Windows Virtualization Team Blog : MVP Summit

Guest Blog: The Role of IT in an Economic Downturn: Spend Smarter, Not Smaller

porourke — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 12:30:00 GMT

Hello everyone, Richard Campbell here from Campbell & Associates based in Vancouver, BC. I am not only the host of RunAs Radio (www.runasradio.com) but also a Microsoft Regional Director and MVP.

It’s fun being an IT consultant during boom times – my clients are only focused on getting more customers, expanding territories and getting new products to market. There’s no time to worry about costs, it’s time to spend and grow. Speed to market is key and building in lots of capacity so that you can keep serving your new markets is essential.

Looks like that fun is over for the moment, and I’m back in a role I’m comfortable with also: Focusing on return on investment. When the boom times end, it’s time to get back to efficiency and profitability. And there’s lots to do. Whether my clients are technology centric (a company with a retail web site) or technology supported, IT can play a huge role in making the business more profitable and more efficient. Apparently I’m not alone, according to a survey commissioned by Microsoft’s Server & Tools Business (www.microsoft.com/infrastructure) the majority of IT professionals recognize that improving end-user productivity is a key reason for innovation in IT.

Ultimately, information technology can benefit a business two ways: It can improve the performance of the business by making it possible for more revenue to be generated for the same cost or the same revenue for less cost. A new order entry system might allow sales clerks to process two hundred orders in a day where they used to only process one hundred – that’s a great boost in efficiency and profitability. The other benefit technology can bring to a company is better instrumentation: Allowing the management of the business to see more clearly where revenue is made and expenses are incurred. This information then is turned into changes of behavior that increase the profitability of the business.

In an economic downturn, the challenge for the IT Pro is getting back to the concepts of return on investment for technology. This involves studying in detail how the business makes money and where the expenses are incurred. Once those facts are known, then the next step is to find opportunities to improve. It’s really as simple as that. However, the challenge is gathering those core facts – perhaps a better instrumentation system is needed to be able to find opportunities to improve. Maybe that means you need a consultant to help guide the way, or you have the skills in-house, either way the job is clear: spend smarter, not smaller. Don’t focus only on reducing your spend, but on spending on the things that makes your company more profitable and more efficient.

-Richard

More on virtualizing SharePoint

porourke — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 00:37:00 GMT

Since there was interest in the previous post about the UK services team's series on virtualizing SharePoint, I wanted to recommend the following video from October 2008. The interview is with Michael Noel of Convergent Computing. Michael is also a SharePoint MVP. In this video (6 minutes long), Michael talks about using System Center Virtual Machine Manager to deploy SharePoint. He also talks about disaster recovery and quickly provisioning a SharePoint farm.

There's a high interest amongst our customers to adopt SharePoint, and to run it within a virtual machine. Mark at Enterprise Strategy Group [his blog] shared the following data with me [from a Dec 2008 research brief by ESG], that partially explains why there's interest.

In a recent survey of 1,191 IT and business managers, ESG found that one in three (33%) North American and Western European midmarket and enterprise companies are currently using Microsoft’s SharePoint suite of collaboration and content management tools. As adoption becomes more widespread, SharePoint is quickly becoming an organization-wide, critical business resource. As shown in Figure 1, 29% of current SharePoint users rate the implementation of SharePoint as one of their top three IT initiatives over the past 12-24 months and 82% place it in their top ten initiatives.

ESG’s research also reveals that SharePoint is viewed very favorably by current users, with 69% of current adopters saying they would recommend that organizations similar to their own implement SharePoint broadly.

Michael Noel on Virtualization Part II

BTW - for those of you who read this blog on the Web (20-25% of you), I hope you like the new skins.

Patrick

Top 5 things to know about Hyper-V

porourke — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 03:32:00 GMT

My name is Ronald Beekelaar. I'm a Microsoft MVP of Virtual Machine Technology, based in Amsterdam. I have my own consultancy firm, and since 2002 I focus on virtualization. At first, this was strictly VMware-oriented, but a few years later this included Microsoft's virtualization products as well.

Since the first public beta of Hyper-V more than a year ago, I have done many presentations about Hyper-V at various events, and talked to a lot of customers about transitioning to Hyper-V. The people I talk to can be divided into two groups: they either have experience with Microsoft Virtual PC and Virtual Server, or they only know the VMware products and are just now looking into Hyper-V. However, for both groups, and despite very different opinions, there are five topics that always come up in discussions. Below is my list of the top-5 things you should know and understand about Hyper-V.

5) Understand the hypervisor model and performance consequences.

This is especially a big one for people that know Virtual PC and Virtual Server. The virtualization model that Hyper-V uses is very different from the model that Virtual PC and Virtual Server use. The Hyper-V model allows for much better I/O performance of virtual machines. This is mainly due to the new 64-bit hypervisor layer underneath everything - including the host operating system even, and the new high-speed VMBus "synthetic" drivers that run in the virtual machines.

Particularly- the use of optimized synthetic disk and network drivers talking to the VMBus, instead of using normal "hardware-oriented" drivers, make for a much faster I/O path from applications inside the Hyper-V virtual machines to the physical hardware. To make use of these synthetic drivers, make sure you use an operating system inside the virtual machines for which Microsoft provides so-called Integration Components. When you install the Integration Components, the synthetic drivers are installed as well.

Please see Microsoft Knowledge Base article 954958 for the list of operating systems in which you can install Integration Components.

4) Understand the use of snapshots

Snapshots in Hyper-V are very different from those found in Virtual PC and Virtual Server. Snapshots in Hyper-V allow you to save the current point-in-time state of your running or non-running virtual machine, and later come back to that particular state. Great for testing, troubleshooting and roll-back of virtual machine state.

This comes in the place of undo-disks, save-state, and to some extend even differencing disks with Virtual PC and Virtual Server.

Make sure you understand the power of snapshots and the scenarios where you should not roll-back the state of your virtual machine. Any scenario with a distributed database (such as domain controllers) is not a good candidate for snapshotting.

3) How to use Quick Migration

No discussion on virtualization can be complete without addressing fail-over support and virtual machine management. That is topic 3 and 2 in the list.

It doesn't take long to realize that any time you run multiple virtual machines on the same physical Hyper-V server, you have to think about how to handle the scenario where you have to do maintenance on the physical server (planned), or worse what happens when the physical server suddenly stops working due to loss of power or similar (unplanned).

For both the planned and unplanned scenarios, Hyper-V has support of host clustering. Windows Server 2008 clustering treats virtual machines as fully-managed clustered resources. For fail-over, clustering moves the

virtual machine from one node to another node. In Hyper-V terminology this is called Quick Migration. Due to the use of shared storage, only the content of the memory of the running virtual machine is copied to the other node.

2) Consider System Center Virtual Machine Manager

Virtual machines created with Hyper-V need to be managed as well. Enter System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008. With Virtual Machine Manager you can simplify lots of tasks related to virtual machine management. This includes easier virtual host cluster support, automatically provisioning new virtual machines based on templates (including taking care of the "sysprep" part to make multiple virtual machines from the same template unique on the network), and an straightforward physical-to-virtual (P2V) conversion

process to move existing physical computers on to Hyper-V as virtual machines.

Interestingly enough, SCVMM 2008 can manage Hyper-V servers, Virtual Server, and even VMware ESX virtualized infrastructure, and even comes with a nifty virtual-to-virtual (V2V) option to move existing VMware virtual machines to Hyper-V.

As you would expect of a new server product from Microsoft, SCVMM 2008 fully supports automation with PowerShell.

1) Hyper-V can run on Server Core Installation

The number one thing to know about Hyper-V is the fact that it can run perfectly well on a Server Core Installation of Windows Server 2008. This means that on the physical server, you only need to install the absolute minimum "host OS,", and still have the full Hyper-V functionality. Having less moving parts and services running on the Hyper-V computer is, naturally, very beneficial to reduce the number of times you need to patch the server, and reduces the possible attack surface exposed to the network.

For any serious production installation of Hyper-V, and for any serious comparison with VMware ESX, being able to run Hyper-V on a Windows Server 2008 Core Installation is essential.

Ronald

Video: Ronald Beekelaar on Virtualization

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