Windows Virtualization Team Blog : Virtual Server

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

The Virtualization platform vs. the Operating System

vtango — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 16:01:00 GMT

Day 1 at VMworld was mostly about Labs and content which builds up to the main event starting with the keynote on Tuesday morning. Looking forward to today.

In the meanwhile I have been hearing about a concept being put forth that the virtualization platform is it and the OS is but relegated to the consigns of history. That’s an interesting argument, one that in my opinion is built around the myth that somehow the interface exposed by the virtualization platform is what applications are written to. The fact of the matter is that the “Virtual Machine” as exposed by the virtualization platform mimics the underlying hardware with all its diversity. An entity is still required to manage the hardware resources and provide the software abstractions to interact with incredibly diverse hardware. That is the operating system and that’s what applications are developed for.

Back in time such as of the Manchester Mark 1 application programs were self-contained which were loaded into the memory of the machine and then executed from there. Overtime developers realized the value of re-use and rather than build in everything into the application program, re-use and common abstractions became prevalent. As the diversity of hardware and peripherals increased in complexity, the operating system is what provided the abstractions which provided a common mechanism for all applications to interact with and utilize the machine effectively. That is what gave rise to the operating system. What befuddles me is the argument that somehow the emergence of the virtualization platform minimizes the tasks as performed by the operating system. There are some who will argue that the emergence of application frameworks such as .net and Java take on this role, but in the end below them they still require the abstractions offered by an OSJ. What do people think?

An interesting debate but mostly put out to confuse our customers who are fundamentally interested in running an efficient IT infrastructure that provides them the flexibility and ability to meet the business goals and be a strategic asset to their organizations. Customers are running a multitude of applications such as SQL, Sharepoint, Exchange, CRM, home grown line of business applications etc. Our partners and us are committed and focused to make sure that it happens.

By the way talking of partners, it was great to our partner Leostream announce their connection broker for Windows Server 2008 R2 and System Center Virtual machine Manager 2008 R2. In talking to our partner here at VMworld, it’s been wonderful to see the incredible innovation on their part based on the Microsoft platform. Thanks, this is what the Microsoft platform the best for our customers with its breadth and partner solutions.

Vijay Tewari

Principal Program Manager, Windows Server Virtualization

Kroll Factual Data: 85% virtualized, 30:1 VM density

porourke — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 18:59:00 GMT

You may have never heard of Kroll Factual Data. But ever since personal credit became harder to acquire, lenders held tighter to their money, and interest rates went up/down like a roller coaster, Kroll has been on a wild ride of their own. In short, Kroll Factual Data offers business information to mortgage lenders, consumer lenders, property management firms and the federal government. So when Ben Bernanke of the Federal Reserve speaks, Kroll often sees the volume of demand for their services increase or decrease.

Chris Steffen of Kroll has posted guest blogs to this site before, and will be speaking on an webcast April 28 (register here). I first met Chris at VMworld 2007 in San Francisco. At the time he was using MS Virtual Server, SCVMM v1 wasn't fully deployed yet and he was waiting for Hyper-V to be released. At the time (Sept 2007), Kroll had 75% of their production servers virtualized, were processing 200,000-250,000 transactions a day, and were managing 1,400 virtual machines. That was amazing at that time. But nothing compared to what Kroll does today.

See the news release here about Kroll Factual Data. A few highlights:

acquired 58 companies in 5 years
"We’re now able to develop, test and deploy new products within three days"
"our datacenter has the ability to deploy additional computing resources in less than 15 minutes.”
a datacenter that is 85 percent virtualized
consolidate its physical server holdings from 650 systems to 22 systems, each server running 30 virtual machines
100 percent wind-generated power for the entire facility
“We’re required to provide 100 percent availability not only to our customer-facing products, but also to the operations inside our facility,”

There are 6 new videos of Kroll Factual Data posted here. You'll see/hear from Russ Donnan, CIO of Kroll Factual Data, and Chris Steffen. Here's my favorite

Patrick

Guest Post: Virtual Eggs in One Virtualization Basket?

porourke — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 09:43:00 GMT

Hi, my name is Dave Demlow and I am the Chief Technology Officer at Double-Take Software.

Double-Take Software has been a leading provider of data replication and failover technologies for Microsoft Windows Server and applications going all the way back to Windows NT 3.51. So like many of you, we’ve seen many changes in the role that Windows Servers play in the enterprise and in the increased requirements for the availability and protection of Windows-based workloads. Hyper-V will accelerate those changes but at the same time make it much easier and more cost effective than ever to provide those higher levels of availability to an even broader range of workloads.

As Jeff Woolsey highlighted so well in his post on Hyper-V Quick Migration, “Virtualization actually creates a major problem: single point of failure.” And if the problem with that isn’t crystal clear,” If that virtualization server goes down and I don’t have a HA solution in place, I will lose my job.”

The hypervisor is only one of many possible points of failure to be concerned with. If the shared storage in a Hyper-V cluster is unavailable due to a site failure, power failure or corruption, ALL of your workloads that rely on that storage or site will also be down.

Fortunately, Windows Server 2008 provides two enabling technologies, Hyper-V and Failover Clustering, that when used with 3^rd party products such as our GeoCluster for Windows or Double-Take for Windows software can create clusters of Hyper-V servers that offer redundancy through replicated storage. Optionally, these can be geographically dispersed to maintain availability of virtualized workloads even when entire sites or datacenters are inoperative also providing for off-site disaster recovery. These are sometimes referred to as “multi-site” or “stretched” clusters and our customers often simply refer to them by our brand name GeoCluster.

As an example, with our GeoCluster product, multiple Hyper-V nodes in a cluster could store independent replicas of each protected virtual machine that are continuously updated as the virtual machine is changed. An example cluster might have 4 nodes in New York, Chicago, LA and Seattle. On the New York node, 10 virtual machines are running and replicating to the other 3 nodes. In LA, 5 other VMs are running in LA but only replicating to Chicago and so on. In the event of an unplanned outage, virtual machines could automatically failover to any site with a replica in a pre-set priority order…perhaps the VMs in New York failover to Chicago first, then Seattle then to any surviving site. The flexibility with software-based replication technologies is extensive, allowing replication between different types of servers, between different storage technologies and allowing very granular selection of which VMs should be replicated and which should not, even on the same disk or LUN.

While SANs and iSCSI storage are supported in a GeoCluster, cluster nodes can even use direct attached storage of nearly any type. VMs normally stored on high performance Fibre Channel or SAS drives could be replicated to a node with internal SATA drives to optimize costs. Hardware independence and flexibility are two key benefits of many software based replication and failover solutions such as Double-Take and GeoCluster software.

While the emphasis on multi-site clusters is often to maintain availability of VMs across unexpected site outages, it is also possible to use our GeoCluster product to perform planned migration of running virtual machines with minimal downtime, also known as Quick Migration. This process works exactly the same as it would between cluster nodes using a shared disk with the additional step that “under the hood” the saved memory state on the previous node is automatically replicated to the destination node before the VM is “resumed” and continues running exactly where it was previously.

In conclusion, if you are concerned about the availability of the virtual eggs in your virtualization basket, consider implementing Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V along with 3^rd party multi-site cluster solutions to provide complete infrastructure and datacenter redundancy to maintain availability of your virtualized workloads across server, storage or even site level disasters.

Dave Demlow

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 RTMs and what I’m hearing from customers and partners about Microsoft’s virtualization solutions

porourke — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 10:52:00 GMT

I’m Zane Adam, sr. director of virtualization strategy here in Redmond at Microsoft. I’m writing today to announce the exciting news that we’ve released to manufacturing (RTM’d) System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 and to talk a bit about its critical role in the broad set of virtualization offerings from Microsoft.

Recently, I returned from a trip abroad where I attended some of our international getVirtualnow launch events which initially kicked off with our September launch event in Bellevue. During this world tour I had the opportunity to visit with customers and partners from a variety of countries, having some great discussions with them. As I talked to representatives from large and small companies, I heard a consistent theme that all these groups are looking to aggressively manage costs and improve operational efficiency, and partners are also looking for ways of helping customers do so. The timing of these conversations couldn’t have come at a better time as I was able to share with them how the broad set of Microsoft virtualization software addresses these areas. First, I was able to talk to these customers about the fact that they can acquire our virtualization offerings for about 1/3 the cost of what a comparable VMware installation would cost, helping them realize immediate cost reduction benefits. The portfolio of technologies we offer spans the entire IT infrastructure from the desktop to the datacenter, while providing the tools for managing a customer’s infrastructure and apps regardless of whether it’s their physical or virtual assets. Additionally, because the solutions we’re delivering are based on Windows, customer and partners can take advantage of the skills and knowledge they already have when implementing, developing to, or managing our virtualization offerings helping to save them both money and time.

As I mentioned, our virtualization solutions span the desktop to the data center including the management tools required to ensure that virtualization remains an asset and doesn’t become an unwieldy burden. On the server we have Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and also Hyper-V Server, our standalone hypervisor, we recently released in September. We’re seeing rapid adoption of Microsoft server virtualization solutions and IDC recently released findings showing Microsoft's Hyper-V delivering a strong showing, and when combined with Virtual Server 2005, helped Microsoft to capture 23% of new license shipments in 2Q 2008. On the desktop we have application, desktop and presentation solutions enabling customers to choose the level of desktop virtualization. The recently released Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.5 helps IT support large-scale virtualization implementations across many sites with various delivery options including over the Internet. Last, but certainly not least, is System Center suite of management tools, which provide not only the tools for managing traditional physical IT infrastructure and apps but also virtualized environments. Whether it’s deploying and managing virtualized desktops and servers with Configuration Manager, monitoring apps and systems across the IT environment and into virtual machines with Operations Manager, or backing up and protecting both physical and virtualized data or apps with Data Protection Manager, System Center provides the broad set of tools to address these needs for IT. Of course today’s announcement of the RTM of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 extends the management benefits of System Center even further by enabling not only the management of Microsoft virtualized environments, but also VMware ESX as well.

We’re already hearing of great results from customers broadly implementing our virtualization solutions like some at Indiana University, who has been consolidating their physical servers onto virtual machines rapidly using these technologies, freeing up hardware, lessening space requirements and reducing electrical and cooling costs. Janssen Jones, Associate Director of Auxiliary IT Infrastructure at Indiana University has provided a guest blog post here with information on his group’s experience and the results they’re seeing where their workloads are now 75% virtualized on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V with plans to be 90% by the end of this year. Janssen talks about how they’re consolidating virtual machines at a ratio of about 10-1 and how they’ve been able to remove about 40 of their existing physical servers. There are already a slew of other customers, including names such as Costco, Land O’ Lakes, or Saxo Bank, that are already talking about the benefits they’re experiencing by deploying Microsoft virtualization solutions, which can be found in our case study library.

The response from our partners has been gratifying as well, including the participation in our September launch event where broad offerings and support were announced. To mention just a few, we’ve seen Citrix, Dell, HP, SAP and Symantec demonstrating their support for our virtualization offerings from the desktop through the data center as well for our management offerings. More directly related to today’s news of the RTM of SCVMM 2008, I’m excited to say that we are already are seeing support for SCVMM 2008 from our OEM partners. Fujitsu and Hitachi participated in our virtualization launch event in Japan last week and both publicly stated that they intend to make bundles of their hardware and SCVMM 2008 available in the coming months.

We’re excited to see the partner and customer adoption of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008. We’ve already seen hundreds of our early deployment customers use either the beta or release candidate version of VMM to manage their Hyper-V deployments. They are seeing the many cost reduction and management simplification benefits of Hyper-V and the SCVMM 2008 integration with the rest of System Center. Now that RTM is official, I fully expect the rate of Hyper-V deployments to further accelerate. Through the SCVMM 2008 console, administrators can see the entirety of their data center infrastructure – physical or virtual. SCVMM 2008 facilitates key functions like P2V (physical to virtual) migration, Intelligent Placement (selecting the best virtual host for a VM), and managing Hyper-V host clusters, to name just a few. SCVMM 2008 works closely with its siblings – particularly SC Ops Mgr – in identifying consolidation candidates and in Performance and Resource Optimization (PRO), a new feature in which SCVMM 2008 can alert and recommend solutions to administrators about failing virtual machines or hardware. As I mentioned above, this comprehensive view extends throughout the data center as SCVMM 2008 is capable of seeing and managing VMware ESX infrastructure through Virtual Center. I hope you download SCVMM 2008 today and give it a try. Additional information, including a link to download an evaluation version is available here and it will be generally available for purchase as of November 1.

Thanks for your time and sharing in the excitement we’re seeing around Microsoft’s virtualization solutions.

-- Zane

Guest post: IU Hoosier virtualizes 75% of workloads - saving time and money with System Center, PowerShell, and Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V

porourke — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 10:50:00 GMT

Hi, I’m Janssen Jones, and I’m the Associate Director of Auxiliary IT Infrastructure at Indiana University.

Since April, my team has been evaluating the beta of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 (SCVMM) as part of the SCVMM Technology Adoption Program, and in the past six months, we’ve made great strides in virtualizing our IT Infrastructure on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V clusters and managing that infrastructure with System Center and PowerShell. We originally planned on easing into virtualization, as we weren’t sure if a virtual machine would be able to handle our workloads, and we didn’t believe that the technology had yet been proven.

Fast forward to today and we’ve now virtualized over 75% of our workloads on Hyper-V, and by year’s end, we’ll be at 90%. I’ve been truly amazed at how well this solution can work once everything is in place. As it stands, we have two 5-node Hyper-V clusters handling the majority of our workloads, along with a special-purpose 2-node cluster and a couple maintenance hosts. We manage all of these virtual machines and hosts through one interface: SCVMM 2008.

To be clear, SCVMM actually has *two* user interfaces: a PowerShell interface, and a traditional graphical interface. Though I do spend time in the graphical interface for looking at VM status, firing up remote console sessions, etc., I like to do all of the heavy lifting with PowerShell. Using SCVMM’s templates along with PowerShell scripts from my script library, I can use a PowerShell “one-liner” to spin up a new virtual machine on our cluster in less than 10 minutes. When comparing this to the old way (getting a requisition for a new server, putting the order through Purchasing, waiting a couple weeks, picking up the server from Receiving, taking the server to the machine room, racking the server, setting up the remote access controller, and installing the OS), I don’t think there’s any way we’ll ever go back.

There are still a few hold-outs from some of our vendors who have not yet certified their solutions on a virtual environment, but we’re trying to put pressure on them to come aboard. We’ve seen first-hand that we can virtualize everything from file, print, and web servers to database servers running SQL Server and Oracle, and actually have the virtual machine run *faster* than what it ran on our original physical box. Of course virtual machines won’t truly run faster than physical machines on identical hardware, but what we’ve found is that when it’s time to replace a 3-year old server, we can easily do a physical to virtual conversion (P2V) of that machine to a VM on a new blade server, and that the VM easily outperforms its old self even while sharing the new hardware with eight to 12 other virtual machines.

To date, we’ve been consolidating virtual machines at a ratio of about 10-to-1, and I think we could go much higher if we weren’t limited by the amount of RAM in our hosts. However, we found that when purchasing a new server, it was the same price to buy two blades with 32GB of RAM as it was to buy one blade with 64 GB of RAM, so we settled on 32GB of RAM per server, which allows us the 10-to-1 consolidation ratio. At 10 VMs per host, each of our Hyper-V hosts still average around 20-25% CPU utilization, so we haven’t come across any bottlenecks to date. Given that consolidation, we’ve removed about 40 existing physical servers, and have consolidated from five racks to three (two at the datacenter and one at a DR site).We also actively use other products within the System Center suite to manage our physical and virtual infrastructure. Most recently, we’ve begun testing Service Pack 1 for Data Protection Manager through the DPM Technical Adoption Program as well, and are excited to see that the same PowerShell interface we’ve grown accustomed to in SCVMM can now allow us to script Hyper-V backups as well.

I won’t say the deployment road has been free from bumps (no new technology is), but after six months, the effort our team has put into standardizing on Hyper-V and the System Center platform, and into immersing ourselves in Windows PowerShell, is now starting to have huge payoffs. Our infrastructure is much easier to manage, our servers are provisioned in minutes (instead of weeks), and our single-purpose servers which used to sit idling at 5% utilization are now sharing that CPU with other virtual workloads.

Janssen

MS Hyper-V Server: in 30 days for $0

porourke — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 08:57:00 GMT

The show begins in 10 hours, but the news it out:

Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008, a new hypervisor-based server virtualization product (like ESXi), will be released within 30 days and be available at no cost via the Web
Microsoft will demonstrate live migration feature of Windows Server 2008 R2. And the next version of Microsoft Hyper-V Server (the one after 2008) will have live migration capabilities.
System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 will be released within 30 days [not a surprise], which will manage Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2, Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 or VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3
Microsoft’s global server OEM partners ... report that nearly 100% of their customers who order Windows Server 2008 with hardware are also choosing to have Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V included with their order.
Dedicated virtualization lab established within the Microsoft Enterprise Engineering Center.

The keynote will be shown here in the morning [noon EDT]: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/events/virtualization/default.mspx

UPDATE:

Here is a clip from Bob Muglia's keynote featuring the first public Hyper-V Live Migration demo. More videos are available here.

Video: Hyper-V Live Migration Demo

Patrick

Guest Post: Why Microsoft and Hyper-V for HostBasket

porourke — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 01:53:00 GMT

Hi, my name is Bert Van Pottelberghe, business unit manager at Hostbasket, which is the leading hosting company and SaaS-provider in Belgium with over 30,000 SMB customers.

In a recent survey of our datacenter with over 1,000 servers, we saw that the average CPU-usage was only 12%. On the other hand, investments in new server hardware, datacenter space and the cost of power and cooling – now at an all time high - keep prices for dedicated servers high. The hosting industry is a very competitive industry, so we needed to come up with an answer.

We have been investigating virtualization technologies such as Xen, VMWare and Virtuozzo, but always found problems (such as security-issues, complex and expensive licensing, stability or scalability) that kept us from creating a virtual machine-offer.

Our Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V offering has two components:

· Flex Servers: Virtual servers on shared hardware platform. More info here.

· Hyper-V servers: dedicated hardware server with 2 virtual machines (application server and database server for example).

Both are positioned as dedicated servers, not as virtual servers. With these two offers we address the needs of 2 customer groups: The Flex servers are for websites and applications that have outgrown shared hosting, while the Hyper-V servers are for larger applications that used to be deployed on two (or more) separate physical servers.

We opted not to use the term “Virtual servers” for our offer, because a “virtual server” implies less value for money than a dedicated server. Also, “Virtual servers” are often associated with cheap solutions based on Parallels Virtuozzo.

Our solutions based on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V provide more functionality (like snapshotting, easy installation, flexible upgrading), are more secure and stable and have a features that guarantee a higher uptime than dedicated servers.

All customers involved during the beta-stage decided to renew their subscription and gave positive comments on the stability and performance.

Bert Van Pottelberghe

Business Unit Manager

HostBasket

Guest Post: Going Live with Hyper-V for myhosting.com

porourke — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 01:44:00 GMT

Hi, my name is Stephen Nichols, VP of sales and marketing for SoftCom Technology Consulting, which is the company behind myhosting.com, a leading global provider of affordable web, email and application hosting. We have been actively engaged with Microsoft technologies since we began in the hosting industry back in 1997. We are part of Gold Certified Partner program with competencies in Data Management Solutions, Information Worker Solutions, Mobility Solutions and Networking Infrastructure Solutions. Based on our strength and experience in shared hosting we see the greatest opportunity for growth is to build new solutions on this foundation. The development of these solutions will be customer requirement driven and need to be delivered cost effectively and on demand.

The best prospect for future profits is to move beyond commoditized hosting of simple websites sold on large amounts of storage, bandwidth and email addresses. To future proof our business we have begun to offer unique solutions backed by exceptional support. As part of our process to find and develop tools and strategies to differentiate our services in the market, our entire organization was keen to implement some form of Virtual Server Hosting.

In the words of our Operations Manager: “Modern computer systems are extremely powerful, 4 socket, quad core CPUs, these systems are able to support many gigabytes of memory and storage. Running one operating system and a single application on these type of machines would be inefficient. By using virtualization technology, we can consolidate multiple physical servers onto one physical machine.”

We have already implemented virtualization technology within our infrastructure for our internal server needs and saw that server consolidation allows us to have smaller footprint and a lower cost of ownership. Fewer physical servers reduce power consumption both by servers and by the cooling infrastructure, lowering costs and at the same time making our solution “greener.” The next step was to build hosting solution that could take advantage of virtualization technology to provide our customers the tools they need to run their businesses. As not all virtualization platforms are created equally we took our time to find the best fit.

At the end of the day the clear choice for us was to go with Microsoft’s Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V platform. Some of the key factors we evaluated include the following.

Efficient Cost and licensing model: As a Gold Partner under the SPLA model, the licensing for the entire platform was included in one package which made things simple. There is no need to deal with multiple vendor systems for reporting.

Hardware support and flexibility: Within our data center we have several server configurations. Hyper-V support for a wide range of hardware makes it attractive for us. Once we install and configure Windows Server 2008 we enable Hyper-V and we are ready to go.

Server management tools: Hyper-V allows our Operations Team to use the same familiar Microsoft tools to manage both the physical and the virtual server environments in one place.

Reliability and Scalability: We need to be able to balance the needs of the few with the needs of the many. Hyper-V enables us to do this by providing each customer with an independent operating system that can be customized by the customer without affecting other customers.

We have been involved in Go Live Programs with Microsoft in the past so we were eager to participate this time around. The exciting part for myhosting.com is to have access to not only the code but to the team of knowledgeable people at Microsoft to collaborate with. The main benefit so far has been how straightforward it has been to implement an integrated hosted Virtual Server solution. We are able to offer customers a transactional hosting experience and at the same time provide the latest platform of Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008. Customers get the best of all worlds; a full operating system supported by Microsoft in a virtual environment, 24/7 live support, scalability that is cost effective, and best of all, a solution that just works.

Stephen Nichols
VP, Sales and Marketing
SoftCom Technology Consulting

See our blog here.

Rumor Mill: Dispelling the "Microsoft Virtualization is not Ready for 'Prime Time'" Myth...

porourke — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 09:31:00 GMT

Greetings! Chris Steffen here again from Kroll Factual Data. I want to share some thoughts on what I have heard about Microsoft virtualization in the enterprise data center. I will also be the first to admit that I am not the average user of Microsoft’s virtualization technologies and that I probably have a bit of a bias toward the Microsoft solution. But the bias did not come without some pretty compelling reasons.

There are several requirements we each consider when evaluating a server virtualization product. Maybe the primary requirement is cost. Maybe the primary requirement is flexibility. Maybe it is manageability or ease of use or compatibility or reliability. Each of these requirements is a valid reason to choose a certain virtualization product. And in my evaluation, each of these requirements is answered by the Microsoft virtualization solution. I am not going to deep dive into a sales pitch here on the benefits of Virtual Server over any of the other solutions, but I did want to address a specific concern that I have heard while attending conferences and while industry analysts have talked to me: that Microsoft’s virtualization products are not ready for enterprise production environments.

For some background, Kroll Factual Data has been using Microsoft Virtual Server in our production environment for nearly five years (since Virtual Server 2003). We have tested and implemented every subsequent version ever since and currently have a more than 1,600 virtual machine environment consisting of Virtual Server 2005 R2 and Hyper-V. We are able to run 300,000 business transactions per day in this environment, and the flexibility afforded to us by having an 85% virtualized data center allows us to deploy additional capacity on demand nearly instantly.

When we started down the virtualization path, I will be the first to admit that some of the other virtualization solutions had an advantage over Microsoft, specifically in their management tools. Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) took care of that, and the improvements coming in VMM 2008 makes the Microsoft virtualization management solution the best in class.

We have had Hyper-V in our production environment now for months and are migrating our existing Virtual Server 2005R2 VMs to Hyper-V hosts as fast as our IT team can work. It has been stable, the support has been outstanding (through the Microsoft TAP program), and we are seeing about a 20% increase in resource utilization over Virtual Server 2005 R2.

Based on Factual Data ’s use of the products, Microsoft’s virtualization suite is ready for the big leagues. I mentioned earlier that I have a bias toward the Microsoft virtualization solution, and I have this bias because Virtual Server, Hyper-V and VMM have proven to me that they work as promised. They have provided the cost-effective, reliable and easy-to-manage solution that we needed, and that we will continue to use.

Some may say that they came a bit late to the party, but I would contend that the party is just beginning.

-Chris

Achtung! 3,500 BMW dealerships going virtual

porourke — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 09:00:00 GMT

Continuing with yesterday's theme... on the first day of "Virt-Mas" my true love brought to me - 3,500 BMW dealerships that will be deploying Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V later this year.

Before sharing BMW's story, I first wanted to say "thanks" to Mark and Dugie for their comments to me today. And Frank at QLogic launched a Web page today where you can learn more about their benchmark measuring QLogic HBA and Hyper-V performance. Their results surpass VMware's May 2008 test, which may surprise some people. Now onto BMW ...

Unless you read German and troll the German newswires, you probably missed Microsoft's news release on a project that BMW is deploying to 3,500 dealerships around the world built on the Windows platform. I don't speak German ["Ich spreche nicht Deutsch"], but a colleague in MS-Germany translated the announcement for me. Following is a translation of some of the news release:

Microsoft Consulting Services has developed a retail server platform based on Windows Server 2003 and Virtual Server 2005 for a globally operating automobile manufacturer. The solution permits the rollout of new applications and services in a typical branch office infrastructure, while ensuring a high degree of standardization, a minimum of operating effort, and the necessary system security. These requirements count among the major challenges in the contract dealer and franchise environments, where operators traditionally tend to operate more independently. Dealers’ customers – and their own employees – profit from optimized advisory procedures, shorter waiting times, and improved quality of advice.

The use of virtualization technology allows the corresponding multiprocessor hardware to be utilized flexibly. It also guarantees a high degree of security against failure, while at the same time reducing the amount of testing necessary for simultaneous use of different applications. With the help of Microsoft Forefront Intelligent Application Gateway 2007, a remote access solution has been implemented that allows access to 3rd level support in the heterogeneous network structures of the workshops while taking into account the high data protection requirements of the dealers.

The BMW group is relying on the Microsoft server platform to underpin its rollout of a new hardware and application infrastructure for its more than 3,500 service operations worldwide. This infrastructure is known as the Integrated Service Infrastructure Server (ISIS). Based on the platform, premium aftersales services will be offered that are standardized across the globe. This rollout will be completed in the first quarter of 2008.

An upgrade to the 64-bit Windows Server 2008 with Microsoft's new Hyper-V virtualization technology is already planned, in order to utilize the performance capabilities of the hardware to an even greater extent. BMW also plans to roll out the SQL Server and BizTalk Server in the course of this migration. SQL Server 2005 allows the platform to be laid out in a more homogeneous fashion, while the use of BizTalk Server 2006 represents a significant steps towards a uniform modular front-end, including the optimization of processes and the integration of various backends.

In short, BMW's Integrated Service Infrastrructure Server will be the technology architecture for after-sales service at 3,500 BMW dealerships around the world. I do recall seeing a slogan that BMW uses/used with this project. It was something like, "the first car was sold my marketing; the second by services." Here's a few other details that didn't make the news release:

On average, dealers will have 2 servers and roughly 20 client devices per location, which they will use for everything from sourcing spare parts to accessing diagnostic manuals and consulting customer service policies.
BMW is initially using Virtual Server 2005 R2 (on Windows Server 2003 EE) to consolidate and run .NET-based applications, business process integration and other applications on each server.
BMW is using System Center Operations Manager; no word if they'll use SCVMM 2007/2008.

So what's my point? Why does anyone care about a deployment using Virtual Server the day AFTER we released Hyper-V? I'm interested to hear your thoughts. Here are mine:

if you're a Virtual Server customer, now you know that there's someone else who has plans to move a large # of Virtual Server-based VHDs to Hyper-V
server virtualization (be it Type 1 or Type 2) is great, but it's just part of the architecture needed to deploy their new after-sales service. As a colleague always tells me, "a hypervisor by itself can't even run calculator; you need apps and an OS to do something." For BMW, it's handy that the hypervisor can come from the same vendor as the applications, dev tools, management tools and OS.
if you're an SI partner (perhaps going to WW Partner Conference next month), it represents a services opportunity to help customers design their architectures, virtualize packaged and custom apps, and integrate those with other systems.
If you're a VMW shareholder, that's approx. 28,000 VMs that will be running on Hyper-V in the near future ;-)

11 more days until Hyper-V available via Windows Update (WU). Have a good weekend.

Patrick

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 beta has arrived

porourke — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 10:30:00 GMT

Hi - this is Hector Linares, I am a Program Manager on the team that built System Center Virtual Machine Manager. I'm happy to report that we released the feature complete public beta of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 (formerly known as vNext) today!

We've heard a lot of great feedback from customers and partners since SCVMM 2007 was released last September which we took into account for this beta release. Let's just say, the product has come a long way.

With this release, Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) 2008 supports managing Virtual Server 2005 R2, Hyper-V and VMware ESX from a single console. Rakesh hit on a few other features and key themes for VMM 2008 here.

Along with Hyper-V and Windows Server 2008 Cluster support, management of VMware ESX environments is an important theme in VMM 2008. VMM enables administrators to manage their virtual environment from a single GUI console and PowerShell interface, including multiple Virtual Center instances and/or multiple hypervisors including ESX, Hyper-V, and Virtual Server. To provide VMware support directly in the console, VMM connects to Virtual Center's public web service APIs to provide support for most day-to-day administrative tasks on VMware, including VMotion. Certain tasks like creating a VMware cluster are still done through Virtual Center directly. Since VMM is designed to co-exist with Virtual Center, any changes performed on Virtual Center will get automatically propagated to VMM, and vice-versa.

Here are two photos sent to me from the Microsoft Management Summit exhibit floor:

But, upon closer inspection it really says...

One of my favorite features in the VMM 2008 release is Performance and Resource Optimization (PRO), which provides integration with System Center Operations Manager 2007 to address alerts from hardware, operating systems and applications allowing for dynamic rebalancing of virtual machine resources using knowledge-based policies and rules.

With deep knowledge of the environment including operating systems, applications and hardware, PRO Packs automatically identifies opportunities for more efficient physical and virtual resource allocation and generates tips within the Virtual Machine Manager 2008 console called PRO Tips.

PRO leverages the Operations Manager framework enabling partners to create products/solutions for our mutual customers by creating specific policies that Virtual Machine Manger, in concert with Operations Manager, is called to act upon, minimizing downtime and accelerating time to resolution.

Partners build a specific management pack that monitors thresholds pertinent to the health of VMs as they relate to their product. Should a threshold be exceeded then the agent reports an alert to Operations Manager. VMM polls Operations Manager for alerts specific to it and, should it find them, imports them as a TIP. Admin then has the option to implement the tip or ignore. In either case the action is sent back to Operations Manager so the console can update the alert.

Example: Operations Manager gets an alert that the CPU on an HP physical host is exceeding utilization threshold. The HP PRO Pack generates a PRO Tip based on that alert and sends it to VMM. Based on HP policies specified in the PRO Pack, the recommended action is to migrate VM workloads to another host to free up resources. The administrator implements the PRO Tip and VMM uses Intelligent Placement to determine the best destination for the virtual machines in the cluster. The VM is migrated to another host and Operations Manager is alerted of the fix and the status returns to green.

What’s even better is what customers can do in ESX with SCVMM 2008 that you can’t do with Virtual Center. Included with VMM is a Library that stores all the building blocks of a VM, including ISOs, Virtual Disk files, answer files for sysprep, virtual floppy files, PowerShell scripts, and VM templates. Unlike Virtual Center that requires users to pick a host first before defining the workload, VMM is not limited by the host chosen. VMM on the other hand, allows users to define the workload first (processor count, memory, virtual disks, high availability) and based on those characteristics and performance requirements uses Intelligent Placement to determine the host that is well suited to handle the workload. This feature works across all three supported hypervisors and can be used throughout the lifecycle of the VM, not just during initial placement. Automation is critical for many administrators to reduce costs in their environments. The VMM GUI console is built completely on PowerShell. Everything a user can do in the UI can be done from the command line. In fact, users only have to know a single set of PowerShell commands for all three hypervisors managed by VMM. No need for pesky “if () else if ()” blocks of code.

One key thing to note – Microsoft offers an incredible value proposition. For a third the cost of VMware, we provide a complete platform and management solution. The System Center suite that includes Operations Manager, Configuration Manager, Data Protection Manager and Virtual Machine Manager to provide a unified management solution for your infrastructure: physical, virtual and from desktop to datacenter.

For more on System Center and virtualization products please visit these sites www.microsoft.com/scvmm and http://www.microsoft.com/virtualization.

VMworld Europe 2008 - will cost be a factor?

porourke — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 04:14:00 GMT

We'll be a gold sponsor at VMworld Europe next week. I'm part of the crew headed to Cannes (along with Jeff Woolsey and Mike Neil and others) to meet with customers, partners, bloggers. We'll demo Hyper-V beta, SCVMM 2007, Terminal Services (Windows Server 2008 has RTM'd after all) and SoftGrid app virtualization. If you're attending the show, stop by booth #57.

And if you're attending from the U.S., I'm sure you're well aware of the exchange rate and prices in Cannes. The dollar is worth 0.67 Euros and Cannes (I'm told) is high rent district.But that's not the only cost discussion that will be echoing through the halls of Palais de Festivals. It's interesting timing that The Yankee Group decided today was the time to publish a new report titled, "Virtualization Price War: VMware's Little Big Horn?" On the eve of VMworld Europe, Laura DiDio's 20-page report goes into detail about the pricing benefits customers will accrue from greater competition around virtualization software. Below is a summary of the report, and an excerpt from the report:

Rapid commoditization and intensified competition in virtualization technology has precipitated a price war, which is a key element of emerging Anywhere Applications environment. This war is a boon for corporate enterprises who can pick and choose from a wide array of products at discounted prices.

No one feels the pressure more than market leader VMware, which has approximately 70% of the installed base, a best-of-breed product and a 2-year lead on its rivals. VMware’s position is similar to General George Custer. One minute he and the 7th Cavalry had the vast Montana plains all to themselves; the next they were surrounded and vastly outnumbered by the Sioux. In VMware’s case, it’s surrounded by rival vendors lusting for its business. Just as Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Gall and their warriors besieged Custer and the 7th Cavalry at the Little Big Horn, VMware’s competitors led by Microsoft, Citrix (which purchased virtualization vendor XenSource in August 2007), Novell and Red Hat are on the war path. They are ready to count coups and lure VMware customers, touting the fact that their products are significantly less expensive. For example, Microsoft Virtual Server offerings are from 40% to 75% less than comparable VMware offerings, depending on specific configuration, volume and licensing factors. Similarly, Citrix’s retail pricing is 66% lower than VMware solutions. Or to use another more specific metric, in the past year, all the virtualization vendors charged between $700 and $800 per socket for their commercial server products while VMware’s product retailed for a whopping $3,000 per socket, a 75% premium.

Yankee Group believes that server operating system vendors such as Microsoft and Novell have a distinct feature and performance edge in their respective management offerings because they have been in this end of the business far longer than VMware. By contrast, operating system vendors such as Microsoft, Novell and
Red Hat provide full management of the baseline OS, virtual machines and hypervisor. Microsoft’s Configuration Manager can patch and deploy software to virtual and physical instances of the Windows OS and hypervisor. VMware still requires a separate infrastructure product to patch its ESX Server.

When you see the report, it certainly won't astound you with technical depth. That's not what it's about. But Yankee Group does a good job of providing first-hand accounts from customers and partners who have weighed the trade-off between features and costs. Case in point these excerpts:

Josh Clark, UNIX systems manager at the systems record management company Mobius Management Systems, Inc. headquartered in Rye, New York, chose niche market virtualization provider Virtual Iron over VMware last year specifically because of the latter was more expensive—85% more expensive to be exact. “We chose Virtual Iron over VMware because of price. The same configuration in VMware was $80,000 compared to just $12,000 for Virtual Iron,” Clark said.

“I think I state the case realistically, so $5750 for VMware ESX3 Enterprise versus $3260 is only a delta of $2490 is a smaller figure than some of the numbers I’ve seen,” said David Dodge, a VMware Authorized Consultant (VAC) systems engineer and certified engineer at TechPower Solutions, Inc. in Redmond, Wash.

“Virtual Machine Manager identifies the correct machine with the appropriate resource and it allows us to set policies on the host server to reject any new Virtual Server deployments if there’s a dearth of server CPU, disk space or memory,” the administrator said. He added that the functionality in VMware’s corresponding virtualization management offering falls far short of the functionality in Virtual Machine Manager. “VMware’s Lab Manager development tool focuses on desktops, not servers and even their new Virtual Data Center tool does not incorporate the intelligent placement feature of the Microsoft product,” he said.

The following chart is based on Yankee Group's figures. Does this configuration match all customer demand? No, of course not. But Yankee Group does an admirable job of portraying a segment of the software market that is ripe for change due to the presence of Oracle/BEA, Red Hat, Citrix, Novell, Virtual Iron, open source alternatives ... and of course Microsoft.

NOTE - I'm told this report is 100% free of any vendor money and that all vendors involved reviewed Yankee Group's work prior to publication.

Look for more blogging from Cannes next week.

Patrick O'Rourke

System Center Virtual Machine Manager: Huge Announcements!

WSV_GUY — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 20:41:00 GMT

Hi - this is Chris Stirrat and I run the team that built System Center Virtual Machine Manager (also known as SCVMM or “Carmine”). I very excited to share a couple of HUGE announcements with everyone around virtualization and SCVMM.

First - I am extremely proud to announce that after 2 short (OK - it didn't always seem short...) years of customer focused development, SCVMM has been officially released! It has been a long road and as many of our TAP and Beta customers can attest, we have come a long way. It is not easy bringing a competitive version 1 product to market, especially in a newer industry that is moving quickly.

Here are some of the interesting details of the release:

Throughout the release we have had over 32 TAP (Technology Adoption Partners) customers and 10 partners which have been testing, giving great feedback and creating solutions with the beta versions of SCVMM
Microsoft's own internal IT group has been managing 100% of their virtual environment (86 physical hosts running 1224 VMs) in production with SCVMM since Beta2 with no (that is zero) impact on their SLAs
To date we have over 20,678 public beta users of SCVMM
SCVMM is available in 9 different languages

In addition here are some quotes from our Beta and TAP customers:

· “VMM came through for us "Big Time", I would have been doing this for many hours, 5 min opposed to many hours, what more can I say! VMM was the only reason I got sleep last night!”

· “We hadn’t used System Center software before, but we found it fairly easy to move from Linux to Virtual Server and adopt Virtual Machine Manager because VMM is so well designed and easy to administer.”

· “Virtual Machine Manager handles so many tedious, yet critical, VM infrastructure tasks. It makes VM management so easy, we’re ecstatic.”

· “System Center Virtual Machine Manager provides us with many important benefits. Its centralized management and sophisticated provisioning capabilities make it so much easier for us to manage and enhance our virtual infrastructure.”

I want to thank all the TAP and Beta customers for all the great feedback – it has been a great partnership for us. The release is now publicly available at www.microsoft.com/scvmm, with general availability in October.

Second – we are announcing the pricing/licensing for SCVMM.

We learned from our customers that managing virtualization encompasses many things – provisioning, monitoring, optimizing, reporting, patching and backup/restore. As we looked at the Microsoft assets across these areas, we created integration with some of the existing tools to help cover all the key scenarios for virtualization. We have tight integration with Operations Manager to provide health monitoring, performance monitoring, eventing/alerts, and ultimately the combination of SCVMM and Operations Manager provides a powerful solution to continually optimize your virtualization environment. In addition, with Operations Manager we can see a full picture of how an application running in a VM. We monitor the application and combine that data with the VM and physical host data. For patching the VMs and images, we have integration with Configuration Manager that allows you to patch VMs including the ones not currently running. For backup/restore, we have integration with Data Protection Manager that allows you to backup at the physical host level (which includes all the VMs running on that host).

In order to make it easy for customers to manage their virtual environments and cover the key scenarios – we are announcing a new license to cover that situation. We are announcing the System Center Management Suite Enterprise license which gives you everything you need to manage you virtual environment at a very reasonable price of $860 per physical host.

You get:

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007 license
Enterprise server management licenses for System Center Configuration Manager 2007, System Center Operations Manager 2007 and System Center Data Protection Manager 2007.

One key thing to note – the license is on the physical host and includes unlimited VMs running on that host. Also – one question I get pretty often is whether or not SCVMM requires the other tools in order to run. The answer is no – SCVMM is stand-alone and does not require the other System Center tools in order to run. Having said that – there are many scenarios that are better and “light-up” when SCVMM is used in conjunction with the other System Center tools.

Third – we are announcing System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007 Workgroup edition, which will be available in January 2008. This edition is aimed at mid-market customers and allows them to manage up to five physical host servers and an unlimited number of virtual machines. The only restriction in the software is the number of physical hosts you can manage (5) but everything else is full functionality. The System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007 Workgroup edition will be priced at $499 and will be available in January.

The fourth announcement centers on where we are taking SCVMM moving forward. We are on a long roadmap with SCVMM and continue to get great feedback from customers about where to go. Our next release is planned to coincide with the release of Windows Server Virtualization (codename Viridian) so that we can expose all the great features it provides. In addition to Viridian support – we are also adding some key customer driven features. We have heard loud and clear from customers and partners that we need to manage other virtualization environments in addition to Windows virtualization. They want a single management solution that manages all the different hypervisor technologies. So – in our next set of releases will be adding support for non-Windows virtualization environments – specifically VMWare and Xen. We listened to you!!! And when I say we will manage these environments I mean really manage them – covering all the key scenarios they offer. From a single console and a single command-line you will be able manage Virtual Server, Viridian, VMWare and Xen.

We are finalizing the project plans and will announce specific details closer to our Beta release – but we are very excited to get working on the next release. The team is focused, hardworking and dedicated to providing a great solution. We have fully recovered from our release celebration and are heads down cranking away.

For more information on Virtual Machine Manger and other Microsoft virtualization products please visit these sites www.microsoft.com/scvmm and http://www.microsoft.com/virtualization.

Virtualization: Big Opportunities

WSV_GUY — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 21:33:00 GMT

Hello, I’m Larry Orecklin, general manager at Microsoft focused on the System Center family of management products and Virtualization. If you picked up a newspaper in the last few weeks, you are more than likely aware that the virtualization industry is moving into the limelight. And while the market is still nascent, with only about 5 percent of servers virtualized today, the technology is poised for strong growth, creating great opportunities for customers and partners.

I’m here today to share how Microsoft views this technology, the market it fuels and how that approach compares to some competitors.

The virtualization market is emerging and therefore very dynamic with significant opportunities to reduce costs and complexity across the IT infrastructure; from the desktop to the datacenter. From a solution perspective, and in order to truly help reduce that cost and complexity, our strategy and investments are anchored on three areas:

1. Virtualization is a key feature of the operating system, and as such, a technology for which you shouldn’t have to pay significantly more to utilize.

2. Virtualization will span from the desktop to the data center, and the broad array of technologies and applications in between that help to solve critical customer needs.

3. Management of the technologies is critical, and our unique approach is to enable the management of both virtual and physical assets from a single platform.

We believe that Microsoft and its large partner ecosystem will help accelerate this market bringing low-cost, high-value, high-volume virtualization products to mainstream customers. It is important to look beyond machine virtualization, enabling customers to take advantage of their existing platform investments, while at the same time utilizing their existing support skills and infrastructure to reduce costs associated with implementing virtualized environments.

Today you can take advantage of Virtual Server for server virtualization needs, Softgrid for application virtualization and System Center for managing your physical and virtual environments. Many customers are already testing and/or using these products. After the release of VS SP1, for example, we now have over 840k downloads of Virtual Server, while in the Application Virtualization space, we just passed 2M devices sold in just 2 quarters. Recently, we also passed 2.5 million downloads of Virtual PC 2007 and we’re expecting the RTM of our Virtual Machine Manager at the end of the month. And that’s just the beginning; you will see additional product news from us as the quarter progresses.

And remember, as you’re following the increased news coverage and buzz around virtualization – talk to your Microsoft channel partner about your infrastructure and needs, look at resources (linked below) and consider the benefits of going with a solution that equips you to manage your environment and spans beyond the server. To learn more about Microsoft’s virtualization efforts, please go to: www.microsoft.com\virtualization.

Resource Links:

· Find out and evaluate a host of partner solutions through pre-configured Virtual Hard Disks (VHDs): http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/virtualization/default.mspx

· Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 is the server virtualization technology engineered for the Windows Server platform. Familiarize yourself with the product, and download Virtual Server 2005 R2 for free: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/virtualserver/

· System Center Virtual Machine Manager provides centralized administration of virtual machine infrastructure and enables increased physical server utilization and rapid provisioning of new virtual machines by the administrator and authorized end users. Download beta 2: http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/scvmm/default.mspx

· Microsoft SoftGrid^® Application Virtualization is the only virtualization solution on the market to deliver applications that are never installed, yet securely follow users anywhere, on demand. http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/softgrid/default.mspx