Entries tagged with virtualization - TechNet Edge

A chat with the authors of Hyper-V Unleashed

AdamBomb — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 07:01:00 GMT

This week I had a chance to sit down with Rand Morimoto and Jeff Guillet, the authors of Hyper-V Unleashed. We talk about their experience in deploying various virtualization technologies, including their recent migration to Hyper-V, as well as tips and best practices for planning a deployment and configuring disaster recovery.

James Governor on Sustainable IT

AdamBomb — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 07:01:00 GMT

James Governor is an an analyst with RedMonk, and he was in town recently to present at the Virtualization event that took place in Bellevue. I asked him a little bit about what it will take to get IT shops to take Green Computing seriously, and how virtualization fits into the Green Computing story.
You can read James' blog at James Governors Monkchips.

Virtualization customer story in Belgium

extreme — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 07:00:00 GMT

Philippe Van Hoe is the head IT advisor for GO and starts off by talking about:

Plans for their organization
2:50 Mission as an IT organization
3:39 Why did they choose Microsoft software over open source

At 4:30 - Bart Bultinck is a systems engineer and consultant at Integrate, who has helped implement some of the IT plans GO has.

5:02 - What was their motivation to virtualize the environment
5:50 - Configuration
6:37 - Tools used to migrate from physical to virtual
8:49 - Why they choose virtual server over VMWare
9:30 - What the future holds for their environment

At 10:22, Bart whiteboards about a networking problem they had on moving a virtual machine from one host to another. Bart explains how to use VLANs and virtual networking to resolve this issue.

Virtualized Desktops with Citrix and Microsoft

Joey — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 07:01:00 GMT

Last week Adam and I had a chance to attend the Microsoft getVirtualnow event in Bellevue. While there we had a chance to talk with Robin Brandl who is the Global Microsoft Evangelist at Citrix. In this interview Robin details desktop virtualization using Citrix XenDesktop and Microsoft Hyper-V. Take a look at the cool stuff Robin has to show.

Demo - Hyper-V Server and Live Migration

AdamBomb — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 07:01:00 GMT

When I met with Edwin to go over the new features in Virtual Machine Manager, he had some other really cool stuff he wanted to show me - so cool we weren't really sure if we were allowed to show it yet.
Word is out though now, so I'm gonna go ahead and let you see this sneak peek at Hyper-V Server and Live Migration.
Think of Hyper-V Server as just an operating system stub that allows you to run virtual machines - no requirement for a full host OS just to run VMs.
Live Migration provides fault tolerant virtual machines with no downtime when failing over to other clustered hosts. It's a really cool feature, and one many customers have asked for. Check it out!

First Look: Hyper-V Server

AdamBomb — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 06:59:00 GMT

The Virtualization Launch this week revealed Hyper-V Server for the first time ever - a dedicated OS just for hosting Hyper-V virtual machines. Bryon Surace took some time out from his launch activities to give us a quick tour around the product.
Hyper-V Server will be a free download, available in about a month.

Virtualization Launch

AdamBomb — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Every once in a while, I get to see a technology that makes me say "Wow!" and this demo from Edwin was one of those moments. He spent most of his time in System Center Virtual Machine Manager, showing me how it could manage Hyper-V, Virtual Server and even Vmware virtual machines from the same console. He showed me how it uses PRO tips to automate tasks based on certain conditions. He showed me the integration with System Center Operations Manager. He showed me that everything that you do through the UI actually just spawns PowerShell commands, and how you can expose those commands to create your own scripts and automation.
He also gave me a sneak peek at two never before seen features - Live Migration of VM's and Hyper-V server.
really cool stuff!

Virtualize your ISA or Forefront TMG servers

extreme — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 22:04:00 GMT

In the past, ISA has had very limited or no support on Microsoft's virtualization platform. Now, ISA and Forefront Threat Management Gateway (TMG) is supported . I met up with Jim Harrison to get some guidance on what you need to think about when you virtualize your ISA/TMG servers. We quickly dive into a whiteboard session on the various ways you can configure Hyper-V / virtual server to work with ISA/TMG and dig into the advantages and disadvantages of each network configuration such as:

Performance
Management
Administration
Security

Some other things we talk about:

[15:12] Why placing TMG on the parent is a bad idea and how you should configure the parent partition
Configuration options of the actual ISA/TMG server
[22:11] Failover, Clustering, and Quick Migration with ISA / TMG in a virtual environment
[24:32] Configuration changes you should make for any host which faces the Internet

View the security considerations for virtualized ISA / TMG deployments guide / whitepaper Jim wrote.

See KB article 957006 which states ISA (and other) products are officially supported on Hyper-V.

Best practices for ISA server co-location with a DC

Tech Ed 2008 Interview with Joe Schurman (MVP)

HaroldWongMS — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 21:33:00 GMT

In this short interview, Joe talks about some of the testing he has been doing with Office Communications Server 2007 in a Virtualized environment.

Microsoft's Investments in Virtualization and Cross-Platform Management

DaveMorehouse — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 05:06:00 GMT

Brad Anderson, GM of the Management Services Division, talks with us about his perspective on Microsoft's developments and directions in the virtualization and x-plat spaces, and where System Center fits in. He also talks a bit about what's coming in the months ahead. If you want a quick overview from the top, this is it, folks.

How MSIT does server Virtualization and Hyper-V Part 2

extreme — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 00:14:00 GMT

In this interview we met up with Devin Murray (Group Manager) and David Lef (Technology Architect) who are in charge of implementing virtualization within Microsoft. They've been running Hyper-V since it was in Beta in 2007 and have been running Hyper-V in production since January 2008. Watch Part 1 first.

In Part 2 of this interview, we cover the following topics:

Challenges they've faced in deploying and recommendations

[2:23] - What their thinking is around a future datacenter to address those challenges

[4:43] - Technical details on the future datacenter

[9:29] - What workloads would this infrastructure support

[13:15] - Branch office efforts around virtualization

[16:05] - How long we've been running Hyper-V, will we be able to have 100% of our servers virtualized in the future, and what is the net impact of running virtual server 2005 R2 vs Hyper-V.

How Microsoft IT does server Virtualization and Hyper-V

extreme — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 15:00:00 GMT

History behind why and when we started implementing virtualization in the environment and what challenges we had.
[6:22] - Number of servers virtualized in Microsoft's environment and goals of what percentage desired to be virtualized
[8:07] - Net business impact and how the team manages this area of the business
[9:54] - Current high availability stats (how many 9's) and how to make this higher
[12:45] - Configuration of virtualization environment
- High availability with Hyper-V
- Why they determined the sweet spot was an 8 node cluster
- [18:18] - Decision points between using VHDs versus Pass-through disks
- [19:45] - What workloads he wouldn't recommend using one disk type versus another in regards to performance
- Downtime they're seeing with quick migration

Watch Part 2 here.
Read more information about MSIT's virtualization strategy.

Hyper-V Part 5 - High Availability - Interview with PMs

extreme — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 07:01:00 GMT

John Howard, Ben Armstrong, Bryon Surace are program managers in the server virtualization team and give us the technical details on various components of Hyper-V. In part 5 we cover:

Guest operating system clustering
Virtualization platform clustering
- Planned failover i.e. "quick migration"
- Unplanned failover
- Clustering VMs
- Disc options and their benefits/costs problems/workarounds
  - iSCSI, Pass-through, disks using GUIDs

Hyper-V Part 3 - TAP and VSS Snapshots - Interview with PMs

extreme — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 07:01:00 GMT

John Howard, Ben Armstrong, Bryon Surace are program managers in the server virtualization team and give us the technical details on various components of the Hyper-V architecture. In part 3, we dive into the following components:

Hyper-V TAP program results
(02:28) Virtual machine snapshots and Volume Shadow copy Service snapshots (VSS)
- Difference between the two
- How VSS snapshots function
- What happens with a backup for VSS and a non-VS aware operating system (i.e. Linux or Windows 2000 Server)

Hyper-V Part 4 - Disks and iSCSI - Interview with PMs

extreme — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 07:01:00 GMT

Determine when you would want to use a pass-through disk
How iSCSI works and how you can use it with Hyper-V
Learn some best practices in using iSCSI

To learn more about iSCSI, view our other iSCSI posts on Edge.

Download Hyper-V RTM

Hyper-V Part 1 - Architecture - Interview with PMs

extreme — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 16:31:00 GMT

Overview of the architecture
- Where the virtual service provider (VSP) and virtual service client (VSC) fit in
- What the VMBUS does
- How a disk operation occurs through this architecture
[08:35] Comparison of fixed, dynamic, and differencing VHD disks

For more on architecture and the advantages Hyper-V has over 3rd party virtualization solutions, check out another Edge video with other program managers.

Hyper-V Part 2 - VM Snapshots - Interviews with PMs

extreme — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 16:28:00 GMT

John Howard, Ben Armstrong, Bryon Surace are program managers in the server virtualization team and give us the technical details on various components of Hyper-V. In part 2 we cover:

How virtual machine snapshots work under the covers
How to properly export a specific VHD/snapshot in your chain
Limitations with multiple branches of snapshots

Hyper-V hits RTM interview with Mike Neil

extreme — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 15:13:00 GMT

Hyper-V finally hits RTM! In this interview, we ask a number of questions to the guy who's in charge of server virtualization such as:
Why we decided to get into the server virtualization environment?
What changes have happened since previous RCs?
What challenges we've had along the way?
Where do you see things headed moving forward?
What challenges would an ITPro face with deploying hyper-v?
Fun Features IT Pros can use right now with Hyper-V

Download the RTM of Hyper-V starting at NOON PST. Existing customers who have deployed WS 2008 can recieve Hyper-V from Windows update beginning July 8.

Loke Kit Kai on Hyper-V

AdamBomb — Fri, 23 May 2008 07:01:00 GMT

I met Loke Kit Kai when he was visiting Redmond for the MVP summit last month. He'd been looking at several virtualization solutions that he could use to build a lab environment. Kit Kai has a good story to share about how Hyper-V has helped him build an environment that he and his colleagues could use to learn new technologies, so I got him to sit down with me for a few minutes to talk about his experience with the product.

MAP tool virtualization demo with Baldwin

extreme — Mon, 12 May 2008 13:36:00 GMT

In this Part 3 interview with Baldwin Ng, we cover the virtualization components of the Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) tool. In the first 5 minutes, he tells us the basics of how the tool works and how it can assist in your plan to virtualize your server and application environment using virtual server 2005 R2, Hyper-V, or Soft Grid. The tool is a compliment to the IPD virtualization guide. After this, Baldwin gives us a demo of the tool and gives us a peek at what's in store for the upcoming version 3.1 and 4.0.

See parts 1 and 2 of the interview with Baldwin.

An Analyst's Perspective on System Center and Virtualization

DaveMorehouse — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 16:40:00 GMT

Robb Mapp of Microsoft Integrated Virtualization analyst relations speaks to ESG Analyst Mark Bowker about his role as an IT analyst, his recent research and what customers are looking for relative to virtualization.

TechNet Radio: Heroes Happen Here Launch in Seattle Part Two

erickingfrog — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 18:08:00 GMT

On this episode of TechNet Radio, we talk with customers at the April 1 Heroes Happen Here launch event in Seattle, WA. Tune in and hear what attendees are excited about and what you can expect at a launch event in your area. We also have our April 2008 Security Bulletin.

Jeff Woolsey on Hyper-V RC

AdamBomb — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 07:01:00 GMT

With the recent release of Hyper-V RC1, Giovanni sat down with Jeff Woolsey, Senior Program Manager in virtualization, to talk about what's new in the Release Candidate.

TechNet Radio: Heroes Happen Here Launch in Seattle

erickingfrog — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 22:17:00 GMT

On this episode of TechNet Radio, We come to you from the April 1^st Heroes Happen Here Launch event in Seattle, WA.

Hyper-V & Server 2008 RTM

gmarchetti — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 08:01:00 GMT

With general availability of Windows Server 2008 Microsoft ships the beta 1 release of Windows Virtualization or Hyper-V (aka. Viridian).

Customers, partners, developers, IT Professionals, everyone buying a copy of Windows Server 2008 will have the opportunity to test drive the Microsoft hypervisor Hyper-V.

The version of Hyper-V included in the RTM build of Windows Server 2008 is identical to the build made available as part of the RC1 release of the server OS. The final release of Hyper-V will be available with 180 days from now. Microsoft’s hypervisor will only be available for x64 hardware platforms supporting hardware virtualization (Intel VT or AMD-V technologies). It will not be available for IA64 (Itanium) platforms. See resources for more information or here for general information about virtualization.

Hyper-V is still in beta. Support for Hyper-V is only available via online forums and newsgroups. See resources section.

The beta release of Hyper-V has limited guest operating support:

Windows Server 2008 32-bit and 64-bit (x64)

Windows Server 2003 32-bit and 64-bit (x64)

SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server 10 with SP1

Other OS installations might run as well but are not “supported” in the beta. The full list of supported operating systems in will be announced prior to RTM.

Virtualization solutions from Microsoft are:

Presentation Virtualization via Terminal Services

Application Virtualization via SoftGrid

Virtual PC

Virtual Server

Hyper-V Server Virtualization

Note:

The Virtual Server product will continue to be available. Hyper-V is only supported on 64-bit platforms, Virtual Server is the Microsoft offering for 32-bit platforms and other systems not providing the necessary hardware infrastructure for Hyper-V.

IT PROs

How does the general availability Hyper-V beta impact IT PROs? For some of the partners this is the first time they will be exposed to Hyper-V. They may be experienced with Virtual Server and/or Virtual PC. Hyper-V is a novel concept: a layer between the hardware and a variety of operating systems handling scheduling and memory allocation (amongst other things). It is the foundation of a dynamic infrastructure, making resource optimization and re-configuration far simpler than before and simplifying operations. Depending on the type of application there might be areas where its performance might be impacted. Heavily I/O bound and graphics-intensive applications are among those. Deciding where, what and how to virtualize infrastructure requires careful thought. Our Infrastructure Planning and Design series of documents will help guide that process.

Resources

Some resources you might find useful:

Forums

Microsoft SoftGrid Application Virtualization
System Center Virtual Machine Manager

Server Virtualization

Documentation

Technet Center for Virtualization

API

WMI

Hyper-V WMI API

HyperCall API

Products