Windows Virtualization Team Blog : Community

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 //

Update: What you won't see at VMworld 2009

porourke — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 02:30:00 GMT

This post is for the readers out there that will be attending VMworld, or have colleagues attending VMworld.

There’s been some speculative statements made in the press and blogs in the past 24 hours, so I want to try to set the record straight:

1. Microsoft will be exhibiting at VMworld 2009. Can't wait! We have a 10x10 booth, #2422. If you have a chance, please stop by booth. It's right next to the Blogger lounge. See more below.

2. Unlike prior VMworld conferences, we’re no longer allowed to sponsor the event. We can only be an exhibitor. Why? Let's look at excerpts from VMworld’s rules (my highlights):

VMworld 2009 Sponsor and Exhibitor Rules and Regulations

Booth/Session Demonstrations (pg. 2)

Sponsors and exhibitors must market or demonstrate products on the exhibition floor and in the sessions

which are complementary to VMware products and technologies. Complementary products and services are

defined as products/services that do not overlap/substitute with VMware’s products/capabilities, and help

expand the reach and solution scope of VMware’s capabilities solely as deemed by VMware. All sponsors

and exhibitors must adhere to following guidelines in regards to booth demonstrations (please also review

the “Promotion, Giveaways, Contests” section below):

Eligibility (pg. 4)

To sponsor or exhibit at VMworld a company must be a VMware partner in good standing in our TAP,

Strategic Global Partner or VIP Partner Programs. Companies that are not VMware partners may be allowed

to exhibit at VMworld under exception by VMware.

Both sides (us and VMware) agreed that, apart from the features in System Center Virtual Machine Manager that manage ESX, Microsoft products aren’t complementary to VMware’s products. We discussed and confirmed their intent of these clauses in early August, and had a follow-up Aug. 11 email from VMware, that reads in part:

As I mentioned, the rules require all exhibitors to market and demonstrate products that are complimentary to VMware products and technologies. We are open to reviewing any proposals for complimentary positioning of Microsoft products and demos at the show…

As a result, based on the clause above, phone/email with VMware employees, we don't believe we have the right to demo our products in the booth. This decision runs counter to Microsoft’s geek culture, as you can imagine, but we've also become more pragmatic over the years :-).

So what is Microsoft doing at VMworld?

We’ve learned over the course of 4 years attending VMworld (first was Vegas 2005) that there are many attendees who use, admin, manage, sell, support Windows Server, SQL Server, Exchange Server, Windows XP/Vista, System Center, etc. They want the opportunity to engage and receive information from Microsoft virtualization experts. So we’ll have Microsoft virtualization experts in the booth. These experts will be there to answer your questions. They’ll also be Tweeting about their experiences and impressions as they talk to customers and attend sessions. I encourage you to follow them on Twitter - see the table below for their usernames.

Expert in	Name	Twitter Username
Disaster Recovery, Backup	Allen Stewart	dynamic_dc
Desktop Virtualization	Ben Armstrong	virtualpcguy
App & Desktop Virtualization	Jeff Johnson	JJ_VDI
Virtualization Management	Stuart Schaefer	Sshaffer_MS
Cloud	Isaac Roybal	DDACloudGuy
Business value	Edwin Yuen	edwinyuen
Workloads, partners, licensing	Kenon Owen	MS_Int_Virt
Server Virtualization	Vijay Tewari	vtango

We’ll also have two customers in the booth at different times. I’ll be there. See you there!

Patrick O’Rourke

Online sessions, book and more

porourke — Wed, 06 May 2009 01:56:00 GMT

Admittedly this post is a stew and not a meal (if that metaphor works). But you might be interested in the following items. I'll keep it short:

John Kelbley will host a webcast on Friday, May 8 at 8:00am PDT titled, "Running Linux on Hyper-V." The session will discuss install, configure, run, backup and monitor non-Windows systems. See here.
On May 14, 8am-noon PDT, Edwin Yuen will host a live chat on TechTarget. He'll answer questions about our virt products, be it datacenter, desktop or managemment. See more here.
Wondering what to read when you're flying to TechEd, or your next trip? The Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V Resource Kit book is it. One of the authors, Robert Larson, architect in MS Services and TechNet blogger, told me that the book is in final formatting and some sample chapters are available to download (here). The book will be available via Amazon and Barnes and Noble in June. Read more from one of the authors here.
Finally

Enjoy.

Patrick

Beta of standalone hypervisor: Hyper-V Server 2008 R2

porourke — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 03:29:00 GMT

Hello fellow virtualization fans,

Bryon here again. With all the excitement around the beta release of Windows Server 2008 R2, it’s important to call attention to another important beta release: Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2!

To ensure there is no confusion, let me be clear that I’m talking about Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2. Not Hyper-V the feature of Windows Server 2008 R2. Alessandro’s post did a good job showing the differences. Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 is the next generation of the standalone hypervisor based product.

Building on the solid virtualization platform of Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008, the R2 Beta release adds some highly anticipated features including live migration, increased memory/processor support, and an updated configuration utility. Let’s take a closer look at each of these:

§ Failover Clustering/Live Migration: With the addition of host clustering technology, Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 beta provides support for unplanned downtime and planned migrations. Live migration enables customers to move running virtual machines between servers without any perceived downtime or dropped network connections.

§ Process/Memory Support: Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 beta now provides native support for up to 32-cores and up to 1TB of RAM on a physical system enabling even greater consolidation.

§ Updated Configuration Utility: Since Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 is command line only, the configuration utility is designed to simplify the most common initial configuration tasks. It helps you configure the settings without having to type long command-line strings. Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 beta adds new options to ease the configuration of options such as remote management, failover clustering, and software update installation just to name a few.

So make sure to check out more information on Microsoft Hyper-V Server and download R2 Beta at the Microsoft Hyper-V Website.

Additionally, the beta can be downloaded by subscribers on TechNet and MSDN.

Virtually Yours,

Bryon Surace

Senior Program Manager for Microsoft Virtualization

UPDATE: Hey MountainDrew, sorry to respond so late. HVS supports up to 16 nodes. Thanks for the Q.

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

Bare metal hypervisor is here, along with new training, services

porourke — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 17:28:00 GMT

"Bare metal" was my attempt at being dramatic ;-)

Anyway, I really wanted you to know that the standalone hypervisor, Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008, was released today for download. This is the no-cost, bare metal hypervisor. Think ESXi, but with Windows and not Linux. More on this in a bit. Today we also announced new virtualization training and certification program. You're qualified to take this training if you have Windows Server experience. Get more info here; I'm told the cost for training is dependent on the country, but generally ranges from US $90-$130. Click here if you need the currency conversion rate.

Before I get back to Hyper-V Server 2008 (and yes, it's different than Windows Server 2008 server core with Hyper-V), today's announcement also said that System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 will be released in a few weeks. The word is: "by end of October", and "there's still some more fine tuning and quality checks to do with early adopter customers." So net-net, SCVMM won't be released next week as announced here, but a couple weeks after.

So what exactly is Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008? Following are some bits I've collected that you might not see/read on the Web site or TechNet (or maybe you will).

Hyper-V Server 2008 was built using the Windows hypervisor and other components, including base kernel and driver technologies. Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 shares kernel components with Windows Server 2008.
Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 contains a sub-set of components that make up Server Core deployment option of Windows Server 2008, and has a similar interface and look and feel. But as you know, Server Core has roles like DNS, DHCP, file. Hyper-V Server 2008 is just virtualization.
Because Hyper-V Server 2008 shares kernel components with Windows Server 2008, we don't expect special hardware drivers to be required to run Microsoft Hyper-V Server.
The maximum number of guest instances that can run on Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 is 128 (of course this is dependent on the hardware, memory and workloads). Additionally, each guest OS must have a valid license.
Hyper-V Server 2008 runs/upports all the guest OSes supported by its big brother, WS08 Hyper-V. See here for a complete list.
Windows Server licenses are not included with Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008. Client access licenses (CALs) are only required for Windows Server and all Windows Server images that are virtualized, regardless of virtualization platform (e.g., ESXi). No CALs are required for Hyper-V Server 2008.

I hope this has helped. Check out the technical resources page for more.

Patrick

Update #1: as John pointed out in the comments, it took longer than expected for the download site to be ready for you to download this morning. Sorry about that.

Update #2: I was reminded that now that WS08 Hyper-V and MS Hyper-V Server support up to 24LP (see KB article 956710), that the actual maximum supported VMs is 192. This is assuming all 192 VMs are uni-processor.

Update #3: Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 will be available in the following languages:

English (EN-US)
German (DE-DE)
Japanese (JA-JP)
French (FR-FR)
Spanish (ES-ES)
Chinese Hong-Kong (ZH-HK)
Chinese Simplified (ZH-CN)
Korean (KO-KR)
Portuguese (Brazil) (PT-BR)
Chinese Traditional (ZH-TW)
Italian (IT-IT)
Russian (RU-RU)

VMworld is over, but the facts remain

porourke — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 03:47:00 GMT

I’ve been to Las Vegas too many times to count and have always left with good stories, but I never thought that my best Vegas story would be work-related. That story of course is about last week’s marketing activity at VMworld. Definitely not your typical day at the office.

While I have enjoyed the headlines (My Favorite: Microsoft attacks VMware with Poker Chips), the speculation as to what transpired has been most amusing to me. Unfortunately, I have to disappoint all those Oliver-Stone-like conspiracy theorists out there. Sorry, but Las Vegas Police were never called to the scene. Nor were we escorted out. We didn’t even attract the eye of hotel staff or security. Sorry! More than anything, I am glad that the right tone came through and loved hearing that it was “Great to see”, “Relevant and unexpected”, and “Pretty hilarious”. I couldn’t help but eavesdrop when I saw attendees share the collateral with a friend or hear someone chatting about it during the conference.

The street team did a great job, and the marketing effort exceeded expectations (3,800 cards in <90 minutes, 25+ articles/blogs, 15,000+ visits and 175,000+ hits to www.VMwareCostsWayTooMuch.com in 7 days, and multiple tough questions on TCO to Paul Maritz). And, yes, that’s more visits to the site than attendees at VMworld! The site and the on-the-ground activity were part of our marketing/PR efforts at VMworld and designed to cut through the noise (over 200 press announcements in 3 days) with one, simple message: Microsoft offers a better TCO than VMware.

Well, all good things must come to an end. Like a developer who spins up a VM for app test/dev and deletes it when he/she is done, our VMworld test is now complete. It was successful, scrappy, and fun. On Monday, the site will go away, but we may leave a short message for those that stumble upon it later. While the site goes away, the facts still remain. TCO matters when it comes to IT purchases. We cited this TCO difference back in February, and now we have customers reiterating the same points in case studies and analysts taking note of it in their reports. It’s of course important to tell the vision for where the technology is going but that must also be grounded in the reality that customers face today.

One random thought to close, I wonder what VMware would say if we asked to pay for our VMworld Europe sponsorship with casino chips? I now have a stockpile of messenger bags that have served a chip-carrying purpose before…

Brett Shoemaker

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

Virtualization Feed for Your RSS Reader

porourke — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 10:06:00 GMT

With a "tip of the cap" to creators of Planet V12n blog, we've just launched a blog and Twitter aggregator for virtualization. It's called VirtualizationFeed. Like Planet V12n, this site aggregates virtualization blogs from lots of sources. In this case, 18 independent bloggers and 14 Microsoft bloggers on either TechNet or MSDN. I'm sure you'll recognize many of the names/blogs ... and maybe you'll discover new ones. For example:

Tarry Singh (Netherlands)
Andrew Dudgell (Australia)
Kevin Fogarty (CIO.com)
Alessandro Perilli (Italy)
David Marshall (U.S.)
Mark Bowker (ESG - analyst firm)
Ben Armstrong (aka, Virtual PC Guy)
Rakesh Malhotra (VM management blog)
The App-V team blog
Tony Soper's blog

The blog aggregator will show a short (200-character) excerpt from the blog and point you to the blogger's site for the full post.

In addition to blogs, you'll see a tab for Tweets. VirtualizationFeed.com is also a Twitter aggregator (supplements the use of Twitter's useful search tool) that pulls all virtualization-related tweets.

I'm told that someone is working on a Vista gadget so that you can view the blog aggregator's RSS feed from your desktop. I'll post the download link once the gadget is available. Otherwise it's self explanatory. Check it out.

Patrick

Guest Post: Virtualization; Something Old, Someone New and Some Really Big Cost Savings

porourke — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 20:58:00 GMT

Hello, I’m Kevin Knox, VP Worldwide Commercial Business at AMD. Microsoft invited me to do this guest blog post in conjunction with our sponsorship of Microsoft’s “Get Virtual Now” event on Sept. 8.

I always find it interesting to hear people singing the praises of x86 virtualization and talking about how this recently introduced technology is already revolutionizing the industry. Fact of the matter is that virtualization technology was originally introduced for the purpose of time sharing on mainframes in the early 1970’s. One could probably trace the roots of x86 virtualization to the early 90’s when IT managers finally realized that people’s desks and wiring closets were probably no place for servers and started to relocate them into the datacenter. The next step in the evolution of x86 virtualization was a few years later when IT managers realized they could safely run multiple applications on a single server simultaneously. And if you are reading this blog, you can probably figure out what came next…..running multiple versions of an OS on a single piece of hardware, or what has affectionately become known as virtualization. While certainly an interesting history, there are two major happenings on the near horizon that I believe will permanently change the face of virtualization.

First is the notion of virtualization becoming “intelligent.” Think about the possibilities when an enterprise infrastructure becomes smart enough to essentially manage itself based on a predefined set of rules, policies and current application requirements. Application A runs for 1 hour and when it is finished, it shuts down, creates a new virtual session with ½ its resources to start a nightly backup and it reallocates the other ½ of the resources to another session getting ready to kick off a major batch run. While just an example, hopefully it shows the possibilities of what some are calling Dynamic Provisioning. In the end what this will enable is the elimination of human capital, which for most IT shops is still the largest budget item they have. No longer will masses of IT people be needed for starting, stopping, configuring and managing virtual sessions. On top of that, by optimizing the software environment in such a way, less, better utilized hardware will result.

The second and probably more important happening is Microsoft’s entry into the virtualization space. While Microsoft has invested in a variety of virtualization areas over the years including partnerships, acquisition and new technologies, they now seem to have a clear strategy and roadmap for delivering broad virtualization technologies across the enterprise. This is not to suggest they will be better or worse than anyone else, but rather having Microsoft in the game will help drive innovation, push the competition and allow for a more competitive marketplace, which ends up being a good thing for end users. Microsoft’s years of experience in operating systems and infrastructure software will also help enable new features and function and enable emerging technologies such as Dynamic Provisioning. One thing I can assure you from my years at AMD is that competition drives innovation and value for the end-users, for the ecosystem and the industry as a whole.

To illustrate this, consider the following advances that AMD has driven into the x86 processor over the past 5 years together with greater choices in virtualization software that are starting to open the doors for IT departments, enabling them to run a larger range of workloads on virtualized servers. 64-bit and multi-core processor technologies now provide the robust platform needed for memory-intensive virtualization. More advanced power management capabilities of the processor are helping to reduce power and cooling costs. AMD-V technology, hardware-enabled virtualization inherent in our processors, is enabling software like Hyper-V to handle the most demanding applications.

So what does the future hold? Well I can’t tell you that, but I can assure you we are in the midst of the most interesting time in the history of x86 virtualization from both a competitive as well an innovation perspective. As Bob Dylan once sang “The Times They Are A-Changin.”

Kevin Knox is Vice President of Worldwide Commercial Business at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

Guest Post: Why Microsoft and Hyper-V for HostBasket

porourke — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 01:53:00 GMT

Hi, my name is Bert Van Pottelberghe, business unit manager at Hostbasket, which is the leading hosting company and SaaS-provider in Belgium with over 30,000 SMB customers.

In a recent survey of our datacenter with over 1,000 servers, we saw that the average CPU-usage was only 12%. On the other hand, investments in new server hardware, datacenter space and the cost of power and cooling – now at an all time high - keep prices for dedicated servers high. The hosting industry is a very competitive industry, so we needed to come up with an answer.

We have been investigating virtualization technologies such as Xen, VMWare and Virtuozzo, but always found problems (such as security-issues, complex and expensive licensing, stability or scalability) that kept us from creating a virtual machine-offer.

Our Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V offering has two components:

· Flex Servers: Virtual servers on shared hardware platform. More info here.

· Hyper-V servers: dedicated hardware server with 2 virtual machines (application server and database server for example).

Both are positioned as dedicated servers, not as virtual servers. With these two offers we address the needs of 2 customer groups: The Flex servers are for websites and applications that have outgrown shared hosting, while the Hyper-V servers are for larger applications that used to be deployed on two (or more) separate physical servers.

We opted not to use the term “Virtual servers” for our offer, because a “virtual server” implies less value for money than a dedicated server. Also, “Virtual servers” are often associated with cheap solutions based on Parallels Virtuozzo.

Our solutions based on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V provide more functionality (like snapshotting, easy installation, flexible upgrading), are more secure and stable and have a features that guarantee a higher uptime than dedicated servers.

All customers involved during the beta-stage decided to renew their subscription and gave positive comments on the stability and performance.

Bert Van Pottelberghe

Business Unit Manager

HostBasket

Hosting Virtualization MVPs

porourke — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 20:22:00 GMT

This week, Microsoft hosted 1,800 tech professionals here in Redmond for the annual MVP Global Summit, and I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to chat with a number of Virtualization MVPs from the community. Since you might not be familiar with the Microsoft MVP Awards, let me give a quick description...

The Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Award is given annually to exceptional technical community leaders from around the world based on contributions made during the previous year to offline and online technical communities. These awards are one way Microsoft shows support for communities that foster the free and objective exchange of independent, real-world knowledge. There are over 4,000 MVPs worldwide that cover 90 different Microsoft technologies, everything from virtualization to gaming. If you are interested in learning more about MVP nomination and award process, check out here.

This year’s summit featured 600+ technical sessions and concluded with closing remarks from Steve Ballmer and Ray Ozzie (who, as Alessandro Perilli over at vitualization.info points out, highlighted virtualization’s fundamental importance in the overall company vision).

For virtualization, we hosted 15+ MVPs and had a flood of interest from MVPs from other product/technology areas. Over the three days, these Virtualization MVPs had the opportunity to network with each other, learn more about Microsoft’s virtualization offerings, and engage with product teams directly. Breakout sessions included Managing Hyper-V with WMI and PowerShell, Using Static VHD’s to Increase Test Efficiency, The Future of System Center Virtual Machine Manager, and a hands-on lab with Quick Migration, WMI, and Authorization Manager.

I definitely enjoyed having the chance to talk with everyone, hearing their excitement for virtualization and learning about all that they do in the community. Two things really stood out to me from my conversations. One was the considerable differences in the stage (for lack of a better word) of adoption for virtualization by geography. The second theme that rang loud and clear was the importance of management with virtualization. Whether it was the importance of being able to manage both physical and virtual environments or look within a virtual machine, there’s no question that management is and will continue to be at the forefront of everyone’s mind when it comes to virtualization.

I hope that the MVPs enjoyed their visit as much as we did hosting them. I can’t wait to see how many more Virtualization MVPs we have next year!

-Brett Shoemaker