Windows Virtualization Team Blog : Interop

Microsoft and Red Hat Complete Cooperative Technical Support

porourke — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 10:00:00 GMT

Hi, I'm Mike Neil, general manager of Windows Server and Server Virtualization. Back in February we announced our work with Red Hat to enable cooperative technical support for virtualized environments. I'm excited to announce we've completed certification in each others' programs! Customers now can deploy Microsoft Windows Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux and a range of select applications, virtualized on Red Hat and Microsoft virtualization products, knowing that the combined solutions will be supported by both companies.

Here are the details:

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2, 5.3, 5.4 have passed cert tests when running on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V, Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2. See more at RedHat's certified hardware site.
Windows Server 2003/ Windows Server 2008 / Windows Server 2008 R2 are validated to run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4, using their KVM-based hypervisor. See more at Microsoft Server Virtualization Validation Program site.

Beyond the OS, both companies have select applications that would receive technical support when running on certified server virtualization software. The Microsoft applications can be seen in KB article 957006. On the Red Hat side, you can now run JBoss Enterprise Middleware within a virtual machine guest on Hyper-V and receive coordinated technical support. This is a step forward for enterprise customers, hosting providers, systems integrators, and those who want to offer their customers the top x86 operating systems to run applications.

And as mentioned in my February post, Microsoft provides the systems management tools, via System Center suite, to manage physical and virtual IT systems and applications, including non-Windows software such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We do a world-class job of managing Red Hat Enterprise Linux, so customers can use one pane of glass to manage their legacy Unix and Linux environments together with their Windows Server environments. Read more here, but here's an excerpt from the website:

System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 supports monitoring of the following operating systems:

HP-UX 11i v2 and v3 (PA-RISC and IA64)
Sun Solaris 8 and 9 (SPARC) and Solaris 10 (SPARC and x86)
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (x86/x64) and 5 (x86/x64) Server
Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 (x86) and 10 SP1 (x86/x64)
IBM AIX v5.3 and v6.1 (POWER)

The work with Red Hat is just one of numerous examples of the way we're helping customers and partners running mixed IT environments with Windows and open source technologies. A little over 2 months ago, we announced that the Linux integration components (ICs) for Hyper-V would be contributed to the Linux Driver Project and the drivers licensed under GPLv2. The community has embraced us and helped ready our submission of the drivers for inclusion in the kernel. It was great to see this support and a couple weeks ago what started as our first submission made it into the official kernel tree. The Linux IC code that we contributed is in the staging phase for the next kernel release (2.6.32). See here.

I'll close by saying that Microsoft and Red Hat have competed for customers and partners for some time now, and as platform vendors continue to compete in the marketplace. While the announcement today extends our ongoing technical support collaboration, these agreements do not address, nor do they include provisions relating to patents, open source licensing or other IP matters. We look forward to supporting our joint customers and providing unparalleled solutions for Microsoft's customers and partners!

Thanks,

Mike Neil

Guest Post: All Eyes on SteelEye with DataKeeper Support for Hyper-V

porourke — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 07:10:00 GMT

Hi all,

My name is Dave Bermingham and I’m the director of Windows product management for SteelEye Technology, a provider of business continuity and disaster recovery solutions. I’d like to thank Microsoft’s Virtualization team for the opportunity to guest blog on SteelEye’s continued support for Hyper-V as well as exciting new features coming in support of Hyper-V on Windows Server 2008 R2.

I can’t believe it is almost a year ago since I demonstrated SteelEye DataKeeper Cluster Edition at the Microsoft Virtualization Launch event in Bellevue, WA. In the past year we have seen the interest in our Hyper-V disaster recovery products increase dramatically and with the recent release of Windows Server 2008 R2, I believe we have just seen the tip of the iceberg!

SteelEye’s mission is to “Replicate Any Data, Protect Any Application.” We pride ourselves on our commitment to provide the Windows marketplace with flexible, scalable and cost-effective solutions that are enterprise-grade yet customizable for any size business. Most recently SteelEye identified an opportunity to extend Microsoft’s Windows Server 2008 Failover Clustering (WSFC) by delivering SteelEye DataKeeper Cluster Edition, a real-time data replication solution that integrates seamlessly with WSFC to enable multi-site clusters while eliminating the single point of failure traditionally associated with shared storage resources. A comprehensive and cost-effective disaster recovery solution, DataKeeper Cluster Edition helps supports improved productivity and availability of your Hyper-V VMs.

SteelEye soon will be announcing support for Windows Server 2008 R2 and the highly anticipated “Live Migration”. As our Windows team continues to develop and build additional capabilities for enhanced disaster recovery support of Hyper-V, we welcome your comments and suggestions. To learn more about the latest developments for Hyper-V support, take a look at our FAQs or visit the SteelEye DataKeeper Cluster Edition page on our website.

Thanks,

Dave

CentOS, OpenSUSE & More Linux Distros on Hyper-V R2!

WSV_GUY — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 08:53:02 GMT

Virtualization Nation,

Just a couple of weeks ago, we surprised a few folks by contributing over 20,000 lines of source code to the Linux kernel under GPL V2. Here are some quotes from the announcement:

Our work in this area is all about providing more flexibility and choice, and requests from our customers and partners were really the impetus behind those efforts. We are hearing more and more customers and open source partners telling us they see some of their best value when they deploy new open source software solutions on top of existing Microsoft platforms. Today's release would have been unheard of from Microsoft a few years ago, but it's a prime example that customer demand is a powerful catalyst for change. -Sam Ramji, Sr. Director, Server & Tools, Microsoft

Customers have told us that they would like to standardize on one virtualization platform, and the Linux device drivers will help customers who are running Linux to consolidate their Linux and Windows servers on a single virtualization platform, thereby reducing the complexity of their infrastructure. Consequently, they'll have more choices in how to develop and deploy solutions, while still managing their entire data center from a single management console. -Tom Hanrahan, Director Open Source Technology Center, Microsoft

What Do Analysts Think?

Reviewers and analysts agree this a very big and positive step:

"This is a logical, but precedent-setting decision for Microsoft. Credit Microsoft for recognizing the reality that a sizable portion of its customer base was going to be running Linux and Microsoft side by side in virtualized environments, so it would be important to be competitive on an interoperability front," said Stephen O'Grady, analyst at Redmonk. "For all of its logic, however, this is a move that would have been inconceivable a few years ago, meaning that the glasnost of Microsoft vis a vis open source continues." Stephen O'Grady, InfoWorld
"This is a big deal. When you get in the mainline Linux kernel it is a competitive advantage for Microsoft." Chris Wolf, Network World

What Does Linus Think?

Linus Torvalds provided his own assessment on the Microsoft contribution:

I agree that it's driven by selfish reasons, but that's how all open source code gets written! We all "scratch our own itches". It's why I started Linux, it's why I started git, and it's why I am still involved. It's the reason for everybody to end up in open source, to some degree.
So complaining about the fact that Microsoft picked a selfish area to work on is just silly. Of course they picked an area that helps them. That's the point of open source - the ability to make the code better for your particular needs, whoever the 'your' in question happens to be.
Does anybody complain when hardware companies write drivers for the hardware they produce? No. That would be crazy. Does anybody complain when IBM funds all the POWER development, and works on enterprise features because they sell into the enterprise? No. That would be insane.
So the people who complain about Microsoft writing drivers for their own virtualization model should take a long look in the mirror and ask themselves why they are being so hypocritical. Linus Torvalds

Jason Perlow, Takes A Look At Hyper-V R2 & Few Linux Distros

Jason Perlow, a ZDnet columnist who has been writing about Open Source for over 10 years, was so intrigued by the new capabilities in Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 that he spent the last week installing various Linux distros (CentOS, Scientific Linux, OpenSUSE) atop Hyper-V R2. The result is a detailed article on ZDnet documenting the step-by-step instructions for each distro!

This article makes for an excellent read. I highly recommend checking out Jason's article here at ZDnet.

Cheers,

Jeff Woolsey

Windows Server, Hyper-V

Too many Virtual Iron customers in the fire?

porourke — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 08:38:00 GMT

With the recent announcement by Oracle to stop Virtual Iron development and sales, the past few weeks have certainly been eventful for Virtual Iron customers. A related announcement came out from VMware about a program to offer Virtual Iron customers discounts to move over. But a closer look at the VMware offer shows some serious limitations. These include:

· Only Virtual Iron 4.0 or newer customers are eligible

· Only those with active support subscriptions with Virtual Iron are eligible

· Customers must buy a VMware license for every socket on their Virtual Iron contract. This effectively locks in the customer to VMware for size of their Virtual Iron contract.

· The discount is 40% off the list price of the product but only 10% on one-year of support and subscription, 0% for more than one year of support subscription.

· The offer isn’t valid on all SKUs. This means for Virtual Iron customers who want to keep their Live Migration and CPU balancing capability, they need to buy vSphere Enterprise Plus, the most expensive SKU.

Even with the discounts, VMware is still very expensive. For vSphere Advanced, the cost after discount is still $1,347 per processor without support, which has a very small discount. For vSphere Enterprise Plus, which is required for DRS and other features, the cost is still $2,097 per processor without support. With two years of support, it’s $3,722.64 per processor.

As noted above, Virtual Iron customers must convert all their sockets to VMware and this can only be done once.

As an alternative, I would recommend Virtual Iron customers try Microsoft solutions. Our Hyper-V solutions are low cost, easy to use, and work well with Xen-based solutions like Virtual Iron. In fact, many Virtual Iron users are already running their VMs in the VHD format that’s used with Hyper-V.

If Virtual Iron customers are running Windows Server 2008 in their VMs, they can leverage Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V. For those customers running non-Windows VMs or do not own Windows Server 2008, you can use the new Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 hypervisor. This is our free, standalone hypervisor, which now includes both high availability cluster and live migration at no cost. Both are available for download, a trial for Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and a full download for Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2.

Best of all, Virtual Iron customers can just try out the Microsoft solutions, see if it fits their needs, and migrate on their own schedule, all at a much lower cost than the VMware solution.

Edwin Yuen

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

Microsoft and EMC renew their (virtualization) vows

porourke — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 18:04:00 GMT

Big happenings in NYC yesterday as SteveB and EMC's CEO Joe Tucci met with a room-full of IT execs to talk about an extended 3-year alliance. The announcement is here. In short, the companies are going to work more closely together in the areas of data loss prevention, collaboration and virtualization.

What's that you say? EMC - 80% owner of VMware - working more closely with Microsoft around virtualization? Here's an excerpt from the joint announcement:

Microsoft offers one of the fastest-growing and most cost-effective virtualization solutions from the desktop to the datacenter, including the ability to manage both physical and virtual environments from a centralized management console. EMC’s technology solutions enable storage, protection and management of information in Microsoft virtualized environments including Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Microsoft System Center, and jointly supported mission-critical workloads such as Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft SharePoint Server. EMC Consulting’s Application Practice, a thousand-person strong team with deep Microsoft knowledge, provides expertise in assessing, planning and implementing Microsoft’s technologies in a wide array of virtualization solutions.

That's all well and good - 1,000 EMC consultants trained on WS08 Hyper-V, System Center and key Microsoft applications that will be virtualized. But can those 1,000 consultants really look past VMware?

Thankfully CNET interviewed Steve and Joe and asked them about it. Here's the excerpt:

In the agreement, one of the areas you talked about working more closely in is virtualization. VMware is affiliated with EMC, which is probably Microsoft's biggest competitor in virtualization. So how credible is the notion that your companies can work together? And where do you draw the lines of cooperation? And how does that benefit customers?

Ballmer: We're not sitting here pretending we're partnering with VMware. That's more competition.

With EMC, which is a large majority owner in VMware, but is also independent, there's a lot that rides on virtualization. The fact of the matter is the storage business is being transformed also by virtualization. And virtualization is transforming the storage business. We want to do very well in virtualization. While Joe may own 80 percent of VMware, he still thinks it's a good idea to sell storage in places where perhaps we'll win as opposed to VMware.

Despite the fact that there's a level of competition with EMC's majority-owned division or entity, there's also a lot of cooperation around how virtualization affects the rest of our product line and the rest of EMC's product line. Let me just say, we're happy with the state of affairs. Of course, there's going to be competition in the virtualization space. I think EMC is as good as you're going to get in terms of being able to both--I won't say compete, but own a competing entity, if you will--and partner with us where we want to. We really respect Joe and the EMC team for that.

Tucci: I agree with everything Steve said. I think I'd add a point that says to really serve our customers, you need to form partnerships and alliances. And if you look for that alliance or partnership to be perfect where there's zero areas of overlap, I'm not sure that's physically possible with two powerful companies. So, what you have is this co-opetition.

As long as, like Steve said, you define the rules, you both know what you're doing, and have respect and understanding. For sure there will be many Microsoft applications running under VMware, and that's fine, because it's a win-win. There will be many times where a customer will pick Hyper-V and want to use EMC storage. And that's fine. We'll work together there.

I think it's an acknowledgment by two people that have great respect for each other, and two companies that are powerful, that this is a very good way to go.

Ballmer: There's enough shared interest for this to work. If it's 90 percent-95 percent competition, it's hard to get the little bit of cooperation. We're nowhere like that. We're 80 percent-85 percent cooperation, something like that. So, that makes it easier to do the whole thing.

Tucci: Good point.

Ballmer: I can't tell you we're "co-opetiting" or whatever you call it very well, for example, with Oracle. So, I'm not pretending you can do it with everybody in the business.

So for the next 3 years it'll be EMC playing the role of Switzerland in IT virtualization, despite VMware pumping $200 million profit toward EMC's bottom line and contributing billions more toward EMC's market cap. I hope it does because it'll be a huge win for thousands of customers who are deploying Hyper-V today. It'll certainly be interesting to watch.

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

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

Thoughts on today's virtualization licensing and support news

porourke — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 01:01:00 GMT

Today we announced some changes to server application licensing and support policies related to running MS server apps on top of anyone's hypervisor. Several folks have written or blogged about it, here are some:

Chris Wolf (Burton Group)

Virtualization.info

NetworkWorld

Windows IT Pro

Thoughts on application mobility licensing

As of Sept. 1, 41 Microsoft server applications are covered, both per-processor apps and server/CAL applications that are available via Volume Licensing [Enterprise Agreement and Open Agreements]. In essence the 90-day mobility rule is removed for these applications. With these changes, both licenses and software can move more freely across servers in a server farm [up to two data centers each physically located in a time zone that is within four hours, or within EU and/or EFTA].

Here are some examples of how the licensing might work for you:

· A customer has a server farm with 8 4-processor servers, running a total of 4 copies of Exchange.

o Under the old rules, they would need to either manually move the Exchange instances to another server that is already licensed for Exchange, OR they would need to license all 8 possible servers for Exchange.

o Starting Sept. 1, they will need to have a license for each running instance (4) and those licenses can be moved from one physical server to another as needed.

· A customer has a server farm with 8 4-processor servers, running a total of 4 instances of SQL Server Enterprise Edition under the per-processor model.

o Under the old rules, the customer would need to manually move an instance from one licensed processor to another, or they would need as many as 32 licenses (8x4)

o Starting Sept 1, the customer will need a maximum of 4 licenses. Because Microsoft allows unlimited instances on a processor licensed for SQL Server Enterprise Edition, the customer could have as few as one license if all 4 instances are always moved together.

A few other points:

these licensing rights don't apply to server apps acquired via OEM or retail channels
only apply to those products listed; it doesn't apply to client access licenses (CALs) or management licenses MLs) or Windows Server
If you've recently purchased these server apps listed in the"Application Server License Mobility" VL Brief based on rules prior to Sept. 1, then you should talk to the Microsoft partner or account rep to receive maximum value.
Why no Windows Server? Check out the use rights with Windows Server enterprise and datacenter editions.

Thoughts on technical support

As of today, you'll see that we're expanding tech support policy for (initial) 31 server applications for customers that run these apps on WS08 Hyper-V, Microsoft Hyper-V Server or any other validated hypervisor (type 1 or 2). The nut of it is ... customers will be able to get the same level of tech support for virtualized workloads that they get today with non-virtualized workloads.

The kicker here, and where many journos reported inaccurate information, is that 3rd-party vendors' hypervisors must first pass the validation test before customers can get cooperative support from Microsoft and that vendor. For example, it was reported that VMware signed an agreement to participate in the Server Virtualization Validation Program. That much is true. However, it doesn't mean that cooperative support is now in place. First, ESX Server must go through and pass the validation test. Once validated, they'll be added to KB article 944987, where we list "support partners for non-Microsoft hardware virtualization software." Today only Novell is listed, and that's due to the broader technical collaboration agreement in place between the companies.

The other thing to note is that the server application teams have posted configurations that will be supported running on validated hypervisors. For example, the Exchange team posted a blog about their policy, which can be summarized as:

Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 is supported on Hyper-V and other validated hypervisors when deployed according to the guidelines published on TechNet.

The Sharepoint team blogged about their policy today and posted an FAQ here.

Let us know if you have questions. Cheers,

Patrick O'Rourke

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

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

Application Virtualization and Streaming

porourke — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 11:15:00 GMT

I am Gavriella Schuster and I am responsible for the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) within the Windows team. This week I was fortunate enough to participate in a panel discussion at Interop with my peers at Symantec, Citrix, and VMWare discussing the benefits to be gained and pitfalls to be avoided with application virtualization and streaming.

It was great to have the opportunity to speak with our industry peers about the technology and to get to know each of them better on a more personal level. The discussion was focused on driving category awareness to the customers. Application Virtualization is a fairly new concept and many of the customers came just to understand what it is. By the show of hands in the audience, about 40% of the customers had plans to do some application virtualization within their environments but only three actually had any level of deployment already.

What was apparent in that session is that our technologies have more similarities than differences - and the approaches are converging. I think the panel was a more effective way to highlight the primary uses for application virtualization within an organization and where the customers might find the most benefits of the technology than if we had each given an hour long presentation on our own technologies. That might be a controversial thing to say – but I think when we each reinforced each others answers it provided a higher level of comfort to our customers that this was not a sales pitch – that it was just a great new technology that solves some of their most common and potentially hairy problems.

That said, I do think Microsoft Application Virtualization (formerly SoftGrid) stands out from the crowd because it offers a full solution. Our advantage lies in the breadth of the offering we have available. As part of the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack and as part of the System Center family, it offers both the application virtualization, multiple application delivery options inclusive of on-demand delivery via application streaming and a level of integration that makes this experience both seamless to the user and easier for the administrator. Microsoft Application Virtualization is a clear part of the desktop management story overall within MDOP and it is part of the broader infrastructure optimization solution that Microsoft provides.

Microsoft Application Virtualization offers customers the potential for complete application isolation from both other applications and from the OS, and then through dynamic suite composition also enables the administrator to configure some intercommunications between applications offering the administrator the best of both worlds. It also offers multiple delivery methods of which application streaming is a component of that capability. Administrators can choose to distribute the application via application streaming which provides dynamic, on demand delivery in a fraction of the time that it might take to download or even start, in many cases, a traditional application. Microsoft Application Virtualization also enables a distributed application delivery model that provides both centralized management and policy control as well as local distribution points to stream the applications to the desktops so that it minimizes the user impact in a distributed or branch office architecture. In addition to streaming delivery Microsoft Application Virtualization also offers the opportunity for the administrator to wrap the virtual application package within an MSI and pre-cache it onto the desktop. This enables either standalone delivery or delivery through a traditional software distribution (ESD) system. For customers that are using System Center Configuration Manager for delivery of their physical applications, Microsoft has also enabled the administrator to replace the Microsoft Application Virtualization server with Config Manager and enabled the same level of management and control to deliver an MSI or deliver the application on demand through streaming to the desktops.

Many of our Microsoft customers such as Swedish Medical Center, State of Indiana, Clarian Health Partners, BASF and others have realized the value of this technology in their increased agility, enhanced responsiveness to business needs, enhanced user experience and lower cost of ownership in delivering applications. Microsoft Application Virtualization is delivered as an integral component of the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack, which delivers dynamic desktop solutions: Microsoft® Diagnostics and Recovery Toolset provides tools that help administrators recover PCs that have become unusable and easily identify root causes of system and network issues; Microsoft Asset Inventory Service, translates software inventory into business intelligence; Microsoft Advanced Group Policy Management, enhances Group Policy through governance and change management tools; and Microsoft System Center Desktop Error Monitoring enables proactive problem management by analyzing and reporting on application and system crashes.

After this experience, I will seek out more opportunities to continue this type of discussion because I think it provides a lot of value to our customers and is more effective at building our credibility with them when we all sit down together in an open, unscripted discussion.

Gavriella Schuster, senior director, Windows Product Management Group