Windows Virtualization Team Blog : Kroll

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

VMware vSphere pricing - Meet the new price; same as the old price, only more

WSV_GUY — Mon, 04 May 2009 17:00:00 GMT

Hi, I'm Edwin Yuen, a Senior Technical Product Manager at Microsoft's Integrated Virtualization team. This past week, there were two key announcements made, one by Microsoft and one by VMware, that have an impact on how we compare Microsoft and VMware pricing.

The first announcement was actually off this blog, made by Zane Adam, announcing that with the upcoming release of our free, standalone hypervisor, Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2, features like clustering, high availability (HA), and live migration would be included. This was a very important announcement, as many customers are currently paying a significant amount of money for those features, and as we'll see below, will potentially continue to pay for them. With Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2, you can now implement HA and live migration without having to buy a premium management SKU, which could save you thousands of dollars.

The second announcement was VMware's announcement of vSphere, the next version of VMware's hypervisor. I spend a lot of time working and speaking with customers, both Microsoft and VMware users. The one theme repeated in those conversations is that everyone understands VMware is not a low cost solution and many have been re-evaluating how much they spend to implement virtualization. I think that everyone, including those of us at Microsoft, were wondering if VMware would drop their prices in the new version of vSphere. When the announcement came out, it had a bullet point on reduced costs and new SKUs for customers. When I sat down to actually figure out the pricing, it was pretty clear that the pricing really didn't change for many customers and the prices still don't compare to the offerings from Microsoft.

One of the key things I noticed is that for the SKU that most people bought, VI Enterprise or vSphere Enterprise, the price didn't actually change. It went from $5,750 for a two processors host to $2,875 per processor, which is the same thing. Thus, for many VMware customers, there is no cost savings in vSphere. Another interesting issue about vSphere can be seen on the version comparisons page off VMware's website. Many of the touted new features of vSphere, such as 8-way vSMP, >256GB of memory on the host, the vNetwork Switch, and Host Profiles, are only available if you buy new Enterprise Plus SKU, which is 18% more expensive than Enterprise and a cost increase for existing customers. This means, for those customers who want these new vSphere features, there is a net increase in their cost. Even when we compare just vSphere Enterprise SKU, the cost of vSphere Enterprise is five times that of buying the Microsoft solution with the Server Manage Suite Enterprise.

On the small and medium business side, VMware changed the name of their VI Foundation SKU to vSphere Essentials and added a new vSphere Essentials Plus SKU. Essentials is just like VI Foundation, but without consolidated backup. Essentials Plus is like Foundation, but with HA added. Essentials is priced at $995 for three two processors hosts and Essentials Plus is priced at $2995 for three two processor hosts. In contrast, a customer using Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 with System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 (VMM) Workgroup Edition (WGE) will only have to pay $499 for five hosts. Thus, the Essentials SKU is four times more expensive compared to the Microsoft Solution, which also includes HA, clustering, and live migration. The Essentials Plus SKU is 12 times more expensive than the Microsoft solution, while still missing live migration. In fact, for customers who need live migration, they must purchase the vSphere Advanced SKU, which starts at $4490 for a single, two processor host. When we look at the chart below, we can easily how the costs add up on the VMware side.

Finally, VMware has also argued on evaluating price per VM, based on a white paper and calculator they published recently. We recently published a white paper that reviews why this model and the cost calculator associated with it are not applicable to most customers. One of the key issues to the price per VM model, especially with how VMware has been promoting it, is that it doesn't take into account the applications being run. The number of VMs that can be run on a host depends on how the applications inside the VMs run. Don't believe VMware marketing about low consolidation ratios on Hyper-V. For example, this case study about Kroll Factual Data shows them running 30 VMs on a single Hyper-V host.

The consolidation ratio can vary depending on what you are running and how you run them. Because of this, you can't just plug consolidation ratios into a calculator and try to apply this across your entire deployment. The best way to compare Hypervisors is to compare Hypervisors, running your applications and VMs. When you do that, it will be easy to see why Microsoft is still less expensive then VMware. You can read about other companies that have made the switch to Microsoft here.

Still, in the end, the big question to ask yourself is the following: Is it worth all this expense for VMware, when the Microsoft solution offers a comparable or even better feature set for much less cost? Is it worth the extra line item on the invoice, the extra line in the budget, to use VMware virtualization when it's built into Windows? That is a question I think many customers will be asking themselves in the coming months and that is just another reason that you should start using Microsoft Virtualization solutions.

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 and Red Hat Cooperative Technical Support

porourke — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Hi, I’m Mike Neil, general manager of virtualization at Microsoft. It’s been a while since I’ve blogged here, but today’s post is worth a read.

Ever since we released Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and Terminal Services, System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 and Microsoft App-V 4.5 last year, customers and partners have been getting huge value from server consolidation projects, have been able to increase business continuity at much lower costs than with VMware, and have decreased the time and cost required to deliver applications to end users. And while doing this, they’ve been able to use a familiar set of system management tools for both their virtualized and non-virtualized systems and applications across the datacenter and desktops. In fact, Chris from Kroll Factual Data wrote about his DR project on this blog last year. So in many ways I’m pleased that we’ve been able to help so many customers and partners break down the barriers to enterprise-wide virtualization.

But until today there’s been one barrier, not product related, that we haven’t been able to overcome to meet customer and partner demand: the ability to run and support Red Hat Enterprise Linux within a guest VM on WS08 Hyper-V and Hyper-V Server 2008. For all of those who have emailed me, my colleagues and your Microsoft account teams and partners, I’m pleased to say that today is the first big step to delivering that support.

Microsoft and Red Hat recently signed agreements to test and validate our server operating systems running on each other’s hypervisors. Customers with valid support agreements will be able to run these validated configurations and receive joint technical support for running Windows Server on Red Hat Enterprise virtualization, and for running Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V or Hyper-V Server 2008. You can see Red Hat’s news release here, and watch a public webcast discussing this news.

So how are we doing this? Red Hat has joined Microsoft’s Server Virtualization Validation Program, and Microsoft is now a Red Hat partner for virtualization interoperability and support. Microsoft will be listed in the Red Hat Hardware Certification List once we’ve completed the Red Hat certification process in H2. In addition to the agreements, Microsoft will publish Linux Integration Components for RHEL when the testing and validation is complete. The folks at Red Hat tell me that they’ll provide WHQL [Windows Hardware Quality Labs] drivers for a variety of Windows Server versions. So not only will you get cooperative technical support, you’ll also get high-performing enlightened VMs.

You might also be wondering – when can I get this? I don’t have a calendar date for you just yet, but I know that validations are now underway and will be as comprehensive as possible. Each company is doing its respective validations separately with the first validated configurations available at different times later this year.

And I’m sure you’re wondering about tools to manage those RHEL guests running on Hyper-V? Good news there. We know virtualization projects aren’t successful unless the right management tools are in place to manage both the virtual and physical. System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2, which will be released in calendar Q2 2009, includes cross platform monitoring and support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux server versions 4 and 5 so that you can manage the applications and OS in the guest VM. Other Linux distros will be supported, too. This will allow you to monitor end-to-end data center applications that are distributed across both Windows Server and RHEL, whether these servers are physical or virtual.

I suspect that you’re now as excited as me about these agreements. But maybe you’re wondering … what took so long? That’s a fair question given the number of customers and partners that have been asking for this result.

Let me say that I’m sure everyone reading this can appreciate the distance between Microsoft and Red Hat is measured in more than just the 2,900 miles between Redmond, WA and Raleigh, NC. Microsoft and Red Hat have competed for customers and partners for some time now and as platform vendors continue to compete in the marketplace. Yet, our customers have told us that technical support for server virtualization is an area we must work together. And that’s certainly understandable when you consider the fact that roughly 80% of the primary guest (in a VM) operating systems on x86 servers today come from Microsoft or Red Hat. Indeed, customer demand is the main driver behind these agreements with our competitor.

One thing I’d like to point out: since these agreements are focused on joint technical support for Microsoft and Red Hat’s mutual customers using server virtualization, the activities included in these agreements do not require the sharing of IP. Therefore, these agreements do not include any patent or other IP licensing rights.

I want to leave you with the point that Microsoft is pragmatically focused on helping customers and partners be successful in a heterogeneous IT world. We’re committed to enable and support interoperability with non-Windows OSes. As a result we take a multifaceted approach to interoperability, be it customer-driven industry collaborations, such as this Server Virtualization Validation Program, be it standards that promote common technologies (e.g., device virtualization through the PCI-SIG), or proactive licensing of IP (e.g., Microsoft’s Virtual Hard Disk format, Microsoft’s Hypercall APIs), or the creation of technologies that bridge different systems (e.g., protocol licensing and documentation, Integration Components for Linux). In the end, customers with mixed IT environments expect it all to work together and today’s announcement is one way of making that happen.

Below you can read an FAQ that is also on Red Hat's website.

Mike

FAQ

Q1: Is this a joint agreement between Red Hat and Microsoft?

A1: It’s not a joint agreement. Red Hat has signed an agreement to join Microsoft’s Server Virtualization Validation Program, while Microsoft has joined Red Hat’s Virtualization Certification Program . Microsoft will be listed in the Red Hat Hardware Certification List once it has completed the Red Hat certification process.

Q2: It seems like customers should have had this type of support some time ago. What took so long to provide customers with technical support?

A2: Microsoft and Red Hat started hearing requests for bilateral validation soon after Microsoft’s Server Virtualization Validation Program went live in June 2008. Both companies quickly agreed to work together; finalizing the details around comprehensive, coordinated technical support has taken some time. As a result, customers will be able to confidently deploy Microsoft Windows Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, virtualized on Microsoft and Red Hat hypervisors, knowing that the solutions will be supported by both companies.

Q3: Are there other components of the deal that have not been disclosed yet?

A3: No. The agreements are specific to establishing coordinated technical support for our mutual customers using server virtualization. The agreements have nothing to do with patents, and there are no patent rights or other open source licensing rights implications provided under these agreements. The agreements contain no financial clauses other than test fees for industry-standard certification and validation.

While Microsoft and Red Hat continue to compete in the marketplace, customers have told us that technical support for server virtualization is an area where we must work together. Now we have agreements to test and coordinate technical support and provide customers with a new level of mutual support between Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Windows Server for their heterogeneous IT environments.

Q4: What versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Virtualization will be validated, to what versions of Windows and Hyper-V?

A4: Validations are now getting underway, and are planned to be comprehensive. Each company is doing its respective validations separately, with the first results expected later this year.

As a participant in Microsoft’s Server Virtualization Validation Program, once Red Hat submits test logs indicating that Windows Server 2008 runs properly on the Red Hat Enterprise virtualization, the specific version of Red Hat used in the tests along with parameters of the virtual machine tested will be posted on Microsoft’s Server Virtualization Validation Program website. At that point customers can confidently deploy Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2003 SP2, or Windows 2000 Server SP4 and later and receive coordinated technical support from both vendors.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux SVVP completion is planned for calendar H2 2009.

Microsoft currently plans to validate Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 as a guest on Windows Server Hyper-V. Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V (all editions) and Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 will now support uni-processor virtual machines running:

· Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 (x86)

· Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 (x64)

· Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 (x86)

· Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 (x64)

Q5: How do customers get support for the validated solutions? Who do they call?

A5: Customers with valid support agreements with both companies call either Microsoft or Red Hat to have their issues resolved. If the first vendor contacted cannot resolve the issue they will work with the other vendor to come to a resolution for the mutual customer.

Q6: What level of support agreement is required from Red Hat and Microsoft for a customer to receive support when running RHEL on Windows or Windows on RHEL?

A6: Customers with current Microsoft support agreements for Windows Server 2008 will be entitled to obtain support under this agreement. Where an existing agreement is not in place, customers can identify their willingness to purchase ‘per-call’ support.

Any customer with a valid Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription, and using Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 or 5.3 guests will be entitled to support under this agreement.

Q7: How do these agreements compare to agreements you both have with VMware and/or Citrix?

A7: There is no change in Microsoft's or Red Hat's relationship with VMware. Note that both Windows Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux can be deployed on VMware ESX. Red Hat doesn’t have any virtualization agreements with Citrix at this time. Both VMware and Citrix have product configurations that have been validated through the Microsoft Server Virtualization Validation Program.

Q8: How do I find out what validations have been completed?

A8: Validations will be posted to the respective Microsoft and Red Hat web sites:

http://www.redhat.com/rhel/compatibility/hardware/

http://www.windowsservercatalog.com/svvp.aspx

Q9: Who will be the primary beneficiary of this agreement?

A9: The primary beneficiary of this agreement will be Microsoft and Red Hat customers. Of course, a secondary beneficiary will be the virtualization ecosystem because it will be more useful to customers, leading to wider deployments and faster technology development.

Guest Post: The Green Benefits We've Experienced with a Virtualized Data Center

porourke — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 20:54:00 GMT

Greetings! I’m Chris Steffen, Principal Technical Architect with Kroll Factual Data and you may have seen some guest posts from me before. At Kroll Factual Data, we’ve done a lot of work with virtualization and while flexibility and cost savings were major considerations for initiating our virtualization efforts, I also wanted to share some of the green benefits we’ve experienced through virtualization technologies.

The most simple and obvious benefit of virtualization is server consolidation and utilization. For the most part, stand alone servers do not utilize anything near 100% of their resources. Virtualization is a great technology for enabling you to move and combine stand alone servers onto on a single Hyper-V host. Ultimately your Hyper-V host configuration will determine the number of Virtual Machines (VMs) that you can run, but we’re running about 30 VMs on a single, beefy Hyper-V host. Today we are running about 650 VMs on 22 Hyper-V hosts, which completely make up our production environment, with each of our VM hosts running at about 90% utilization.

From a numbers perspective: if you figure that a 1U rackmount stand alone server uses about 10,000 kWh annually, it would take approximately 6,500,000 kWh to run our entire production environment annually on standalone servers. Using Hyper-V virtualization, we are able to reduce our power consumption to about 700,000 kWh per year, for a savings of nearly 90%.

Keep in mind that this is only a reflection of computer hardware operating costs: it does not include the additional “green” savings that we get from reduced cooling, data center real estate, and computer hardware purchase and maintenance.

Kroll Factual Data commitment to energy awareness extends beyond the data center: the KFD campus in Loveland, Colorado is run entirely on renewable, wind powered energy. Kroll Factual Data is serious about environmental stewardship and taking responsibility for our impact on the environment in which we do business. As a technology company, virtualization is a critical component in utilizing technology in an environmentally friendly way.

I recently provided an overview of our green benefits as part of the Microsoft Live and Virtualized Live Meeting series in a session titled “Green IT and Virtualization”. You can listen to the playback of the session at this link and as part of it you’ll also hear from Francois Ajenstat, Director, Environmental Sustainability at Microsoft and Ward Ralston, Group Product Manager Windows Server at Microsoft. Another great tool Microsoft recently made available is the Hyper-Green site, which helps companies calculate their potential green savings through server consolidation on Hyper-V. I urge you to check out the Live Meeting and the Hyper-Green site when you have a chance.

For KFD, going “green” was not only the right thing for our company to do, virtualization also made it the most cost effective and flexible technology solution.

Thanks – Chris

Disaster Recovery – not a nightmare with virtualization

porourke — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 01:53:00 GMT

Hello all, my name is Chris Steffen and I am the Principal Technical Architect at Kroll Factual Data.

Kroll Factual Data is a company that provides business information to mortgage lenders, consumer lenders, property management firms and other businesses. We have been a part of the Microsoft Technology Adoption Program for virtualization products for the past several years, and we have about 1,500 Virtual Machines (VM) across our computing environment.

As companies experiment with server virtualization, one of the benefits that is seemingly overlooked (or not emphasized as often as it should be) by those discussing virtualization technologies is the impact that virtualization can have when creating & maintaining a disaster recovery environment.

Put simply, the more that your production environment is virtualized, the easier it is to build a disaster recovery environment using the golden images created for your production systems.

For years, I had worried about my company’s ability to recover from a catastrophic disaster. But over the last 18 months, we have utilized Microsoft Virtual Server to create the situation that we are in today:

We have a production data center environment that is 85% virtualized. All of the golden images are replicated to our Disaster Recovery (DR) site (the golden image store is constantly updated to the DR site, and the updated / patched / modified golden images are automatically copied to DR as soon as they are changed). We have standing virtual machine hosts awaiting a VM image (these machines are running and used for testing). Our Internet circuits and vendor connections are “hot” and tested constantly. Databases and all other non-VM machines are already duplicated and maintained at DR (we’re talking a couple dozen machines, not the 600 that are located in our production environment today).

Were we to experience a major disaster, the IT staff at our DR site would immediately start the process of copying VM images to selected hosts. We would change our circuit routing and externally hosted Domain Name Service to the DR IP range. After the VMs have been copied to the host machines, we would start to bring up the “new” data center. Our testing has shown that this can realistically be completed in less than a day, but we have a 24 hour Recovery Time Objective (RTO).

Our DR site is populated by our hand-me-down equipment. But with server virtualization, this is not a problem. Sure, you may not be able to run 20 VMs on a single host machine due to the older hardware configs, but even if you can only run a quarter of that number, you are gaining additional life out of “end of life” equipment, and getting your production systems up and running in pretty much the same condition that they were running in your real production environment.

I still worry about business continuity situations (who doesn’t?). But the DR plan that we have established for our core technology finally lets me rest a little bit better. And using the Microsoft virtualization software and their System Center management tools has made the entire disaster recovery project more cost effective, not only from a licensing and equipment side, but from a manpower / administrative perspective. As you embrace a virtualization technology, keep disaster recovery in the back of your mind as another solution to your DR maintenance nightmare.

I welcome your questions or comments.

Chris