal Schedule for Vijay Tewari

Monday


7:30 AM-9:30 AM (Waiting List)	LAB01	VMware vSphere™ 4 - New Features, Best of, Advanced Topics

10:00 AM-11:00 AM (Waiting List)	V13100	The VMware Competitive Advantage - A Comparison of Server Virtualization Offerings

11:30 AM-12:30 PM (Waiting List)	V13229	Introduction to VMware vSphere

1:30 PM-2:30 PM (Waiting List)	V11721	Best Practices for Successful VI Design

2:30 PM-3:30 PM (Waiting List)	V13478	Executing Enterprise Virtualization - Continuing Case Study with USMC

4:00 PM-5:00 PM	V12226	Building a High Availability and Disaster Recovery Solution with VMware

Tuesday


9:30 AM-10:30 AM	SS5160	Stop Virtualizing Servers, Start Virtualizing Infrastructure

11:30 AM-12:30 PM	VM3142	Large Scale Virtualization

1:00 PM-2:00 PM	VM3235	Introducing VMware vCenter Product Family: Managing Service Levels Across Dynamic IT Infrastructure

2:30 PM-3:30 PM (Waiting List)	VM1960	Datacenter Consolidation and Migration with VMware Site Recovery Manager

4:30 PM-5:30 PM (Waiting List)	BC2761	ESX Networking for High Availability and Disaster Recovery

5:30 PM-7:00 PM	TA2544	A Comprehensive Look at the Security and Compliance of vSphere 4

Wednesday


9:00 AM-10:00 AM (Waiting List)	BOF105	Technology and Architecture -- Virtual Networking

10:00 AM-11:00 AM	TA3220	VMware vStorage VMFS-3: Architectural Advances since ESX 3.0

11:00 AM-12:00 PM (Waiting List)	BOF104	Cloud Computing

12:00 PM-1:30 PM (Waiting List)	VM1700	vApps and advanced VM templates in vSphere 4

2:00 PM-3:30 PM	TA3880	Head-To-Head Comparison: VMware vSphere and ESX vs. Hyper-V and XenServer

4:30 PM-6:00 PM	BC3301	DR Architecture Design Workshop with SRM

Thursday


9:30 AM-10:30 AM (Waiting List)	BC2961	VMware Fault Tolerance Architecture and Performance

11:00 AM-12:00 PM	BC3387	Advanced Data Protection for Microsoft SQL and Exchange Server in a VMware Environment

12:30 PM-2:30 PM	LAB07	VMware vCenter Lab Manager 4

2:30 PM-3:30 PM (Waiting List)	BC3421	SRM Architecture & Features: The Road Ahead

4:00 PM-5:30 PM	TA2525	VMware vSphere 4 Networking Deep Dive

Server & Tools Business Exec to discuss state of IT, answer your questions on June 23

porourke — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 07:27:00 GMT

Do you have questions about Microsoft’s efforts to deliver new server infra (Windows Server, virt, System Center, Forefront security) to customers and partners?

What is Microsoft doing about enterprise security?

Are you interested in hearing how other IT pros are reacting to economic conditions and where they’re investing?

On Tuesday, June 23rd from 10:30am – 11:00am (PDT), you're invited to join a teleconference with Bob Kelly, corporate VP of Infrastructure Server Marketing. Bob will talk about the state of IT within the context of results from a new Harris Interactive study. The study, of 1,200 IT professionals from the U.S., United Kingdom, Japan and Germany, was commissioned by Microsoft’s Server & Tools Business.

There will be time for your questions following the brief presentation. Submit questions over the phone or you can submit them at any time leading up to, or during, the teleconference by tweeting with the Twitter hashtag, #qs4ms. If you are interested in attending, please REGISTER NOW. Once you open the invite box, you can save and close to your calendar.

Patrick

Guest post: "Does my enterprise need internal cloud computing?"

porourke — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 18:45:00 GMT

As the president and COO of a datacenter-based managed server provider, I’m constantly on the hunt for leading edge technology. I peruse every new IT technology announcement for the next cost-effective solution, for both internal needs, and for hosted solutions we can use to help customers.

In my previous blog, I talked about how cool Microsoft’s virtualization turned out to be, saving SBWH, and therefore our customers, time and money. I started my virtualization research with VMware, but quickly became a fan of Hyper-V, ultimately deploying it in many production systems. As a result of my experience, I get asked by industry analysts, press, and investors, “Why not VMware?” With Palo Alto’s latest announcement that I can buy an “Internal Cloud” for only $3,495 per CPU, I figured I’d share my thoughts about the real vs. perceived benefits of this new private compute cloud idea.

Let me say that the private cloud concept seems to be more marketing than architecture. The private cloud has many of the same load balancing, storage management, and provisioning that virtualization already offers. Based on how the private cloud has been described so far, I have to say that the emperor, although not totally naked, seems somewhat thinly attired.

Is this private cloud thing good for IT? The short answer is, money being no object, and assuming private cloud computing actually delivers something unique, maybe. The long answer, based on the cards played so far, is no. SBWH is not a fortune 100 company, and in this economy, we evaluate every cost. We don’t have thousands of physical servers, and we don’t store 10 billion photos. If I read the press release correctly, vSphere’s “private cloud” lets me combine, say, thirty-two 16-CPU servers and $1.8 million dollars in Enterprise Plus licensing, along with abundant training for a new tool set, to achieve “the mainframe of the 21^st century.”

I just don’t think SBWH needs that.

But wait…I’m a service provider and have been told that, over time, VMware will support such provider-centric features as federation between internal and external clouds. However, these are promises and conceptual things, not capabilities delivered. I guess when that time comes, we will see if the private cloud has something special to offer.

For now, SBWH will stick with Hyper-V. We have highly available virtual machine clusters in production that automatically move virtual machines to new hosts if hardware fails, and will have live migration and load balancing in production this year. Oh, and it’s all private. Already.

David Straede, president, SBWH.com

Microsoft case study here

The vSphere Cloud Operating System: Extra Layer, Extra Cost?

porourke — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 11:30:00 GMT

Hi, I’m David Greschler, director of Microsoft virtualization and management. Today VMware announced their new “Cloud OS,” called vSphere. It’s an interesting announcement in that it points out more clearly than ever that VMware adds an extra layer to the computing stack.

This extra layer, a virtualization “substrate” (VMware CEO Paul Maritz’s words), is inserted by VMware between hardware and the OS. But is it really necessary to add an extra layer just to do virtualization and the cloud? Do we really need another operating system to effectively just host other operating systems?

I can see how initially this made sense when the industry was first experimenting with virtualization. But virtualization has now become mainstream, and as such it’s just another feature we should have as part of our computing process. As a result, Microsoft chose to take a more streamlined approach to virtualization. Instead of adding an additional layer of complexity, we’ve put the virtualization component inside the OS. We think this is a better approach as it means you have one less layer to manage, secure and pay for. (And at the cost of $3,495 per processor for vSphere Enterprise Plus, that’s a pretty expensive layer!).

But what about cloud? There’s a lot of talk about how vSphere lets enterprises build “private clouds.” This concept, of a dynamic datacenter where additional compute power can be provisioned on-demand, is something Microsoft has already been talking about for over six years with our Dynamic IT initiative. But does it need an extra layer? We have been developing Windows Server 2008 with System Center, as well as development tools and an application platform, with the Dynamic IT vision all along. The industry terms may have changed from “dynamic datacenter” to “private cloud” but the fact remains that these products today already provide the foundation for building a private – and hosted – cloud infrastructure. After all, the cloud isn’t about throwing away your old applications; it’s partly about taking your existing applications and making them more flexible, extensible and distributed. That’s what Windows Server 2008 and System Center are all about. And customers agree. Take a look at what Kroll Factual Data did with the two products to build their own private cloud. Check out what Lionbridge Technologies did with their Virtual Cloud Lab.

In other words, you don’t need an extra “cloud operating system” to build a cloud running Windows Server. Just use Windows Server.

If you’re an existing VMware 3.x customer who’s considering migrating to VMware’s new Cloud OS, try the combination of Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and System Center first. You’ll see that System Center can manage both your VMware and Hyper-V deployments from the same console, as well as both your virtual and physical infrastructure. And compare costs: VMware vSphere’s extra layer is approximately three to five times the cost of Microsoft’s solution, while just yesterday Zane Adam announced in this blog that Microsoft Hyper-V Server R2, which includes live migration and high availability, will be free of charge.

vSphere may be the best reason yet to move to Microsoft’s virtualization solution.

David Greschler

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

Register for 'Is There a Cloud in Your Future?' Webcast

porourke — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 14:30:00 GMT

On Tuesday, April 28 at 11:00am PDT, Microsoft will continue its webcast series on 'How to Invest in the IT Infrastructure You Have While Preparing for Tomorrow' with Part 2: "Is There a Cloud in Your Future?"

Join Zane Adam, Microsoft Senior Director of System Center and Virtualization, Barry Briggs, Microsoft CTO for IT, and Chris Steffen, Principle Technical Architect, Kroll Factual Data, to discuss solutions and best practices that help you secure and manage IT environments today, while also looking to the future and integrate new and emerging IT models such as cloud computing.

Part 1: "One Server Does Not Fit All" is available for on-demand viewing here

Bill Laing, Microsoft CVP Windows Server Division, Al Gillen, program vice president, IDC, and a Microsoft Customer present best practices to keep your costs down during this economic downturn and solutions that help you both choose and make the most of your server.

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

DPM for data backup/recovery of virtualized apps and environments

porourke — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 20:47:00 GMT

We want to congratulate the Microsoft Storage Solutions team for releasing Service Pack 1 for System Center Data Protection Manager 2007.

SP1 for DPM 2007 brings some great new capabilities for protecting Hyper-V environments. Most notably, of course, is the ability to protect guests within Hyper-V environments, often without downtime (for those guests running a Windows operating system that supports VSS). Also new for DPM with SP1 is the ability to run the DPM server on the Hyper-V host itself, so that the DPM server can protect the guests from the host viewpoint, within the same physical server - to disk, to tape and even to the cloud.

And unlike other (shall-not-be-named) virtualization platforms’ backup mechanisms, DPM does not require a SAN and does not require 3rd party backup software or add-ons. It’s an all Microsoft backup and recovery solution for Microsoft’s virtualization platform.

For more details on the SP1 release for DPM 2007, check out:

· Bala’s executive viewpoint on DPM 2007 sp1

· Some early SP1 customers are also blogging about their experiences and you can see at these links – ICON & Convergent Computing

· A feature overview of DPM SP1 is located here

The DPM folks have dedicated resources on “How to protect virtualized environments with DPM 2007” – http://www.microsoft.com/DPM/virtualization. And a very cool podcast showing how to protect Hyper-V with DPM 2007 SP1 - http://edge.technet.com/Media/DPM-2007-SP1-Protecting-Hyper-V

Congrats to the DPM crew – and nice job on backing up Hyper-V !!!

Patrick

Videos to watch: Mark Russinovich; Virt and cloud computing panel

porourke — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 01:00:00 GMT

Before I start hunkering down for what's supposed to be a snowy weekend in Redmond, and without college football on TV, I wanted to pass along a couple videos that are worth a watch.

First, TechTarget interviewed Mark Russinovich, technical follow, about Windows 7, WS08 R2, virtualization and Vista. It's about 8 minutes long. You can watch Mark's interview here.

Second, this week Mike Neil, GM of virtualization, hosted a live meeting to discuss virtualization and cloud computing. Joining Mike was Dominic Foster, CTO of web hoster MaximumASP, and Deepak Patil, GM within Microsoft Global Foundation Services, which hosts the Windows Azure Services platform. You'll see slides and hear them talk and answer some Q&As in 45 minutes. You can access the playback here (log-in required).

And if online videos aren't of interest, I'll point out that Mike Neil recently submitted his 2009 predictions to David Marshall over at VMblog.com.

Patrick

Pre-VMworld: Check out Hyper-V Server and Live Migration demos

porourke — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 09:33:00 GMT

While you getting ready for the weekend, or getting ready to head to Vegas, you might be interested to check out these first-look demos of Hyper-V Server 2008 (standalone hypervisor, due in a few weeks) and live migration with Windows Server 2008 R2.

Adam wrote this about the Hyper-V Server demo:

The Virtualization Launch this week revealed Hyper-V Server for the first time ever - a dedicated OS just for hosting Hyper-V virtual machines. Bryon Surace took some time out from his launch activities to give us a quick tour around the product.

Adam wrote this about the live migration demo:

When I met with Edwin to go over the new features in Virtual Machine Manager, he had some other really cool stuff he wanted to show me - so cool we weren't really sure if we were allowed to show it yet.
Word is out though now, so I'm gonna go ahead and let you see this sneak peek at Hyper-V Server and Live Migration.
Think of Hyper-V Server as just an operating system stub that allows you to run virtual machines - no requirement for a full host OS just to run VMs. Live Migration provides fault tolerant virtual machines with no downtime when failing over to other clustered hosts. It's a really cool feature, and one many customers have asked for.

If you're headed to Vegas, remember that it's going to be in the high 90s F (high/mid 30s C) during the day, low 70s (low 20s C) at night. Not a cloud in the sky, but likely a few clouds in Maritz's Tuesday keynote ;-)

Patrick

Guest Post: Virtualization and Cloud Computing

porourke — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 22:54:00 GMT

Hello, my name is Karl Schulmeisters, director of alliance technology and architecture for the Microsoft global alliance at Unisys. We are a global systems integrator that focuses on large scale-up solutions particularly in the public sector, financial services, federal government and pharmaceuticals industries.

I watched Monday’s mid-day keynote at the Virtualization Launch in Bellevue, in which Senior VP of Server and Tools, Bob Muglia, spoke and brought a Gartner analyst on stage for an industry view. The traditional viewpoint of virtualization is that it is driven by cost savings, Green IT and operational efficiency. But according to Gartner, those are tactical considerations. Gartner believes that virtualization unlocks Cloud Computing, which in turn fundamentally transforms how IT is run.

I’m not sure that virtualization itself unlocks Cloud Computing. Pervasive connectivity and standardized data protocols, like XML, are more crucial to this. What virtualization lets you do though is to get rid of the issues of app conflicts that have grown out of the PC industry’s history of using dedicated machines for a particular server type. Essentially it lets you isolate the various application servers as though they were on a separate physical box without having to assume the cost of that separation.

Where I agree with Gartner is their somewhat radical notion that Cloud Computing is the future of INTERNAL IT!! Because it moves IT operations from managing components in silos to managing pools of resources in clouds. Gartner identified the four key hallmarks of Cloud Computing as Services Orientation, Utility Pricing, Massive Elasticity, and Delivered over the Internet. And the only difference with the modern IT approach is the delivery over the Internet. IT delivers over the Intranet.

The Gartner analyst did a nice job of categorizing the big change issue that virtualization brings to the puzzle – the decoupling of components previously locked together (Hardware, OS, Apps) that enables a new set of solution categories:

· Infrastructure As A Service: hardware pooling, dynamic hardware provisioning, Pay for usage, etc. which are built on virtualized hardware

· Grid Computing, which is essentially a service that delivers virtualized Hardware PLUS OS but not much more.

· Software Appliances – which is a service that delivers virtualized OS plus Application, and can run independently of the particular OS environment. JavaVM apps fit this profile

· Application Streaming – which is a service that delivers virtualized applications

This differentiates nicely the distinctions between different Cloud Computing directions. Amazon’s ESS online storage is Infrastructure As a Service. Grid Computing, ala Google Gears, is really a Software Appliance – Google Gear Apps target the Google Gears runtime (OS) environment. Facebook is pure application streaming – all Facebook Apps are thin browser apps that connect to other types of back end services

So where does Microsoft fit in this? Kevin Turner comes out to tell us. Software plus Services is one of the four pillars of innovation that he cites and Kevin differentiates between MS Online, which is targeting Commercial customers, and MS Live services, which is targeting the consumer world. In particular he points out that unlike the other players in the S+S field, Microsoft offers the ability to have the commercial services operate either as locally installed solutions, partner hosted solutions or Microsoft generically hosted solutions (i.e., App Streamed, Software Appliance Mode or Infrastructure As a Service)

Seems to me this approach is a much stronger way to bridge to this coming world. Rather than via 100% commitment to one or another mechanism in a world that is not yet tried and true.

I am very pleased to see that Microsoft is not limiting its view of virtualization simply as a means of offering Infrastructure as a Service. And I am looking forwards to PDC 2008 this October to see what cool things are in store (Kevin Turner closed by throwing up a teaser slide about the new things that will be released at the PDC).

Karl Schulmeisters

Unisys