Windows Server Division WebLog

This week kicked off the Masters golf tournament in Augusta, Georgia. While thousands of fans cheer for their favorite player, each professional golfer will pick up a club, swing, and hope for the best. What’s often overlooked in this story is the scientific Read More...

The team behind Windows Essential Business Server 2008 for midsized companies (part of the newly announced Windows Essential Server Solutions family and formerly known as "Centro") has launched a team blog here . Group Program Manager Eric Watson provides Read More...

In the course of talking to many Microsoft partners and customers, the Windows Small Business Server team has learned that there are sometimes misperceptions about the product, in many cases based on experiences with the earlier versions of SBS. In hopes Read More...

back to Redmond late yesterday from Reno where I was attending Supercomputing 2007 conference. I suspect SC07 will be best remembered for the power outage that hit the convention center and most of downtown Reno, and Ashlee's stellar headline. While I was in Reno, there were lots of colleagues in Barcelona making all kinds of announcements, from Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V to System Center, at Microsoft's IT Forum. I'm told there were 50+ journalists at a panel session on virtualization, and from the looks of all the news this week, IT reporters either attended Oracle Openworld or IT Forum (except the aforementioned Ashlee Vance). One Microsoft news item that went overlooked, despite the news of Oracle VM hypervisor, Sun xVM hypervisor, VMware Server 2.0 beta and Hyper-V (did I miss one?), was the Server Virtualization Validation Program. You can read a bit about it in this news release, read comments non-MS people here and Alessandro's post. So what is this program? Customers who have valid Windows Server licenses or support agreements can call for support to either Microsoft or the vendor that has provided them the validated server virtualization solution. Whichever company is contacted first will try to resolve the customer's issue, and in the absence of a solution will, via TSAnet, pass on the information to the other company to help solve the problem. For those of you who know WHQL [Windows Hardware Quality Lab], think of it as WHQL but for server virtualization software. The program will be open to any vendor who creates/sells/services server virtualization software can test and validate that Windows Server 2008/2003/2000 runs as expected as a guest OS. Along with this validation comes mutual technical support for the Windows Server OS running in the non-Microsoft VM. Given this week's news by Sun and Oracle, this program just became a bit more important to customers. [more] Read More...

For those of you interested in parallel computing and high performance computing, you'll take note that today we released the first public beta of V2 of Windows Server 2008 for HPC clusters. The V2 product is called Windows HPC Server 2008. The product currently in the market is called Windows Computer Cluster Server 2003 (or Windows CCS). I'm told the product has been renamed to reflect an expanded feature set beyond compute for very scalable enterprise clusters. Some of those features include high-speed networking, support for clustered file system (e.g., IBM's GPFS, HP Polyserve, Panasas), new failover capabilities, enhanced management tools and a service-oriented architecture job scheduler. Windows HPC Server 2008 will be available in the 2nd half of 2008. In the booth at Supercomputing 2007, we’re running a couple demos with mixed clusters (Linux and Windows). This is a first for Microsoft at a conference, and from what I’m told is link directly to customer input from research, academia, life sciences industries. Here’s an excerpt from today’s news release: Mixed, dual-boot clusters can also improve cluster efficiency. Because dual-boot clusters flexibly serve both Linux and Windows users, they increase utilization rates by expanding their number of addressable users. Examples of customers deploying large mixed clusters include the University of Iowa, Cambridge University, 3M and Baker Hughes Inc. Leading technology partners that have announced mixed cluster support for Windows HPC Server 2008 include Altair Engineering Inc., Cluster Resources Inc. and Platform Computing. One demo station, titled “Virtualization for Mixed Clusters” assumes the customers isn’t running MPI, and has SLES running as a child partition on Hyper-V with Windows HPC Server 2008 parent partition. I’m told that this scenario is coming when customers want to optimize for manageability and cluster utilization and not necessarily peak performance. The second demo station, titled “Linux and Windows: Mixed Cluster Management” assumes a dual-boot cluster (running SLES), storage from Panasas and management tools from Moab. I was told that this scenario could use Hyper-V. A gentleman from Moab explained that customers are seeing more demand for Windows-based apps running on HPC clusters, but the primary HPC environment is Linux. Moab’s tools let customers provision either OS with the chosen app – on an as needed basis. Very cool. Last item to point out is the new Top500 supercomputer list. For those of you not familiar with this bi-annual benchmark, the Top500 list represents the 500 most powerful computers in the world. We’re talking trillions of computations per second. And for the first time ever, there were six Windows-based clusters on the list. While this seriously pales in comparison to the 426 Linux-based clusters, it’s certainly a start. The most powerful Windows-based cluster is owned by Microsoft in our Rainier (Washington) datacenter, and measured in at 11.7 teraflops. And by upgrading this cluster to Windows HPC Server 2008 (same hardware, new OS), I’m told the Linpack benchmark results improved 30%, and more importantly, ran the test in 2 hours. To follow news from the Supercomputing 2007 conference, visit http://insideHPC.com or www.winhpc.org. Patrick Read More...

It's been a while since I posted about Windows CCS (the high-performance computing edition of Windows Server 2003). Just because I've been radio silent, doesn't mean others have been. In fact, we launched a new Web site geared toward the industries like financial services, manufacturing, oil & gas, geo sciences and life sciences. And if you truly want to stay updated on Microsoft's HPC news, Ken does a good of tracking the news at his site. That said, today we published results of a Microsoft-sponsored survey on capital markets firms (154 qualified high-performance computing users) growing use/need of high-performance computing. Here's excerpts from the survey: The online survey was conducted in June 2007 and includes responses from high-performance computing users in the capital markets industry. Significant findings include these: • 45% of respondents reported that customer demand is currently driving the growth of their firm’s high-performance computing needs. • 24% of respondents reported that they plan on increasing the capacity of their high-performance computing environments by 1,000 nodes or more in the next 12 to 18 months. • 47% reported that performance is the most important factor when purchasing an operating system to run high-performance computing applications. • 83% are considering a Microsoft high-performance computing solution for their next appropriate project. • 62% report that Microsoft Office Excel is the most widely used application in their high-performance computing environment. • 60% are currently using a 64-bit operating system to run their high-performance computing projects. • 63% report that they deploy their high-performance computing environments as a centralized or shared utility. I recently had the opportunity to speak with a few customers from banks and Cap Market firms as they kicked the tires of Windows CCS. We had very interesting discussions about using hypervisors to further utilize HPC nodes, and creating mesh networks with multi-core procs and MPI. Much of the conversation reminded me of Burton Smith's Q&A in HPCwire. They're re-investing computing from the programming processor/FPGA upward. Aside from the tech talk, what caught my attention is that these folks aren't scientists, engineers or researchers. They're evangelists and IT pros who have immersed themselves into the world of parallel computing and large-scale computing without looking back. Very cool stuff! Read More...

At some point along the way, you've probably been given this advice about public speaking: (1) tell them what you're going to say; (2) tell them; and (3) tell them what you've said. I've always found that to be good guidance, yet so easy to overlook or disgard because there's so much we want to communicate. Similarly, in November 2005, we told customers and partners about the Windows Server roadmap and the transition to 64-bit. In short, Windows Server 2008 will be the last 32-bit server OS from Microsoft. So this week's WinHEC served as a time to remind customers and partners what we're going to do. Bill Laing showed a roadmap of server products that are already 64-bit only, such as Exchange 2007, Windows CCS, Windows Server virtualization, others, and approximate timeframe for other server products. Unfortunately, Joe Wilcox and a few others got it wrong and heard that Windows Server 2008 would be the last 32-bit OS from Microsoft ... server and client. Cue Bob Harris pitching Suntory whiskey in "Lost in Translation." While the server team is bullish on 64-bit, the embedded and desktop world isn't near ready for x64 only. So the Vista team cleared up reporter's confusion today. Read More...

For ISVs and developers who want to build parallel apps for Windows CCS, you should try to attend one the upcoming lab in Redmond or the labs next year in Redmond, Copenhagen or Munich. Following is a quick description and check out the agenda. Read More...

While David Lowe and folks are getting mid-60s in Barcelona at IT Forum, there's a bunch of us enjoying the sun (through the convention center windows) and heavy-number crunching computing in Tampa. You can see video highlights of the conference at WinHPC.org. Others from the HPC community who are commenting from the show include Dan, Joe and Doug. Read More...

Several of us will be on airplanes this weekend, some headed to Barcelona for IT Forum, and others headed to Tampa for Supercomputing 2006. For those who want to follow the news and happenings from Barcelona, you can visit the VirtualSide. You'll hear and read about virtualization, systems management, access and security, Windows Server (including Longhorn). For those who want to follow the high-performance computing happenings at SC06, you can visit WinHPC. Ken will be posting videos from the show, and updating the news sections. Read More...

Port25, which is a blog for Microsoft's open source software lab, is casting an eye toward high-performance computing. They've tapped the talents and experiences of Frank Chism, a technology specialist by title here as Microsoft. As you can watch/listen to in this interview, Frank has earned his stripes working on HPC systems and clusters. Read More...

"Quadrophenia" is how CNET charaterized it. At Intel Developer Forum this week, Intel is showing off its forthcoming "Clovertown" quad-core processor for servers. Today at IDF we participated in a personal supercomputing demo that used the "Clovertown" processors within Tyan Compter's Typhoon system, running Windows CCS, along with Mellanox Infiniband interconnect and Wolfram's gridMathematica. Read More...

I learned that next week's exec web chat on Windows CCS has been postponed until later in the month. But in the mean time, you can watch the Port 25 interview with Ryan Waite, group product manager for Windows CCS. Ryan discusses how open source influenced Windows CCS through the inclusion of open source in the product and contributions back to the community. Read More...

Now that Windows CCS has shipped the product team leadership will answer your questions regarding the product. They are also prepared to hear your suggestions for version two specifically around scheduling and HPC tools. The Web chat is Monday, October 2 at 2pm Eastern (11am Pacific). Read More...

I'm not talking about deskside HPC clusters, but rather learning more from your desk about the new Windows Server edition for running parallel applications on HPC clusters. Read More...