Windows Virtualization Team Blog : VDI

Virtualization: desktop to datacenter

porourke — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 21:54:00 GMT

It's been a while since I've posted a blog ... but that one really caused a stir in the Virt circles in the Bay Area. Hopefully it doesn't mean I can't hit up those people for Sharks tickets.

I've stumbled across some interesting items that I wanted to share with you.

Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack 2009 R2 is now available. The big thing is support for Windows 7. Read the blog here. Here's an excerpt:

If you are an MDOP customer, you can download MDOP 2009 R2 through Microsoft Volume Licensing Site (MVLS). For others who wish to evaluate MDOP products, the MDOP software is available at MSDN and TechNet (in accordance with your MSDN or TechNet agreements, except for AIS).

MDOP has been licensed for over 21 million desktops worldwide! In a recent survey completed for Microsoft by Answers Research, and including 1000 IT professionals across five countries, we learned several interesting facts:

66% of MDOP customers deployed three or more of the MDOP products

52% of them deployed MDOP across more than half of their PCs

94% of MDOP customers said they would recommend MDOP to a colleague

When comparing MDOP and non-MDOP customers, customer satisfaction with Software Assurance increases by 25%

Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MED-V) V 1.0 SP1 - This updated tool will support Windows 7 and enable enterprise deployment of virtual Windows XP environments to support incompatible applications. A Beta version of MED-V 1.0 SP1 will be available by the end of 2009 and final release is scheduled for the first quarter of calendar year 2010.

On the server side, the latest is from Gartner Symposium in Orlando. Gartner announced their top 10 strategic technologies for 2010. Not surprisingly, virtualization is named or underlying several of the strategic technologies. And speaking of, Gartner also shared data on server virtualization adoption today and forecasted through 2012. Read this article. Here's an excerpt:

According to Gartner, 18% of server workloads this year run on virtualized servers; that share will grow to 28% next year and reach almost half by 2012. But growth is anticipated among the small-to-midsize businesses (SMB), and it's in this segment that Microsoft has a good chance to build a customer base. By 2012, VMware's share is expected to shrink to 65% but the base of VMs will have grown to 58 million, a 10-fold leap. By that time, Gartner believes, Microsoft will hold 27% share, Citrix 6%, Red Hat 2% and others about 1%.

Along those lines, I had a great email exchange a couple weeks ago with Steve at PoundHost in Maidenhead, UK. I was giving a presentation at IP Expo / VM Expo conference in London, and wanted to highlight PoundHost's business results since switching to Hyper-V and System Center away from VMware tools, and since PoundHost has deployed the Dynamic Datacenter Tookit for hosters. PoundHost has a very compelling story of how technology can really help a business transform itself and create new opportunities. The Microsoft case study doesn't really do it justice. Here's some of what Steve shared with me:

Cost. "It meant we could offer Linux and Windows at the same price (when we went live with the beta of R2 we had Linux guests but we don’t now). It means we can offer low cost VMs on high quality (and cost!) host servers which ultimately give the end user a better experience. [It] works out about £1.00 per guest assuming 60 guests per host."
Common management tools. "We were also very impressed with a demo we had seen of System Center Virtual Machine Manager and Ops Manager so we now use both in our infrastructure."
Choice. "I’m a VCP and have a lot of experience with ESX but I’d never use it again now I’ve used Hyper-V under R2"
Grow business. "[We've] expanded our Hyper-V/System Center offerings into our managed services company Server Arcade "
Grow business: profitability boost by 55%
Customer service. "We’re also doing the customer control panel now for Poundhost which is based on the Dynamic Datacenter Toolkit."

Check out more about the Dynamic Datacenter toolkits and partner alliance at their blog.

Patrick O'Rourke

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

Microsoft’s new VDI licensing: VDI Suites

porourke — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 00:48:00 GMT

Hi, my name is Manlio Vecchiet, and I am a director of product management on the Windows Server marketing team. I'm in New Orleans right now attending the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC), and wanted to update you on new licenses we’ll offer for hosted virtual desktops, or virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).

When deciding whether to implement or even pilot VDI, most customers look for technical integration of the key VDI building blocks:

· the hypervisor,

· management of the virtual machines and the (physical) VDI host,

· a brokering and remoting infrastructure, and

· an application delivery technology for dynamic provisioning of applications to virtual desktops.

But customers also look for a simple and cost-effective way to license this scenario, as they will compare the technical and business benefits of VDI with more traditional desktop deployment options, such as session-based desktops and rich clients. Today we introduced two new licenses for VDI – the Microsoft Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Standard Suite and the Microsoft Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Premium Suite. These licenses make it simple for customers to purchase the comprehensive Microsoft VDI technologies while providing excellent value compared with competing VDI offerings. The new VDI suite licenses will be available via Microsoft volume licensing in calendar Q4.

This is a pretty big deal, so let me explain what we mean by comprehensive, simple and excellent value. First, both new offerings include licenses for all the key technology components mentioned above when used in a VDI scenario: Hyper-V Server, System Center Virtual Machine Manager, System Center Configuration Manager, System Center Operations Manager, Remote Desktop Services (CAL) and MDOP. The Premium VDI Suite even includes additional use rights for Remote Desktop Services (RDS) as well as App-V for RDS, to enable mixed environments with not only VM-based remote desktops, but also session-based desktops and applications. With these two new offerings, the only additional license you will need to correctly license a VDI environment from Microsoft is Virtual Enterprise Centralized Desktop or VECD (you will need VECD even to deploy VDI on a non-Microsoft platform)

By now, you are probably wondering how the licensing of these new VDI Suites will work given their standalone components have very different license schemes. The two new VDI Suites are designed to match the VECD license (which is a device subscription), so the math has become very simple now: As with VECD, the number of VDI Suite licenses equals the total number of client devices that accesses the VDI environment. The subscription-based license will ensure that customers always have access to the latest versions of the software.

But now comes actually the best part. At only $21 per year per device, the VDI Standard Suite is about one-third the cost of a corresponding VMware View edition (the comparison is based on the cost of licenses and software maintenance over a five-year period, which many customers tell me that’s what they base their desktop infrastructure investments on). Similarly, our VDI Premium Suite is about half the price of the premier VMware VDI offering, and it also offers the capability to deploy session-based desktops and applications, in addition to VM-based desktops. And for those customers who are still missing a feature or need an enterprise-ready solution, you can add a 3^rd party connection broker for Hyper-V such as Citrix XenDesktop - and most likely still pay less than if you chose to deploy VMware. In fact, Citrix today announced continued alliance in the area of desktop virtualization.

If you would like to see a demo of Microsoft VDI solution running on Windows Server 2008 R2, please come to the Microsoft booth at WPC if you’re attending the conference. For all others, please post your comments in the section below.

Manlio

UPDATE: to answer morriswj's question. I'm excited, too, about this new single licensing for VDI’s server infrastructure, which will complement VECD for a VDI deployment. Regarding High Availability, it is included in MS Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 (the no-cost, standalone hypervisor) and will therefore be available as part of the VDI Suite offering. No other license other than VDI Suite (Standard or Premium) and VECD will be required for a highly available VDI deployment.

UPDATE 2: I'm responding to the question from cstalhood, and the similar question in Brian Madden's post today. For session virtualization using WS08 R2 Remote Desktop Services (RDS), you don’t need the VECD license. The Premium VDI Suite license includes full rights of the RDS CAL, in addition to the other components for a VDI solution. The Premium VDI Suite license, when available in Q4, will be available as a device subscription, while RDS CAL (the new name for TS CAL) is available as a perpetual user or device license. After all, some customers don’t want to buy on a subscription basis.

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

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 at VMworld Europe 2009

porourke — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 09:30:00 GMT

VMworld Europe's tagline this year is "virtually anything is possible". Kinda reminds me of Mike's blog post on Monday about Red Hat. And for many IT pros, "virtually anything is possible" might apply to the fact that Microsoft is exhibiting at, and sponsoring, VMworld Europe for the second year in a row. Tres bien, as they say in Cannes.

So if you're one of the 3,000 paid attendees expected at VMworld Europe 2009, below's a sneak peak at what you'll find inside booth #133. If you're not attending, I'm going to attempt to post some pix ... maybe video if I'm lucky ... from the booth so you can see the action. No doubt there will be plenty of other blogs coming from VMworld Europe. You can see most of them at the Virt blog aggregator.

So what am I expecting to see in Cannes? Outside of the Microsoft booth, I'd expect to see early versions of client hypervisors, interop announcements, new product packaging, cloud computing announcements, and likely an update about VMsafe. Should be a busy week.

As for Microsoft, of course we'll be showcasing our server virtualization platform - Hyper-V. (Citrix might do a little bit of that, too). We'll have a total of 4 demos in the booth:

Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V running Live Migration
System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 showing management of VMware ESX Server and a Citrix PRO pack demo. Not sure if this will be a sneak peak of the next version or not of SCVMM.
Desktop virtualization with App-V 4.5 and beta of MED-V 1.0.
a VDI demo with Citrix XenApp and WS08 r2 remote desktop services.

I was hoping we'd be demoing the lab manager functions in Visual Studio 10, or the integration to System Center DPM 2007 sp1 and Iron Mountain cloud backup. Oh well, maybe next show. I know we will be there to answer all your licensing questions about the above scenarios. I do recall about 33%-50% of all the people I met in the booth last year had licensing questions. Thankfully Chris Wolf (Burton Group analyst) will have a session on that topic Feb. 24 at 3:15pm. Check it out.

The Microsoft-presented session (comes with the sponsorship) is Feb. 25 at 2pm in Les Ambassadors 2/3. I know Jeff and Edwin have some good demos for this session.

This will also be the first time Paul Maritz takes the stage in front of his European customers and partners. Let's just hope he can pronounce Cannes better than Diane did last year [hint: it's not pronounced like "canz"].

Now it's off to Cannes, and the beautiful promenade with lots of well-dressed locals walking their tiny little dogs. A memory I won't forget. No doubt the poodles will offer a better welcome than we did in Vegas ;-).

Patrick

WinServer 2K8 Hyper-V is alive

porourke — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 03:02:00 GMT

Fellow Virtualization Fans,

Bryon Surace here. I’m a senior program manager on the server virtualization team. Last week Steve Ballmer officially announced the public availability of Windows Server 2008 R2 Beta! So did my friends over at the Windows Server Division blog. With this release, there are a tremendous number of new features and capabilities that I encourage everyone to check out. However, since I am somewhat partial to virtualization, let’s talk about my Top 5 favorite new Hyper-V features:

Bryon’s Favorite New Hyper-V Feature #1: Live migration of Virtual machines

Microsoft is enhancing the product with the ability to “live migrate” a virtual machine. With this, there will be no perceived downtime in the workloads running in the VM, and network connections from and to the VM being migrated will stay connected. This capability will be possible between hosts within a High Availability cluster. In addition, Microsoft is adding ‘Clustered Shared Volumes’ (CSV) capability to failover clustering that allows multiple virtual hard disks (VHDs) from different virtual machines (VM’s) to be stored on a single LUN, presented as a single continuous namespace. This not only simplifies management of shared storage for a cluster, but provides a significant reduction in the migration time for VM’s being live migrated.

Bryon’s Favorite New Hyper-V Feature #2: Hot Addition/Removal of Virtual Storage

Virtualization decouples the software running on a system from the hardware and makes it convenient for customers to deploy and manage their IT environments. With this flexibility it is inevitable that customers also seek the ability to expand and reduce storage coupled with virtual machines. With the next generation of the virtualization platform, Microsoft is adding the ability to hot add and remove VHDs and pass through disks in a virtual machine while it is in operation. This capability opens up a range of possibilities including new storage solutions for backup.

Bryon’s Favorite New Hyper-V Feature #3: Enhanced Virtualization Capabilities in the Hardware

Over the years hardware vendors such as AMD and Intel have made significant enhancements (such as AMD-V and Intel VT) to processors and chipsets with capabilities specifically targeting virtualization. Continuing with these enhancements, AMD and Intel are adding capabilities to their processors called Nested Page Tables (NPT) and Extended Page tables (EPT) respectively. These capabilities improve the performance of translation of memory addresses.

Bryon’s Favorite New Hyper-V Feature #4: VDI Connection Broker

The need for a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) is becoming ever more present. With this in mind, Microsoft is including a Remote Desktop Connection Broker which creates a unified admin experience for traditional session-based remote desktops and virtual machine-based remote desktops in a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure. The two key deployment scenarios supported by the Remote Desktop Connection Broker are persistent (permanent) VMs and pooled (temporary) VMs. Today, most early adopters of VDI deploy persistent VMs as they provide the greatest flexibility to the end user.

Bryon’s Favorite New Hyper-V Feature #5: Power Management Enhancements

Microsoft has updated the Windows Hypervisor with enhancements to reduce the power footprint of virtualized workloads. These capabilities include the use of “core parking” wherein the hypervisor proactively consolidates idle workloads to fewer cores, freeing up processor packages which can then be put into a deep sleep state reducing the power consumption of the server

In addition to my top 5, there are many other great new features including VMQ support and Jumbo Frame support.

Be sure to check out all the great new Hyper-V features in R2 at the Windows Server 2008 R2 website.

Virtually Yours,

Bryon Surace

Senior Program Manager for Microsoft Virtualization

Videos to watch: Mark Russinovich; Virt and cloud computing panel

porourke — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 01:00:00 GMT

Before I start hunkering down for what's supposed to be a snowy weekend in Redmond, and without college football on TV, I wanted to pass along a couple videos that are worth a watch.

First, TechTarget interviewed Mark Russinovich, technical follow, about Windows 7, WS08 R2, virtualization and Vista. It's about 8 minutes long. You can watch Mark's interview here.

Second, this week Mike Neil, GM of virtualization, hosted a live meeting to discuss virtualization and cloud computing. Joining Mike was Dominic Foster, CTO of web hoster MaximumASP, and Deepak Patil, GM within Microsoft Global Foundation Services, which hosts the Windows Azure Services platform. You'll see slides and hear them talk and answer some Q&As in 45 minutes. You can access the playback here (log-in required).

And if online videos aren't of interest, I'll point out that Mike Neil recently submitted his 2009 predictions to David Marshall over at VMblog.com.

Patrick

New VDI, Management Technology Announced

porourke — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 09:17:00 GMT

A few items to call out.

First up is Manlio's post about the renaming of Terminal Services - it'll be known as Remote Desktop Services in Windows Server 2008 R2 -- and the new VDI features. Here's an excerpt:

The key here is that RDS in Windows Server 2008 R2 makes the new server OS the ideal platform for companies to implement a centralized desktop strategy and for partners to provide additional innovation. It introduces the new Remote Desktop Connection Broker – an expansion of the Session Broker in Windows Server 2008 – which provides the administrator with a unified experience for setting up user access to both virtualized desktops (running as a full Windows client OS on top of Microsoft’s virtualization infrastructure) and traditional session-based remote desktops. Together with Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager, the Remote Desktop Connection Broker enables a VDI solution for low-complexity, departmental environments, and a platform for partners who are delivering rich, extensible solutions where heterogeneous client support is a prerequisite, and when enhanced management and scalability is a requirement. The Remote Desktop Connection Broker it complements other, shared RDS infrastructure components in Windows Server 2008, such as Remote Desktop Web Access or Remote Desktop Gateway. With the Remote Desktop Connection Broker, partners will find an extensive set of APIs that will allow them to continue innovation and deliver added value to customers.

Second, over at the System Center team blog, Paul announced the beta of System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2. Check out the video with Barry Shilmover. Here's an excerpt:

The beta itself will include a number of enhancements including the cross platform capabilities that we originally released as separate beta at MMS earlier this year, some enhanced service level monitoring reports and dashboards, and a number of UI improvements that include a new version of the management pack authoring console. Combined these will provide a lot of opportunities for organizations to make their data center and server management activities more cost effective and efficient.

Last item is a recent CRN magazine interview with Microsoft GM Mike Neil (who's blogged here before). It's about 6 minutes long. See below or go here.

Patrick

Guest post: virtualization requires the proper perspective

porourke — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 08:09:00 GMT

Hi, I’m Doug de Werd, technical marketing manager for Windows Virtualization at Hewlett-Packard.

In the past few weeks following the Microsoft virtualization launch event in Bellevue the virtualization buzz keeps growing louder and louder. We keep hearing more and more from customers that virtualization is a key component of their IT infrastructure strategy. IT organizations fall across a wide spectrum of virtualization implementation and sophistication. Some have been doing it for quite some time, while others are just starting or even just starting to think about it.

One thing that keeps coming up over and over, however, is the notion of using virtualization as an enabling technology, rather than an end in itself. This means aligning your IT strategies to your business strategies. Ultimately it’s not about how many virtual guests you can run on a physical host, or how cool your underlying infrastructure is – it’s about using these technologies to achieve better business outcomes. Whether the specific goal is to use virtualization to save money, reduce data center footprint, gain competitive edge, drive business continuity and availability, or go green by reducing power and cooling, it all comes down to using virtualization as a means to reach these goals.

OK, so that makes sense – so how do I do that? One of the key things that HP and Microsoft recognize is that it is the management tools that really enable you to take advantage of the underlying virtualization technologies. Microsoft System Center, especially with System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008, will provide easy to use tools that will allow you to manage your physical and virtual environments from a single pane of glass. This means customers won’t have to use one set of tools to manage their physical infrastructure and another set to manage their virtual environment.

HP has also recognized that management of virtual environments is quickly becoming a customer top priority, and is working to integrate HP management tools to both extend and complement the functionality of System Center.

HP is taking a two-fold approach to this. First, our HP ProLiant and BladeSystem servers are management enabled for System Center. HP provides Management Packs that integrate with System Center Operations Manager and Configuration Manager, as well as an upcoming HP PRO Pack for Virtual Machine Manager. These HP Management Packs enhance the customer experience by providing detailed HP-specific information to System Center. The PRO Pack will enable dynamic allocation of virtualized compute resources based on predefined set of rules and policies. This means that predictive hardware alerts can be used to migrate virtual machines to alternate hosts before a failure causes downtime.

The second is that HP Insight Software complements Microsoft System Center to provide comprehensive physical and virtual systems management. HP management tools such as Systems Insight Manager and Insight Control Environment will comprehend virtualized environments using Hyper-V in the same manner and console as non-virtualized physical host environments. HP Insight Dynamics – VSE enables administrators to manage physical and virtual resources in the same way and includes a foundation for management of virtual machines, capacity planning, virtual machine migration, and remote control.

Microsoft and HP are also working closely with Citrix in the area of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure. VDI is a flexible desktop replacement solution that increases security, decreases cost and delivers higher availability for the desktop while continuing to provide end-users with the functionality of a standalone desktop. The VDI stack incorporates Microsoft components such as Vista and Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack, along with Citrix XenDesktop, all running on Hyper-V and managed by System Center. HP Consulting and Integration Services provides the end-to-end solution, including servers, storage, access devices, networking devices and printers as well as the software and services to bring it all together.

HP and Microsoft have been closely collaborating for over 20 years as part of the HP-Microsoft Frontline Partnership. The strength of this work is evident in the strong management tool integration that both extends and complements Microsoft System Center. Working together, HP and Microsoft can help customers realize the tangible benefits of virtualization today.

Doug de Werd

Oct. 16, 2008 update: Here's Doug's response to JRedmond's comment/queston.

There's really 2 parts to the HP integration with Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V. The first is that HP will be providing support for Hyper-V in the HP management tools that address virtualization. So things like Insight Dynamics - VSE, HP Insight Control Environment, HP Server Migration Pack, and HP Virtual Machine Manager will all support Hyper-V hosts and guests. For example, in HP Systems Insight Manager, you will be able to see physical Hyper-V hosts as well as the virtual machines running on them.

From the System Center side, HP already provides management packs that integrate with SC Operations Manager and SC Configuration Manager. These management packs push HP ProLiant and BladeSystem specific information into SCOM and SCCM to provide more detail about what is being managed. To further extend the functionality of System Center Virtual Machine Manager, HP will provide a PRO Pack. This works in conjunction with the HP management packs to send HP server management agent information to SCOM. The PRO Pack provides additional HP information and suggestions, allowing SCOM to make recommendations via SCVMM. As an example, a server could experience a high rate of correctable memory errors. Once a threshold has been reached, an alert is sent through the HP management pack to SCOM. OM then works with the HP PRO Pack and SCVMM to make a recommendation as to where to proactively move the virtual machines from the affected system. Using SCVMM and Quick Migration, you can then quickly move the affected VMs to other servers and diagnose and fix the original server, preventing downtime.

Guest Post: Virtualization and Cloud Computing

porourke — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 22:54:00 GMT

Hello, my name is Karl Schulmeisters, director of alliance technology and architecture for the Microsoft global alliance at Unisys. We are a global systems integrator that focuses on large scale-up solutions particularly in the public sector, financial services, federal government and pharmaceuticals industries.

I watched Monday’s mid-day keynote at the Virtualization Launch in Bellevue, in which Senior VP of Server and Tools, Bob Muglia, spoke and brought a Gartner analyst on stage for an industry view. The traditional viewpoint of virtualization is that it is driven by cost savings, Green IT and operational efficiency. But according to Gartner, those are tactical considerations. Gartner believes that virtualization unlocks Cloud Computing, which in turn fundamentally transforms how IT is run.

I’m not sure that virtualization itself unlocks Cloud Computing. Pervasive connectivity and standardized data protocols, like XML, are more crucial to this. What virtualization lets you do though is to get rid of the issues of app conflicts that have grown out of the PC industry’s history of using dedicated machines for a particular server type. Essentially it lets you isolate the various application servers as though they were on a separate physical box without having to assume the cost of that separation.

Where I agree with Gartner is their somewhat radical notion that Cloud Computing is the future of INTERNAL IT!! Because it moves IT operations from managing components in silos to managing pools of resources in clouds. Gartner identified the four key hallmarks of Cloud Computing as Services Orientation, Utility Pricing, Massive Elasticity, and Delivered over the Internet. And the only difference with the modern IT approach is the delivery over the Internet. IT delivers over the Intranet.

The Gartner analyst did a nice job of categorizing the big change issue that virtualization brings to the puzzle – the decoupling of components previously locked together (Hardware, OS, Apps) that enables a new set of solution categories:

· Infrastructure As A Service: hardware pooling, dynamic hardware provisioning, Pay for usage, etc. which are built on virtualized hardware

· Grid Computing, which is essentially a service that delivers virtualized Hardware PLUS OS but not much more.

· Software Appliances – which is a service that delivers virtualized OS plus Application, and can run independently of the particular OS environment. JavaVM apps fit this profile

· Application Streaming – which is a service that delivers virtualized applications

This differentiates nicely the distinctions between different Cloud Computing directions. Amazon’s ESS online storage is Infrastructure As a Service. Grid Computing, ala Google Gears, is really a Software Appliance – Google Gear Apps target the Google Gears runtime (OS) environment. Facebook is pure application streaming – all Facebook Apps are thin browser apps that connect to other types of back end services

So where does Microsoft fit in this? Kevin Turner comes out to tell us. Software plus Services is one of the four pillars of innovation that he cites and Kevin differentiates between MS Online, which is targeting Commercial customers, and MS Live services, which is targeting the consumer world. In particular he points out that unlike the other players in the S+S field, Microsoft offers the ability to have the commercial services operate either as locally installed solutions, partner hosted solutions or Microsoft generically hosted solutions (i.e., App Streamed, Software Appliance Mode or Infrastructure As a Service)

Seems to me this approach is a much stronger way to bridge to this coming world. Rather than via 100% commitment to one or another mechanism in a world that is not yet tried and true.

I am very pleased to see that Microsoft is not limiting its view of virtualization simply as a means of offering Infrastructure as a Service. And I am looking forwards to PDC 2008 this October to see what cool things are in store (Kevin Turner closed by throwing up a teaser slide about the new things that will be released at the PDC).

Karl Schulmeisters

Unisys

Before we get to VMworld Vegas

porourke — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 19:26:00 GMT

My ears are still ringing from Monday's virtualization event in Bellevue. Not necessarily from the keynotes or demos, but mainly from being 10 feet away from the stage as the band Live played a 60+ minute set during the party. Here's a photo I snapped with my T-Mobile Dash.

I was fortunate enough to meet and speak with several customers and partners (and the members of Live). It was great to meet Matt at MLS Network of New England (who requested greater coordination with OEMs around NIC teaming for Hyper-V), Michael from Heidelberg in Germany (who's using Windows mobile phones and MS Dynamics to provide mobile access to internal data), and Howard from Heidelberg ... who has more PIMs than goals in his adult hockey league ;-)

Next week many of us will be in Vegas. I'm looking forward to my 4th straight year attending VMworld (despite having to go to Vegas). It appears this year's conference will be much larger than last year, and I'm looking forward to hear Paul Maritiz speak. Who knows, maybe Paul will mention Microsoft in his keynote and create greater interest to visit our booth.

For those of you who will be there, stop by our booth (#1120) to see demos of WS08 Hyper-V, SCVMM 2008, Windows Server terminal services, MS Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (from the Kidaro acquisition) and VDI using Vista/Citrix XenDesktop. And I think there's a customized laptop and "Gears of War 2" XBox giveaway.

You might also be interested to know that Microsoft is participating in a couple sessions. On Thursday (9/18) at 9am, we'll co-present a breakout session (EA4460) with VMware on Microsoft's Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP). On the same day, but at 2pm, several folks will present our strategy and demo Microsoft's desktop and server products.

A few other things to know:

Read Mike Sterling's post about the Linux ICs for WS08 Hyper-V. They're now available on MS Connect [note: you may need to browse the Connection directory, then log in to Connect and then find the Linux Integration Components program.
For those readers in Western Europe, you should consider attending the Virtualization Congress in mid-October in London. Alessandro has assembled quite a lineup of speakers from around the industry, to include our own Mark Russinovich. The coolest thing ... no slides from them, just technology. And several noteworthy bloggers and independent voices will attend.
Rand Morimoto and Jeff Guillet, consultants with Convergent Computing, just published a book titled, "Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V Unleashed." List price is $39.99 for 430 pages. You can see the Table of Contents at the link provided. They also cover SCVMM 2008.

Hope to see you next week at Microsoft's booth at VMworld.

Patrick

Rationalizing a Virtual Desktop Architecture

porourke — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Hi, my name is Manlio Vecchiet, and I am a group product manager in the Windows Server marketing group at Microsoft.

I am on my way back from Interop where I participated in an industry panel about Virtual Desktop Architecture. I was joined by VMware, Citrix and Qumranet. I enjoyed discussing Microsoft’s approach and all the great work we are doing on this scenario.

Just as a level-setting since the taxonomy and terminology is still emerging in the space, Virtual Desktop Architecture was defined as the storage and execution of a desktop workload (OS, apps, data) on a virtual machine in the datacenter and the presentation of the UI via a remote desktop protocol (such as RDP) to user devices such as thin and rich clients. Other terms used in the industry are VDI, server-hosted desktop virtualization and desktop delivery. Yes… we really need to come to some agreement in the industryJ.

First of all, server-based client computing and centralized desktops are of course not new to Microsoft – Windows Terminal Services has been delivering centralized desktops and applications for more than twelve years, and many IT departments today are enjoying the proven benefits of this mature technology.

What is new, however, is the unprecedented interest in server-based client computing, and the availability of a new virtualization infrastructure that creates different technical implementation possibilities. Advances in all forms of virtualization as well as specific business problems, such as ensuring greater levels of data privacy, reducing the cost of desktop management and improving disaster recovery processes, are driving the interest in new models of client computing within the enterprise.

Deciding on the right desktop delivery strategy and the right technologies and tools to implement is not an easy task. Enterprise IT departments need to be able to respond to the various computing needs of their entire user base, and so they have to be able to choose from a full spectrum of client computing options from full rich PCs to thin clients and centralized Windows Vista/XP, and everything in between. There is no “one size fits all” model for optimizing the delivery of a modern enterprise desktop to a broad variety of information workers.

Companies with a centralized desktop strategy effectively have a choice between a terminal server-based architecture and a hypervisor-based (VDI) architecture to deliver data center-hosted enterprise desktops. Terminal services is an integrated part of Windows Server that takes advantage of the multi-user capabilities of the OS allowing IT to create multiple, locked-down user sessions sharing a single image of the server OS. VDI is actually quite similar to terminal services except that a full client environment is virtualized within a server-based hypervisor instead of a light-weight session. In either case, the desktop is accessed by the end user via a remote desktop protocol such as RDP.

While the terminal services model is proven, mature, extremely scalable and cost-effective, not all applications are compatible with the session concept. Furthermore, many users demand higher levels of desktop customizability than terminal services supports. In contrast, with VDI users are able to get a complete desktop experience (including full admin rights), and applications will run just fine as they are running on top of a standard client OS. However, VDI is still an emerging technology which is less scalable, requires more server hardware resources and introduces additional management complexity compared with a terminal services approach.

I should point out here that Microsoft’s offering for VDI includes a management solution with System Center Virtual Machine Manager, which complements Hyper-V as the hypervisor and RDP as the remoting technology for VDI. And for optimal manageability of a virtual desktop, applications can be provisioned and updated either by streaming applications to the virtual desktop on-demand (with Microsoft Application Virtualization), or with the Terminal Services RemoteApp feature which remotes specific applications to the virtual desktop via RDP.

Partners are also building on this infrastructure delivering end to end customer value. While I was speaking in the Interop panel, on the other side of the Las Vegas strip at Microsoft Management Summit, Citrix demoed a version of XenDesktop (their VDI product) running on Hyper-V and SCVMM. I am very excited that, with our Citrix partnership, we can offer a leading end-to-end VDI solution based on the Microsoft Hyper-V infrastructure, with common management for physical and virtual environments alike through the System Center line of products.

Centralized desktops, including virtual desktop architectures have a firm place in the ‘arsenal of weapons’ enterprise IT can choose from to best respond to the needs of specific users. At the same time we probably won’t see large production deployments of virtual desktops until some of the hard problems such as the provisioning of personalized virtual desktop images and the user experience over a remote protocol are addressed. In fact, I believe that Microsoft’s recent acquisition of Calista Technologies is proof that investments into areas such as improving the remote user experience are both necessary and instrumental in accelerating broad adoption of virtual desktops.

Virtual desktop architectures have caught the eye of corporate IT, and for a good reason. The technology is only emerging, and there are still many challenges around implementing and managing a virtual desktop environment. But the promise of VDI is real, and the payoffs of a rationalized implementation are potentially huge. So let’s enjoy the ride!

-Manlio Vecchiet