Still, things are freeing up and I hope to post more going forward (at least until baby #2 for me arrive)….

The big thing I wanted to post on is Microsoft Management Summit 2010.  I’m heading out to Las Vegas for the show this weekend.  I’ll be speaking on Tuesday, at 1015am, at session BD02 - Understanding How Microsoft Virtualization Compares to VMware.  If you will be at MMS, please swing by and at least say hi to me. 

In addition to my session, I’ll also be doing a demo during the Day 1 keynote.  For those who are not attending MMS, you can still watch both the day 1 and day 2 keynotes live, which I strongly recommend.  We’ll be making some really neat announcements and some great demos so it’s a must watch even if work with systems management, virtualization, datacenters or desktop.  The schedule is as follows:

· Tuesday, April 20, 8:30 – 9:45 AM PST:  Managing Systems from the Datacenter to the Cloud,  Bob Muglia, president, Microsoft Server and Tools

· Wednesday, April 21, 8:30 – 9:45 AM PST:  User Centric Client Management, Brad Anderson, corporate vice president, Management and Services Division

You can watch the keynotes from the Microsoft News Center at the times post above.  I hope to see everyone either in person or live online!

    
Edwin Yuen 
Director – Virtualization
 

Today, I wanted to highlight some of what Microsoft and a lot of people on my team have been working on for the last couple months.  We are working hard to expand our outreach with the online community.  We’ve worked hard on blogs and twitter feeds but we want to go well beyond.  I think I can break down what we’ve done in three areas.

Come check out our new Community web portal

Our goal is not to bombard you every time you turn the corner, but we want to be accessible in the media sites you are already spending time in and cut back on your time you need to troll around on the internet.  We are making our information easy to find, because we know you want real-time information without wasting your time to get it.

If you want an easy location to see all of the blogs & forums currently available from Microsoft virtualization experts - visit the new Community page on our virtualization website to see where conversations are already occurring around server and client virtualization, as well as the private cloud. 

Join us on Facebook

All of us are busy but we always seem to have time to check up Facebook, right?  Well, if you are Facebook user, you can get all the latest Microsoft Virtualization news right in Facebook.  Sign up to day to become a fan of Microsoft Virtualization on Facebook and gain access to information you want. 

We keep this page up-to date with press articles, analysts news, as well as the latest resources such as eBooks and whitepapers. 

Want to see how easy it is to set up a Microsoft Virtualization environment?  Watch the demo series in the video section. 

Want to see where the next event is that Microsoft Virtualization experts will be at?  Check out the events tab to find out more information & register.

Have questions you want answered?  Post a question our wall & have the facebook community help you out.  Our fans include the product group teams here at Microsoft

It’s more than just the Microsoft perspective

I know that most of you want to hear the Microsoft perspective but you also want the whole picture.  We want to bring more perspectives from from your peers, who have actually used Microsoft Virtualization solutions and from industry experts to get their take on the virtualization world.  We want to provide fair and balanced information that you can trust and refer to as a good resource of information.  We want you to provide you access to the the best virtualization information resources. 

With that in mind, we are inviting guest bloggers to post in this space so you can get every angle of how virtualization is changing the desktop and the datacenter and how it will impact you in the workplace. 

Be the first to hear it

There is often a lag period from when we announce new product & feature sets here at Microsoft, to customers actually hearing about it and understanding it.  I’ve spoken with many people that aren’t aware of all the changes that have occurred across our client & datacenter solutions over the past few years. 

To help, we have an RSS feed on our Virtualization home page, that you can check to see the latest information from the latest case studies to industry articles related to virtualization.  Our goal is to get customers educated on our products and solutions TODAY so you can make educated decisions about virtualization. 

Want to be more involved in the conversation?  We have a twitter account that follows Microsoft virtualization experts, as well as industry experts and our press announces.  Follow MS_virt to keep up to date with news.  Retweet/favorite/reply back – we love hearing from our customers and value their opinions and feedback. 

I hope this all sounds exciting to you and provides you some great resources for more information on Microsoft Virtualization.  In the future, look for us to provide more information on other community resources, including other ways to interact with other Virtualization experts.  If we missed anything or you have a great new idea, let us know.  As always, you can comment or send me feedback and I’ll work on it!

    
Edwin Yuen
Senior Technical Product Manager – Virtualization
 

As AMD’s director of commercial software, I’ve had a front row seat to the kinds of new efficiency AMD and Microsoft have been driving in the industry for years now. And, quite simply, it just keeps getting better. I was able to sit down with Vineet Thuvara, the Worldwide Launch Leader for Windows Server, to talk about just that. Check it out:

Margaret Lewis (@margaretjlewis) is a Product Marketing Director at AMD. Her postings are her own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

Due to its ability to drive down costs and drive up resource usage, Microsoft SQL Server consolidation is top of mind for our customers these days. Microsoft virtualization, which includes Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and System Center, is one of the well known mechanisms to enable this. Today, Ted Kummert, Senior Vice President, Microsoft Business Platform Division, released a video (click here) that outlines how virtualization enables consolidation.

So the natural question is – can we achieve higher amounts of throughput as we consolidate? Can we improve the throughput with recent advances in hardware and the recent release of Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V?

To address this, we recently performed tests that are discussed in the Best Practices for SQL Server Virtualization webcast (click here) and in the SQL Server Consolidation Guidance (click here).

In our tests, we ran a complex stock trading application workload on servers with Second Level Address Translation (SLAT). In physical environments, the operating system translates virtual memory addresses to physical addresses. However with virtualization, we have an additional translation (the second level address translation) because you are running operating systems within virtual machines. This means additional CPU cycles are spent doing this translation. The SLAT enabled processors complete this translation within the silicon, leading to performance advantage compared with non-SLAT enabled CPUs. You get these processors from both Intel and AMD.

We chose a 16-core HP DL585 server with SLAT-enabled AMD processors with HP EVA 8000 storage running Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V. We created virtual machines (VM) each with 4 virtual processors and 7 GB RAM using a fixed-sized VHD format. We started to run our workload with one VM and gradually increased the load, adding more VMs as we went along. We found that we were able to increase the throughput with consolidation. The workload scaled near-linearly up to 4 VMs consuming all of the physical cores on the server (16 cores total). Then we added even more VMs, consolidating up to 8 VMs. We over-committed virtual-processors to physical-cores ratio by 2:1. We were able to run heavy load (3000 batch requests per second), consuming about 70% CPU on the server. The tests also found that Windows Server 2008 R2 offered improved performance than the prior release as shown by the dotted red-line in the graph.

Microsoft virtualization (Hyper-V and System Center) combined with advances in hardware technology (such as SLAT-enabled technology) can provide a solid consolidation platform for production workloads using SQL Server.

Microsoft continues to work with partners to offer solutions that help our customers realize the benefits of virtualization (click here). Further guidance from our partners will be forthcoming. For more resources on virtualizing Microsoft server applications, click here.

Vipul Shah

Microsoft Virtualization Team, Senior Product Manager

To get more information on the actual announcement itself, the press releases, videos, and other details, click here.

One the key areas for the agreement is Virtualization.  By working on integrating the technologies from both companies, Microsoft and HP can provide customers with a management solution that goes from Infrastructure to Application, from Cloud to Desktop.  I think it’s clear that the future of IT it’s not just a discussion of physical and virtual management but how to manage IT holistically, which includes both physical and virtual infrastructure.

In the near term, the technical result of this partnership is that we’ll see data center management solutions based on both the System Center family of tools and HP’s Insight Software.  This allows for heterogeneous management of data centers, integrating not just monitoring but also provisioning and maintenance of both physical and virtual systems.

Second, there are new “Smart Bundles” that bring Virtualization solutions to Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs), using HP Servers, Storage, and Networking along with Windows Server and Insight software, all managed with System Center Essentials (SCE) and HP Operations Center.  SMBs can really benefit from virtualization and these new Smart Bundles provide a single, cost effective package for virtualization.

Over the next three years, customers can expect to see deeper integration of Insight Software and System Center, interoperability between Business Technology Optimization software with the System Center, increased collaboration on run book automation, HP and Microsoft services integrating their expertise on virtualization and cloud based implementations, and much more.

How this impacts virtualization is that the focus of this partnership is in the area I have repeatedly highlighted as the key to virtualization, management.  I’m sure many have heard the phrase that virtualization without good management is worse no virtualization in the first place.  This statement becomes more and more true as everyone deploys more virtualization.

Like I’ve posted many times, management of virtualization and the integration of virtualization management into the rest of IT is what should be the focus of customers.  Too much focus is spent on technologies & features and too little is focused on implementation and management.  In the lifecycle of your systems, you will spend more time, energy, and money on management of the systems than on the initial implementation.  Great management capabilities reap benefits on a daily basis.  That’s why I’m so excited about this announcement and why I think the people who benefit the most from it are customers who are implementing and will continue to implement virtualization.

    
Edwin Yuen
Senior Technical Product Manager – Virtualization
 

First, I made what I considered a really important post right before the holidays.  The post, Cutting through the FUD: Facts you should know about Hyper-V and System Center, really is a response to some of the negative attacks that I saw late last year.  Now, I want to stress again that this isn’t all the articles out there (it’s really in the minority), but I felt compelled to respond.  Still, I think that 2010 is going to be a good year for everyone.

Second, I think that I forgot to highlight the release of the Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool 2.1.  The Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool provides tested guidance and automated tools to help keep virtualized machines updated, without introducing vulnerabilities into the existing 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. This latest version supports all our latest R2 releases and is available for download at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc501231.aspx.

Finally, I wanted to highlight two new whitepapers that have been released.  They are

How Customers Are Cutting Costs and Building Value with Microsoft Virtualization: http://download.microsoft.com/download/6/0/2/6025DD0C-CC79-4D06-B4F6-EDAF5993CE86/HyperV-VMware-Cost-Comparison-Jan2010.pdf

In-Guest Monitoring with Microsoft System Center: http://download.microsoft.com/download/A/7/7/A77AB5C5-8ABA-4C3F-B0DB-12F51D789775/In-Guest-Monitoring-with-SC-Jan2010.pdf

You can find these two whitepapers and more like them at the Microsoft Virtualization Compare site.

   
Edwin Yuen
Senior Technical Product Manager – Virtualization
 

OTRUM is a Norwegian company that provides interactive television solutions to the hospitality industry. Although it had been using VMware, it needed a virtualization solution that was more affordable, easy to set up and scale, and simple to manage. After learning that Hyper-V was included in OTRUM’s licenses for Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter, it implemented the technology, along with System Center products. By switching from VMware, OTRUM immediately saved more than NOK 50,000 (U.S.$8,775) in license fees, and will save another U.S.$20,000 over three years on VMware support costs. And, by managing its data centers from a central console, the company simplified administration of its physical and virtual server environments, saving about 20 hours per month in management time.

“Hyper-V works better than VMware. It’s easier to set up and, with System Center Virtual Machine Manager, I have a single console for managing the whole virtual environment, including one remaining VMware host… Running several servers on the same physical machine is more cost-effective. But having Hyper-V virtualization software included with our Windows Server licenses meant even greater savings.”

Mercuri Urval, a Switzerland-based international personnel and management consultancy, realized similar benefits. While the company was using virtualization technologies from VMware and Citrix, it needed to develop a new server infrastructure that would provide better performance, flexibility, and ease of use, while being cost-effective. With Windows Server 2008 Datacenter and Hyper-V, and System Center Virtual Machine Manager, it can now add new virtual servers or migrate existing ones in just minutes, and activate test environments easily to test updates or new software installations.

Because Windows Server 2008 Datacenter can accommodate an unlimited number of virtual servers on each physical server, Mercuri Urval saved U.S.$48,000 on Citrix licenses, and saw an additional 35 percent cost reduction by eliminating VMware licenses and its external terminal solution.

“With Windows Server 2008 Datacenter, we developed a simple, clear, cost-effective, and scalable solution that provides our employees access to information regardless of place and time. And with the flexibility provided by Hyper-V, we can develop our IT gradually, without disrupting daily business.”

  
Edwin Yuen
Senior Technical Product Manager – Virtualization
 

Still, when I meet users and customers, especially at shows like TechEd EMEA and VMworld, I often get asked "why do comparison to VMware at all?"  The honest answer is that we get asked for comparisons against VMware and often, we have to respond to negative attacks on Hyper-V.  While it’s within anyone’s right to post their opinions on Hyper-V, lately, there has been a lot of comparisons and opinions that I feel fall into the FUD category.  That’s why I felt compelled to write up something to respond.

What is FUD?  I think a lot of people forget what FUD really stands for.  FUD is Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt.  FUD is when people make assertions or statements that simply are trying to scare people away from what they are attacking.  FUD is not simply an argument that you don’t agree with. 

I do want to make clear that not everyone is pushing FUD.  There are many articles and bloggers out there, including Pro-VMware ones, that are not pushing FUD.  I read many of them regularly and I respect and appreciate what they write (even if I don’t always agree :) ).  Unfortunately, lately, there still seems to be articles and posts, that people keep highlighting due to their provocative titles, that are more FUD than fact.

The issue is that the FUD being spread about Hyper-V is for one purpose, to get you not to try Hyper-V and System Center.  Very few of the FUD articles say something like “Try both solutions out and compare".  They all basically say “It’s not worth your time to try it, trust me” or “You might try it a little but don’t deploy it as it’s very risky and your business might suffer because of it.”  This goes against the most basic point that I make on my site, which is to try Microsoft Virtualization , evaluate it, deploy it for workloads, ask others who have deployed it, and see for yourself.

What I want to do today is not address specific articles on Hyper-V.  I want to address a couple of key facts to help sort through the FUD that is being posted.  So let’s start:

• You do not need to remove or replace your existing VMware installation to deploy Hyper-V
  This is probably the most important fact that seems to be missing when reading the FUD articles.  Those articles work on the premise that you have to dump your VMware investment, that the Microsoft solution requires you to remove your VMware systems.
  
  At the most basic level, you can deploy Hyper-V and Microsoft Virtualization side by side with any VMware installation.  Virtualization is a growing technology and there are plenty of opportunities in most businesses to deploy both hypervisors.  It is NOT an all or nothing proposition. 
  
  More importantly, the management stack for Microsoft Virtualization supports managing VMware systems also.  Virtual Machine Manager supports managing VMware servers and the integration points to the rest of System Center allow you to take advantage of the features of Microsoft Virtualization Management, even if you only have VMware and do not deploy Hyper-V. And it’s not just about managing and integrating VMware with System Center, but also providing key Microsoft unique features such as In-Guest Monitoring, End to End, Physical to Virtual to Application Level management, and advanced features such as Performance Resource Optimization (PRO).  In a VMware environment, Microsoft System Center is a compliment to the existing VMware infrastructure, not a replacement for the VMware tools.
  
  In fact, if your organization already uses Windows Server or System Center, you may already have the infrastructure to deploy and manage Hyper-V.  Microsoft Virtualization is built so that it doesn’t require you to build an entire new IT infrastructure to support it.  Rather, it leverages as much of your existing IT infrastructures as possible, whether it be physical or virtual, Microsoft or VMware, or even Desktop or Server.  Trying out Hyper-V and Microsoft Virtualization is easy to do.
  
• Hyper-V is Enterprise Ready
  There seem to be a lot of people out there that have what I call checkbox-itis.  Checkbox-itis is the tendency to focus on feature checkboxes rather than on features and business cases that apply to real deployments.  Checkbox-itis often is used by those who try to tell you what is “Enterprise-ready” based on feature sets they feel are important.
  
  Hyper-V and the rest of Microsoft Virtualization is “Enterprise ready” for hundreds of companies today.  You can read the case studies on our site for some great examples of that.  The features and capabilities of Microsoft Virtualization provide benefit to all those customers. 
  
  The truth is that “Enterprise ready” is only applicable to YOUR Enterprise and YOUR requirements.  Simply attempting to look for features in software and NOT mapping them to your requirements needs is the wrong way to evaluate if a software meets your needs.
  
  Many of the FUD articles keep citing features that VMware has that Hyper-V does not as an example of what is required for Enterprise readiness.  In this worst case of checkbox-itis, they don’t even discuss what the applicability of those features are or even the limitations.  They just simply tell what the features are, that Hyper-V doesn’t have it, and because of that, Hyper-V isn’t “Enterprise Ready”. 
  
  The truth of the matter is that some of features are new to VMware also.  If those features are truly required to be “Enterprise Ready”, does that mean that older versions of VMware like ESX 3.5 are not “Enterprise Ready” any longer?  Should people be worried that their existing installations are somehow in danger?  Of course not. 
  
  That gets right back at the FUD issue.  Trying to scare people with checkbox-itis to not trying Hyper-V.  The importance of features is based on each company’s requirements, not someone’s list of features.  Try out Hyper-V, look at its feature set, and try it.  If it doesn’t meet your requirements for certain workloads, deploy VMware for those workloads.  But for the majority of workloads, I believe that Hyper-V will meet the requirements.  And don’t forget, either way, you can manage both the VMware servers and Microsoft servers using the Microsoft management stack.
  
• Virtual Machine Manager is not a replacement for vCenter
  Whenever the FUD articles actually acknowledge that Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) manages VMware, they always cite specific features that VMM doesn’t do to VMware environments.  The simply answer to this is that VMM wasn’t designed to replace vCenter.  It’s designed to be the centralized, day to day virtualization management tool for multiple hypervisors, such as creating VMs, moving VMs, configuring VMs, and optimizing the placement of VMs.  
  
  More importantly, many of the features that people cite as missing in VMM are found in the other System Center tools.  Why is that?  That is because the Microsoft philosophy is that one tool set, one management infrastructure, should be used to manage both physical and virtual.  We believe it doesn’t make much sense to have both a physical AND virtual monitoring tool, a physical AND virtual backup utility, a physical AND virtual update and software deployment tool.  In the end, tt’s not really about Physical OR Virtual management or even Physical AND Virtual management.  It’s about IT management as a whole and if virtualization is to become a core feature capability of everyday IT, the management of virtualization needs from a specialization to a model like System Center has adopted.
  
  Finally, as with Hyper-V and the rest of System Center, VMM is not an either/or implementation.  VMM integrates with vCenter with existing WebAPIs.  In fact, when you initiate an action in VMM against a VMware server, VMM tells vCenter to perform the action.  Thus, work done in VMM against a VMware server is shown in vCenter because vCenter does the work and work done in vCenter shows up in VMM via the APIs.  You do not need to stop using vCenter to use VMM. The systems are not mutually exclusive.  Even some past behavior in VMM 2008, such as creating new port groups in vCenter, have been changed in VMM 2008 R2. 
  
• Hyper-V is a mature, safe, secure hypervisor
  This is probably most cited point by the FUD articles that have been written.  They claim Hyper-V is somehow unsecure, unreliable, immature compared to VMware.  Most of those articles never actually cite specific instances, issues, or problems that would confirm those points.  The true test is to try Hyper-V and perform the necessary test and evaluations against both it and the competition.  While no software is infallible, the growing track record of Hyper-V and the rest of the Microsoft Virtualization solutions speak for themselves. 

My final point is one that based on my conversations over the years, that many of you agree with me on.  Virtualization and Hypervisor choice is not like going to war.  You don’t have to pick one side only and you don’t have to destroy the other side to successful.  People take it way too seriously.  Virtualization is a great technology but it’s simply that, a technology.  Something we use to make our lives easier and better.  

As I have stated throughout this post and in most of my posts, try Hyper-V and the Microsoft Virtualization products for yourself.  That is the only way to determine what Microsoft Virtualization can do for you. 

  
Edwin Yuen
Senior Technical Product Manager – Virtualization
 

• Installation Guides
• Deployment and Performance Guidance
• Deployment Guides
• Planning and Pre-deployment Tools
• Management Tools
• Workload Specific Guides, including Sharepoint, SQL, and Exchange whitepapers

This is definitely a site to bookmark as a Hyper-V technical reference. 

Another nice resource for all the IT Pros out there is a new reference poster available for download, which covers Windows Server 2008 R2 Feature Components architecture.  Here is the Hyper-V Architecture.

The full poster includes not only the Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V architecture, but other Windows Server 2008 R2 features such as

• Active Directory Domain Services
• File Services
• Internet Information Services
• Remote Desktop Services
• BranchCache
• Management Interfaces
• DirectAccess

This is a nice poster to have around to review what’s in Windows Server 2008 R2.

-Edwin

Its growing servers were gobbling up energy and cooling resources, floor space, and management time, and it was very close to filling its data center space. And the more dependent Podravka became on its servers, the more management worried what would happen if they failed.

Podravka had used VMware GSX in its test environment, but VMware ESX Server was too expensive for a large-scale production environment. Instead, it deployed Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise with Hyper-V and Microsoft System Center. The benefits are pretty impressive: IT staff respond quickly to business needs by deploying virtual machines in hours instead of weeks. It created a low-cost disaster-recovery facility, and reduced its data center footprint by 93 percent, which opens up growing room and eliminates the need for an expensive new data center.

I think these two quotes really sum up the impact of Microsoft Virtualization.

“We were able to reduce our server holdings by 76 percent and our energy costs by 78 percent. We can funnel this $2 million savings into other areas of the business, such as new product development, that will make us more competitive.”

“Our staff is 20 to 40 percent more efficient. Only six people manage our infrastructure, and we will be able to accommodate more growth without increasing our headcount.”