Windows Virtualization Team Blog : Virtuallization Solution Accelerators

Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool v2.1

porourke — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 15:20:00 GMT

Virtualization affects how we plan, build, deploy, operate, and service workloads. Customers are creating large libraries of virtual machines containing various configurations. The patch-state of these virtual machines are not always known. Ensuring that offline virtual machines are properly patched and won’t become vulnerable the instant they come online is critical.

I am therefore very pleased to state that the Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool v2.1 has now been released!

Congratulations to the Solution Accelerator team for this release!

The Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool 2.1 has free, tested guidance and automated tools to help customers keep their virtualized machines updated, without introducing vulnerabilities into their IT infrastructure.

The tool combines the Windows Workflow programming model with the Windows PowerShell interface to automatically bring groups of virtual machines online, service them with the latest security updates, and return them to an offline state.

What’s New?

Release 2.1 is a direct response to customer and Microsoft field requests to support the R2 wave. Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool 2.1 now supports the following products:

· Hyper-V-R2

· VMM 2008 R2

· SCCM 2007 SP2

· WSUS 3.0 SP2

· OVMST 2.1 also supports updates to Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 virtual machines.

Bryon Surace

Senior Program Manager

Hyper-V

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

Hyper-V, your journey starts here!

vtango — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 19:59:00 GMT

I have been inundated by people here at VMworld 2009 with tons of questions on Hyper-V and who want to see demos of Hyper-V. This blog post attempts to put together a list material for folks. Given the large amount of material this list is only a snapshot but one which will provide you enough to get started.

First off there is a huge amount of technical articles, documentation, whitepapers, case studies, API documentation that’s available. Your start point should be the Virtualization page here. That site provides links to numerous case studies about customers who are using Hyper-V and Microsoft Virtualization solutions. Next I suggest looking at the solutions site that provides information on the customer focused scenarios. Following this I encourage you to delve into the products that are used to build these solutions.

For the geeks like me who are really looking to understand how to get started and the technical details you should start your journey at the Virtualization TechCenter. For those of you who wanted to just get to the nuts and bolts go straight to the Hyper-V Getting Started Guide. For folks wanting to understand the architecture in some depth you want to start here. Developers can jump straight to the WMI API’s.

Finally for folks who want to see a collection of videos with great demos of the products I’d like to point to Tony Sopers blog which contains a huge collection of these.

Enjoy.

Vijay Tewari

Principal Program Manager, Windows Server Virtualization

Microsoft and EMC renew their (virtualization) vows

porourke — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 18:04:00 GMT

Big happenings in NYC yesterday as SteveB and EMC's CEO Joe Tucci met with a room-full of IT execs to talk about an extended 3-year alliance. The announcement is here. In short, the companies are going to work more closely together in the areas of data loss prevention, collaboration and virtualization.

What's that you say? EMC - 80% owner of VMware - working more closely with Microsoft around virtualization? Here's an excerpt from the joint announcement:

Microsoft offers one of the fastest-growing and most cost-effective virtualization solutions from the desktop to the datacenter, including the ability to manage both physical and virtual environments from a centralized management console. EMC’s technology solutions enable storage, protection and management of information in Microsoft virtualized environments including Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Microsoft System Center, and jointly supported mission-critical workloads such as Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft SharePoint Server. EMC Consulting’s Application Practice, a thousand-person strong team with deep Microsoft knowledge, provides expertise in assessing, planning and implementing Microsoft’s technologies in a wide array of virtualization solutions.

That's all well and good - 1,000 EMC consultants trained on WS08 Hyper-V, System Center and key Microsoft applications that will be virtualized. But can those 1,000 consultants really look past VMware?

Thankfully CNET interviewed Steve and Joe and asked them about it. Here's the excerpt:

In the agreement, one of the areas you talked about working more closely in is virtualization. VMware is affiliated with EMC, which is probably Microsoft's biggest competitor in virtualization. So how credible is the notion that your companies can work together? And where do you draw the lines of cooperation? And how does that benefit customers?

Ballmer: We're not sitting here pretending we're partnering with VMware. That's more competition.

With EMC, which is a large majority owner in VMware, but is also independent, there's a lot that rides on virtualization. The fact of the matter is the storage business is being transformed also by virtualization. And virtualization is transforming the storage business. We want to do very well in virtualization. While Joe may own 80 percent of VMware, he still thinks it's a good idea to sell storage in places where perhaps we'll win as opposed to VMware.

Despite the fact that there's a level of competition with EMC's majority-owned division or entity, there's also a lot of cooperation around how virtualization affects the rest of our product line and the rest of EMC's product line. Let me just say, we're happy with the state of affairs. Of course, there's going to be competition in the virtualization space. I think EMC is as good as you're going to get in terms of being able to both--I won't say compete, but own a competing entity, if you will--and partner with us where we want to. We really respect Joe and the EMC team for that.

Tucci: I agree with everything Steve said. I think I'd add a point that says to really serve our customers, you need to form partnerships and alliances. And if you look for that alliance or partnership to be perfect where there's zero areas of overlap, I'm not sure that's physically possible with two powerful companies. So, what you have is this co-opetition.

As long as, like Steve said, you define the rules, you both know what you're doing, and have respect and understanding. For sure there will be many Microsoft applications running under VMware, and that's fine, because it's a win-win. There will be many times where a customer will pick Hyper-V and want to use EMC storage. And that's fine. We'll work together there.

I think it's an acknowledgment by two people that have great respect for each other, and two companies that are powerful, that this is a very good way to go.

Ballmer: There's enough shared interest for this to work. If it's 90 percent-95 percent competition, it's hard to get the little bit of cooperation. We're nowhere like that. We're 80 percent-85 percent cooperation, something like that. So, that makes it easier to do the whole thing.

Tucci: Good point.

Ballmer: I can't tell you we're "co-opetiting" or whatever you call it very well, for example, with Oracle. So, I'm not pretending you can do it with everybody in the business.

So for the next 3 years it'll be EMC playing the role of Switzerland in IT virtualization, despite VMware pumping $200 million profit toward EMC's bottom line and contributing billions more toward EMC's market cap. I hope it does because it'll be a huge win for thousands of customers who are deploying Hyper-V today. It'll certainly be interesting to watch.

Patrick

VM standards, offline patching tools

porourke — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 08:58:00 GMT

Quick post here on two items.

Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool can be downloaded here. As blogged about at by the System Center team blog, Virtualization.info, and InfoWorld blog.

This product allows the update of large-scale deployments of virtual machines, leveraging PowerShell, System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2007 and WSUS 3.0 (or Configuration Manager 2007). As Alessandro pointed out, "It just automates the VM power-on, updates deploying through virtual network access, and VM shutdown." You can use this Solution Accelerator to help you with business scenarios such as these:

Your IT organization is converting physical servers to virtual machines to reduce costs, including administrative overhead. How can you regularly update offline virtual machines while minimizing administrative costs?
Your IT organization has thousands of virtual machines stored for months at a time in a number of libraries. How do you keep the virtual machines reliably up to date?

Second, today Citrix issued an announcement about "Project Kensho", which is described as:

will deliver Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF) tools that, for the first time, allow independent software vendors (ISVs) and enterprise IT managers to easily create hypervisor-independent, portable enterprise application workloads. These tools will allow application workloads to be imported and run across Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and VMware ESX virtual environments

While you can read ComputerWorld's article or Alessandro's blog on the announcement, I think the most interesting perspective comes from Simon Crosby's June 27 post. Here's an excerpt from his post:

Kensho showcases our commitment to open standards based virtual infrastructure management using DMTF CIM based interfaces, and will in the not too distant future allow Microsoft System Center VMM to manage XenServer. It also allows users to quickly and easily export their virtualized workloads to and import them from the new industry standard portable virtual machine format, OVF. You'll be hearing much more about Kensho and its features in the near future.

The OVF standard, which I was fortunate to be able to help to develop offers ISVs and enterprise IT staff a hypervisor-independent portable virtual machine format that packages a complete application workload with its resource requirements, configuration and customization parameters, licebnsand signatures to facilitate appliance integrity and security checking, as an open standard. Virtualized data center workloads captured in OVF format can be installed and run on any DMTF compliant virtualization platform. OVF also supports software license checking for the enclosed VMs, and allows an installed VM to localize the applications it contains and optimize its performance for a given virtualization environment.At the DMTF interoperability event, we used Project Kensho to create VMs from VMware, Hyper-V & XenServer in the OVF format. We also used Kensho to import and run OVF virtual appliances on XenServer and Hyper-V. Kensho will allow application vendors and IT users to produce virtual appliances once as "golden application templates", independent of the virtualization platform used to deploy them - and is a clear demonstration of how Citrix will add value to Hyper-V.

The Citrix news release says Kensho will be available as a download in September.

As for Microsoft, we support the OVF standards work, which isn't complete yet. There's no public schedule for when OVF will be supported in our products, such as Hyper-V or SCVMM, but it's on the board. It's great to see partners like Citrix doing converts for interop based on our DMTF standard interface. And we'll continue to work with Citrix, Novell and Sun on interoperability, in addition to making technology (like VHD image, Hypercall API) available via Open Specification Promise.

Patrick O'Rourke

Hyper-V Deployment Case Study – Sporton International

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

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

1) What was deployed?

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

2) Why deployed with Hyper-V?

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

3) In the customer’s own words....

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

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

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

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

Cheers,

Baldwin Ng

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