Windows Virtualization Team Blog : Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Tool

Announcing the availability of the updated Infrastructure Planning and Design Guides for Virtualization and System Center

vtango — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 17:03:00 GMT

Microsoft has a comprehensive portfolio of technologies when it comes to Virtualization ranging from Presentation Virtualization with Remote Desktop Services to Server Virtualization using Hyper-V with many more in between as below.

· Server Hardware Virtualization. Also known as a hypervisor, Server Hardware Virtualization runs a very lightweight core operating system. The hypervisor can host independent virtual machines (VMs). This form of virtualization requires hardware that has embedded virtualization awareness capabilities. Since the hypervisor is very lightweight, there is little overhead in the system, which allows for more scalability in the virtual machines.

· Server Software Virtualization. An operating system, such as Windows Server® 2003 or Windows Server 2008, runs an application that is able to host virtual machines. Each virtual machine runs a completely separate operating system and application set.

· Presentation Virtualization. Centralized systems host multiple user sessions, and all processing is done on those host systems. The user sessions are isolated from each other. Only the presentation information, such as keyboard and mouse inputs, and video updates are sent between the client and the host system. The client can be a full Windows-based workstation or a Windows-based terminal device.

· Application Virtualization. An application is isolated from the underlying operating system by means of wrapper software that encapsulates it. This allows multiple applications that may have conflicting dynamic link libraries (DLLs) or other incompatibilities to run on the same machine without affecting each other.

· Desktop Virtualization. This is similar to Server Software Virtualization, but it runs on client systems such as Windows Vista®. The client operating system runs a virtualization application that hosts virtual machines. This is often used when a specific person needs to run one or a limited number of legacy applications on a legacy operating system.

With the richness and breadth of these technologies, customers should evaluate their needs against the capabilities and solutions that each of the technologies is targeted at. The Solution Accelerators team has been working furiously to create guides for customers and we are really excited to announce the availability of the Infrastructure Planning and Design Guide for Virtualization updated for Windows Server 2008 R2, which can help customers start their planning and deployment process for Virtualization using the Microsoft portfolio. With detailed documentation and simple flowcharts customers now have a powerful tool in their hands as they plan their deployments. Once the decision to go with a particular technology has been made, detailed guides are available for each of the technologies as well giving business decision makers, infrastructure stakeholders, and the organization as a whole a comprehensive tool for designing their virtual deployments.

As Tom Bittman from Gartner had said “Virtualization without good management is more dangerous than not using virtualization in the first place”. Our System Center suite of products provide a full suite of management solutions for this environment and the Infrastructure and Planning Guides for System Center have been updated for System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2.

Vijay Tewari

Principal Program Manager, Windows Server Virtualization

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

Hyper-V Deployment Case Study – Sporton International

porourke — Wed, 21 May 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Managing 60 servers is no small feat when it comes to midsize company, Sporton International in Taiwan. With limited IT resources, Sporton decided to turn to Systex Corporation (Microsoft Gold Certified Partner) to explore options to virtualize their physical servers in an effort to reduce operation cost while improving the agility and manageability of their server assets. Here're the case study highlights:

1) What was deployed?

35 physical production servers were virtualized with Hyper-V Release Candidate into on three physical servers (that's 12:1 consolidation ratio).
10 virtual machines were configured with Hyper-V clustering to support Sporton's business continuity and disaster recovery needs.
The Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Tool was used to collect the performance metrics of every server in the data center and to identify which servers were good candidates. The MAP tool saved a substantial amount (60%) of inventory and planning time – which otherwise would have to be done manually.

2) Why deployed with Hyper-V?

Optimizing Hardware Assets to Cut Costs: Saved on 70% of hardware costs & increased server utilization from 10-15% to about 70%
Streamlining Provisioning to Boost Responsive IT Service: Cut the time it takes for our IT staff to provision a server by up to 70 percent, which is critical to the productivity of the development and IT departments
Improving Availability for Better Business Continuity: Provided better continuity of IT service to internal users through quick migration and clustering technology from Microsoft
Hyper-V offers better and more familiar user interface as well as lower cost of ownership than VMware

3) In the customer’s own words....

"Hyper-V in Release Candidate 0 was so reliable that we deployed VMs into the production environment serving all Internet guests and customers, and our subsidiaries in Taiwan, China, and Korea" - Kathy Lin, IT Manager of Sporton International.
"Hyper-V is the best virtualization solution running on Windows Server 2008, with enhanced performance and stability for Sporton at a fraction of the cost of VMware’s hypervisor-based offering." - David Feng, Technical Services Director of Systex Corp.

4) Where to find the tools mentioned in this case study and other key virtualization resources?

Hyper-V Release Candidate and Hyper-V Demo Video
Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Tool (to identify server machines suitable for virtualization) & MAP Tool demo video
Microsoft Assessment and Planning Team Blog
Virtualization Solution Accelerators
TechNet Virtualization TechCenter

If you want to learn more please CLICK HERE for the entire case study.

Cheers,

Baldwin Ng

Sr. Product Manager, Virtualization Solution Accelerators + Microsoft Assessment and Planning Tool