Windows Virtualization Team Blog : SoftGrid

Online sessions, book and more

porourke — Wed, 06 May 2009 01:56:00 GMT

Admittedly this post is a stew and not a meal (if that metaphor works). But you might be interested in the following items. I'll keep it short:

John Kelbley will host a webcast on Friday, May 8 at 8:00am PDT titled, "Running Linux on Hyper-V." The session will discuss install, configure, run, backup and monitor non-Windows systems. See here.
On May 14, 8am-noon PDT, Edwin Yuen will host a live chat on TechTarget. He'll answer questions about our virt products, be it datacenter, desktop or managemment. See more here.
Wondering what to read when you're flying to TechEd, or your next trip? The Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V Resource Kit book is it. One of the authors, Robert Larson, architect in MS Services and TechNet blogger, told me that the book is in final formatting and some sample chapters are available to download (here). The book will be available via Amazon and Barnes and Noble in June. Read more from one of the authors here.
Finally

Enjoy.

Patrick

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

Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization now available via MDOP

porourke — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 07:36:00 GMT

It's great to see that MED-V is now available to customers with the new version of MS Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) for customers with Software Assurance.

See Ran's post here. Following are excerpts from Ran's post:

MED-V provides deployment and management of virtual Windows desktops to enable key enterprise scenarios. MED-V 1.0 helps enterprises upgrade to the latest version of Windows even when some applications are not yet compatible. MED-V builds on top of Microsoft Virtual PC to run two operating systems on one device, adding virtual image delivery, policy-based provisioning and centralized management.

A recent brief by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) emphasized some of the customer benefits of using MED-V: "We found that MED-V really solved our application compatibility problems. It allowed us to deploy the applications that we were having difficulty with, where third party vendors were not providing a supported version. Where we used to have hundreds of images, we were able to move to one [Windows] Vista image, and use MED-V to deploy [legacy] applications on top of that," said IT Deployment Manger at Belfast Health and Social Care Trust, an organization of 22,000 staff members.

"We are really happy with MED-V. We can virtualize the applications that are made only for XP, and they work fine, with all the functionality intact," said a large European telecommunications company with almost 80,000 employees.

For a look-back at Kidaro's perspective prior to acquisition being completed, watch this interview with Kidaro CEO from May 2008, or listen to this podcast from February 2008. We announced the acquisition in March 2008, about 18 months after Kidaro announced their first desktop virtualization product.

Two other items caught my eye.

Ran's post said there are 14.4 million MDOP customers. There were 4.5 million seats in March 2008 according to my blog post. Wow, that's something. Wonder what the SA haters will say about that?
The new version of MDOP includes the update to App-V 4.5, which adds support for Windows 7 beta. See Karri's post here.

Patrick

March 31 live web chat

porourke — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 19:24:00 GMT

On Tuesday, March 31, Microsoft's Edwin Yuen will be hosting a live web chat 11am-3pm EST. Edwin is a sr. technical product manager. Edwin came to Microsoft with the acquisition of Softricity (and the SoftGrid application virtualization technology). He now also covers Hyper-V and System Center VMM. Sign up here.

Patrick

Microsoft customers showcased at VMworld Europe 2009

porourke — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 15:09:00 GMT

This week at VMworld Europe 2009 we're showcasing a number of European customers who have deployed Windows Server Hyper-V, System Center and App-v 4.5. You can watch two videos below.

One is of Bouygues Construction based in France. Bouygues does civil engineering, electrical contracting, and maintenance, employs 51,100 people and operates in more than 80 countries. This video is in French with English subtitles, and includes discussion of their Hyper-V and SCVMM deployment on Dell servers with EMC storage.

The second is Saxo Bank of Denmark. They’re an investment bank, and they used a Web-based trading platform and excellent customer service to drive rapid growth over 10 years, which in turn has led to a rapid expansion in the number of servers required to handle the bank’s data-intensive operations. Saxo Bank has deployed Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager to consolidate servers in the datacenter. Saxo plans to virtualize nearly all applications over the next few years, with the project expected to produce a 3-year internal rate of return of 150% and a net present value of 5.8 million Danish kroner (~U.S.$1.2 million).

Enjoy. A bientot.

Patrick

The Virtualization Essentials from Citrix

porourke — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 08:10:00 GMT

Bonjour from Cannes. This is just a quick post about Citrix making public the Essentials for Hyper-V news. It's been talked about already by Alessandro and others.

There's lots of opinions of what this means for the virtualization software vendor landscape. But that's less important really than what it means for IT pros and developers. They're now getting much broader access to the benefits of a hypervisor platform, one that's interoperable with other hypervisors, and one that will have a common management interface. It's a reminder that virtualization is just another means to an end (obviously a great one, otherwise I wouldn't blog here). The value has become management, automation, processes, and the like.

That's enough from me. Here's a video with Simon Crosby, CTO of Citrix, and Mike Neil, GM of virtualization, talking about Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V. Enjoy,

Patrick

[update: Two items. First, the real-world clock on our blog is out of sorts. I hit publish on this blog on Feb. 23, not Feb. 20. Just in case someone out there was wondering. I'll try to fix this issue. Second, Barry at Citrix blogged about Essentials for Hyper-V, too, and included demo. Check it out].

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.

For $50,000, I could pay someone to move my virtual machines for me

porourke — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 00:47:00 GMT

The title of this post will make sense in a moment. It's a quote from a customer in Australia ... and pretty funny one, too. But before that, a few items crossed my inbox that I thought I'd share:

Software vendor AspenTech has a process engineering/manufacturing application called aspenONE. Today they announced that their customer BASF deployed aspenONE using Microsoft App-V. I found this interesting for a few reasons. One, I've participated in conversations about whether enterprise customers would deploy 3rd-party apps running on App-V/SoftGrid without some sort of application certification program/logo for App-V. Second, BASF runs large, complex chemical process simulations - and now they're doing so as a network service. I know these sorts of computer-aided engineering apps often times get computed on HPC clusters; but never did I think they'd then get streamed at sufficient speed to the desktop using application virtualization. I'll be interested to see/read about more ISVs packaging their apps this way for enterprise customer deployments.
Along the lines of App-V, J.C. over at the App-V blog noted some new downloads:

Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.5 security configuration wizard. Download here.
Microsoft Application Virtualization best practices anayzer. Download here.

J.C. wrote last week that App-V 4.5 for Terminal Services license will be available Nov. 1. Read more here.
Adam over at TechNet Edge just posted a video interview with the authors of "Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V Unleashed." I mentioned Rand's and Jeff's book a couple weeks ago. I had the opportunity to meet Rand/Jeff last week while they were up here in Redmond. Rand spoke to a bunch of us about Convergent's business, and set us straight that applications (Exchange, Sharepoint) and solutions such as disaster recovery and compliance are driving his customers' infrastructure purchases (e.g., Windows Server, Hyper-V, System Center) ... not the other way around. Here's a link to Jeff's blog.

Finally, the headline to this Australian article caught my eye over the weekend: "PacLib performs VMware analysis but chooses Microsoft." The money quote, which I already alluded to, comes from IT manager David Furey when discussing VMware's proposal:

“They came back with a proposal of about $25,000 in installation costs and another $25,000 in software costs,” Furey told iTnews. “You’ve got to question whether it’s worth paying $50,000 for that. I know the VMware camp go on about features like VMotion, but for $50,000 I could pay someone to move my virtual machines for me.”

Hmm, sounds eerily similar to something I read at VMworld 2008. ;-)

In a couple weeks I'll be attending Gartner's Data Centre conference in Amsterdam and plan to blog about some of the sessions. Let me know if you'll be there so we can compare notes and share an adult beverage.

Patrick

Virtualization Feed for Your RSS Reader

porourke — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 10:06:00 GMT

With a "tip of the cap" to creators of Planet V12n blog, we've just launched a blog and Twitter aggregator for virtualization. It's called VirtualizationFeed. Like Planet V12n, this site aggregates virtualization blogs from lots of sources. In this case, 18 independent bloggers and 14 Microsoft bloggers on either TechNet or MSDN. I'm sure you'll recognize many of the names/blogs ... and maybe you'll discover new ones. For example:

Tarry Singh (Netherlands)
Andrew Dudgell (Australia)
Kevin Fogarty (CIO.com)
Alessandro Perilli (Italy)
David Marshall (U.S.)
Mark Bowker (ESG - analyst firm)
Ben Armstrong (aka, Virtual PC Guy)
Rakesh Malhotra (VM management blog)
The App-V team blog
Tony Soper's blog

The blog aggregator will show a short (200-character) excerpt from the blog and point you to the blogger's site for the full post.

In addition to blogs, you'll see a tab for Tweets. VirtualizationFeed.com is also a Twitter aggregator (supplements the use of Twitter's useful search tool) that pulls all virtualization-related tweets.

I'm told that someone is working on a Vista gadget so that you can view the blog aggregator's RSS feed from your desktop. I'll post the download link once the gadget is available. Otherwise it's self explanatory. Check it out.

Patrick

Virtualization wrap from TechEd IT Pro

porourke — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 19:10:00 GMT

I'm NOT in Orlando this week attending TechEd IT Pro conference. That means I get to enjoy Redmond's "wintery" spring weather and not Orlando's hot/humid thunderstorms. For those of you also NOT in Orlando, you can follow along with the happenings at a few spots:

Scott Lowe's blog, focus on virtualization (and expect comparisons to VMware's tools)
Margie Semilof from Techtarget will be publishing articles
Go here for blog roll and a bunch of news sources from the conference

I'll point out a few cool items from today's keynote:

You can now get cooperative technical support from Microsoft and four (initial) vendors [Citrix, Novell, Sun, Virtual Iron] when running Windows Server 2008 (or 2003, or 2000). How so? Microsoft's Server Virtualization Validation Program is now operational and vendors have begun validating their configs. So you'll soon see additional vendor names added to KB article 944987. This program is only intended for the dozen or so vendors that make/sell their own Type 1 or Type 2 hypervisor, and want their customers to receive technical support from them and Microsoft.
MS Application Virtualization (formerly SoftGrid) 4.5 Release Candidate will be available by the end of June. And interestingly enough it's been almost 2 years since the Softricity acquisition. Tim Mangan blogged about this over at BrianMadden.com.
Double-Take, an ISV partner, announced that their GeoCluster technology will run on Hyper-V once the latter is released. GeoCluster works with Windows Server 2008 failover clustering, and offers somethign that VMware can't.
Forefront Client Security is adding host and guest VM support for Hyper-V upon its release. See more here.

Enjoy,

Patrick

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