Windows Virtualization Team Blog : MMS

Promotion of Brad Anderson to Corporate Vice President, Management and Services Division

larrygrothaus — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 23:16:00 GMT

It comes as no surprise to the regular readers of this blog, that a key tenant of Microsoft’s virtualization strategy is that customers should be able to manage their physical and virtual IT resources from the same set of easy to use tools. It seems that customers agree, as demonstrated through the growth of the Microsoft Management and Services Division (30% growth year over year) offerings during some challenging economic times.

Today we’ve announced that Brad Anderson, one of the key drivers behind Microsoft’s management offerings, including the System Center suite and products such as VMM, has been promoted to corporate vice president. We wanted to share the news with those of you that have worked with or met him over the years through events such as the annual Microsoft Management Summit conference. Congratulations Brad!

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

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

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

What is Microsoft doing about enterprise security?

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

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

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

Patrick

HP releases Insight Control suite for Microsoft System Center

porourke — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 12:00:00 GMT

Hello - I’m Zane Adam, senior director of System Center and Virtualization marketing at Microsoft. I wanted to share some exciting news related to Microsoft’s virtualization and System Center offerings and HP’s Insight Control Suite for System Center. With the official release today of Insight Control Suite for System Center, HP has taken a significant step in advancing the dynamic datacenter for customers with HP ProLiant and HP BladeSystem platforms by enabling HP Insight Control capabilities to be invoked directly from the Microsoft System Center consoles.

We believe the combination of the System Center suite, Microsoft’s virtualization offerings and Insight Control suite for System Center will help further ease the customer experience by reducing complexity and the requirements on administrator’s time, delivering integrated management of virtual machines, the underlying host systems and optimizing the utilization of resources, power and space. Today’s release of ICE-SC includes a combination of functionality delivered seamlessly through System Center and HP Systems Insight Manager. At a high level, the fully integrated components include:

} Bare Metal deployment – delivered via an Operating System Deployment (OSD) toolkit that plugs directly into System Center Configuration Manager

} PRO pack integration – the ability to manage virtual machines running on ProLiant host systems through System Center consoles

} Lights out remote management – via an iLO Advanced license

} Enhanced configuration and inventory information for ProLiant systems surfaced in the System Center Configuration Manager console

} ProLiant system health monitoring from the System Center Operations Manager console

} All backed by the power of the HP Services organization with 30,000 Microsoft-trained professionals

Congratulations to HP on bringing this offering to market and providing these powerful capabilities to our mutual customers. Be sure to check out the guest blog post on the System Center blog from Scott Farrand of HP.

Thanks - Zane

MMS 2009: Application Virt for Servers

porourke — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 01:50:00 GMT

I'm a bit behind is sharing the following demo video. On Tuesday at Microsoft Management Summit, we did a demo of application virtualization for servers. Both Mary Jo and Alessandro predicted this demo a couple weeks ago - so not a real surprise. The demo was described as a technology preview, meaning there's no plan of record for beta testing date. So what did Bill Morein demo?

As you'll see, Bill's demo was setup by talk about administering the compute fabric and managing deployment of a tightly bound OS can create challenges. By applying application virtualization to this challenge, we can separate apps from the server. This should mean a more simplified, and accelerated, approach to deploying those virtualized apps and patching. Bill pointed out that this leads to reduce image libraries, and accelerated migration.

Check out the demo - it's less than 6 minutes.

Patrick

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 beta available

porourke — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 17:44:00 GMT

Exciting news for Windows Server Hyper-V, System Center, and VMWare customers. The beta of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 is now available on the Microsoft Connect site for download. If you don't already have access to VMM on the Connect site you can get to it here by simply filling out a quick survey, which will help us better understand your virtualization needs. The new beta continues to extend the data center management capabilities of the System Center suite of offerings to build on the all up physical and virtual IT asset management features you already know, including the integration of Operations Manager and Virtual Machine Manager through the PRO functionality.

You can find current, full details on the VMM 2008 R2 beta in a post by Rakesh Malhotra at this location.

In summary, VMM 2008 R2 beta now supports new Windows Server 2008 R2 beta features such as Live Migration. Some additional features include:

Windows Server 2008 R2 Beta Hyper-V host management

Enhanced migration including Live (Live Migration) and SAN migration in and out of clusters

Multiple VMs per LUN using Clustered share volumes

Hot add of VM storage

A reminder also that the Microsoft Management Summit is April 27 - May 1 in Las Vegas. This is an excellent time to learn more about all of the management offerings from Microsoft including the System Center suite and VMM 2008 R2. Hope to see you there.

Please go download the beta of Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 today from the Microsoft Connect site and let us know what you think.

Analyst perspectives on Microsoft's Integrated Virtualization strategy & System Center evolution, from MMS 2008

porourke — Fri, 02 May 2008 11:34:00 GMT

Greetings! My name is Robb Mapp and I’m the analyst relations manager in Server & Tools focused on System Center management tools and Integrated Virtualization. This week at MMS, we had nearly 60 industry analysts participate in a summit focused on strategies for systems management and virtualization. These summits are great for Microsoft, as it gives us an opportunity to truly engage in a productive dialogue with the infrastructure pundits. Two of the attending analysts – Neil Macehiter from Macehiter Ward-Dutton and Mark Bowker from Enterprise Strategy Group – were kind enough to sit down with me to discuss the role of an IT analyst and thoughts around our Integrated Virtualization strategy and our move to manage heterogeneous platforms. Enjoy the videos!