Windows Virtualization Team Blog : VMM 2008

More on today's announcement with NetApp

porourke — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 06:06:00 GMT

We published some news today with NetApp; see here. In short, Microsoft and NetApp...

today announced a new three-year agreement that deepens product collaboration and technical integration, and extends joint sales and marketing activities to customers worldwide. Under the new agreement, the two companies will collaborate and deliver technology solutions that span virtualization, private cloud computing, and storage and data management, enabling customers to increase data center management efficiencies, reduce costs, and improve business agility.

As NetApp's partner site states, we'll work with NetApp to sell/market disaster recovery solutions using NetApp HA and DR storage with Hyper-V and System Center. There's a sample customer blueprint (.pdf) here with datacenter configs. And there's datacenter consolidation solutions, which are discussed in this white paper (here).

Above and beyond this, examples of technical integration include

the creation of NetApp's SnapManager for Hyper-V, which integrates their storage with Hyper-V and supports CSV.
NetApp management pack for System Center Operations Manager

In addition, NetApp is working with the Dynamic Datacenter Toolkit for enterprises and Powershell commandlets to rapidly provision VMs as the foundation for private cloud computing environments.

Patrick O'Rourke

City of Frisco (Texas) saves big with Hyper-V and NetApp

porourke — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 23:52:00 GMT

Hi, I'm Jim Schwartz, a director of virtualization solutions marketing in Redmond.

A great example of why companies are adopting virtualization and the resulting benefits can be seen in Texas, at the City of Frisco. The city, one of the fastest growing in America, needed to scale a siloed IT infrastructure to accommodate data growth of 200-300% year.

Check out this NetApp blog to learn how the City’s move toward virtualization resulted in substantial savings and maximized uptime for Exchange, SharePoint, and other apps.

Also don’t miss the Microsoft and NetApp live webcast on Thursday, December 3 at 11am Pacific/2pm Eastern: Virtualize with Microsoft and NetApp: Consolidate and Increase Uptime with Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and NetApp. City of Frisco Enterprise Technology Manager Tim Yarbrough will join the discussion to talk about his environment and Windows Server 2008 R2 upgrade. You will have the opportunity to submit live questions to Microsoft and NetApp experts during the webcast.

Thanks,

Jim

Visual Studio Lab Management 2010 beta 2

porourke — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 06:20:00 GMT

Hello, this is Bryon Surace again. I’m a senior program manager on the Windows virtualization team at Microsoft.

Recently, the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 beta 2 became available for public download. Part of this release is the Beta 2 version of Visual Studio Team System 2010 Lab Management; an integrated solution to give you all the benefits of virtualization for application lifecycle management. Congratulations to the Visual Studio Lab Management team for reaching this milestone!

Beta 2 Improvements:

§ Simplified Virtual Environment creation

§ Lab Environment Viewer with full-screen capability

§ Manual and automated testing in virtual environment

§ Build-deploy-test workflow for virtual environments

§ Enhanced workflow process parameters UI and report

§ Network isolation with support for domain controller VMs

§ Setup & Config – verification and auto provisioning of accounts

§ Virtual Machine templates

§ “In-Use” support for shared environments

The main features of Lab Management are:

Easily manage more complex test configurations

Lab environment as a first class entity for managing multi-machine test environments
Setup multiple configurations for testing quickly
Consistent, reliable access to test environments
Create multiple copies of test environments for parallel testing

New “clean” environment in minutes

Environment snapshot: lightweight and efficient
Facilitates exploratory testing

Scheduled build/test cycle on steroids

Snapshot to clean environment
Build triggered app deployment
Testing in more realistic environment

Rich bugs with environment snapshot

reduce the number of no-repro bugs

Visual Studio Download Page – you can download all the required components from there. This video can guide you through the download and installation process of TFS. And check out the Lab Management blog.

Thank you,

Bryon Surace

Re-blog: Microsoft Site Recovery Solution Launch

porourke — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 07:27:00 GMT

I'm re-blogging here. Over at Virt Planet blog, Jim wrote the following:

This week Microsoft is launching a comprehensive solution to help customers implement cost effective, end-to-end site recovery programs. Built on proven capabilities in Windows Server 2008 R2 and the System Center management suite, Microsoft is helping IT Professionals leverage Windows Server Hyper-V and Failover Clustering along with tools like Virtual Machine Manager to deliver cost effective site recovery.

The Microsoft Site Recovery Solution ecosystem is ramping with a broad range of storage replication partners like Double-Take Software, EMC, HDS, HP delivering solutions that take advantage of the Microsoft Cluster Resource DLL. With cluster integration IT Professionals can deploy streamlined and operationally effective site recovery.

You can learn more about the Microsoft Site Recovery Solution by joining the Microsoft team and Enterprise Strategy Group on Thursday, November 5^th at 10:30am Pacific for a webcast Building Effective and Highly Available Disaster Recovery Solutions Using Microsoft Virtualization This webcast looks at key drivers for site recovery solutions and reviews practical deployment considerations (you can view the recorded version of the webcast after the 5^th). Microsoft and select partners will also be demonstrating Site Recovery Solutions at TechEd, so if you plan to be in Berlin during the week of November 9^th, make sure to stop by the Virtualization Solutions kiosk in the Technical Learning Center.

Patrick

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

Update: What you won't see at VMworld 2009

porourke — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 02:30:00 GMT

This post is for the readers out there that will be attending VMworld, or have colleagues attending VMworld.

There’s been some speculative statements made in the press and blogs in the past 24 hours, so I want to try to set the record straight:

1. Microsoft will be exhibiting at VMworld 2009. Can't wait! We have a 10x10 booth, #2422. If you have a chance, please stop by booth. It's right next to the Blogger lounge. See more below.

2. Unlike prior VMworld conferences, we’re no longer allowed to sponsor the event. We can only be an exhibitor. Why? Let's look at excerpts from VMworld’s rules (my highlights):

VMworld 2009 Sponsor and Exhibitor Rules and Regulations

Booth/Session Demonstrations (pg. 2)

Sponsors and exhibitors must market or demonstrate products on the exhibition floor and in the sessions

which are complementary to VMware products and technologies. Complementary products and services are

defined as products/services that do not overlap/substitute with VMware’s products/capabilities, and help

expand the reach and solution scope of VMware’s capabilities solely as deemed by VMware. All sponsors

and exhibitors must adhere to following guidelines in regards to booth demonstrations (please also review

the “Promotion, Giveaways, Contests” section below):

Eligibility (pg. 4)

To sponsor or exhibit at VMworld a company must be a VMware partner in good standing in our TAP,

Strategic Global Partner or VIP Partner Programs. Companies that are not VMware partners may be allowed

to exhibit at VMworld under exception by VMware.

Both sides (us and VMware) agreed that, apart from the features in System Center Virtual Machine Manager that manage ESX, Microsoft products aren’t complementary to VMware’s products. We discussed and confirmed their intent of these clauses in early August, and had a follow-up Aug. 11 email from VMware, that reads in part:

As I mentioned, the rules require all exhibitors to market and demonstrate products that are complimentary to VMware products and technologies. We are open to reviewing any proposals for complimentary positioning of Microsoft products and demos at the show…

As a result, based on the clause above, phone/email with VMware employees, we don't believe we have the right to demo our products in the booth. This decision runs counter to Microsoft’s geek culture, as you can imagine, but we've also become more pragmatic over the years :-).

So what is Microsoft doing at VMworld?

We’ve learned over the course of 4 years attending VMworld (first was Vegas 2005) that there are many attendees who use, admin, manage, sell, support Windows Server, SQL Server, Exchange Server, Windows XP/Vista, System Center, etc. They want the opportunity to engage and receive information from Microsoft virtualization experts. So we’ll have Microsoft virtualization experts in the booth. These experts will be there to answer your questions. They’ll also be Tweeting about their experiences and impressions as they talk to customers and attend sessions. I encourage you to follow them on Twitter - see the table below for their usernames.

Expert in	Name	Twitter Username
Disaster Recovery, Backup	Allen Stewart	dynamic_dc
Desktop Virtualization	Ben Armstrong	virtualpcguy
App & Desktop Virtualization	Jeff Johnson	JJ_VDI
Virtualization Management	Stuart Schaefer	Sshaffer_MS
Cloud	Isaac Roybal	DDACloudGuy
Business value	Edwin Yuen	edwinyuen
Workloads, partners, licensing	Kenon Owen	MS_Int_Virt
Server Virtualization	Vijay Tewari	vtango

We’ll also have two customers in the booth at different times. I’ll be there. See you there!

Patrick O’Rourke

Windows Server 2008 R2 Core: Introducing SCONFIG.

WSV_GUY — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 16:27:00 GMT

Virtualization Nation,

It's been very busy in the world of Windows Server. With the launch of Windows Server 2008 R2 Release Candidate, Tech Ed and the announcement of several new Hyper-V R2 capabilities such as 64 logical processor support and processor compatibility, it's been pretty non-stop. In fact, it's been so busy, that we haven't even had a chance to introduce one more really cool new feature in Windows Server 2008 R2, but first, some background.

Windows Server 2008 R1: Core Deployment

In Windows Server 2008, we introduced the ability to deploy Windows Server in a core deployment. Server Core is a minimal server installation option which provides a low-maintenance server environment with limited functionality. Just to be clear, Server Core isn't a SKU. You don't buy "Server Core" it's simply a deployment option presented during Windows Server Setup. For example, here's a screen shot during Windows Server Setup, notice that there are options for Full Installations and Server Core Installations.

The benefits are smaller attack surface, a reduction in patches and reduction of server reboots. If you compare the number of reboots between running a server running Windows Server 2008 core deployment versus Windows Server 2008 a full installation, there's a substantial reduction in the number of reboots which, in turn, helps reduce management costs.

While customers like the idea of core installations, the fact that a server core deployment is a command-line interface (CLI) only (no GUI, no Start Menu, etc) with a very differently deployment mechanism introduces a challenging learning curve for those considering core deployments. For those of you who've never seen a Windows Server 2008 server core deployment it looks like this:

Pretty spartan.

As you can see, there's no Start Menu. It's all command-line all the time. For enterprise customers, this isn't a big deal because very often they deploy Windows Server in an automated fashion. However, for small and mid-sized customers a command-line only interface can make some of the most rudimentary tasks a challenge. For example, here are the commands to rename your computer and then join a domain via a Windows Server 2008 core deployment.

Rename your computer: netdom renamecomputer %computername% /newname:<new_computername>
Domain join: netdom join %computername% /domain:<domain> /userd:<username> /passwordd:*

Not the easiest thing to remember. We knew we could do better.

Improving Usability

While Windows Server 2008 R1 was in development, a few of us were quietly working on the Hyper-V Server 2008 standalone SKU which also uses a CLI. We spent time working on improving the server configuration experience with an easy to use CLI called HVCONFIG. Within hours of our first private releases of Hyper-V Server 2008 to testers, we received email asking/begging/pleading/cajoling/offering bribes for a similar tool for Windows Server as well.

Happy to oblige.

Introducing SCONFIG for Windows Server 2008 R2 Core Deployments

We are pleased to announce that in Windows Server 2008 R2, there's an easy to use CLI, SCONFIG. SCONFIG dramatically eases server configuration for Windows Server 2008 R2 core deployments. With SCONFIG, you can easily set your system up, get it on the network so you can easily manage the server remotely.

Rename your computer? Press 2 and you will be prompted to type in the computer name.
Domain join? Press 1 and you'll be prompted for name & password.

Simple and fast.

With SCONFIG you can easily have a Windows Server 2008 R2 Server Core deployment setup in minutes. I should also mention that SCONFIG is also localized in almost 20 languages.

Tasks include:

Domain join
Rename Computer
Configure Remote (Enable management via Server Manager, & PowerShell including properly configuring the firewall.)
Configuring Windows Update
Enabling Remote Desktop (in case you want to login remotely.)
Configuring Networking (static vs. DHCP and for multiple NICs)

All you have to do is type sconfig at the command line.

Great! Now What?

Remember, the goal with a server core deployment is to get the server on the network so you can manage it remotely. With SCONFIG this is a snap. Now from another system you can enable roles, run PowerShell scripts, manage it using System Center, manage it using Server Manager from another server running Windows Server 2008 R2, or manage it using the free Remote System Administration Tools (RSAT) for Windows 7.

In short, our goal is to provide customers multiple solutions based on their business needs.

Cheers,

Jeff Woolsey

Principal Group Program Manager

Windows Server, Hyper-V

Re: Windows Server 2008 SP2 Hyper-V

porourke — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 19:51:00 GMT

Hi Isaac Roybal here. I’m a technical product manager on the Windows Server team covering Hyper-V.

It’s been 3 weeks since the release of Windows Server 2008 Service Pack 2 (SP2) and we’re seeing great adoption. From a Hyper-V point of view, we’re excited because the final Hyper-V release is an integrated feature in SP2 making it easier and faster to deploy Hyper-V. If you recall, when Windows Server 2008 was released, Hyper-V Beta was included. This meant to get the final Hyper-V release, you needed to go to Windows Update, download and go through the update process.

With Windows Server 2008 SP2, Hyper-V final bits are included so there’s no need to pull down individual downloads which speeds up deployments. There are also some notable updates in SP2, including scalability enhancements for running on systems with up to 24 logical processors which enables support for up to 192 running virtual machines, update for Hyper-V when managed with System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 and updates for backup/restore of virtual machines with the Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS).

For those of you who have already deployed Hyper-V, SP2 is a simple upgrade. Here are a couple of top-of-mind things to think about when you’re planning your upgrade or fresh install of SP2:

· In-place upgrades of Windows Server 2008 to Windows Server 2008 SP2 is supported for both the parent partition and child VMs.

o If the Hyper-V role was enabled on the parent partition prior to the upgrade to SP2, it will be automatically enabled once the upgrade is completed.

o Uninstall any prerelease versions of SP2 that might be installed.

· If a fresh SP2 install is being done and you’d like to move VMs to it, export the VMs from the originating Windows Server 2008 host and import them on the SP2 host.

· Integration Components (ICs) for the child virtual machines must be updated to the SP2 version.

o If you’re doing a fresh install or an upgrade of SP2 on the parent partition, it does not update the integration components inside the virtual machine. Be sure to update the VM ICs after SP2 is installed.

o If you have virtual machines created on the Beta version of the Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V role, and you installed the Beta version of the integration components on those machines, you must uninstall the integration components and reinstall the latest SP2 integration components.

o When upgrading to SP2 inside a Windows Server 2008 child VM the ICs are automatically upgraded.

o If you are running a supported Windows operating system other than Windows Server 2008 as a VM, you need to use vmguest.iso to upgrade the integration components

Isaac

UPDATE. Responding to question by Ed051042

Yes, your assertion is correct. Follow these steps when upgrading a cluster to SP2:

1. Evacuate the cluster node of VMs via quick migration (assuming you’ve extra capacity) to other nodes in the cluster.

2. Upgrade the node to SP2 while it is still part of the cluster

3. Once the SP2 install is complete, quick migrate those VMs back to node and update VMs’ ICs. The last bit is important.

4. Follow the same process starting step #1 until entire cluster had been updated to SP2

For more info see KB 174799 which outlines how to install SPs on a cluster and Microsoft's Failover and Network Load Balancing Clustering Team Blog which explains a rolling upgrade of a cluster.

Check out the Visual Studio Team System blog

porourke — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 20:54:00 GMT

Many of you will be interested to learn more about forthcoming lab management capabilities in Visual Studio Team System 2010. Or you may have lunch or meetings with a dev who you want to know more about VSTS 2010 Lab Management. That last part is a nod to "that darn reality" post at SharkTank.

So check the VSTS Lab Management team blog.

HP releases Insight Control suite for Microsoft System Center

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

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

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

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

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

} Lights out remote management – via an iLO Advanced license

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

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

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

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

Thanks - Zane

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

VMware vSphere pricing - Meet the new price; same as the old price, only more

WSV_GUY — Mon, 04 May 2009 17:00:00 GMT

Hi, I'm Edwin Yuen, a Senior Technical Product Manager at Microsoft's Integrated Virtualization team. This past week, there were two key announcements made, one by Microsoft and one by VMware, that have an impact on how we compare Microsoft and VMware pricing.

The first announcement was actually off this blog, made by Zane Adam, announcing that with the upcoming release of our free, standalone hypervisor, Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2, features like clustering, high availability (HA), and live migration would be included. This was a very important announcement, as many customers are currently paying a significant amount of money for those features, and as we'll see below, will potentially continue to pay for them. With Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2, you can now implement HA and live migration without having to buy a premium management SKU, which could save you thousands of dollars.

The second announcement was VMware's announcement of vSphere, the next version of VMware's hypervisor. I spend a lot of time working and speaking with customers, both Microsoft and VMware users. The one theme repeated in those conversations is that everyone understands VMware is not a low cost solution and many have been re-evaluating how much they spend to implement virtualization. I think that everyone, including those of us at Microsoft, were wondering if VMware would drop their prices in the new version of vSphere. When the announcement came out, it had a bullet point on reduced costs and new SKUs for customers. When I sat down to actually figure out the pricing, it was pretty clear that the pricing really didn't change for many customers and the prices still don't compare to the offerings from Microsoft.

One of the key things I noticed is that for the SKU that most people bought, VI Enterprise or vSphere Enterprise, the price didn't actually change. It went from $5,750 for a two processors host to $2,875 per processor, which is the same thing. Thus, for many VMware customers, there is no cost savings in vSphere. Another interesting issue about vSphere can be seen on the version comparisons page off VMware's website. Many of the touted new features of vSphere, such as 8-way vSMP, >256GB of memory on the host, the vNetwork Switch, and Host Profiles, are only available if you buy new Enterprise Plus SKU, which is 18% more expensive than Enterprise and a cost increase for existing customers. This means, for those customers who want these new vSphere features, there is a net increase in their cost. Even when we compare just vSphere Enterprise SKU, the cost of vSphere Enterprise is five times that of buying the Microsoft solution with the Server Manage Suite Enterprise.

On the small and medium business side, VMware changed the name of their VI Foundation SKU to vSphere Essentials and added a new vSphere Essentials Plus SKU. Essentials is just like VI Foundation, but without consolidated backup. Essentials Plus is like Foundation, but with HA added. Essentials is priced at $995 for three two processors hosts and Essentials Plus is priced at $2995 for three two processor hosts. In contrast, a customer using Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 with System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 (VMM) Workgroup Edition (WGE) will only have to pay $499 for five hosts. Thus, the Essentials SKU is four times more expensive compared to the Microsoft Solution, which also includes HA, clustering, and live migration. The Essentials Plus SKU is 12 times more expensive than the Microsoft solution, while still missing live migration. In fact, for customers who need live migration, they must purchase the vSphere Advanced SKU, which starts at $4490 for a single, two processor host. When we look at the chart below, we can easily how the costs add up on the VMware side.

Finally, VMware has also argued on evaluating price per VM, based on a white paper and calculator they published recently. We recently published a white paper that reviews why this model and the cost calculator associated with it are not applicable to most customers. One of the key issues to the price per VM model, especially with how VMware has been promoting it, is that it doesn't take into account the applications being run. The number of VMs that can be run on a host depends on how the applications inside the VMs run. Don't believe VMware marketing about low consolidation ratios on Hyper-V. For example, this case study about Kroll Factual Data shows them running 30 VMs on a single Hyper-V host.

The consolidation ratio can vary depending on what you are running and how you run them. Because of this, you can't just plug consolidation ratios into a calculator and try to apply this across your entire deployment. The best way to compare Hypervisors is to compare Hypervisors, running your applications and VMs. When you do that, it will be easy to see why Microsoft is still less expensive then VMware. You can read about other companies that have made the switch to Microsoft here.

Still, in the end, the big question to ask yourself is the following: Is it worth all this expense for VMware, when the Microsoft solution offers a comparable or even better feature set for much less cost? Is it worth the extra line item on the invoice, the extra line in the budget, to use VMware virtualization when it's built into Windows? That is a question I think many customers will be asking themselves in the coming months and that is just another reason that you should start using Microsoft Virtualization solutions.

Live Migration and Host Clustering available at no charge in Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2

porourke — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 01:13:00 GMT

I’m Zane Adam, senior director of virtualization and System Center. It’s been a while since my last post, and wanted to update you on our standalone hypervisor, Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2

Last Fall we released Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008, a standalone hypervisor-based virtualization product that is available for free. We continue to add more features and value to this product in the upcoming release, Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2. Our core strategy is to ensure that our customers can virtualize their IT environment in the most cost effective manner, and at the same time, have access to enterprise features like live migration and clustering features for high availability. So in addition to scalability and performance improvements in this version, customers can get live migration and host clustering capabilities and high availability (up to 16 nodes) at no charge.

Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 will continue to be free, and now will include live migration and host clustering capabilities. Customers won’t need to pay thousands of dollars for alternate virtualization platforms to get these features. With Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2, customers have a solution for both planned and unplanned downtime and can use it for scenarios like server consolidation, branch server consolidation, high availability, and VDI.

These same features also will be available in Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-v, which provides our customers with core virtualization features as part of Windows Server offering. With Windows Server 2008 R2, customers also get flexible virtualization rights (e.g., 4 free virtual instances with Windows Server Enterprise Edition and unlimited virtual instances with Windows Server Datacenter Edition).

You can download Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 beta here. Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 can be managed by System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2. You can download the beta here.

You can find more info on Microsoft’s virtualization products and solutions at http://www.microsoft.com/virtualization.

Zane

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