Windows Virtualization Team Blog : virtualization management

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

Upcoming Webcasts on Best Practices for Virtualizing MS Server Applications

porourke — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 22:25:00 GMT

We’ve got some great webcasts coming up in the next few weeks to discuss recommendations for virtualizing MS server applications and the benefits of choosing hyper-V + System Center as your virtualization solution. Each technical webcast will focus on a specific server application- Exchange, SQL and SharePoint. Please see below for detailed information.

TechNet Webcast: Microsoft Virtualization Best Practices for SQL Server (Level 300). Thursday, Oct. 29, 2009 at 10am Pacific time

Virtualizing business critical applications will deliver significant customer benefits including cost savings, enhanced business continuity and an agile and efficient management solution. This session will focus on virtualizing SQL Server using Microsoft solutions, the benefits over key competitors such as VMware, and guidance for virtualizing SQL server for Production and Test/Dev scenarios focusing on consolidation, scale, load balancing, dynamic provisioning and high availability. We will go into technical details with best practices. Customer evidence and results from lab deployment tests will also be discussed.

TechNet Webcast: Microsoft Virtualization Best Practices for Exchange Server (Level 300) Wednesday, Nov. 4 at 10am Pacific time

Virtualizing business critical applications will deliver significant customer benefits including cost savings, enhanced business continuity and an agile and efficient management solution. This session will focus on virtualizing Exchange using Microsoft solutions, the benefits over key competitors such as VMware, and guidance for virtualizing Exchange for various Production scenarios. We will go into technical details with best practices. Customer evidence and results from lab deployment tests will also be discussed.

Update: More than recession: IDC's server virtualization tracker report

porourke — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 04:24:00 GMT

Update: The folks at IDC asked that I remove this blog post until further notice.

That said, do check out Roger Johnson's post. He discusses Dell PowerEdge R910 and his Hyper-V deployment at Crutchfield. I met Roger at VMworld 2009. He's a VCP, having run an ESX Server-based datacenter for some time before Crutchfield moved away from VMware and onto Hyper-V/SCVMM earlier this year.

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

Microsoft and Red Hat Complete Cooperative Technical Support

porourke — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 10:00:00 GMT

Hi, I'm Mike Neil, general manager of Windows Server and Server Virtualization. Back in February we announced our work with Red Hat to enable cooperative technical support for virtualized environments. I'm excited to announce we've completed certification in each others' programs! Customers now can deploy Microsoft Windows Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux and a range of select applications, virtualized on Red Hat and Microsoft virtualization products, knowing that the combined solutions will be supported by both companies.

Here are the details:

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2, 5.3, 5.4 have passed cert tests when running on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V, Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2. See more at RedHat's certified hardware site.
Windows Server 2003/ Windows Server 2008 / Windows Server 2008 R2 are validated to run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4, using their KVM-based hypervisor. See more at Microsoft Server Virtualization Validation Program site.

Beyond the OS, both companies have select applications that would receive technical support when running on certified server virtualization software. The Microsoft applications can be seen in KB article 957006. On the Red Hat side, you can now run JBoss Enterprise Middleware within a virtual machine guest on Hyper-V and receive coordinated technical support. This is a step forward for enterprise customers, hosting providers, systems integrators, and those who want to offer their customers the top x86 operating systems to run applications.

And as mentioned in my February post, Microsoft provides the systems management tools, via System Center suite, to manage physical and virtual IT systems and applications, including non-Windows software such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We do a world-class job of managing Red Hat Enterprise Linux, so customers can use one pane of glass to manage their legacy Unix and Linux environments together with their Windows Server environments. Read more here, but here's an excerpt from the website:

System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 supports monitoring of the following operating systems:

HP-UX 11i v2 and v3 (PA-RISC and IA64)
Sun Solaris 8 and 9 (SPARC) and Solaris 10 (SPARC and x86)
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (x86/x64) and 5 (x86/x64) Server
Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 (x86) and 10 SP1 (x86/x64)
IBM AIX v5.3 and v6.1 (POWER)

The work with Red Hat is just one of numerous examples of the way we're helping customers and partners running mixed IT environments with Windows and open source technologies. A little over 2 months ago, we announced that the Linux integration components (ICs) for Hyper-V would be contributed to the Linux Driver Project and the drivers licensed under GPLv2. The community has embraced us and helped ready our submission of the drivers for inclusion in the kernel. It was great to see this support and a couple weeks ago what started as our first submission made it into the official kernel tree. The Linux IC code that we contributed is in the staging phase for the next kernel release (2.6.32). See here.

I'll close by saying that Microsoft and Red Hat have competed for customers and partners for some time now, and as platform vendors continue to compete in the marketplace. While the announcement today extends our ongoing technical support collaboration, these agreements do not address, nor do they include provisions relating to patents, open source licensing or other IP matters. We look forward to supporting our joint customers and providing unparalleled solutions for Microsoft's customers and partners!

Thanks,

Mike Neil

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 Virtualization: Best Choice for MS Server Applications

porourke — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 19:21:00 GMT

Hello, I’m Zane Adam, general manager of Virtualization and Systems Management. As more and more customers are looking at virtualization to help reduce cost and decrease complexity in their infrastructure, we are seeing lots of questions around virtualizing MS server applications such as Exchange, SQL and SharePoint. What benefits should I expect to see? What do I need to consider when virtualizing these mission critical business application? Should I virtualize all roles within a server application?

We have worked across MS application groups to test our products with hyper-v and we believe that MS virtualization is the best choice for MS server applications. First, MS server applications are built for Windows Server, and because hyper-v is part of the operating system, there is no need to add complexity of support and interoperability by adding a 3rd party virtualization layer. This means there is just one stop for all of your support needs and also assurance that the stack of applications and hypervisor works well together. Second, to help ensure optimal performance Microsoft has specific deployment guidance for virtualizing MS server applications which results in a mixed physical and virtual environment. System Center is the management solution that allows you to view both physical and virtual instances from one console. Third, as you know MS virtualization is up to six times less expensive than other virtualization solutions in the market, which makes running your server applications even that more affordable.

The folks who developed the MS server applications have developed specific guidance on virtualizing individual applications based on deployment scenarios. You can hear more thoughts from them on the following blogs:

Exchange Server: http://msexchangeteam.com/

SQL Server: http://blogs.technet.com/dataplatforminsider/default.aspx

SharePoint: http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint

Also, for more information please visit www.microsoft.com/virtualization/solutions/business-critical-applications .

Thanks-

Zane

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

Follow us on Twitter and get a chance to win a Zune HD

vtango — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 16:09:00 GMT

I now have the final list of sessions that I will be attending at VMworld. As I noted last time I had a lot of waitlists which it now appears I have not made the cut for most of the sessions. That means I will be at our booth (#2422) almost all of today (Aug 31, 2009) and at the times when I am not attending a session.

There is a great opportunity to win a 32GB Zune HD. All you have to do is to follow the Microsoft Virtualization experts on Twitter. By the way this is open to folks who are not attending VMworld as well. So follow along with us!! You can follow me here.

I am heading over to the Moscone Center to register and see if I can get into some of the labs being offered today.

Vijay Tewari

Principal Program Manager, Windows Server Virtualization

VMworld 2009 an oppurtunity to meet our customers

vtango — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 19:09:00 GMT

Hi, I am Vijay Tewari a program manager with the Virtualization team here at Microsoft. Having spent the last 15 months or so deeply involved in the development of Hyper-V I am really looking forward to meeting customers and partners at VMworld 2009.

Much is being made about the fact that we are not showing Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager at this event due to the show policies. I will stay away from that debate although coming on the heels of our RTM I would have loved to show the product. However, a lot of us will be there at the event and are really looking forward to interacting with customers. At the end of the day the product is only useful if it meets our customers’ demands and there is nothing like having a face to face interaction with our customers to hear firsthand what they like and hate about the product.

Below is my tentative schedule for VMworld. As you can see a lot of wait lists, but I am hoping that I can squeeze in. Would like your feedback if there are sessions you would like to see covered.

We will be tweeting (follow vtango on Twitter) and blogging all through the event, so follow along.

Looking forward to seeing you!!

Vijay

Vijay Tewari, Principal Program Manager, Virtualization

Personal Schedule for Vijay Tewari

Monday


7:30 AM-9:30 AM (Waiting List)	LAB01	VMware vSphere™ 4 - New Features, Best of, Advanced Topics

10:00 AM-11:00 AM (Waiting List)	V13100	The VMware Competitive Advantage - A Comparison of Server Virtualization Offerings

11:30 AM-12:30 PM (Waiting List)	V13229	Introduction to VMware vSphere

1:30 PM-2:30 PM (Waiting List)	V11721	Best Practices for Successful VI Design

2:30 PM-3:30 PM (Waiting List)	V13478	Executing Enterprise Virtualization - Continuing Case Study with USMC

4:00 PM-5:00 PM	V12226	Building a High Availability and Disaster Recovery Solution with VMware

Tuesday


9:30 AM-10:30 AM	SS5160	Stop Virtualizing Servers, Start Virtualizing Infrastructure

11:30 AM-12:30 PM	VM3142	Large Scale Virtualization

1:00 PM-2:00 PM	VM3235	Introducing VMware vCenter Product Family: Managing Service Levels Across Dynamic IT Infrastructure

2:30 PM-3:30 PM (Waiting List)	VM1960	Datacenter Consolidation and Migration with VMware Site Recovery Manager

4:30 PM-5:30 PM (Waiting List)	BC2761	ESX Networking for High Availability and Disaster Recovery

5:30 PM-7:00 PM	TA2544	A Comprehensive Look at the Security and Compliance of vSphere 4

Wednesday


9:00 AM-10:00 AM (Waiting List)	BOF105	Technology and Architecture -- Virtual Networking

10:00 AM-11:00 AM	TA3220	VMware vStorage VMFS-3: Architectural Advances since ESX 3.0

11:00 AM-12:00 PM (Waiting List)	BOF104	Cloud Computing

12:00 PM-1:30 PM (Waiting List)	VM1700	vApps and advanced VM templates in vSphere 4

2:00 PM-3:30 PM	TA3880	Head-To-Head Comparison: VMware vSphere and ESX vs. Hyper-V and XenServer

4:30 PM-6:00 PM	BC3301	DR Architecture Design Workshop with SRM

Thursday


9:30 AM-10:30 AM (Waiting List)	BC2961	VMware Fault Tolerance Architecture and Performance

11:00 AM-12:00 PM	BC3387	Advanced Data Protection for Microsoft SQL and Exchange Server in a VMware Environment

12:30 PM-2:30 PM	LAB07	VMware vCenter Lab Manager 4

2:30 PM-3:30 PM (Waiting List)	BC3421	SRM Architecture & Features: The Road Ahead

4:00 PM-5:30 PM	TA2525	VMware vSphere 4 Networking Deep Dive

What you won't see at VMworld 2009 - a demo of SCVMM 2008 R2

porourke — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 03:32:00 GMT

Ordinarily it'd be great news that we RTM'd System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 ahead of schedule, so close to the RTM of WS08 R2 Hyper-V and one week before VMworld conference. You can't beat the timing of it all. And the ~10,000 beta testers of SCVMM08 R2 are a big part of why we were able to deliver a high-quality release in the time we did. Some of the early adopters included Continental Airlines, Lionbridge Techologies, Sporton, Indiana University Auxilary IT and MaximumASP. Thanks to all!

But unfortunately, next week at VMworld 2009 we can't show SCVMM 2008 R2, or any other products, in our booth. You've probably read about it. In short, it's their show, it's not an industry show, and they set the rules. So we'll make the best of it; always lots of Microsoft customers and partners on the floor. Stop by the booth to meet some of the best/brightest minds at Microsoft.

As for the RTM of SCVMM 2008 R2, Zane summarizes his thoughts here. Kerim blogged about upgrade path to R2 from SCVMM 2008. See here. And on May 11, Vishhwa provided some details on features of SCVMM 2008 R2 here.

As Cheng wrote in his blog (I can't say it any better)

Go download a trial and give it a try, go get it now, and unleash the virtualization power that Microsoft brings to you.

Patrick

Microsoft’s new VDI licensing: VDI Suites

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

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

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

· the hypervisor,

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

· a brokering and remoting infrastructure, and

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

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

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

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

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

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

Manlio

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

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

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

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.