virtualization.info

Last week, at its TechEd Conference in Berlin, Microsoft published updated roadmaps for most of its products.
The most interesting one from a virtualization perspective is the one about System Center family.

It seems that Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) will not receive any major update before 2011:

Thanks to Bink.nu for the news.

Labels: Microsoft

Five months after the first beta, Microsoft is ready to push out the beta 2 of Visual Studio Team System 2010 Lab Management, a special version of the popular IDE that interacts with Hyper-V R2 and System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 R2 to provide a fully featured virtual lab automation platform.

There’s not really much to say about this new beta, expect reporting a few improvements in the setup and administrative GUI, along with support for network fencing with virtual machines that are acting as domain controllers (this last one is a very welcome addition).

.

The Visual Studio Lab Management team is publishing a number of in-depth walk-through about how to use the platform and how special features (like network fencing) workIt’s really worth a check.

Labels: Microsoft, Virtual Lab Automation

Just last week virtualization.info questioned the Microsoft effort on desktop virtualization (including application virtualization and the so called enterprise desktop virtualization, what we call here platform wrappers).
Our article mentioned the MED-V lethargic development lifecycle and the fact that Microsoft stays under the radar for App-V too because at this time it may be the best thing to do.

What Microsoft is waiting for to massively push App-V and everything else beyond Hyper-V?
For App-V, the answer may be Office 2010 (codename Office 14).

During the summer in fact ZDNet reported that the new version of Office, expected somewhere in 2010, will feature a special edition called Click-To-Run.

Office 2010 CTR will be available on Microsoft servers, and streamed on the customers desktops on demand, as the Microsoft invitation letter to its beta testers describes:

…

Q: Can I use any of the Office 2010 applications before the install is complete?
A: Yes, you can use them while they are being streamed to your computer. You might notice some slight delays when using the product if they are not fully installed on your machine.
Does the Office 2010 products get installed on my machine every time I use an application or when I reboot my machine?
No. The Office 2010 products are streamed to your computer and installed once. After they are streamed to your computer the product stays installed on your machine.
Do I need to be connected to the Internet when I use any of the Office 2010 applications?
You only need an internet connection to download the complete product. Once it has been fully downloaded you no longer need an Internet connection.
What happens if I lose my internet connection before the complete Office 2010 product is fully downloaded?
You can still use the Office 2010 applications. But since not all of the entire product features have been streamed to your computer, your applications may have limited capabilities, depending on what has been downloaded so far. When you connection is restored, the product will continue streaming from the point that it left off…

ZDNet can’t confirm that App-V is involved but virtualization.info just received independent confirmations.

Microsoft is not really trying to keep the secret. Here’s a video introducing the CTR edition that Microsoft published just one month ago. It doesn’t mention App-V but application virtualization is clearly mentioned:

Office CTR is in private beta at the moment. Microsoft may decide to unveil it along with the Office 2010 public beta (aka beta 2), hopefully to be unveiled at TechEd Europe 2009, November 6.

If customers will embrace Office CTR it will be a major validation for application virtualization, and Microsoft will be able to leverage the awareness and interest around it by pushing its platform in the enterprise space in a completely different way.

This may also trigger the ISVs reaction: without 3rd parties applications supported on this new platform, customers could use App-V only with Microsoft products, which is a good start but not enough to reach the level of adoption that hardware virtualization has today.

Labels: Microsoft

Ten days ago Microsoft announced the availability of its Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) 2009 R2.
As most readers know, this is a special bundle that the company offers to its enterprise customers (Volume License only), and only if they subscribe the Software Assurance (SA) service.

MDOP contains key components of the Microsoft virtualization offering, like the application virtualization platform App-V, acquired from Softricity in May 2006, and the security wrapper for Virtual PC MED-V, acquired from Kidaro in March 2008.

While none of the two technologies is as popular as the hypervisors, both are critical for the Microsoft long-term virtualization strategy.
App-V is specially important and Microsoft is silently working behind the scene to offer it inside servers, not just on desktops like today.

This new MDOP 2009 R2 only updates App-V 4.5 with the Service Pack 1, and the SP1 only introduces support for Windows 7 (which includes support for AppLocker, BranchCache and BitLocker ToGo features).
MED-V 1.0 won’t support Windows 7 before Q1 2010, and it seems that there will not be much more.

Microsoft seems far behind with MED-V. After the Kidaro acquisition, it took 13 months to release a rebranded version 1.0, and now it’s taking another 9-12 months just to release the first service pack.
And it’s worth to remember that the product still supports a hosted virtualization platform, Virtual PC, where Microsoft is not investing at all.

It’s acceptable that Microsoft doesn’t push too hard on App-V until the market is ready to adopt it on a large scale.
This way it has the time to focus on Hyper-V, the time to develop a stronger engine and to port it to the server side, the time to shape a meaningful marketing strategy, while Citrix is containing the VMware early attempts to invade the application virtualization market with ThinApp.

It’s less acceptable that Microsoft is not doing anything concrete with MED-V, which leverages hardware virtualization to secure the enterprise in an innovative way.
Microsoft doesn’t have a lead in the security space. And the perception that the security industry has about Microsoft didn’t improve too much over the years.
Securing the enterprise customers with virtualization is a unique opportunity that Microsoft is wasting, mostly considering that VMware couldn’t win this market with ACE.

Microsoft may be doing this because it doesn’t want to waste any time in developing something on top of an almost death platform like Virtual PC. But so far the company didn’t disclose any plan for the desktop virtualization space.
It may replace Virtual PC with a version of Hyper-V for desktops (which would become a really ubiquitous client hypervisor for VDI) or it may decide to seriously restart the investment on Virtual PC.

Customers have no idea and whatever will happen to this second class virtualization platform it will also impact MED-V.
How an enterprise can trust a non-leading vendor (like Microsoft in the security space) without a clear roadmap and a lethargic development lifecycle? Where’s the value for SA customers in having MED-V inside MDOP?

Labels: Microsoft, Platform Wrapper, Releases

So far the Microsoft customers that wanted to convert their physical boxes into Hyper-V virtual machines had to buy and use System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) and its physical to virtual (P2V) migration tool.
Or buy and use a third party P2V migration tool like the ones offered by Novell/Platespin or Quest/Vizioncore.

Other less expensive (free in some cases) tools allow to perform the P2V migration as well but they usually don’t permit to convert the machine while it’s running.
Now there’s a free tool that performs a live migration: Disk2VHD.

The tool was released by the worldwide popular Mark Russinovich, founder and former Chief Software Architect at Sysinternals/Winternals and now Microsoft Technical Fellow, a couple of weeks ago.

Disk2VHD runs on any Windows system starting from XP SP2 and Server 2003 SP1.
It performs the live migration leveraging the Volume Shadow Service (VSS) like most commercial software do.
The converted VHD can be booted with a Hyper-V or Windows Virtual PC virtual machine. Or you can mount it inside the Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 file system.

Like most Systinternals tools it’s a stand-alone executable that can you can even launch online.

It doesn’t have many options but it’s the perfect companion for Hyper-V if you are in evaluation.
And with some PowerShell help it probably can do a lot more.

Labels: Microsoft, P2V/V2V Migration, Tools

Last week Microsoft and Red Hat announced the certification of their operating systems, Windows and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), on each other virtualization platforms, Hyper-V and KVM.

It is a major announcement in many ways.

First of all, customers that have Windows/Linux mixed environments finally have a decent choice. 
Side by side with Novell SUSE Enterprise Linux, now Hyper-V (both R1 and R2) supports RHEL 5.2, 5.3 and the new 5.4.

More importantly, Microsoft and Red Hat validated the use of Windows Server 2003, 2008 and 2008 R2 as guest operating system on the KVM implementation that comes with RHEL 5.4.

On top of that Microsoft has even accepted to provide support to Red Hat users that run most of its enterprise applications inside KVM virtual machines.

Now, and only now, Red Hat has something concrete to tell to the customers.
With the large majority of virtual machines running Windows worldwide, without this mandatory step the new Red Hat offering couldn’t be considered anything more than an interesting future platform.

Thanks to the Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP) instead, KVM, or at least the Red Hat implementation of KVM, is at the same level of VMware ESX, Citrix XenServer, Novell Xen and Oracle VM Server in terms of support for Microsoft technologies.

Now Red Hat has to hurry up and show the serious stuff.

Labels: Alliances, KVM, Microsoft, Red Hat

At the end of September Microsoft launched the public beta program for Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2010 (codename Zinger).

DPM 2010 beta introduces support for Hyper-V R2 (both the Windows edition and the stand-alone Hyper-V Server edition).

More importantly, the product finally introduces the capability to backup virtual machines running on the Windows Server 2008 Cluster Shared Volumes (CSVs), a technology that is used to perform the VMs live migration with Hyper-V R2.
At the moment virtualization.info is not aware of any disaster recovery product that works at the host level (rather than at the SAN level), that is in GA, and that is officially certified by Microsoft to perform such operation (if any different let us know in the comments and we’ll update this article). 
Without DPM 2010, and similar 3rd party solutions, the only way to backup Hyper-V virtual machines in CSVs is by running the backup agent inside the guest operating systems.

On top of that DPM 2010 introduces other virtualization-friendly features, like the capability to restore virtual machines to an alternative host, or the capability to restore single items from within the VHDs.

Thanks to Bink.nu for the news.

Labels: Disaster Recovery, Microsoft

Last week Citrix announced the public beta of its premium management solution for the Microsoft hypervisor: Essentials for Hyper-V 5.5.

The main new feature of this version is the support for Hyper-V R2 and System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 R2 (plus Windows 7, for the OEM’ed VMLogix Lab Manager), but it also introduces the StorageLink Site Recovery technology for Hyper-V.

StorageLink Site Recovery allows the Hyper-V administrators to control the replication features that their SAN arrays offer without using multiple consoles, and allows to test the recovery process by restoring the protected VMs in isolated, test networks.

The technology may become the foundation of a new product able to compete with VMware Site Recovery Manager, and now Citrix is in the position to offer it to its customers and the Microsoft ones.

Labels: Citrix, Microsoft

At the end of last week, with a short announcement on the corporate blog, Microsoft announced the RTM of its Windows XP Mode, a pre-configured virtual machine with Windows XP SP3 as guest OS that will run on the Virtual PC version included in Windows 7 Professional, Ultimate or Enterprise.

virtualization.info already covered the last-minute features included in the August release candidate build.

Every Microsoft customer will be able to download the virtual machine for free by October 22, the official launch day for Windows 7.
Everybody but the Sony customers that purchased a VAIO laptop.

Thanks to the absurd strategy that Sony adopted, its customers cannot run Windows XP Mode or any virtual machine, because Windows Virtual PC needs Intel VT, and the Intel VT capability has been intentionally disabled and hidden inside every VAIO BIOS.

Labels: Microsoft

Cloud computing means a lot of different things. As virtualization.info mostly focuses on virtual data centers technologies, our interest for cloud computing is, at the moment, limited to those architectures known as Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), where a hypervisor meets an orchestration framework and generates a scalable, pay-per-use, on-demand virtual infrastructure.

Our attention of course also focuses on the many shapes that IaaS clouds can have, like the Server-as-a-Service (nobody every used this term so far, but the industry may do it at a point) or the imminent Desktop-as-a-Service architectures (DaaS).
Thus virtualization.info closely monitors both IaaS service providers (like Amazon, IBM, Rackspace, tuCloud, etc.) and IaaS technology providers (like Citrix, Desktone, Skytap, VMware, etc.).

Soon enough we are going to cover Microsoft as well.

Right now the Microsoft cloud computing effort, called Azure, is recognized as a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) architecture that competes with Google AppEngine and, maybe, one day, with the result of a complex technology merge between VMware, SpringSource and Terremark.

But Microsoft is moving to extend the Azure capabilities to also become a IaaS cloud, which can compete with Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2), the Rackspace Cloud, etc. And, again, with whatever VMware and Terremark are planning to do together.

First of all there’s a new Cloud Computing section in the Microsoft virtualization website, and inside it, a Private Cloud sub-section that specifically mentions Azure.

Secondarily, Microsoft launched a new blog about the private clouds concept called Dynamic Data Center Alliance Blog, where the message currently addresses the hosting providers by promoting a new, free Dynamic Data Center Toolkit for Hosters:

…The Toolkit is end-to-end prescriptive guidance for creating managed services and partner hosted Cloud offerings using the virtualization infrastructure of Windows Server 2008 / Hyper-V coupled with System Center. That means we give you the straightforward guidance to bring Windows Server 2008 and System Center together, overlaid with rich web services to integrate the underlining virtualization infrastructure into your existing environment. Once the virtualization infrastructure and web services have been combined, you’re now set to deliver a topnotch Cloud offering. Utilizing the toolkit, hosters can deploy on-demand virtual machine (VM) provisioning via customer facing portals that provide self-service visibility and management…

The newest articles in this blog already points to an upcoming Dynamic Data Center Toolkit for the Enterprise.
Nowhere here Microsoft mentions Azure but there are cross links that hint at the IaaS future of the cloud architecture:

…With Windows Server 2008 R2 our fabric capabilities become even stronger. In this release, we deliver enhancements to the native virtualization capabilities:

• Live Migration
• Larger VM Support: 32 and 64-bit VMs, with up to 64GB memory per VM
• Boot from VHD & Clustered Shared Volumes (core enhancements from Windows Azure)

To net this out, we’re bringing the lessons learned from our public cloud to the places where they will likely deliver the most benefit in the near term – right in your data center. As we evolve the technology that drives Azure, you can count on continued innovation and evolution of our premises technology that will make private cloud computing a reality…

The rumors floating around tell that Microsoft is testing the IaaS capabilities of Azure right now, and that a formal launch is not far away.

So far VMware scored a remarkable interest and support for its vCloud initiative, but an early appearance of this Hyper-V powered Azure and the recently announced Xen Cloud Platform may make a complete dominance of the cloud computing space harder to achieve. 
There’s nothing concrete yet, but it seems clear that Microsoft and Citrix are not going to let VMware play alone like in the early days of server virtualization.

Labels: Microsoft

At the end of April, a Russian business magazine reported about a $11M investment that Parallels secured from Almaz Fund, and unveiled how the company contemplated an IPO one or two years ago.

Now Bloomberg further confirms the interest to launch an IPO, reporting the words of Serguei Beloussov, the Parallels founder and CEO:

Parallels Chief Executive Officer Serguei Beloussov says he wants to take the software maker public in about two years, striving to stay independent.

More interestingly, Beloussov reveals how IBM and Microsoft started a discussion to acquire his company:

Companies including Microsoft Corp. and International Business Machines Corp. have “casually” approached him about an acquisition, Beloussov said in an interview last week.

The interest of Microsoft for Parallels isn’t surprising at all: in May 2006, at the Microsoft conference WinHEC, Bob Muglia clearly said during his keynote that Microsoft was going to provide all three major virtualization tecnologies in the Longhorn wave: server (or hardware) virtualization, OS partitioning and application virtualization.

Microsoft now has every piece of the virtualization stack: the Hyper-V hardware virtualization engine, the App-V application virtualization engine, a VDI connection broker, the security wrapper MED-V.
The only missing part is the OS partitioning technology, and Parallels is the only enterprise company that offers it at today.
So unless Microsoft changed its plans or what to develop it from scratch, Parallels is the company to acquire.

The fact that IBM is interested in acquiring Parallels is much stranger. It may mean that the big OEM is finally reconsidering its market strategy and may soon start to focus on the x86 virtualization market.

If the IBM interest for Parallels is real, it means that the Big Blue may move to acquire more than just the OS partitioning layer. And Red Hat would probably be much happy to demonstrate its new KVM-based platform.

Labels: Funding, IBM, Microsoft, Parallels

The conference VMworld is just one week away and this year VMware’s competitors seem to have additional reasons to start a controversy and disturb the event.

The topic of the day is the size of the hypervisor footprint, which equals to a certain attack surface and has a relevance when you try to estimate the overall security level of a platform.

This is an area where VMware always claimed a neat superiority over Microsoft because the primary version of Hyper-V comes with a full copy of Windows Server 2008 as its parent partition.
VMware believes this is a major selling point at the point that it is highlighted on the corporate website.

Microsoft never addressed the critique before a couple of weeks ago, when it published an interesting analysis (part 1, part 2 and part 3) of what happens to the hypervisors footprint after a round of patches.

On its website, VMware compares its lightweight ESXi, the hypervisor version without the Console Operating System (COS), against the full version of Hyper-V. For Microsoft a more fair comparison should be between ESXi and its lightweight Hyper-V Server.
Nonetheless the company prepared three different analysis (only including critical and security patches):

• Hyper-V Server 2008 vs ESXi 3.5 | June 2008 - June 2009
  Hyper-V: 82MB footprint increase with 26 patches
  ESXi: 2.7GB footprint increases with 13 patches
• Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V vs ESX 3.5 | January 2008 - June 2009
  Hyper-V: 408MB footprint increase with 32 patches
  ESX: 3GB footprint increases with 85 patches
• Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V vs ESXi 3.5 | January 2008 - June 2009
  Hyper-V: 408MB footprint increase with 32 patches
  ESX: 2.7GB footprint increases with 13 patches

Without patches, Microsoft highlights that the only part of the two platforms that can be really attacked (the hypervisor plus the virtualization stack) is 32MB in ESX and 20MB in Hyper-V.

At the end of the last week VMware officially answered. 
First on the hypervisors footprint without patches:

…

We don't know how many lines of code are in a Hyper-V system, so we use the installed disk footprint-- the size of the installed files needed to support virtual machines -- as a reasonable proxy for lines of code.

…

A df -h command will then show you that the total size of those compressed ESXi boot images in the directory corresponding to /bootbank is 59.3MB -- somewhat less than the 70MB figure we've publicly stated.

…

For comparison, here's a look at the disk footprint of ESX 4.0 "Classic", which measures about 1.7GB.  Most of the additional footprint is due to the Linux-based service console.

The disk footprints we measured for Hyper-V R2 RTM are far larger.  Windows 2008 R2 Server Core with the Hyper-V role enabled, was 3.6GB.  For those Hyper-V users that want to preserve the "Windows they know," a full Windows Server 2008 R2 installation is pushing 10GB.

Yes, ESX "Classic" does use a Linux-based service console and therefore has a larger disk footprint, but VMware has publicly stated that the OS-free ESXi architecture is our future direction and ESXi has all the capabilities of ESX "Classic".  Microsoft has made no such commitments to eliminate Hyper-V's dependency on Windows…

And then on the footprint with patches:

…

Because ESXi is installed and patched like an appliance -- the entire image is replaced as a whole -- our patches are naturally the size of the full ESXi installer package.  Our customers prefer that appliance approach because it ensures consistency in the their installations and avoids "patch drift" away from a validated configuration.  With the Windows Update-based patching used for Hyper-V, patches can be smaller, but customers can skip or miss patches, resulting in insecure, partially patched configurations.

…

With both ESX and ESXi, a host reboot following patching has always been non-issue because VMotion and Maintenance Mode make it trivial to shift VMs to alternate hosts during the reboots.  Microsoft's customers must certainly be looking forward to using those same features in the long-awaited release of Hyper-V R2

…

We've kept track of the "Patch Tuesday" patches required on a Server Core Hyper-V system since Hyper-V first shipped in June 2008 and there have been multiple "Important" or "Critical" patches to apply almost every month.  Most of those patches don't apply to Hyper-V, but users must still install them and then reboot their hosts.  And, as users are painfully aware, Hyper-V R1's missing live migration support has meant downtime for their VMs with each reboot.  The downtime may lessen with Hyper-V R2, but the patches won't…

Both positions are extremely long and articulated. The excerpts above can’t really give the readers a full summary of every detail that both companies covered in their analysis.

A complete reading of all articles is recommended to evaluate who’s right.

Anyway it’s worth to remind everybody that security of the hypervisor impacts the security of the virtual infrastructure just partially.
The attacks can come from everywhere: the virtualization.info security columnist, Claudio Criscione, is covering this very topic on his first series: Real-World Security in a Virtual Infrastructure (Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3. Wait for Part 4 in the coming days).

Labels: Microsoft, Security, VMware

A few hours ago the Microsoft virtualization management solution System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 R2 hit the RTM.

As expected the RTM arrives just a few weeks after Windows Server 2008 R2, Hyper-V R2 and Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 were released to the Microsoft partners.

The most important new capability included in this release is the long awaited virtual machines live migration.
Anyway Microsoft surprised its audience in early June by adding other welcome features to the SCVMM 2008 R2 Release Candidate, like the Quick Storage Motion and the support for VMware port groups.

The Release Candidate should be considered feature complete but the company managed to squeeze a last unexpected thing to the RTM: the (partial) support for VMware vSphere 4.0.
Basically Microsoft supports the new VMware platform only for the same features that were available in VI3.5. Some of the new capabilities that VMware offers will be supported in a future update of SCVMM.

virtualization.info detailed the entire feature-set here.

Microsoft already released the trial version of the product on its Download website.
The full version instead will be available to its its Volume License customers first, starting on October 1st.

Labels: Microsoft, Platform Management, Releases

At the end of July virtualization.info highlighted how Sony intentionally disabled the Intel VT capability in all its VAIO laptops, making its expensive hardware useless for virtualization professionals and highly undesirable for every Microsoft customer that wants to upgrade to Windows 7.
Now this short-sighted strategy is causing the company a major image damage.

A week after virtualization.info published that article the story was republished by The Register (too bad they forgot to mention our post as the original news source), and immediately after by pretty much every major news outlet including:

• Engadget: Sony laptops can't use Windows 7's XP mode due to disabled hardware virtualization
• ZDNet: Sony kills virtualization on Vaio notebooks
• CNET: Sony nixes Windows 7's XP virtualization mode for current Vaio laptops
• Tom’s Hardware: Sony Vaio Have VT Disable; No Win 7 XP Mode
• Gizmodo: Sony Laptops Have Hardware Virtualization Disabled, Can't Run Windows 7's XP Mode
• Neowin: Sony laptops disable Windows 7's XP Mode
• Slashdot: No Windows 7 XP Mode For Sony Vaio Z Owners

To calm down the users Microsoft probably asked a Sony VAIO product manager, Xavier Lauwaert, to address the issue on the Windows Partner blog. His post says nothing but his answer to a specific comment about the lack of VT capability provides an astonishing explanation and fix roadmap (our emphasis):

Contrary to perceived opinion, we have received very little if any requests to enable VT technology up until very recently.

In addition, our engineers and QA people were very concerned that enabling VT would expose our systems to malicious code that could go very deep in the Operating System structure of the PC and completely disable the latter.

For these two reasons we have decided, until recently, not to enable VT.

However, with the advent of XP Virtualization, there is impetus for us to relook at the situation and I can share with you that we will enable VT on select models.

Though, I fear to say that the Z series will not be part of our VT-enabling effort.

Indeed, we will focus on more recent models.

Needless to say, the point is not if Sony is right or not about the risks related to malicious use of Intel VT (anyway, from a security standpoint they are deadly wrong).
The point is that Sony has to clearly advice that its VAIO laptops don’t support a CPU feature that is provided out-of-the-box by the CPU vendor. Without this information customers can’t make an informed choice and since the company doesn’t offer a way to circumvent the limitation this may be enough to start a class-action lawsuit.

The idea that Sony will re-enable Intel only on “selected models” and in future machines is ridiculous.
If a single upset customer was able to reverse engineer the VAIO BIOS and develop a patch to achieve the task, then the laptop manufactured and the CPU maker (cause Intel is to blame as much as Sony on this mess) should be able to release a firmware update without any problem.
And if not, they should recall the laptops it sold worldwide and replace the CPUs.

Labels: Intel, Microsoft, Sony

Last week virtualization.info reported that both VMware VI 3.5 and vSphere 4.0 are being tested by a Common Criteria lab to earn the EAL4+ rating.

VMware already has the EAL4+ certification for VI 3.0.2 but ESX is not they only hypervisor that was rated that high.

Microsoft in fact just announced that Hyper-V 2008 (the first release and not the just launched R2)  achieved the EAL4+ certification as well.

It is worth to note that Microsoft earned that certification for the release candidate version of Hyper-V that is embedded in the full version of Windows Server 2008, plus the KB950050 hotfix, which upgrades the hypervisor to 1.0 RTM.

Microsoft didn’t even need to certify Hyper-V using editions that have a reduced attack surface, like the version that is embedded in Windows Server 2008 Server Core or the stand-alone Hyper-V Server 2008.

This should clarify how the typical argument that Hyper-V is less secure than ESX, because the former comes with a full copy of Windows while the latter has a very small footprint, doesn’t work at all. Unless we accept to dispute the absolute value of the Common Criteria rating, as virtualization.info suggested several times.

Labels: Microsoft, Security

As virtualization.info reported in April, Microsoft is working on a new version of Virtual PC simply called Windows Virtual PC(WVPC), which supports Windows 7 as host OS and can launch a special virtual machine called Windows XP Mode.

Windows XP Mode is just a pre-configured VM with Windows XP SP3 as guest OS, but it seems especially integrated with Windows 7 because the new Virtual PC engine introduces seamless application publishing, USB virtualization and multi-monitor support.

The Windows XP Mode VM is available at no additional cost for Windows 7 Professional, Ultimate and Enterprise SKUs but requires a CPU with AMD-V or Intel VT enabled (so all the Sony customers worldwide will be unable to use it).

Windows 7 was released yesterday to Microsoft partners through MSDN and TechNet facilities,  so the company made available the release candidate of this new Virtual PC to grant compatibility.

Microsoft has included a few refinements to this new build:

• USB devices can be attached to Windows XP Mode applications directly from the Windows 7 task-bar
• Windows XP Mode applications are accessible with a “jump-list” (right click on the Windows XP Mode applications from the Windows 7 task bar to select and open most recently used files)
• The location of differencing disk files can be customized
• Drive sharing between Windows XP Mode and Windows 7 can be disabled

Labels: Microsoft

While the virtualization community waits to see how Microsoft will be able to apply application virtualization to multi-tier back-end services with App-V for Servers, the company officially opens the App-V 4.6 beta program.

This version is still oriented to client applications but introduces a major new feature: the support for 64bit platforms (including the just released Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2).
For the first time customers will be able to sequence a 64bit application, something that nobody else on the market can do at the moment according to Microsoft.

Microsoft expects to finalize App-V 4.6 during H1 2010. Meanwhile you can enroll for the beta program here.

Labels: Microsoft

The biggest challenge when a customer embraces any form of virtualization is verifying that the ISVs support their products inside the virtual machines, the OS containers or the virtual layers of choice.
Without an official support statement, the ISVs may require to reproduce any technical issue experienced inside the virtualization platform also on a physical machine. And this is a costly and time-consuming process that is often impossible to complete.

The lack of ISVs support is pretty common when dealing with virtualization platform that are brand new or not widely adopted, like Oracle VM or Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor (which is based on KVM).
Compared to VMware ESX, Hyper-V still has a limited diffusion and the ISVs that official support the Microsoft hypervisor are not so many. But things may dramatically change very soon.

With a move that almost passed under the radar, Microsoft just reshaped its Windows Logo specifications in a way that ISVs are now obliged to support Hyper-V:

Hyper-V is no longer an optional requirement. Applications seeking the Logo will be tested on Virtual Machines running on Microsoft Hyper-V enabled Windows Server 2008 R2 Server computers. See the policies section in this document for options to proceed if your application cannot be tested within a Virtual Machine on Microsoft Hyper-V.

…

This update requires applications to work properly on Virtual Machines with 4 Virtual processors instead of physical machines with 8-cores.

…

Microsoft approved testing vendors will test the application within a Virtual machine running on top of Microsoft Hyper-V. Applications that cannot be run in this environment must justify the technical and any other reasons for not meeting this policy.

…

Applications that pass testing on a Virtual Machine running on Microsoft Hyper-V will be listed with an extra modifier in the Windows Server Catalog designating them as Hyper-V tested.

The designation means that the application’s primary functionality has been validated in a Windows Server 2008 R2 virtual machine running on Hyper-V and that the application supports five key Hyper-V features specific to virtual machine behavior – save state, restore, pause, shut down and snapshots.

The designation does not imply that the application is fully Hyper-V compliant and that all application functionality works optimally. In some cases, the application and or some components in the application may have reduced and or missing functionality while running in a virtual machine running on Hyper-V.

The designation also does not imply that the application has passed all the certification requirements while running in a virtual environment. Some test cases in the Certification program may still be executed on a physical machine. If the application is expected to be impacted when running in a Virtual machine on Hyper-V (or) when Hyper-V features such as Save state, restore etc., are performed, then such impact and workarounds if any must be documented and made available to Customers on demand.

VSS aware applications may have special considerations when running inside a Virtual Machine. Although this is not a Certification requirement, Independent Software Vendors must test VSS scenarios and ensure the application continues to work as expected and do not interfere with other services, applications or Windows features.

So the ISVs that want the new Logo don’t have any choice but jump on the Hyper-V bandwagon, and in this way Microsoft is securing the broadest industry support for Hyper-V even if the product is not leading the market.

Labels: Microsoft

A couple of weeks ago Microsoft did something unique in its history: released some of its technology as open source, under the GPLv2 license.
Specifically, the company released as open source the Hyper-V Linux Integration Components, a set of para-virtualization drivers that improves the Linux guest OSes performance.

The official reason that Microsoft provided to justify this unprecedented behavior was the desire to improve the interoperability and the performance of Linux virtual machines. But immediately after the launch some behind-the-scene details emerged and revealed a completely different story.

Way before the open source release of these components, Stephen Hemminger, Principal Engineer at Vyatta, was doing some research to see how his company could support Hyper-V out-of-the-box.
To do so, Hemminger had to investigate the Linux Integration Components that Microsoft releases for Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise and see if the para-virtualization drivers could be integrated into the kernel of Vyatta virtual router.
At that point he discovered that Microsoft violated the GPL license by mixing together closed-source and open-source code in its package.

Trying to keep the things quiet, he contacted Novell and asked them to work with Microsoft to solve the license infringement in a peaceful way, by releasing the whole package as open source.

The Microsoft official announcement didn’t mention the GPL violation and Novell avoided to add this little detail to the story, but they had to ultimately confirm the events as ZDNet reported.

The final answer that Microsoft provides about this whole story denies any violation anyway:

Microsoft’s decision was not based on any perceived obligations tied to the GPLv2 license.

Labels: Microsoft

Last week the authoritative news service of Dow Jones launched a bomb by reporting that Microsoft Hyper-V now has 24% of the virtualization market share.

The claims comes from Microsoft itself, specifically from Kevin Turner, the company COO, that said:

We launched our first product in October of this past year. From then till now, we gained 24 points of market share against a very, very formidable competitor.

VMware didn’t provide an official reply to Dow Jones, but answered to the virtualization.info inquiry by saying that there’s no evidence they are aware of to support this statement.

If true this would be a giant leap for Microsoft. Last time somebody checked the reports where pretty different:

• In March 2008 Gartner reported that the Microsoft market share was equal to 7%.
• In October 2008 IDC reported that the Microsoft market share was equal to 23%, but that number was obtained by aggregating the distribution of Hyper-V and Virtual Server.

Labels: Microsoft

On July 22 Microsoft released the long awaited Windows Server 2008 R2 and Hyper-V R2. The same day anyway Microsoft also released the stand-alone version of hypervisor, called Hyper-V Server 2008 R2.

Compared to the first release, which had a subset of the features available in the Windows Server 2008 edition, this new stand-alone Hyper-V seems to match the capabilities of its Windows-embedded counterpart (this post will be updated if we’ll receive different information). And this includes the most-wanted Live Migration capability.

Instead of having something less, this version of Hyper-V R2 has something more: the capability to boot from flash.
This is a major new feature that Microsoft didn’t announce earlier and that may put Hyper-V side by side with VMware ESXi and Citrix XenServer in the OEMs pre-installation options.

Like the Windows-embedded version, Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 is free and will be released to the Microsoft partners through MSDN, TechNet and other distribution channels on August 6.

Labels: Microsoft, Releases

The Sony customers that bought a VAIO laptop in the last couple of years and are interested in virtualization should know by now that their machines are not worth the money spent.
The company in fact completely locked down the computers’ BIOS, preventing the capability to enable the Intel Virtualization Technology (VT) extension.

For the newcomers, the Intel VT technology was introduced in November 2005, featured by Pentium 4 662 and 672 CPUs.
Today VT is included in almost every Intel CPU, from the Atom mobile processor to the Xeon 5500 server processors, up to the upcoming new generations Core i3, i5 and i7.

This extension is used by the virtualization vendors to perform some virtual machines stunts, like running a 64bit guest operating system on top of a 32bit host OS, without much overhead.
Every virtualization platform uses it, commercial and open source ones, hosted ones and bare-metal ones (aka hypervisors). And this list includes products like VMware ESX and Workstation, Microsoft Hyper-V and Virtual PC, Citrix XenServer, Oracle VM and Sun VirtualBox, Parallels Desktop, Red Hat KVM and others.

Given the ubiquity of Intel VT, most virtualization vendors don’t use anymore alternative techniques (like the VMware Binary Translation) to perform some complex operations that the processor can do on their behalf. Their products simply check if the CPU is VT-capable and if so they use it.
In some computers the Intel VT extension is not enabled by default, so when the virtualization platform recognizes its presence the customers is invited to go inside the BIOS and enable it. And this solves everything, except if you are a Sony customer.

If you are an unlucky owner of a VAIO notebook you simply can’t perform the operation above, because Sony doesn’t expose any option inside the BIOS to enable VT. And for the ones that want it Sony doesn’t provide any firmware update.

The official Sony position on this is that Intel VT is not supported on VAIO machines but it’s not true at all: any customer can download a simple and free tool like CrystalCPUID and verify that its CPU includes Intel VT.

 
The customers are so frustrated by this situation that have to perform a reverse engineering of the firmware and develop unsupported, dangerous patches to enable VT.

It doesn’t matter if the total number of Sony customers that want to run virtualization on their VAIO laptops is very low. This issue is damaging the virtualization vendors but most of all it is damaging the Intel image as they are selling themselves as the leading chipmakers in virtualization.
Worse than that Intel received complains about the topic since February 2009 and it is doing nothing to push Sony.

The next one that will receive a damage from this is Microsoft, and it will probably receive it on a much larger scale.

On October 22, Microsoft will release its new consumer operating system: Windows 7.
The successor of Vista embeds a special version of Virtual PC that Microsoft hopes will simplify the migration of legacy applications from Windows XP.

Simply dubbed Windows Virtual PC, it will allow the users to run in the so-called Windows XP Mode.
Basically the applications will run inside a Virtual PC 7 virtual machine and will appear on the Windows 7 desktop through the so-called seamless window publishing.
But guess what? Windows XP Mode requires Intel VT and so no Sony customer will be able to use it.

For the ones that are optimistic and believe in an providential BIOS updated before October 22, there is a bad news: Sony officially said that has no plans to enable VT on old and new VAIO models.

According to this, the Sony VAIO notebook I own (a VGN-SZ770) will be immediately replaced (suggestions are welcome).
And of course, according to this virtualization.info doesn’t recommend Sony VAIO laptops to anybody looking for some serious use of virtualization technologies or just looking to upgrade to Windows 7.

Update: Sony gives the official reasons behind this major limitation.

Labels: Intel, Microsoft, Sony

As expected, Microsoft announces today the sign off of the Windows Server 2008 R2 RTM, which includes Hyper-V R2.

The finalized feature list is known since June, when Microsoft released the Release Candidate:

• support for virtual machines live migration (expect Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard Edition)
• support for virtual disks hot plug
• support for up to 64 logical processors (8 cores for up to 8 physical processors) 
• support for up to 1TB physical RAM (Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard Edition only supports 32GB)
• support for up to 384 1-way virtual machines (8 vCPUs per logical processor)
• support for Processor Compatibility Mode (migrate the virtual machines across different generations of the same CPU vendor)
  
  
• support for Core Parking and CPU power consumption control
• support for Second Level Address Translation (SLAT, formerly called nested page tables or NPT - specifically AMD RVI and Intel EPT)
• support for TCP/IP Offload Engines (TOEs)
• support for Jumbo Frames
• support for Intel Virtual Machine Device Queues (VMDq)

Additionally, it’s worth to mention that Hyper-V R2 is now declared ready for VDI, as the new Windows Server 2008 R2 Remote Desktop Services (RDS, formerly Terminal Services) include a basic connection broker component: Remote Desktop Connection Broker.
The company is now promoting the adoption of VDI through more friendly licensing terms and the effort of partners like Citrix and Quest.

Nothing changes about the licensing terms: Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard Edition allows to have only one “free” virtual machine, the Enterprise Edition allows up to 4 virtual machines and the Datacenter Edition allows unlimited VMs.

The new hypervisor will be available to worldwide customers October 22, but the Microsoft partners can download it today from the MSDN and TechNet websites.

Some of the other products in the Microsoft virtualization portfolio already support Hyper-V R2: Microsoft Assessment & Planning (MAP) Toolkit 4.0, released last week, and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2, currently in Release Candidate and soon to be released as well.

In the the coming weeks virtualization.info will release a new edition of its Buyer’s Guide to include VMware vSphere 4.0, XenServer 5.5 and this new Hyper-V R2.

Labels: Microsoft, Releases

Just a couple of days ago Microsoft released the source code of its Linux Integration Components for Hyper-V under the GPLv2 license.
Only time will tell if the integration of these paravirtualization drivers into the Linux kernel (something that is under evaluation) will translate into a concrete benefit for the Microsoft customers.

For now the priority remains to have the two most popular enterprise distributions, Red Hat and Novell, inside the Hyper-V virtual machines. And Microsoft didn’t help much about the former so far.

Things are changing anyway : the new R2 version of the Linux Integration Components will finally support Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 and 5.3.
Unfortunately they still lack the support for mouse integration, that must be provided by the Linux distributor, and they still only support virtual machines with a single vCPU.

The new package just hit the Release Candidate 2 phase and will released shortly after Windows Server 2008 R2 and Hyper-V R2 reach the RTM status (expected within this week and the next one).

The Linux Integrated Components R2 will be available for free for both Hyper-V and Hyper-V R2.

Labels: Microsoft

With an unprecedented move, today Microsoft releases the Hyper-V paravirtualization drivers for Linux guest OSes, called Linux Integration Components, as GPLv2 open source software.

When EMC, the VMware parent company, signed a 3-years alliance on virtualization with Microsoft virtualization.info wondered if the hell was frozen (not the case as the two companies seem to call this co-opetition), but this goes much beyond that.

To be credible in the enterprise Microsoft has to support Linux inside its virtual machines. And Linux has to deliver enterprise-grade performance.

To achieve the goal the company releases the Linux Integration Components as a free stand-alone package since September 2008.
Through them Microsoft supports Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise as guest OS, which is a first step in the right direction but certainly not enough to satisfy the many customers that have more than one Linux distribution to consolidate.

Now, rather than just extending its support to Red Hat Enterprise Linux guest OSes, Microsoft prefers to do something amazing: release the Linux Integrated Components as an open source code, licensed with the General Public License (GPL) v2.

In details Microsoft is giving away the code of three drivers that integrate with the Hyper-V VMbus (check the hypervisor architecture here), submitting 20,000 lines of code for review and inclusion in the Linux kernel. 
Today they appear in the Greg Kroah-Hartman’s tree (aka The Linux Driver Project) and, if accepted, over time every major Linux distribution will offer them out of the box.

Novell took a major role in this project: they reviewed the code and are committed to further enhance it in the future.
With them there was Tom Hanrahan, the Microsoft Director of Linux Interoperability at Port 25 facility and former Director of Engineering at the Linux Foundation (formerly Open Source Development Labs or OSDL). 

Why Microsoft is doing this?

The official press announcement offers a very vague explanation, talking about the desire to address interoperability and performance issues. The reality is probably different: Microsoft wants to speed up the consolidation process.

Moving physical Linux boxes inside Hyper-V still is a very time-consuming activity because you have to download the Integration Components, install them inside the distribution, and only at that point you can safely perform a P2V migration.
You can probably automate the process through smart scripting but dealing with Hyper-V-ready Linux distributions is much easier.

Even if this is the real intention, the plan has a big flaw (at the moment): only because the Linux kernel includes the Hyper-V Integration Components it doesn’t mean that Microsoft will support every Linux distribution that features them.
Yes, the customers will accelerate the P2V migration, but their new Linux virtual machines will be completely unsupported.

So, or Microsoft has something else in mind, or we are about to see a massive extension of the Hyper-V support for Linux.

Update: Microsoft confirmed that every Linux distributor joining the Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP) will be supported.

Labels: Microsoft

Just last month virtualization.info highlighted how Microsoft may be working under the radar to to hit VMware where the vendor is betting the most: on the virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) initiative.

Part of this silent effort involves the improvement of the RDP protocol to efficiently handle the heavy multimedia protocols that every VDI client has to render.

Anyway this is just one piece of the VDI story that Microsoft may be shaping.
Another one is the so called client hypervisor, needed to break free the mobile VDI clients from the corporate network dependency. 
On this front Microsoft is deadly silent but it’s evident that the company could push the button at any moment: nobody in the market has the capability to distribute a client hypervisor on million devices like Microsoft.
They could write a dedicated version of Hyper-V and embed it in Windows 7 (or its successor), or just wait for Citrix and Intel to do the dirty work, and then use their upcoming XenClient (which will be free of charge) with an OEM license.

A third key aspect where Microsoft may want to change things to smash VMware is the VDI pricing, which is much higher than any terminal server farm because of the additional component that it requires.
About this very point Microsoft announced yesterday the availability of two new volume licenses for VDI: the Microsoft Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Standard Suite and the Microsoft Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Premium Suite.

Both new offerings include licenses for all the components used in a VDI architecture: the hypervisor (Hyper-V), the management layer (SCVMM, SCCM and SCOM), the remote protocol access license (Remote Desktop Services CALs) and the application virtualization platform (MDOP which includes App-V and MED-V).
On top of these licenses the customer is still required to buy the Virtual Enterprise Centralized Desktop (VECD) and honestly isn’t clear why Microsoft didn’t just package all together.

Like the VECD, these new licenses are per-device and cost $21 per year (Standard Suite) and $53 per year (Premium Suite). They will be available in Q4 2009.
VECD still costs $23 per year (if you are a Software Assurance customer) or $110 per year (if you are not).
Microsoft says that over a 5-years period this pricing costs 1/3 and 1/2 respectively of the VMware View licensing.

As expected Citrix immediately jumped on the bandwagon and announced the XenDesktop support for these new licenses.

Labels: Microsoft, VDI

In the last couple of years virtualization.info reported how the relationship between Microsoft and Citrix is getting tighter and tighter around virtualization, well beyond the historical Terminal Server/Metaframe partnership.

In the name of a planned integration that the two announced two years ago, XenServer uses the Microsoft virtual hard drive format (VHD), the Citrix Essentials management suite controls Hyper-V (and Citrix gives a part of it away for free) and the Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) will manage XenServer and XenApp.

It’s not finished anyway: yesterday Citrix announced further integration, this time about App-V and XenApp.

Citrix will now support the Microsoft application virtualization platform on its Receiver in H2 2009 and in the new Dazzle management solution in H1 2010.
Additionally, in H1 2010 Citrix will release a connector for System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) to distribute XenApp virtual applications through the Microsoft management solution.

About the first part of the announcement the new CTO of XenApp division at Citrix, Harry Labana, addresses the key question immediately: is Citrix stopping Application Virtualization development?

Well, now that I have the advantage of having access to status reports I don't have to speculate anymore. I know for a fact that there are a number of enhancements that our development teams are working on, so these enhancements continue in preparation for the next XenApp release. Moving beyond just the next release of XenApp, we plan to continue to invest to enable delivery of Windows applications as a service.

Labels: Alliances, Citrix, Microsoft

Last week Wyse Technology announced the release of Virtual Desktop Accelerator (VDA).

This new protocol enhancement, probably a superset of the existing TCX Multimedia technology that VMware is OEM’ing, is promised to accelerate up to 3 times the performance of Citrix XenDesktop and XenApp (using the ICA protocol), VMware View and Microsoft Remote Desktop Services (both using the RDP protocol) in WAN scenarios with more than 200ms in network latency.

Like the Citrix Branch Repeater and other products in this space, VDA works as a proxy that customers need to install on the branch office.

VDA is embedded in Wyse thin clients that use the ThinOS 6.4 but its works also on regular fat clients like workstation and laptops powered by Windows XP.

Here’s a 2 minutes demo of the technology:

Labels: Citrix, Microsoft, VDI, VMware, Wyse Technology

Microsoft releases today the RTM version of its capacity planning tool Microsoft Assessment & Planning (MAP) Toolkit 4.0.

As anticipated during the beta program, this new version supports Hyper-V R2, that will be part of the Windows Server 2008 R2 RTM between today and tomorrow, and the inventory of VMware Server Hosts and Guests.

The product is still free of charge.

Labels: Capacity Planning, Microsoft, Releases

Citrix didn’t quite finish to give away its technology for free.
They started with XenServer in February, deciding to pack it with the multi-host management console (XenCenter), the virtual machines live migration (XenMotion), the dynamic resource management (Resource Pools) and a basic storage management capabilities.

To survive to this huge investment, which is on top of the $500 million paid in 2007 to acquire XenSource, the company changed the business model: profit would come from the support licenses and the sales of a premium management package called Citrix Essentials.

There’s a lot of skepticism about this new model, and while the SMB customers may greatly appreciate the move, many think that this is a nice way to slowly fade out Xen to finally adopt Microsoft Hyper-V and re-establish the well-known synergy already seen with Terminal Server and Metaframe/Presentation Server/XenApp.
But if Sun can use this model for its Solaris operating system, and plans to do the same with the XenServer competitor called xVM Server, then Citrix probably can do that as well.

Things get much more complex today, as Citrix releases a free version of Essential for Hyper-V.
The formal announcement will be given next week at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC).

Called Express Edition, this version is capped to two Hyper-V hosts and one storage array.
It does have the StorageLink technology but doesn’t have the other premium features like the lab and stage management (OEM’ed by VMLogix) or the orchestration framework (Workflow Studio).

Despite that, it’s more than enough for an average SMB to build a redundant virtualization platform (Hyper-V R2 with VM live migration will be out next week) for server consolidation. And that’s a big problem.

The problem is that, while it may sound fantastic for the customers, it exposes more than ever how the Citrix strategy is totally depending on Microsoft.

If Hyper-V is free and also Essentials is free, who’s gonna adopt XenServer in the SMB market? A customer may not like the idea of using a Microsoft technology as its mission critical platform but at this point sticking with XenServer, free or not, is just not convenient anymore. And during a worldwide financial crisis money talks, more than ever.

The plan to “assign” the SMB market to Microsoft and the Enterprise one to Citrix is now crystal clear (but virtualization.info highlighted how it was evident since day one): Citrix facilitates the adoption of Hyper-V by giving away enterprise technologies like Essentials, and Microsoft directs its enterprise customers to Citrix for VDI and large-scale deployments.

But even with such defined plan, a lot can go wrong: what if a big customer decides to start a very small pilot by choosing the less expensive option (which now is Hyper-V R2 plus Essentials Express Edition)? 
And most of all what will happen when Microsoft will feel confident enough to push hard its hypervisor (let’s say Hyper-V 3.0) on the enterprise market?
Citrix has no way back. It cannot recover the customers that passed to Microsoft.

No matter how convenient and transparent Citrix makes the migration of virtual machines from XenServer to Hyper-V (for example with a live migration between heterogeneous hosts).
Switching the virtualization platform is a painful process and people will think a million times before moving.

Maybe Citrix believes that, over the long term, selling Essentials Express Edition support agreements to hundreds of thousands of Microsoft small customers will generate more profit that trying to win those SMBs by itself with XenServer.

In any case Citrix has to clarify the long-term strategy here or this endless give-away will generate more suspects than trust.

Labels: Citrix, Microsoft

In the last two years pretty much every major vendor in the IT industry rushed to develop a rich VDI portfolio and roadmap. Each of them did its best to acquire promising startups, to announce new and highly efficient remote desktop protocols, to sign partnerships with OEMs for the next generation thin client.

From VMware to Citrix, from Sun to Quest, from HP to Verizon.
Even TV vendors like LG want to be part of the VDI game.
Everyone but Microsoft.

So far Microsoft preferred to stay under the radar as much as possible, even when they acquired Calista Technologies in January 2008, a small startup able to offload the remote client from the task of rendering any sort of multimedia resource; even when they announced some basic desktop brokering capabilities in the imminent Windows Server 2008 R2.

Now some concrete details are finally emerging and the Microsoft VDI strategy seems more interesting than expected:

…In the RTM version of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, GDI applications, media with Windows Media Player, and Aero Glass will continue using the client-side rendering for remote scenarios as demonstrated in the pre-release version. For the RTM release, client-based rendering will no longer be available for DirectX 10.1 / DXGI 1.1 and Direct 2D applications, instead this type of content will be remoted using host-side resources leveraging the enhanced bitmap acceleration capabilities in R2. This decision was made based on the feedback we received during the engineering and validation process, where the number one requirement was quality and robustness.  While this design change may impact the utilization of CPU and GPU resources on the host side for certain use cases, it provides a consistent approach to remoting multiple types of rich (2D and 3D) content across a broad range of rich and thin client devices.

…

As for running DirectX applications on Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V virtual machines, there will be the GPU offload hardware assist Calista technologies at some point in the future…

So basically Microsoft doesn’t just plan to integrate Calista technologies in RDP as already announced, but it also plans to elaborate on the virtualization host those multimedia contents executed inside the VDI virtual desktops (Brian Madden has additional insights about this).

The key point is that Microsoft knows a lot about the roadmap of the upcoming GPUs that many customers may be ignoring at the moment.
Those next generation display cards will be just another piece, along with a new remote desktop and a client hypervisor, of the very complex infrastructure that will have to build in the future to make VDI a really efficient solution.

Labels: Microsoft, VDI

With much irony, now that Microsoft is about to release Hyper-V R2, its Press department finally releases the Resource Kit for Hyper-V 1.0 (or better Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V).

The 750-pages book was written by Robert Larson and Janique Carbone, who already authored the Virtual Server 2005 R2 Resource Kit.
The former comes from Microsoft Consulting Services, the latter is a former Microsoft Premier Support Engineer.

The book has been included in the virtualization.info Bookstore (which is powered by Amazon).

Labels: Books, Microsoft

Microsoft has just opened a new beta program for its almost unknown free capacity planning tool called Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) toolkit.

As for the previous versions, MAP 4.0 can be used to perform a capacity plan for Hyper-V and App-V but also for other, non-virtualization related tasks.
The most significant update of this new version anyway is the support for Hyper-V 2.0/R2 that will be released in late July for Microsoft partners and October 22 for the rest of the world.

On top of that MAP 4.0 can now perform the inventory of VMware hosts and guests:

In details, the new features available with MAP 4.0 are:

• Windows 7 Hardware and Device Compatibility Assessment
• Windows Server 2008 R2 Hardware and Device Compatibility Assessment
• Virtualization Candidates Assessment for Hyper-V R2 Server Consolidation
• Integration with the Microsoft Integrated Virtualization ROI Calculator
• Inventory of VMware Server Hosts and Guests
• User Interface and Proposal Customization for Partner co-branding

The beta program can be enrolled here.

Labels: Capacity Planning, Microsoft

The few vendors busy in the virtual lab automation space (which include VMware, Surgient, VMLogix, Skytap and the almost died StackSafe) may soon have a big, big problem called Microsoft.

After wasting years not leveraging its huge developers community to spread virtualization in every corner of the world, the company is finally moving on.

Announced in November 2008, the integration between Visual Studio 2010, System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 and Hyper-V 1.0/2.0 for virtual lab automation scenarios is now a reality called Visual Studio 2010 Lab Management.

The product just entered the beta 1 phase and has the potential to become a huge hit in the .NET world.

The Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) Lab Management Team has recently started a blog that introduces to the virtual lab automation and the capabilities of Visual Studio 2010 that is well worth a subscription.
Here’s a small excerpt from their first article:

The lab management service in TFS uses System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) for management of lab infrastructure and provisioning of virtual machines across multiple virtualization platforms. You get a copy of SCVMM with Lab Management.

Microsoft Test and Lab Manager is a Windows Presentation Foundation based rich client. The Lab Center in Test and Lab Manager allows you to

• Create and manage virtual or physical environments
• Take environment snapshots or revert to existing snapshots for virtual environments
• Interact with the virtual machines in the environments through environment viewer
• Define test settings for the environments

You can define test plans, test suites and test cases in the Testing Center and execute them on the lab environments.

At the heart of this product there is the concept of the workflow:

Lab Management workflow activities are bundled with Team Foundation Build Service. You can drag and drop these activities in Windows workflow designer to create custom workflows that allow you to

• quickly provision a virtual environment
• revert to ‘clean’ environment in tens of seconds by using environment snapshot instead of running multiple ‘cleanup’ scripts or reinstalling OS and application prerequisites
• using distributed workflow, run setup and configuration scripts on virtual machines
• Take post deployment environment snapshots, etc

This beta 1 is set to expire in mid-April 2010 so it’s very likely that the RTM will be available a few months before that deadline.

Labels: Microsoft, Virtual Lab Automation

As virtualization.info readers now know by now, Microsoft will release the Hyper-V 2.0 RTM as part of the Windows Server 2008 R2 RTM, both expected in late July for partners, and in late October for customers.

So it’s not really surprising to see that System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 R2 hit the Release Candidate status during the weekend.
What is surprising is to see that the new build sports a big number of improvements in the storage area, like the support for Sanbolic and Symantec/Veritas solutions or the all new Quick Storage Migration.

Anyway at this point the product should be feature complete, so this is the list of the new capabilities that we’ll see in the RTM:

• Virtual machines live migration between Windows Server 2008 R2 clustered hosts.
  With live migration, you can migrate a virtual machine from one node of a Windows Server 2008 R2 failover cluster to another node in the same cluster without any downtime. Because the virtual machine does not experience any downtime, the move is completely transparent to the users that are connected to the virtual machine.
• Network optimization detection during virtual machine placement.
  SCVMM 2008 R2 supports both Virtual Machine Queue (VMQ) and TCP Chimney, which are Windows Server 2008 R2 features that improve network performance for virtual machines.
  Network adapters that support the VMQ feature are able to create a unique network queue for each virtual network adapter and then connect that queue directly to the virtual machine’s memory. This connection routes packets directly from the hypervisor to the virtual machine, bypassing much of the processing in the virtualization stack.
  Network adapters that support the TCP Chimney feature are able to offload the processing of network traffic from the networking stack. Both of these features increase network performance and reduce CPU utilization.
• Hot addition and removal of virtual hard disks (VHDs).
  In Windows Server 2008 R2, Hyper-V allows users to add and remove VHDs from a virtual machine while it is running
• Clustered Shared Volume (CSV) Support
  VMM 2008 R2 supports the Windows Server 2008 R2 clustered shared volume (CSV) feature. CSV enables all hosts on a Windows Server 2008 R2 failover cluster to concurrently access virtual machine files on a single shared logical unit number (LUN). Because all nodes on the cluster can access a single shared LUN, virtual machines have complete transparency with respect to which nodes actually own a LUN. This enables live migration of virtual machines within the cluster because all nodes in the cluster can access any LUN.
• Support for Sanbolic Clustered File System
  VMM 2008 R2 supports the Sanbolic Clustered File System (CFS), a third-party shared volume solution for quick migration on hosts running Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V, and live migration on hosts running Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V.
• Support for Veritas Storage Foundation for Windows
  VMM 2008 R2 supports Veritas Storage Foundation 5.1 for Windows (SFW), an online storage management solution for creating virtual storage devices from physical disks and arrays. Volumes created as part of a cluster resource group by using SFW are detected by VMM 2008 R2 and can be selected during virtual machine placement or migration. An SFW volume is limited to one virtual machine.
• SAN Migration into and out of Clustered Hosts
  VMM 2008 R2 supports the use of SAN transfers to migrate virtual machines and highly available virtual machines into and out of a cluster. When you migrate a virtual machine into a cluster by using a SAN transfer, VMM checks all nodes in the cluster to ensure that each node can see the LUN and automatically creates a cluster disk resource for the LUN. Even though VMM automatically configures the cluster disk resource, it does not validate it. You must use the Validate a Configuration Wizard in Failover Cluster Management to validate the newly created cluster disk resource. To migrate a virtual machine out of a cluster, the virtual machine must be on a dedicated LUN that is not using CSV.
• Expanded Support for iSCSI SANs
  VMM 2008 supports SAN transfers of virtual machines that use initiator-based iSCSI target connections, which requires one iSCSI target for every LUN. VMM 2008 R2 adds support for LUN masking, which allows multiple LUNs per iSCSI target and expands VMM support for iSCSI SAN vendors.
• Quick Storage Migration
  For a Windows Server 2008 R2 host or a Storage VMotion-capable host, you can migrate a running virtual machine’s files to a different storage location on the same host with minimal or no service outage. If you use a wizard to migrate a virtual machine to a host that is running Windows Server 2008 R2 and you use a network transfer, VMM 2008 R2 now gives you the option to specify separate storage locations for each virtual hard disk (.vhd) file for the virtual machine.
• Maintenance Mode for Hosts
  In VMM 2008 R2, you can start maintenance mode for a Windows-based host anytime you need to perform maintenance tasks on the host, such as applying updates or replacing a physical component.
  When you start maintenance mode on a host in a Windows Server 2008 R2 cluster with highly available virtual machines, you can do one of the following:
  • If the option is available, use live migration to evacuate all virtual machines to other hosts on the same cluster. If the migration fails for any virtual machine on the host, maintenance mode is not started on that host and VMM does not migrate back the virtual machines that have already migrated.
  • Place all virtual machines on the host into a saved state.
• Support for VMware Port Groups for Virtual Switches
  VMM uses the network location and tag specified for the virtual network adapter in the hardware configuration to determine the network availability of a virtual machine on a host. In VMM 2008 R2, if you are deploying the virtual machine to a VMware ESX Server host, you can select from the VMware port groups that are available for virtual switches.
• Support for Virtual Machine Permissions Assigned in Hyper-V
  In VMM 2008 R2, VMM preserves changes made to role definitions or role memberships in the root scope of the Hyper-V authorization store. All changes to any other scope are overwritten every half hour by the VMM user role refresher. This differs from user role processing in VMM 2008. In VMM 2008, VMM determines access to virtual machines, hosts, and resources based solely on the rights and permissions associated with VMM user roles. VMM 2008 does not make any changes to Hyper-V role definitions and role memberships; it simply ignores the Hyper-V authorization store while the hosts and virtual machines are under its management.

The beta program is still open if you want to enroll.

Labels: Microsoft

On the Windows Server Division blog, Ward Ralston, Group Product Manager of Windows Server Marketing, announced that Windows Server 2008 R2 will reach the RTM milestone the same time of Windows 7.
Both will be generally available on October 22, 2009.

The big question is when Hyper-V 2.0 will be available then.

At the time of Hyper-V 1.0 Microsoft decided to include just a beta version of the hypervisor inside the Windows Server 2008 final code, and to subsequently update it to RTM using the Windows Update services.
The official explanation for this was that the virtualization team could fine-tune the hypervisor only after the operating system was finalized, as the former is embedded into the latter.

This year is different: Hyper-V 2.0 RTM will be part of Windows Server 2008 R2 RTM, as virtualization.info has learned directly from the company.
And this means of course that the hypervisor will be broadly available starting on October 22.

The only edition of Hyper-V 2.0 that will be delayed is the stand-alone platform Hyper-V Server 2008 R2, which Microsoft will release within 30 days the release of Windows Server 2008 R2.

All the Microsoft partners will have access to Hyper-V 2.0 starting the second half of July, probably through MSDN and TechNet software subscriptions.
It’s clear that the company wants to be ready to show its new live migration in time for the VMworld 2009, even if this year nobody knows yet how much can be seen beyond VMware stuff.

Labels: Microsoft

The release of Hyper-V 2.0 (aka Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V) and Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 is approaching.
The Release Candidate build is available since almost a month now, and Microsoft may release both platforms before 2010 as originally announced.

As the hypervisor hits the RC, the company unveils additional details about it.
In Q4 2008 we discovered the existence of a virtual machine live migration feature, along with the virtual disks hot plug capability and the support for nested page tables (NPT), TCP/IP Offload Engines (TOEs) and Jumbo Frames.
Now we know that Hyper-V 2.0 will support up to 64 logical processors on the host (8 CPUs each featuring 8 cores) and the so called Processor Compatibility Mode.

This last feature is critical to live migrate the virtual machines across different generations of the same CPU vendor.
Surprisingly the Processor Compatibility Mode doesn’t rely on the two technologies that Intel and AMD developed to achieve the task, Intel FlexMigration and AMD-V Extended Migration, so Hyper-V 2.0 doesn’t depend on the processor.

Microsoft also published a new table detailing some limits of the upcoming edition of Hyper-V:

Of course the table is not updated to include the 64 logical processors support described above.

Labels: Microsoft

The open source Xen hypervisor reaches version 3.4 after almost one year of development.

This is an important milestone for the project because of the key features introduced:

• Xen Client Initiative (XCI) Enhancements
  Xen 3.4 contains the initial XCI code release providing a base client hypervisor for the community to extend and improve.
  Simon Crosby, CTO of Virtualization and Management division at Citrix, adds a pretty interesting detail to this point:
  For the first time the Xen project is moving away from providing simply the hypervisor, and leaving it to vendors/users/developers to build their own system.  This release contains the whole enchilada, including Dom0, the management tool stack and Xen.  In other words, everything you need to be up and running with a Xen client system.
• Reliability – Availability - Serviceability (RAS)
  Xen 3.4 delivers a collection of features designed to avoid and detect system failures, provide maximum uptime by isolating system faults, and provide system failure notices to administrators to properly service the hardware/software. The combination of these services provide for a robust Xen hypervisor with fault-tolerant and back-up capabilities built-in.
• Power Management
  Xen 3.4 improves the power saving features with a host of new algorithms to better manage the processor including schedulers and timers optimized for peak power savings.
• Support for the Hyper-V enlightenment interface

The XCI components are critical for all those vendors that are working to offer a client hypervisor (including Citrix, Phoenix Technologies, Virtual Computer and Neocleus) but of course the most interesting new feature is the out-of-the-box support for the closed-source brother of Xen, Hyper-V.

From now on it will be specially interesting to see how the Xen roadmap evolves, considering that only three major players are using the hypervisor: Citrix, Novell and Oracle (which now includes both Sun and Virtual Iron).

Labels: Microsoft, Xen

Microsoft continues to tease about the upcoming server-side App-V product that is developing since a long time now.
The company hinted at it for the first time in September 2008, and then again in March 2009, but so far there are no official details about the product features or its roadmap.

Despite that the company showed a 5 minutes demo of it at MMS 2009 last week.

This may be the first application virtualization product ever used for server workloads so it’s clear that Microsoft wants to be extra careful about it.
At the same time it’s clear that the company may want to release it as soon as possible, attacking VMware on an unexpected front.

Yes, App-V is an application virtualization technology and cannot be directly compared with the hardware virtualization approach used by VMware in ESX. But from a strategy perspective Microsoft is much more interested in shifting the competition here rather than on the hypervisors. And this is not because Hyper-V is still behind ESX in the market share stats, or because the Redmond company is not confident that it can win against the current market leader, but because the hypervisor, any hypervisor, takes away the control of the entire stack from the operating system.

Politically speaking Microsoft couldn’t permit this, and technically speaking it simply doesn’t make sense for an OS company.
If VMware and others accuse Windows to be highly inefficient, then Microsoft can’t just embrace the hypervisor as the new platform of choice to run applications without wasting resource. 
Right now the company has no other choice than compete on the hardware virtualization market, but on the long run the Microsoft best interest is to make its OS more efficient, acting directly on the applications and vanishing the need for hardware virtualization.
App-V (both client-side and server-side) is the way to go there and it’s very likely that Microsoft will invest on it much, much more than what it’s investing for Hyper-V.

Labels: Microsoft

At its Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) conference last month Microsoft unveiled the roadmap for the System Center family.

First of all the company announced that Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 R2 is expected 60 days after the release of Windows Server 2008 R2, and we know that Microsoft now is confident to release its OSes in October.

After this late 2009 launch Microsoft doesn’t plan to release a new version of SCVMM before 2011, as exposed in this chart provided by Techlog:

This may mean that the virtual lab automation solution that Microsoft promised to deliver with Visual Studio 2010 and Virtual Machine Manager may not come before 2011.

Considering the massive amount of vCenter modules that VMware is about to release, Microsoft may have a hard time to stay competitive without a SCVMM 2010. Even if the SCVMM 2011 will have the capability to manage the upcoming App-V for Servers and to interact with private and public clouds.

Unless, of course, the company decides to release stand-alone solutions that are not centrally managed by SCVMM.

Labels: Microsoft

One thing Microsoft never made clear in the last few years was its virtualization strategy for the consumer market.
Yes, if we talk about the client side of an enterprise infrastructure, then we know that Microsoft has big ambitions, and it’s working to push both App-V (formerly SoftGrid) and MED-V (formerly Kidaro Managed Workspace) through its MDOP bundle for Software Assurance customers. But nothing has been said so far about what options will be available for the millions of consumers that want to run a virtualization product on top of their Windows Vista and Windows 7 boxes.

Yes, Microsoft offers VirtualPC, a product that is not seriously updated since a long, long time.
The latest version, VirtualPC 2007, is dated February 2007. To arrive there Microsoft took 4 years, during which it only released service packs for VirtualPC 2004 that introduced minor enhancements.
The company even cancelled the Mac editon of VirtualPC in August 2006.

It doesn’t surprise that prosumers look at VMware Workstation or Sun VirtualBox, and maybe Citrix XenWorkstation (if it really exists).

After years of nothing Microsoft must have finally recognized the value of evangelizing the masses about virtualization with a valuable desktop virtualization product, so it’s now embedding a new version of VirtualPC, internally called VirtualPC 7, inside the upcoming Windows 7.

The way Microsoft is pushing this anyway is odd: the new version of VirtualPC will be used just to virtualize Windows XP SP3, and the resulting virtual machine (which we can safely call a virtual appliance) will be bundled only with the Professional, Enterprise and Ultimate editions of Windows 7.

The new product is called Windows XP Mode and includes some long-awaited features like seamless windows, as well as support for multi-monitor and USB virtualization.
VirtualPC 7 will require a Intel VT or AMD-V enabled CPU and of course an appropriate amount of RAM (Microsoft says 2GB minimum).

This approach may work for the average consumer but the professionals (like the millions of developers that Microsoft feeds with its programming languages) out there that want to really play with virtualization may be easily consider this too little too late.

Update: Microsoft published a new Windows 7 Virtual PC Evaluation Guide which contains additional information about the new product.

It seems that Microsoft plans to allow its customers to use VirtualPC 7 beyond the Windows XP Mode:

Integration components make it easier to use a virtual machine by improving the interaction between physical resources and a virtual machine environment. These are installed automatically when you set up Windows XP mode. For other operating systems, you install them separately after you set up the operating system.

…

Option 2: Create your own virtual machine

Choose this option if you do not want to use Windows XP as the guest operating system. This option shows you how to create a virtual machine and install the guest operating system that you want to run in the virtual machine…

Thanks to Dugie’s Pensieve for the link.

Labels: Microsoft

On April 9 virtualization.info published an article titled How Microsoft and VMware use virtualization internally, detailing how the two competitors use their own virtualization products inside the company.

The details about the Microsoft internal case study appeared in a public TechNet article that raised a number of critics on how poorly the vendors seems to use Hyper-V.

One of the Microsoft employees involved in that article, David Lef, Microsoft IT Technology Architect, wrote to virtualization.info giving additional details about the adoption of virtualization inside Microsoft:

I was not the source for all of the information in the Microsoft case study, but I was a significant contributor and presented the associated webcast. Keep in-mind that at MS we deploy very early, often before products are released publicly and everything needed to support them elegantly is available. Some of the decisions early on around clustering were driven by this and by the benefit/drawback decisions that were made at operational levels. It simply did not make sense for us to bring clustering into an environment that did not need it at the time, particularly at the price of additional complexity. System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 handles it well and our newer infrastructure is more suited to it, but that was not initially the case. Things change. We are designing it in as an integral part of our Windows Server 2008 R2 infrastructure for Hyper-V. ALL hosts will be clustered and managed by SC VMM from the start.

The VM-to-Host ratio is also very subjective and simply looking at a few excerpts does not tell the true story. Comparing simple numbers in what are probably very different scenarios can also be very misleading. Our 10:1 (or sometimes lower) ratio is a result of the fact that we are putting rather robust and demanding workloads into VMs, as-opposed to the legacy and small workloads that people have traditionally targeted for virtualization. We position Hyper-V VMs directly against our smaller standard physical servers, challenging the people requesting new server instances (or replacing older systems) to justify going with anything other than a VM. That is how we are approaching 40% of our total population (4500+ our of 11K instances) running in VMs and targeting 80% of net-new instances going straight to VMs going forward. Even when we talk about our "lab environment", this is not purely dev/test. These are really pre-production environments, supporting live data and applications with users that depend on them to get the internal business of Microsoft done. (Source code management, product builds, support, etc.) It also encompasses the "dogfooding" aspect, where we move very large segments of our population through beta release cycles to exercise our products and scenarios before we inflict them on our customers. The comment about how our units are "absolutely monstrous" and "VMware is significantly cheaper" because they get the same number of VMs on a smaller host is easily explained if you realize it is a classic apples-versus-oranges comparison. We are putting 10 VMs on a host, but the VMs are running everything from SQL to enterprise core infrastructure to critical line-of-business tools. Where it was common to have single processor with 512 MB of RAM yesterday, we are now looking at 2-4 processors and four or more GB of RAM for each VM as the norm today. We have to make all of this happen in a way that assures we meet stringent SLAs, can assure performance expectations, and make a very demanding end-user community happy. We don't want to simply stuff as many VMs onto a host as possible, without regard to the potential cost. We actually don't want people to know or even care that their app or service is running on a VM. Most don't, which indicates we are doing pretty well.

Virtualization is not perfect by any means. Microsoft, partner, and even competitor's products continue to get better. We all continue to refine how we use them, a big part of which is changing business and operational process to really take advantage of the aspects of flexibility, agility, and centralization. We continue to work in a direction where the underlying capabilities of the platform and management tools around it will make it more efficient, but we are already much better off than if we would have been without it. The business recognizes this, which is why virtualization is very high on our list of priorities.

As an established enterprise, we don't have the luxury of changing things overnight. Directionally, we know we are on the right path. We are evolving things in Microsoft IT toward a better future, just as we hope others are doing and can benefit from very candid views of our experience.

Labels: Microsoft

In January 2008 virtualization.info highlighted how Microsoft indirectly announced the plan to bring its application virtualization technology (App-V, formerly SoftGrid) on servers.

At that time no mainstream news source recognized the groundbreaking news but a recent job announcement appeared on the Microsoft Career portal catalyzed the attention of CodenameWindows and Mary-Jo Foley at ZDNet.

Do you want to be part of a great, growing team that will deliver technology that will change the way Microsoft and the industry deploy and execute software on the Windows platform? Join the Microsoft Application Virtualization (App-V) team and work on a new v1 product to bring the revolutionary Application Virtualization technology to a new market - the datacenter. Server Application Virtualization will effectively let any application be repackaged as an xcopyable application, making deployment vastly simpler and more reliable…

Foley inquired Microsoft to have a confirmation and they pointed her to our January article.

Microsoft acquired Softricity in 2006. It’s surprising that App-V is being ported in the data center after such a long time even if it’s evident that there are a number of technical challenges in this space.

Maybe the company didn’t consider the market mature enough to have server-side application virtualization. Maybe the original SoftGrid architecture was not designed to virtualize multi-tier backend services.
Whatever is the reason Microsoft is now getting concrete about this product, which may easily become the most important tool in its virtualization offering.

Labels: Microsoft

After the precious article about how Microsoft IT department internally uses Hyper-V, the TechNet library exposes another key resource: a list of all possible errors returned by Hyper-V.

The troubleshooting guide, called Hyper-V Health Model by Microsoft, is still a draft (last update was on April 7) but it’s already very detailed.
It divides the events and errors in five categories:

• Services
• Virtual Machines
• Virtual Network Switch
• Hypervisor
• Authorization manager (AzMan) Store

Each section has sub-categories with tens of event IDs. Each event ID has a list of actions to resolve the issue and to verify that everything is properly working.

Because Hyper-V 2.0 is not out yet, it’s safe to assume that this Health Model is only related to the first release of the hypervisor.
It’s surprising that Microsoft published it only now, and that the guide is still in draft.

Nonetheless, if you manage Hyper-V, this is one of the best resources available at the moment.

Thanks to HyperVoria for the news.

Labels: Microsoft, Tech

Who better than a virtualization vendor to show a successful case study to convince prospects to buy?

In May 2008 Microsoft published some details about how it’s using Hyper-V to serve MSDN and TechNet IIS7 web front-ends.

Nor VMware neither Citrix or other vendors ever published any information about their in-house implementations.
Anyway juicy additional details recently emerged about both the Microsoft and the VMware data centers.

How Microsoft is really using Hyper-V

The MSDN and TechNet case studies were interesting but lacked many details. A new document published in January 2009 on the TechNet library now tells a much clever (and in some cases concerning) story:

As early as September 2004, Microsoft IT calculated that the average CPU utilization for servers in data centers and managed lab environments was less than 10 percent, and continuing to decrease.

The virtualization goals are set very high for Microsoft IT, which has deployed more than 3,500 virtual machines. By June 2009, Microsoft IT plans to have 50 percent of all server instances running on virtual machines. With Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, the expectation is that at least 80 percent of new server orders will be deployed as virtual machines.

…

As Microsoft IT developed standards for which physical machines to virtualize, it identified many lab and development servers with very low utilization and availability requirements. Because of the lower expectations, Microsoft IT now is deploying the lab and development virtual servers with four processor sockets, 16 to 24 processor cores, and up to 64 gigabytes (GB) of random access memory (RAM). These servers can host a large number of virtual machines, averaging 10.4 virtual machines per host machine.

As Microsoft IT developed its expertise in deploying virtual machines, and especially with the performance improvements available with Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, it has increasingly moved toward virtualization of production servers. Although many production servers still have low utilization, some have significantly higher performance requirements than the lab and development computers. For the production-server deployments, Microsoft IT is using servers with two processor sockets, 8 to 12 processor cores, and 32 GB of RAM.

…

On average, the host servers with eight processors and 32 GB of RAM are hosting 5.7 virtual machines in the production environment.

…

Microsoft IT configures all virtual machine hosts to use a SAN to store the virtual machine configuration and hard disk files. The host computers connect to the SAN by using dual-path Fibre Channel host bus adapters (HBAs). For production virtual servers, the SAN storage uses redundant array of independent disks (RAID) 0+1, whereas RAID 5 is used for lab and development virtual machine storage. Microsoft IT has chosen the RAID 0+1 configuration for the production servers because it provides better performance, but it does consume more disks. Performance is not as critical in the lab environment, so Microsoft IT uses RAID5 because it uses fewer disks to store the virtual machines.

…

When Microsoft IT first deployed server virtualization, the goal was to use a shared storage model for the virtual machines. During the first iteration, Microsoft IT would create one or two large logical unit numbers (LUNs) on the SAN (100-plus GB) for each host computer and then deploy multiple virtual machines per LUN. In a typical scenario, Microsoft IT gave the customer a 50-GB drive C and a 20-GB drive D. Because both drives were dynamic virtual disks, the actual space used on the LUN was much less than the maximum size.

However, over time, the dynamic disks grew as the customers stored data on the virtual servers, and just two or three virtual machines could fill an entire LUN. This became a significant management issue for Microsoft IT, which had to track all LUNs for space availability and then move virtual machines before all space was utilized.

To address this issue and to enable failover clustering for the virtual machines, Microsoft IT next adopted a model of configuring just a single virtual machine per LUN. With this model, a LUN with 30 to 50 GB was dedicated to each virtual machine, with the option to give the virtual machines more space as required.

Microsoft IT has avoided using disk mount points, so the limiting factor for the number of virtual machines deployed on a host became the number of available drive letters on the host computers. In most cases, this meant not deploying more than 23 virtual machines on a host.

…

• Microsoft IT has achieved 99.95 percent availability for virtual machines running on Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2, and it anticipates that the availability will increase for virtual machines running on Hyper-V. Very few applications that have been deployed as virtual machines require a higher availability level.
• With Windows Server 2008 failover clustering, an administrator must store each virtual machine on an individual LUN. Because an administrator must provide all cluster nodes with access to the same shared storage by using the same drive letters, 23 is the maximum number of virtual machines that can run in a failover cluster. Microsoft IT could work around this limitation by using mount points and virtual machine groupings, but it considers this configuration too complex to administer. Because of this limitation, Microsoft IT has adopted a standard of using only three nodes in a cluster, with the cluster configured to tolerate one node's failure.
• When virtual machines fail over in a Windows Server 2008 failover cluster, the cluster service with Hyper-V must save the virtual machine state, transfer the control of the shared storage to another cluster node, and restart the virtual machine from the saved state. Although this process takes only a few seconds, the virtual machine still is offline for that brief period. If an administrator has to restart all hosts in the failover cluster because of a security update installation, the virtual machines in the cluster have to be taken offline more than once. Therefore, Microsoft IT determined that highly available virtual machines could have more downtime than virtual machines deployed on stand-alone servers in the case of simple planned downtimes for host maintenance, such as applying software updates.
• Because of the required brief outage every time a virtual machine is moved from one host to another, Microsoft IT found that coordinating the server update processes with virtual machine owners was difficult. Because one physical host could contain several virtual machines, Microsoft IT had to communicate with each of the virtual machine owners and coordinate host server maintenance with virtual machine maintenance.

Because of these issues, Microsoft IT has not deployed failover clustering as the default standard for virtual machines. Microsoft IT has deployed several three-node clusters and does provide this service for virtual machines running critical workloads. One of the places where Microsoft IT is using failover clustering for virtual machines is in some branch offices that do not have 24-hour support staff on site. In a data center where administrators always are available to react to host downtime, Microsoft IT has minimized the use of Hyper-V clustering…

The whole article is priceless and its read is highly recommended (thanks to Vinternals for the link).
For the lazy ones Microsoft even published a webcast about this internal case study. The presenter is David Lef, a Microsoft IT Technology Architect at Microsoft.

How VMware is really using ESX

As we said, despite its leadership, VMware never revealed how it’s using ESX and other products internally.
The fist time ever that the company disclosed details about its virtual infrastructure was in September 2008 at VMworld US. A refreshed presentation (DC35) was shown during the VMworld Europe 2009 by Tayloe Stansbury, the company CIO.

• VMware has an internal VDI deployment of over 550 users, including members of most departments.
  The client configuration includes Wyse V10 Thin Clients, Dell 24” monitors (configured at 1920x1200 pixels, 15bit resolution), keyboard and mouse.
  The server configuration runs on HP c7000 blade systems, EMC Clariion CX3-80 storage and Cisco 3020s switch modules for the HP blades.
  The entire infrastructure is powered by VMware Virtual Desktop Manager (VDM) 2.1 for US and View 3.0 for Europe.
• VMware has an internal virtualized mail server deployment serving 7800 mailboxes.
  The entire infrastructure is powered by 29 virtual machines (split in two data centers) running Microsoft Exchange 2007 Enterprise Edition. 22 of them are just for the mailboxes, the other 7 work as Client Access Servers (CAS).
• VMware virtualizes its entire ERP infrastructure except Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC). 
• 97% of the company servers are virtualized across one Tier 4 and two Tier 2 data centers.
  Just two applications are missing (one is Oracle RAC).
  EMC DMX4 is used as the storage backend of choice for mission-critical applications, otherwise EMC CX3-80 is the choice.
  The front-end servers of choice are HP c7000 blades everywhere.
• The average consolidation ration is 10:1 for server and 64:1 for VDI desktops
• Each administrator manages an average of 145 virtual machines.

For the ones that cannot access the VMworld presentations (it requires a yearly subscription) VMware published a webcast about this internal case study.

Labels: Microsoft, Tech, VMware

After more than one year after the acquisition of Kidaro, Microsoft is finally able to release its version of Managed Workspace, now renamed as Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MED-V).

MED-V is a platform wrapper for Virtual PC that envelops virtual machines in a security layer where the administrator can define granular corporate policies, deciding which physical networks can be accessed, when the VM expires, if the virtual hard drive is encrypted, etc.

The user can’t run more than one virtual machine per time with MED-V. Its image can be updated from a central management console.

MED-V has an enormous potential but Microsoft is mainly selling this product as a solution to maintain legacy applications inside the company while updating to new OSes (namely Vista and very soon Windows 7).

Microsoft has just three competitors in this space at the moment even if none of them is using the same marketing message: VMware, with its ACE (but please note that the ACE capabilities are being moved directly inside VMware Workstation and the product as is today will possibly disappear soon), Sentillion with its vThere and the just arrived Tresys Technology with its VM Fortress.

MED-V 1.0 is distributed as part of the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) 2009, along with App-V 4.5 Cumulative Update 1 and other non-virtualization products.
MDOP is only available for those Microsoft customers that bought the Software Assurance.
Despite the numerous complains about this sales model, Microsoft says that it’s very happy about it and claims 14.4 million MDOP customers.
Maybe it’s true but it’s legit to wonder how many customers Microsoft would get directly selling MED-V and APP-V instead.

Labels: Microsoft, Platform Wrapper, Releases

In February 2008 Microsoft released Windows Server 2008.
At that time Hyper-V was still in beta phase. Despite that, Microsoft decided to take some serious, unprecedented risks and included it in the RTM version of its server operating system.

The actual RTM version of the hypervisor didn’t come out before June 2008.
The customers that wanted to upgrade could download a stand-alone package or just connect to the Windows Updated service.

At today the situation is still the same: who downloads Windows Server 2008 has to install Hyper-V beta and then upgrade it in some way.

Microsoft will fix this with the upcoming Service Pack 2 for Windows Server 2008, which will finally integrates Hyper-V 1.0 RTM as part of the OS.

The RTM-Escrow of this SP2 was released just yesterday and this means that the final release is really near.
It’s ironic that this happens now that Hyper-V is already in 2.0 beta phase.

Labels: Microsoft

Yesterday Citrix released under GPL2 open source license a new component of its Project Satori, the software stack for paravirtualized Linux guest OSes that run on Microsoft Hyper-V.

The core of this software has been already released by Microsoft under the name of Linux Integration Components in September 2008.
It included the hypercall adapter for Hyper-V, the optimized disc driver (called StorVSC) and the optimized network driver (called NetVSC).

The package missed an optimized mouse driver (called InputVSC) that implies poor performance when the Hyper-V console is remotely accessed and the use tries to interact with the Guest OS from inside it.

The InputVSC driver is now available here.

Labels: Citrix, Microsoft, Releases

In March 2008 Microsoft acquired an interesting startup called Kidaro, which was focused on the corporate virtual machine security segment (something we call “platform wrappers” in the Virtualization Industry Radar).

The original product, Managed Workspace, was renamed in Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MED-V), and relaunched as a beta in January 2009.

Microsoft plans release the product in H2 2009 as part of the much hated software bundle called Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP), which means that no potential customer will ever see it unless it has an enterprise license agreement with the Software Assurance.

The company insists to claim MDOP a smart and successful product but the reality is that an endless number of customers have complains about the bundle and can’t access both MED-V and App-V because of it.

There’s no chance that Microsoft chances its mind about MDOP but at least this time is releasing a public demo version (not exactly a trial) of MED-V 1.0 beta that anybody can download and install.
The kit comes as a Virtual PC 2007 virtual machine and its preconfigured to show the use of legacy applications in a Windows XP SP 3 virtual environment on top of a Windows Vista host.

The 1GB package will expire on June 30, 2009, so it’s safe to assume that MED-V 1.0 will be released around that timeframe.

Labels: Microsoft, Platform Wrapper

Microsoft is currently publishing multi-part webcast to introduce and deep dive the capabilities of its hypervisor Hyper-V.

So far the company published seven parts:

• Part 1 - Server Virtualization (42:09 min)
• Part 2 - Installing, Configuring, Managing Hyper-V (17:35 min)
• Part 3 - Understanding Integration Services (7:43 min)
• Part 4 - Exports & Snapshots (5:33 min) 
• Part 5 - PowerShell Management (11:03 min)
• Part 6 - Configuring Failover Cluster (16:46 min)
• Part 7 - Failover & Migration of VMs (14:04 min)

If you never saw Hyper-V in action this is probably the best thing after a classroom course.

Labels: Microsoft

Finally, after more than three months since virtualization.info broke the news, Cisco is ready to unveils its much rumored blade system codenamed California, dubbed as Unified Computing System (UCS).

The announcement was made a few minutes ago by John Chambers, Cisco CEO, and top notch executives from Intel (Paul Otellini, CEO), VMware (Paul Maritz, President and CEO), EMC (Joe Tucci, CEO), BMC Software (Bob Beauchamp, CEO) and Microsoft (Bob Muglia, President of Server and Tools Business).

For Cisco “unified computing” means data center networking, unified fabric as well as private and extranet-intranet clouds (Cisco calls this “inter-cloud).

To deliver this architecture the company is calling a number of partners, not just the ones above: Accenture, BMC Software, CSC, EMC, Emulex, Intel, Microsoft, Net App, Novell, Oracle, QLogic, Red Hat, SAP, Tata, VMware and Wipro.

Intel collaborates with Cisco on this project not only for the Nehalem CPUs, but also for the 10Gb Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) part.

Besides FCoE, UCS will access the storage (provided by EMC) will be accessible through Ethernet, Fibre Channel and iSCSI.

Easy to guess VMware is going to certify the upcoming vSphere 4.0 for this platform and ship it with Cisco Nexus 1000V.

Microsoft is going to do the same, with an OEM agreement to ship Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V (or Windows Server 2003 or SQL Server 2008).
Anyway the involvement of Microsoft is limited as their System Center Virtual Machine Manager (or other components of the System Center family) is not going to ship with the hardware.

On top of the hypervisors and their management tools UCS will ship with BMC software management and automation technology.

The whole thing will be orchestrated by the new UCS Manager (available as GUI and command line interface).
Additionally, Cisco will provide an open API for management, to simplify the transition from “legacy” data center infrastructures.

But for now Cisco is not yet showing what UCS Manager can really do, so there’s no way to measure the level of innovation and the capability to compete with Egenera on the software stack integration.

The only public things right now are the fact the platform can be segmented to simulate up to 320 isolated servers, with thousands of virtual machines, and its components:

• Cisco UCS 6100 Series Fabric Interconnects is a family of line-rate, low-latency, lossless, 10-Gbps Cisco Data Center Ethernet and FCoE interconnect switches that consolidate I/O within the system. Both 20-port 1RU and 40-port 2RU versions accommodate expansion modules that provide Fibre Channel and/or 10 Gigabit Ethernet connectivity.
• Cisco UCS 5100 Series Blade Server Chassis supports up to eight blade servers and up to two fabric extenders in a 6RU enclosure without the need for additional management modules.
• Cisco UCS 2100 Series Fabric Extenders bring unified fabric into the blade-server chassis, providing up to four 10-Gbps connections each between blade servers and the fabric interconnect, simplifying diagnostics, cabling, and management.
• Cisco UCS B-Series Blade Servers based on next generation Intel Xeon processors adapt to application demands, intelligently scale energy use, and offer best-in-class virtualization. Each blade server utilizes network adapters for access to the unified fabric. Cisco's unique memory-expansion technology substantially increases the memory footprint, maximizing performance and capacity for demanding virtualization and large-dataset workloads. In addition, the technology offers a more cost-effective memory footprint for less-demanding workloads.
• Cisco UCS Network Adapters are offered in a mezzanine-card form factor. Three types of adapters offer a range of options to meet application requirements, including adapters optimized for virtualization, compatibility with existing driver stacks, or efficient, high-performance Ethernet.
• Cisco UCS Manager provides centralized management capabilities that serve as the central nervous system of the Cisco Unified Computing System. Cisco UCS Manager is the embedded software that unifies system components into a seamless, cohesive, system

No specific word on pricing or availability, but is providing the general availability for Q2 2009 (during the Q&A session Cisco mentioned April 09), which means that VMware vSphere will be likely available in Q2 2009.

Update: As usual, Scott Lowe has some brief but very interesting details to add to the UCS story.

Labels: BMC Software, Cisco, EMC, Intel, Microsoft, VMware

Microsoft and Citrix agreed on who’s the guru in town when managing Hyper-V and XenServer hosts (tip: it’s Citrix) but this doesn’t seem to slow down the development of System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM).

Just two months after opening the public beta of Hyper-V 2.0, Microsoft is now launching the public beta of SCVMM 2008 R2.
This first beta build introduces the following features:

• Windows Server 2008 R2 Beta Hyper-V host management
• Enhanced support for Clustered Shared Volume (CSV) and SAN migration into and out of clustered hosts (including support for multiple virtual machines per LUN by using CSV)
• Support for multiple LUNs per iSCSI target
• Support for host’s “Maintenance Mode”
• Support of disjoint domains
• Use of defined port groups with VMware vCenter 

Enroll for the beta program here.

Labels: Microsoft

Microsoft just opened a new beta program for the Hyper-v Management Pack for System Center Operation Manager (SCOM) 2007 R2.

The management pack is incomplete for now as it only allows to  monitor the health of Hyper-V hosts that are part of Windows Server 2008 full (Standard / Enterprise / Datacenter).

No support at the moment for Windows Server 2008 Core Server versions or for the stand-alone Hyper-V Server 2008.

The program is not directly available on the Connect website. To access it you have to email Microsoft.

Labels: Microsoft

Tim Mangan, a well-respected application virtualization expert, just released an interesting tool to monitor the system performance of a Hyper-V infrastructure.

Rather than relying on the Task Manager inside each Windows virtual machine, HyperV_Mon connects to Hyper-V through its WMI interface and retrieves the physical and virtual CPUs consumption data from hosts and guests.

The tool is able to recognize when a vCPU is descheduled and thus provides more precise information compared to the guest OS Task Manager.

HyperV_Mon is available for free here.

Labels: Microsoft, Tools

It doesn’t matter how hard you look, it’s almost impossible that you are going to find a performance comparison that involves Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware ESX.
The VMware End User License Agreement (EULA) specifically says that the company won’t recognize any 3rd party performance testing before it has the chance to review and approve the adopted methodology.

(before June 2006 the situation was even worse as VMware simply didn’t allow the publishing of any benchmark comparison)

At these conditions, the chances that you’ll see an independent benchmark where VMware is outperformed by its competitors are zero.

Despite that, last week a group of brave reporters at Virtualization Review challenged VMware and published an independent analysis without asking any permission.

To ensure the validity of our test results and testing environment, Virtualization Review enlisted the help of Stuart Yarost to formulate and validate the test plan. Yarost is an ASQ Certified Software Quality Engineer and Certified Quality Engineer with more than 22 years' experience in the software and quality fields. Yarost currently holds the position of Vice Chair of Programs for the ASQ Software Division.

The results are more than interesting:

• In our tests, Hyper-V did well in all categories-it's a real, viable competitor for the competition.
• XenServer's test results are impressive, but are they enough to justify a replacement of your current hypervisor? For environments with virtualized systems that have a large number of CPU- and memory-intensive workloads, it may be a good choice. The caution is that those high I/O workloads flirt with not being good virtualization candidates, so some administrators might instinctively place these workloads on physical systems. Make no mistake, however: XenServer did extremely well, posting excellent performance numbers.
• For the first two tests of heavy workloads, VMware underperformed both XenServer and Hyper-V. For the lighter workloads on the third test, the results were almost indistinguishable across the platforms, but ESX had the best results in three of the four categories.

Easy to guess, VMware is not happy and yesteday severely criticized Virtualization Review on the corporate blog Virtual Reality with the post: A big step backwards for virtualization benchmarking.

The list of objections is long:

• The fact that ESX is completing so many more CPU, memory, and disk operations than Hyper-V obviously means that cycles were being used on those components as opposed to SQL Server.  Which is the right place for the hypervisor to schedule resources?  It’s not possible to tell from the scarce details in the results.
• All resource-intensive SQL Servers in virtual and native environments have large pages enabled.  ESX supports this behavior but no other hypervisor does.  This test didn’t use that key application and OS feature.
• The effects of data placement with respect to partition alignment were not planned for.  VMware has documented the impact of this oversight to be very significant in some cases.
• The disk tests are based on Passmark’s load generation, which uses a test file in the guest operating system.  But the placement of that file, and its alignment with respect to the disk system, was not controlled in this test.
• The SQL Server workload was custom built and has not been investigated, characterized, or understood by anyone in the industry. As a result, its sensitivity to memory, CPU, network and storage changes is totally unknown, and not documented by the author.  There are plenty of industry standard benchmarks to use with hypervisors and the days of ad hoc benchmark tests have passed.  Virtual machines are fully capable of running the common benchmarks that users know and understand like TPC, SPECweb and SPECjbb.  An even better test is VMmark, a well-rounded test of hypervisor performance that has been adopted by all major server vendors as the standard measurement of virtualization platforms or the related SPECvirt benchmark under development by SPEC.
• With ESX’s highest recorded storage throughput already measured at over 100,000 IOPS on hundreds of disks, this experiment’s use of an undocumented, but presumably very small, number of spindles would obviously result in a storage system bottleneck. Yet storage performance results vary by tremendous amounts. Clearly there's an inconsistency in the configuration.

VMware highlights how this analysis was not reviewed and approved, and that because of this kind of work they don’t remove the EULA restriction.
And to be absolutely sure that everybody know about the flaws of this benchmarks, this morning the company sent out an alert to its entire Channel.

How the other two vendors reacted?

Citrix didn’t comment so far, while Microsoft validated the study by linking it on the corporate blog.
Now if they want to defend the Hyper-V score in this benchmark is better they publish a counter-analysis explaining why VMware is wrong.

Labels: Benchmarks, Citrix, Microsoft, VMware

While VMware is working hard to recruit the hosting providers of tomorrow, tempting them to jump on the the cloud computing bandwagon with its upcoming vCloud APIs, Microsoft continues to focus on the hosting providers of today.

As highlighted several times, Microsoft is focusing its Hyper-V adoption strategy on this market segment, where VMware is not particularly strong.
It’s not a case that MyHosting, HostBasket, MaximumASP, Layered Technologies and others were the first to testify the adoption of the new hypervisor.
And it’s not a case that Microsoft recently released a specific licensing guide for hosting providers.

Last week, at the Microsoft Hosting Summit 2009, the company released yet another resource for them: the Dynamic Data Center Tool Kit.

The resource will contain guidance, sample code, best practices and additional collateral to build and launch managed services with Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM).

Everything should appear online at this address (almost empty right now):
http://dynamicdatacentertoolkit.com/Default.aspx

Labels: Microsoft

Two weeks ago Citrix announced the unthinkable: XenServer, one of the technologies that acquired from XenSource for $500 million almost two years ago, becomes a free product.

The move raised an unprecedented level of attention, from customers, partners and competitors.
It’s not a speculation: the virtualization.info statistics reveal how serious the echo of this action has been and still is.

To make profit Citrix counts on support agreements (which is exactly the same model Sun is using for its Solaris operating system and what it plans to adopt for the upcoming xVM virtualization portfolio) and on the sales of premium management features, packed in a new Essentials product, available for XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V.

Citrix wants to obtain a lot of things with this strategy:

• with XenServer for free it wants to build a serious brand awareness in the virtualization industry and, at the same time, disturb the VMware activity in the enterprise market
• with Essentials for XenServer it wants to demonstrate its enterprise prospects that it has something serious to pit against VMware vCenter
• with Essentials for Hyper-V it wants to reproduce the successful combination of Microsoft Terminal Server plus Citrix Metaframe that made its early fortune

Of course the key part of the strategy is the synergy with Microsoft and not the free hypervisor.

Essentials for Hyper-V is in beta starting today.
Chris Wolf, Senior Analyst at Burton Group published some early feedbacks about it and seems pretty satisfied:

…As you can see, this is a massive improvement for Hyper-V VM provisioning on networked storage. My experience with the software was basically what I’ve come to expect from beta software, and did include one hurdle to overcome – CVSM provisioned storage and created VMs without a problem, but did not create the VM passthrough disks and associate the correct LUNs with each. I had to do that step manually using the Hyper-V manager tool. Note that other beta testers also identified this problem, and it has been fixed. Also, only passthrough (raw) disks are supported today; virtual hard disk files are not supported. I’m hoping that virtual disks will be supported for Windows Server 2008 R2 cluster shared volumes, once they’re available.

Still, after doing the initial work to create the storage repository and VM template, VM deployment was a piece of cake. And what’ not to like about spinning up a bunch of new VMs in seconds? …

Now, what will happen if Citrix releases a version of Essentials for VMware?

The question is legit and comes as a reaction to the post of Rakesh Malhotra, Program Management Team for System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) at Microsoft, about the capability of SCVMM 2008 to manage VMware ESX.

His post clarifies some of the design decisions that Microsoft made when developed the ESX management part, and how some of the features work.

One of his early sentences generated the question above:

…Let me start by saying that no software is perfect and we are constantly trying to improve and respond to customer feedback. In fact, the whole VMware ESX management feature was a result of customer feedback. Put simply, people want to use a single primary console for day to day management of virtual machines across multiple hypervisors so we went after this problem. As a result, multi-hypervisor management via SCVMM 2008 has proven to be enormously popular with customers and partners alike…

In normal conditions it’s hard to believe that a customer may drop the vCenter console to manage his ESX farm with SCVMM, but we live in interesting times where enterprise customers can have hundreds or thousands of machines virtualized with different hypervisors.
SAP for example is about to virtualize 500 servers with XenServer side by side with its current VMware Infrastructure.

Microsoft believes it can manage ESX better (or at least as good as) than VMware itself. And Citrix believes it can manage Hyper-V better than Microsoft itself (something that Microsoft is not arguing actually).
So why Citrix shouldn’t try to extend its Essentials offering to manage ESX as well?

There’s no risk to validate the competitor too much. VMware is abundantly validated by its market share.
The only (positive) result would be that Citrix would become the first virtualization vendor to provide enhancements for all the three major hypervisors on the market.

If it’s true that there are customers out there that look for a single primarily console for virtualization management, why they shouldn’t be interested in such offering?

Labels: Citrix, Microsoft, VMware

While a new startup works to unofficially open source the VMware VMFS, Citrix has officially open sourced its implementation of the Microsoft VHD format.

Citrix and Microsoft adopt the same virtual hard drive format since September 2007, when they closed a deal to adopt VHD in all the upcoming products.

In over two years Citrix has developed an optimized implementation of the product and it’s now giving it back to the open source world by submitting its code to the Xen community for inclusion in the hypervisor code base under the BSD license.

If approved, Citrix partners and competitors that adopt Xen (like Virtual Iron, Oracle, Sun, etc.) will be able to use it side by side with QEMU Copy-On-Write (QCOW).

Labels: Citrix, Microsoft, Xen

At least three things seem true in the virtualization industry:

1. It doesn’t matter how many times a vendor repeats that free stuff doesn’t compete against a feature-rich end-to-end solution, it will end up offering a free hypervisor
2. It doesn’t matter how many surprises a vendor can pack for its premier conference, its competitors will do their best to steal the thunder
3. It doesn’t matter how many NDAs a vendor puts in place to embargo its most amazing announcement, the news will leak out even before hang up the conference call

Today is one of those days when the three rules above are true at the same time: Stephen Vaughn-Nichols unveiled on his personal blog the news that next week (Feb 23), during the VMware VMworld Europe 2009 conference, Citrix will give away for free its XenServer hypervisor.

Vaughn-Nichols doesn’t refer to a scaled down version of XenServer. He’s reporting that the Enterprise Edition with all its features will become free (but not open source).

To compensate the lost revenue Citrix will release a new management package called Citrix Essentials, available in two editions, priced between $1,500 and $5,000 per server, one for XenServer and one for Microsoft Hyper-V.
This last version will be available as part of a renewed partnership with Microsoft, dubbed Project Encore.

Project Encore will also imply that System Center (possibly the entire product family and not just the Virtual Machine Manager) will manage XenServer.
The description Vaughn-Nichols provides sounds like a full overlap of the two virtualization offerings, so it will need some official clarification to exactly understand the strategy here.

Anyway it’s a state of fact that every major virtualization vendor on the market now has a free, unlocked hypervisor.
This means two things:

• the battleground is officially shifted to virtual data center automation/orchestration
• the cost of entry for upcoming hypervisor providers (Parallels, Sun) is becoming huge

Who said “strict embargo” ?

Labels: Citrix, Microsoft

The first forecast of the year comes from Gartner, which predicted an increase by 43% of virtualization software revenue during this year, moving from $1.9 billion scored in 2008 to $2.7 billion.

In particular the analysis firm expects that revenue from VDI solutions will more than triple from $74.1 million to $298.6 million in 2009 while revenue from server virtualization management software will increase 42% from $913.9 million in 2008 to $1.3 billion in 2009.
Last but not least, the revenue from server virtualization infrastructure will grow 22.5% from $917 million in 2008 to $1.1 billion in 2009.

Gartner is also saying that VDI solutions already represent 11% of the current virtualization software revenue market.

Even more interesting than that, Garner predicts that Microsoft will challenge the VMware leadership by 2013.

This last one sounds like the most pessimist estimate about Microsoft released so far: in 2007 Forrester predicted that the Redmond giant wouldn’t impact the virtualization market until 2010, while IDC, just two months ago, suggested that Microsoft would turn the hypervisor market upside down this year.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Predictions has been updated accordingly.

Labels: Market Trends, Microsoft, VDI, VMware

It’s more than clear that Microsoft is betting on hosting providers to demonstrate how well Hyper-V can perform on large scale virtual infrastructures.

The company is so committed to win the hosting market (something that Parallels should carefully watch) that just released a (much needed) licensing guide: Hyper-V Hosting Guidance: Using and Licensing Microsoft Server Products in Hyper-V Virtual Hosting Scenarios

The 28-pages guide covers every scenario, including:

• Unmanaged dedicated server with Hyper-V
• Virtual dedicated server (VDS) for Web scenarios (using Windows Server guests in anonymous mode)
• Virtual dedicated server with line-of-business (LOB) scenarios (using Windows Server guests in authenticated mode)
• Use of virtualization in shared hosting scenarios
• Desktops as Hyper-V guests
• End customers running Microsoft products using the customers own licenses on the guest OS

As the Microsoft Services Provider License Agreement (SPLA) is not exactly an easy reading this additional help is recommended.

Labels: Licensing, Microsoft

The young application virtualization startup InstallFree (launched in April 2008) must be really interesting if it was able to hire away a former Thinstall executive from VMware and a former Kidaro executive from Microsoft.

The first one is Jean Morain, who served as Vice President of Marketing and Strategic Alliances at Thinstall before the VMware acquisition in January 2008.
Prior to Thinstall, Morain was at BMC Software, Inc., where she was senior manager of the Configuration Automation Products Group.
Morain will cover the role of Vice President of Business Development and Strategic Alliances at InstallFree.

The second one is Carl M. Wright, who served as Vice President, Sales and Corporate Strategy at Kidaro before the Microsoft acquisition in April 2008.
Wright previously held executive roles at Decru (purchased by NTAP) and Securify (purchased by SCUR), and served as Chief Information Security Officer for the U.S. Marine Corps.
Wright will cover the role of Senior Vice President of Sales at InstallFree.

The reason why InstallFree needs both Thinstall and Kidaro executives expertise is that the startup is trying to play two games at the same time.
On one side it’s offering a remarkable application virtualization product that really shines against some more popular competitors.
On another side it’s trying to leverage its approach to application virtualization in a way that the engine could offer the same capabilities currently offered by security wrappers like the former Kidaro Managed Workspaces:

Labels: InstallFree, Leadership, Microsoft, VMware

While virtualization professionals are still trying to figure out how the renewed alliance between Microsoft and EMC will work on virtualization, another major event happens: Red Hat joins the Microsoft Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP).

Pretty much like Cisco (why Cisco is here?), Citrix, Novell, Oracle, Sun, Unisys (why Unisys is here?), Virtual Iron and VMware did in the last few months (the SVVP was launched in June 2008) now also Red Hat had to accept the Microsoft conditions to offer concrete Windows support to its virtualized customers.
As side benefit, the Microsoft customers finally will be able to run Red Hat guest OSes on their Hyper-V hosts.

The agreement implies that:

• Red Hat will validate Windows Server 2003 SP2, Windows 2000 Server SP42, and Windows Server 2008 guests on Red Hat Enterprise virtualization technologies
• Microsoft will validate Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 and 5.3 guests on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V (all editions) and Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008

Note that, as usual, Red Hat is not specifying which virtualization technology will be validated. As their new offering based on KVM is not ready yet, we may safely assume that this agreement is about the implementation of Xen currently part of Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

Labels: Microsoft, Red Hat, Xen

While the virtualization community is still intensely discussing the benchmarks around XenServer, ESX and Hyper-V used for VDI scenarios, provided by Ruben Spruijt / Jeroen van de Kamp and confuted by VMware, a new study surfaces.

This performance analysis, committed by VMware, shifts the focus from VDI to application virtualization, comparing Citrix XenApp 5.0, Microsoft App-V 4.5, Symantec SVS Pro 2.1 and VMware ThinApp 4.0.1.

The measurements were performed using the Devil Mountain Software (DMS) Clarity Suite: the Clarity Tracker Agent is deployed on the benchmarked Windows machines, the Clarity Studio produces workload simulation, and the results are uploaded for further analysis to the Exo Performance Network.

The conclusion are rather interesting:

• Application virtualization solutions that use an embedded virtualization model (ThinApp) deliver the best application throughput. Only ThinApp delivers the combination of excellent raw performance plus low overall CPU utilization, making it the better solution for organizations seeking to minimize the performance “hit” typically associated with virtualization technology.
• By contrast, solutions that employ a kernel-mode driver or service (App-V, SVS, XenApp) introduce additional layers of software complexity – including significantly higher kernel-mode activity – which translate into runtime overhead that slows the application and/or places an additional burden on the CPU. These agents also consume a considerable amount of memory, both directly – as part of the agent’s process – and indirectly, through expansion of the application’s working set.
• Agent-based solutions also introduce a new and potentially catastrophic single point of failure (kernel mode execution) that IT organizations must factor into the testing and certification of their desktop computing stacks. Functional limitations, such as the lack of support for locked-down environments and/or inability to run on specific Windows versions (x64), further complicate the application virtualization equation, forcing IT shops to invest additional resources into designing infrastructure around these planning and deployment hurdles.

Read the whole document here.

Labels: Benchmarks, Citrix, Microsoft, Symantec, VMware

Microsoft is preparing a new key document for its virtualization customers: the Hyper-V Security Guide.

Considering the mission-critical role of any hypervisor, this guide should be available since day one (but Microsoft is not the only virtualization vendor to blame for the lack of security guidance).

The document is divided in three chapters:

• Hardening Hyper-V
• Virtual machine management and delegation
• Protecting virtual machines

So far it doesn’t seem particularly rich and Microsoft will have to greatly enhance the first chapter to make it a valuable resource, but it already offers some little jewels like the Hyper-V Attack Surface Reference Workbook.

The Hyper-V Security Guide is now in (public) beta testing so anybody can enroll for the program and download it right now.

Labels: Microsoft, Security

Yesterday EMC and Microsoft signed a 3 years extension of their strategic alliance (now ending in 2011).

Part of the agreement involves virtualization, which is pretty odd considering that EMC owns 80% of VMware and that VMware can be seriously impacted by the endless amount of free virtualization products/technologies that Microsoft released and will release in future.

The thing is rather comic as part of the agreement (published by both companies PR departments) includes:

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

Now, coopetition is something that every customer can understand but believing that the EMC consulting division will recommend (or support) the implementation Hyper-V over VMware seems way too much.

Steve Ballmer answers to CNET on this very point with a hard-to-believe statement:

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

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

(the entire interview below definitively deserves a read)

EMC always waved the VMware independence and its desire to not influence the virtualization vendor, but at the end of the day, as Patrick O’Rourke at Microsoft says, VMware provides EMC $200 million direct profit /year plus additional indirect profit positively influencing the stock trading.

Assuming EMC will really do its best to play fair with both VMware and Microsoft on virtualization, the real question is: how VMware will react to this?

At this point it’s legit to suspect that this agreement is the real reason why Diane Greene couldn’t stay as VMware CEO and had to be replaced by Paul Maritz (a former Microsoft executive).

While wondering about this last point it’s worth to recap the current status of the some key strategic alliances in the virtualization world:

• Microsoft, which is now seriously partnering with EMC, is also seriously partnering with Citrix which is now seriously partnering with Intel which was rumored to be interested in buying VMware away from EMC.
• EMC, which is now seriously partnering with Microsoft, owns 80% of VMware which is now seriously partnering with Cisco which owns 1,7% of VMware

So, let’s see, this story will end up with VMware and Citrix seriously partnering together?

Labels: Alliances, EMC, Microsoft, VMware

Microsoft just released an introductory book about its virtualization products for free:

Understanding Microsoft Virtualization Solutions (From the Desktop to the Datacenter) Mitch Tulloch (with the Microsoft Virtualization Team) ISBN: 9780735693371 452 pages

The book covers Hyper-V 2008, System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008, App-V (formerly Softricity SoftGrid), Terminal Services, MED-V (formerly Kidaro Managed Workspace), Microsoft Assessment & Planning Toolkit and even the technologies that Microsoft is trying to market as profile virtualization: User Profiles, Folder Redirection and Offline Files.

Some chapters are very basic (for example the one about MED-V) while others are pretty detailed (like the ones about Hyper-V and SCVMM).
Overall, this book is without doubts the best overview available today to understand the Microsoft virtualization offering.
If you are evaluating the adoption of one of the products above it deserves a read.

Thanks to Andrew Dugdell for the news.

Labels: Books, Microsoft

In June 2008 Microsoft published an important document for all the customers that are evaluating and adopting its hypervisor: the Performance Tuning Guidelines for Windows Server 2008.

The document contains a section dedicated to Hyper-V and while most of the suggestions included in this whitepaper are just common sense or recap of the product features, there are some hidden treasures:

Correct Memory Sizing

…

A good standard for the memory overhead of each VM is 32 MB for the first 1 GB of virtual RAM plus another 8 MB for each additional GB of virtual RAM. This should be factored in the calculations of how many VMs to host on a physical server. The memory overhead varies depending on the actual load and amount of memory that is assigned to each VM.

…

Disabling File Last Access Time Check

Windows Server 2003 and earlier Windows operating systems update the last-accessed time of a file when applications open, read, or write to the file. This increases the number of disk I/Os, which further increases the CPU overhead of virtualization. If applications do not use the last-accessed time on a server, system administrators should consider setting this registry key to disable these updates.

NTFSDisableLastAccessUpdate

HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem\      (REG_DWORD)

By default, both Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 disable the last-access time updates.

…

I/O Balancers Control

The virtualization stack balances storage I/O streams from different VMs so that each VM has similar I/O response times when the system’s I/O bandwidth is saturated. The following registry keys can be used to adjust the balancing algorithm, but the virtualization stack tries to fully use the I/O device’s throughput while providing reasonable balance. The first path should be used for storage scenarios, and the second path should be used for networking scenarios:

HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\StorVsp\<Key> = (REG_DWORD)

HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\VmSwitch\<Key> = (REG_DWORD)

Both storage and networking have three registry keys at the preceding StorVsp and VmSwitch paths, respectively. Each value is a DWORD and operates as follows. We do not recommend this advanced tuning option unless you have a specific reason to use it. Note that these registry keys might be removed in future releases:

• IOBalance_Enabled
  The balancer is enabled when set to a nonzero value and disabled when set to 0. The default is enabled for storage and disabled for networking. Enabling the balancing for networking can add significant CPU overhead in some scenarios.
• IOBalance_KeepHwBusyLatencyTarget_Microseconds
  This controls how much work, represented by a latency value, the balancer allows to be issued to the hardware before throttling to provide better balance. The default is 83 ms for storage and 2 ms for networking. Lowering this value can improve balance but will reduce some throughput. Lowering it too much significantly affects overall throughput. Storage systems with high throughput and high latencies can show added overall throughput with a higher value for this parameter.
• IOBalance_AllowedPercentOverheadDueToFlowSwitching
  This controls how much work the balancer issues from a VM before switching to another VM. This setting is primarily for storage where finely interleaving I/Os from different VMs can increase the number of disk seeks. The default is 8 percent for both storage and networking.

…

Interrupt Affinity

Under certain workloads, binding the device interrupts for a single network adapter to a single logical processor can improve performance for Hyper‑V. We recommend this advanced tuning only to address specific problems in fully using network bandwidth. System administrators can use the IntPolicy tool to bind device interrupts to specific processors.

…

Labels: Microsoft, Tech

Just yesterday virtualization.info covered the amazing work of Ruben Spruijt (Solution Architect and CTO at PQR) and Jeroen van de Kamp (Enterprise Architect and CTO at Login Consultants), a couple of well-known and respected virtualization experts that lead two separate Citrix and VMware solutions providers.

Their Virtual Reality Check project is a performance analysis of the leading hypervisors (VMware ESX, Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V) when running typical Microsoft Terminal Services/Citrix XenApp workloads: a Windows XP virtual desktop loaded with Outlook 2007 and Acrobat Reader 8.

Easy to guess, the post achieved one of the highest page view score in the history of virtualization.info, despite other prominent influencers already covered the project the previous week.

The non-sponsored results published by Spruijt and van de Kamp generated a lot of reactions as their conclusion on Citrix XenApp is:

Not having the ability to overcommit virtual machine memory is an clear disadvantage when
virtualizing desktops. Such a feature allows much more VM’s to be run than physical memory
normally would allow, which makes a virtual desktop solution much more economical.

…

XenServer is clearly optimized for Terminal Server and XenApp workloads, achieving near bare metal performance and even higher user densities than bare-metal configurations. This is possible because 32-bit 2003 terminal server with 4GB memory is relatively very efficient in comparison to other Windows operating systems.

While Microsoft didn’t comment (it has no interest in doing so), VMware immediately reacted: the company’s performance team published a new benchmark just few days (Jan 30) after the project Virtual Reality Check was announced (Jan 26).

The VMware performance study compares XenServer 5.0 and ESX 3.5.0 Update 3 performance when running Citrix XenApp workloads and highlights some odd results compared to what Virtual Reality Check exposed:

ESX supports about 13% more users than XenServer at a given latency while using less CPU.

Why the benchmarks are so different?

Stats and polls can be read in several different ways and manipulated as needed.
Simon Crosby, the CTO of Virtualization and Management division at Citrix, provides a possible read:

…

the VMware "study" is not a thorough exploration of a valid set of parameters for the Terminal Services / XenApp workload.  Instead, it is a narrow look at a particular set of configurations which are not reasonable in practice:

• No test of 32 bit workloads - the primary candidates for server consolidation for this workload because a 32 bit OS exhausts its memory at 4 GB and a modern server can pack hundreds of GB and many cores.  Our work in this area has shown a
  compelling benefit to virtualizing TS/XenApp 32 bit workloads on XenServer, and an equally compelling set of reasons not to use ESX for this purpose.
• Unrealistic configuration - The server used in the tests is certainly punchy - the machine had 64 GB RAM and 4 processors--each with 4 cores (16 total processor cores).  Anyone familiar with 64b TS/XenApp knows this machine could easily  support hundreds of XenApp sessions.  But the "scientists" at VMware don't.  They instead chose to run exactly one VM (with only 2 vCPU's and using only 25% of the available memory) and XenApp at minimal levels of concurrency (i.e. 10-40 users).  No multi-VM scenarios, no tests at useful user-counts.  Based on their measurements they appear to gleefully extrapolate deeper into the realm of fiction to proudly pronounce their horse the winner.

At this point we would like an additional comment from Ruben Spruijt and Jeroen van de Kamp as their work is somewhat questioned by the new VMware study.

Labels: Benchmarks, Citrix, Microsoft, VMware

Last week a couple of well-known and respected virtualization experts, Ruben Spruijt (Solution Architect and CTO at PQR) and Jeroen van de Kamp (Enterprise Architect and CTO at Login Consultants), launched a remarkable project called Virtual Reality Check.

The non-sponsored joint effort produced a set of valuable benchmark comparisons between VMware ESX, Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V, when running Windows XP and Vista virtual machines for Terminal Services and VDI environments:

• Bare-Metal Platform Index v1.0
• Hyper-V Platform Index v1.0
• VMware Platform Performance Index v1.0
• XenServer Platform Performance Index v1.0

To measure the hypervisors performance they used the recently released, free of charge, Login Virtual Session Indexer (VSI) and performed over 150 tests.

The best part of the documents released so far is that they carefully analyze the impact of several configuration changes for each hypervisor, suggesting which setup is the most performing.

If you are planning a VDI infrastructure the performance analysis these virtualization professionals redacted is a mandatory reading.

By the way: Ruben Spruijt and Jeroen van de Kamp will speak at the virtualization.info’s Virtualization Congress 2009, in Las Vegas.

On stage the two will discuss the results, unveil additional details that were not published and preview the upcoming new tests.
Additionally, they will teach how to setup a benchmarking facility using Login VSI.

Be sure to check their presentation abstract here.

Labels: Benchmarks, Citrix, Microsoft, VMware

Last week the public companies busy in the virtualization market (VMware, Citrix and Microsoft) reported their Q4 2008 results. While it’s not possible to make a comparison, as both Citrix and Microsoft businesses are not solely depending on virtualization, it’s yet interesting to have an aggregated view of  how they performed.

VMware

• Revenues for the fourth quarter were $515 million, an increase of 25% from the fourth quarter of 2007.
• GAAP operating income for the fourth quarter was $102 million, an increase of 34% from the fourth quarter of 2007. Non-GAAP operating income for the fourth quarter was $135 million, an increase of 25% from the fourth quarter of 2007.
• GAAP net income for the fourth quarter was $111 million, or $0.29 per diluted share, compared to $78 million, or $0.19 per diluted share, for the fourth quarter of 2007.   Non-GAAP net income for the quarter was $142 million, or $0.36 per diluted share, compared to $103 million, or $0.26 per diluted share, for the fourth quarter of 2007. 
• Revenues for the full year 2008 were $1.9 billion, an increase of 42% from 2007.
• GAAP operating income for the full fiscal year 2008 was $313 million, an increase of 33% from 2007. Non-GAAP operating income for the year 2008 was $469 million, an increase of 39% from 2007.
• GAAP net income for the full fiscal year 2008 was $290 million, or $0.73 per diluted share, compared to $218 million, or $0.61 per diluted share, for 2007.   Non-GAAP net income for the year 2008 was $416 million, or $1.05 per diluted share, compared to $295 million, or $0.82 per diluted share, for 2007. 
• Cash was more than $1.8 billion and deferred revenue was $870 million as of December 31, 2008. Since the beginning of 2008, cash increased 50% and deferred revenue increased 57%.

VMware didn’t cut at all its workforce, but because of this uncertainty, VMware is not providing revenue guidance for the full year 2009.

Citrix

• Product license revenue decreased 9%
• License updates revenue grew 13%
• Online services revenue grew 18%
• Technical services revenue, which is comprised of consulting, education and technical support, grew 13%
• Revenue grew in the America’s region by 3% and in the EMEA region by 2%, and decreased in the Pacific region by 6%
• Deferred revenue totaled $533 million, compared to $443 million on December 31, 2007, an increase of 21%
• Operating margin was 15% for the quarter; and non-GAAP operating margin was 26% for the quarter, excluding the effects of amortization of intangible assets primarily related to business combinations, stock-based compensation expense, the write-off of IPR&D, and the non-cash benefit related to the adjustment of payroll taxes discussed under non-GAAP results
• Cash flow from operations was $166 million, compared to $113 million in the fourth quarter of 2007
• Repurchased shares were 2.2 million shares at an average net price paid of $25.89.

Citrix cut the workforce by 10% and expects net revenue to be approximately flat as compared to 2008.

Microsoft

• Microsoft Corp. today announced revenue of $16.63 billion for the second quarter ended Dec. 31, 2008, a 2% increase over the same period of the prior year
• Operating income, net income and diluted earnings per share for the quarter were $5.94 billion, $4.17 billion and $0.47, declines of 8%, 11% and 6%, respectively, compared with the prior year

Microsoft cut the workforce by 5,000 jobs and can’t offer quantitative revenue and EPS guidance for the balance of this fiscal year.

Labels: Citrix, Microsoft, VMware

Right after releasing the first beta of Hyper-V 2.0 (with Windows Server 2008 R2 and without it), Microsoft continues to feed the potential customers with details about the badly wanted live migration capability.

Last week the company published a couple of interesting resources:

• a Hyper-V Live Migration Overview & Architecture whitepaper
• a Step-by-Step Guide to Using Live Migration in Windows Server 2008 R2 article

Both are worth a check if you plan to test the feature against VMware VMotion, Citrix XenMotion, etc.

Labels: Microsoft

One of the biggest challenge when adopting a new virtualization platform is securing the ISVs support.
Without it moving from the market leader to a more innovative or cheaper solution is a risky business.

It’s the case of KVM, the open source virtualization platform that is part of the Linux Kernel since version 2.6.20 and that is attracting a large number of developers (away from Xen, we were told).

KVM may be very cool, and the fact that Red Hat acquired its maintainer, the startup Qumranet, certainly ignites high hopes for the platform.
But the reality is that, at today, KVM is still too young to feature the ISVs support that VMware, Citrix or Microsoft can offer.

Excluding IBM, which just started to its Lotus Notes, Symphony and a bunch of other applications on the Virtual Bridges implementation of KVM, no other major IT vendor is officially endorsing KVM.

As often happens, Microsoft is the key to change this situation: it’s now more than clear that virtualization is being used across the globe to virtualize and consolidate in large majority Windows boxes.
If Microsoft officially supports Windows in a KVM virtual machine then the other ISVs will follow, and the customers can start adopting the solution with confidence.

With much surprise it’s possible that the unlikely event already happened.

As most readers remember Cisco is using a mysterious virtualization platform inside its Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) 4.1 appliance. 
Despite the company stays mum about the VMM used inside WAAS, in the past months virtualization.info received a remarkable number of confirmations from different sources that the appliance is almost certainly powered by KVM.

Now Cisco is selling WAAS 4.1 and its new virtualization capabilities certifying its use as a platform where the core Microsoft services (part of Windows) can be consolidated.
To do so Cisco joined the Microsoft Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP) in August 2008. But the SVVP program doesn’t include Windows support.

This means that, through the SVVP program, Microsoft is supporting its core services inside the Cisco WAAS 4.1 virtual machines (which are, we are almost sure, KVM virtual machines), but not the operating system itself.
So, who is supporting Windows exactly? 

The only two possibilities are that Cisco is in charge for the OS support, and it seems unlikely, or it’s Microsoft that is making an exception and is supporting its operating system inside KVM, at least the Cisco implementation of it.

The reason why all these details are unclear, and Cisco customers should investigate before buying WAAS 4.1, is the business relationship of the two software giants: Cisco is definitively in bed with VMware and it’s preparing to make a major announcement, while Microsoft is totally in love with Citrix, which probably isn’t too happy to know that KVM is being supported so quickly.

If it will emerge that Microsoft officially supports Windows on KVM, this may further boost the Red Hat chances to attract customers with its upcoming new virtualization platform.

Labels: Alliances, Cisco, KVM, Microsoft

As promised in November, Microsoft launched yesterday the first beta of Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MED-V), formerly known as Kidaro Managed Workspace.

Microsoft acquired Kidaro in March 2008, but as usual the product must be re-engineered to meet the software development criteria and quality standards that the company enforces before it can be rebranded and sold.

Managed Workspace is a platform wrapper for Type-2 VMMs (non bare-metal virtualization platforms, like Virtual PC or Virtual Server) that envelops virtual machines in a security layer where the administrator can define granular corporate policies, deciding which physical networks can be accessed, when the VM expires, if the virtual hard drive is encrypted, etc.

Rather than platform wrappers Microsoft is calling this category of products as client-hosted virtualization, highlighting the fact that the virtual desktop images are centrally stored and managed. But this terminology may lead to confusion with VDI (which Microsoft used to call hosted desktop environments just last year).
As the industry doesn’t agree yet on an unambiguous definition, virtualization.info will use “platform wrappers” in articles and in the Virtualization Industry Radar.

Microsoft has just three competitors in this space at the moment: VMware, with its ACE (but please note that the ACE capabilities are being moved directly inside VMware Workstation and the product as is today will possibly disappear soon), Sentillion with its vThere and the just arrived Tresys Technology with its VM Fortress.
On top of them also MokaFive is moving to include similar features in its new Virtual Desktop Solution.

MED-V, which only supports Virtual PC 2007 SP1 in this first version, will be included in the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) where also App-V (formerly SoftGrid) is.
This means that any customer unwilling to subscribe the software assurance can’t access it.

Microsoft expects to release MED-V 1.0 in the H1 2009. Meanwhile the beta program can be enrolled here.

Labels: Microsoft

Yesterday Sun announced a new offering for the SMB segment: a bundle of some of its mid-range servers and SANs with VMware ESX or Microsoft Hyper-V.
Exactly: Sun, which is investing million of dollars on its own hypervisor, is actively pushing two leading competitors.

What’s the strategy behind this initiative?

This is not just a typical offering to pre-install the hypervisor of choice inside a brand new server like every major OEM does since a while now: Sun issued a press announcement, published a dedicated website, highlighted the differences between the two virtualization products suggesting which one is better in which scenario.

An agreement to resell competing hypervisors would make sense if Sun was three years away from releasing xVM Server. But while in late, xVM Server is almost here (as the available documentation demonstrates).

Supposing that Sun can successfully sell ESX and Hyper-V to its customers, what its sales reps will tell them when xVM Server will be out? “Do you mind throwing away the investment that we suggested and that you just made and switch to our hypervisor?”

At that point it will not matter if xVM Server+Ops Center will be a free, valuable platform: customers will invest in learning, deploying and troubleshooting ESX or Hyper-V. How they could consider switching to xVM Server before, let’s say, three years?

This is not the first time that Sun pushes for a competing hypervisor: its VDI solution at the moment only supports VMware ESX and the company couldn’t say when they plan to support xVM Server.

As the Sun VDI is around since a while, it (barely) makes sense that the company tried to push it using the support for ESX as a major selling point. But what’s the sense of this new initiative announced just (hopefully) weeks before the xVM Server launch?

The Sun virtualization proposition seems solid and promising over the long term. Why the company has to sell other solutions instead of waiting for its own?

Labels: Alliances, Microsoft, Sun, VMware

As most virtualization.info readers know, Microsoft offers two flavors of its hypervisor: the first is part of the Windows operating system, no matter if it’s the Server Core version or the fully-featured one, the second is a stand-alone product.

There are some remarkable differences between the two: the former places Windows Server 2008 in its parent partition, using its driver model and licensing terms, while the latter comes with a minimal version of Windows (even smaller than Server Core) and thus can offer just a subset of features. Additionally, this second version can’t use the licensing term of its parent partition OS, so the customers must use it with existing licenses (for example the ones of Windows Server 2003 guests) or buy new ones.

Just one week after releasing Hyper-V 2.0 as part of the new Windows Server 2008 R2 beta 1, Microsoft is also releasing the stand-alone version of the beta.

There is welcome surprise: the two R2 versions are fundamentally the same, and even this stand-alone product ships with both Quick and Live Migration:

The product stays free of charge and can be downloaded here.

Labels: Microsoft

The second version of Hyper-V is much awaited as Microsoft promised to introduce with it a virtual machine live migration technology that could rival with VMware VMotion and Citrix XenMotion.

As it seems that customers can’t live without this capability, the news that Microsoft won’t deliver Hyper-V 2.0 before 2010 immediately put the company out of competition for another year.

But Microsoft learned from the errors of the past and it’s trying to announce less and deliver more. So, with much surprise the new version of the hypervisor came out last week, as part of the Windows Server 2008 R2 beta.

This first build, available for download to the general public, includes all the features already announced in a whitepaper in November 2008 plus some more:

• Live Migration (here a 5 minutes video showing it in action)
• Virtual disks hot plug
• Support for 32 logical processors
• Support for Second Level Address Translation or SLAT (usually known as Nested Page Tables or NPT
• Support for TCP/IP Offload Engines (TOEs) and Jumbo Frames
• Extended PowerShell support (with 240 new cmdlets for hard core scripting)
• CPU Core Parking

Along with Hyper-V 2.0, Windows Server 2008 R2 includes another much awaited virtualization component: the VDI connection broker.

Microsoft has in fact extended the Terminal Server (now called Remote Desktop services or RDS) capabilities to include a connection broker: the Remote Desktop Connection Broker.

Labels: Microsoft

Thanks to its fault-tolerance engine, everRun FT, Marathon Technologies became one of the key partner of Citrix in the last year at a point that parts of its product were included in the new XenServer 5.0.

Now Marathon is ready to rock Microsoft Hyper-V as well: last week the company announced a new agreement with Microsoft to develop a future version of the hypervisor which uses everRun as fault-tolerance mechanism.

Once again Citrix and Microsoft are sharing technologies and partners, making their two hypervisors more and more similar in approach and features.
Over time the difference between the two will be in a small set of cutting-edge capabilities that Citrix will implement 18 months before Microsoft, and will sell to enterprises that don’t want to go with VMware anymore for any reason.

Labels: Alliances, Marathon Technologies, Microsoft

One of the biggest limitation of Virtual Server 2005 was the impossibility to backup the running virtual machines with NTBackup.

When Microsoft moved to Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V this limitation was finally removed, but the capability is not exactly out of the box.

To achieve the goal customers must manually create some new keys in the Windows Registry so that the Hyper-V Volume Shadow Service (VSS) writer can interact with the new Windows Server Backup (WSB).

The configuration also has some serious limitations:

1. WSB only supports volume based backups: if the VM configuration file and the actual virtual hard drive (.VHD) are stored in different volumes, all volumes must be selected.
   Conversely, when performing a recovery from backup, the entire volume or volumes must be restored.
2. Live backup is not supported for those VMs that have dynamic disks. In such case only offline backups can be performed.
3. If the VM has more than one snapshot the restore will fail (there’s a workaround for this)
4. Live backup is unavailable for those guest OSes that don’t support VSS, like Windows 2000 or XP, as well as those guest OSes that don’t have the Hyper-V Integration Services installed.
   In such cases WSB will put the VM in a saved state, backup the snapshot, and finally restore the VM.

Of course Microsoft has all the interest to keep these limitations so that most demanding customers will be forced to look at the new Data Protection Manager 2007 SP1.

Labels: Microsoft, Tech

SearchServerVirtualization.com is breaking the news today revealing that Citrix will release a management suite for Microsoft Hyper-V in Q1 2009.
The product, dubbed Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V (codename Encore), will bring in some most wanted features like the virtual machines live migration that Microsoft will be unable to deliver until Windows Server 2008 R2, somewhere in 2010.

Citrix continues to advertise the same strategy since the XenSource acquisition: deliver value on top of the Microsoft hypervisor as it did for Terminal Services in the last decade.
But with virtualization the situation is different: Citrix doesn’t have a solution that depends on a Microsoft product. Citrix has a complete virtualization stack that could totally replace Microsoft in a customer environment. So what’s the strategy for the overlapping components and features?

Lou Shipley, General manager and Group Vice President of XenServer division at Citrix clarifies it: the company plans to stay on top of competition developing software that is 18 months ahead of Microsoft technologies.

The article also reveals that Citrix will introduce a memory overcommit technique, the so called ballooning, in XenServer 6.0, along with virtual lab management and workload balancing capabilities.
The new release is expected somewhere in 2009.

Labels: Alliances, Citrix, Microsoft

More than one year ago Microsoft released Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2007, its solution for enterprise backup/restore.
In the company strategy System Center can serve as a modular management suite for virtual infrastructures, and DPM is a key component, but the 2007 version only supported Virtual Server 2005.

This week Microsoft releases the first service pack which introduces support for Hyper-V (both the version embedded in Windows Server 2008 and the stand-alone Hyper-V Server 2008).
It means that Microsoft virtualization professionals will be finally able to backup a running virtual machine without service interruption.

Here’s a video showing the product in action:

Interestingly enough, on the video page on TechNet EDGE Microsoft suggests to run DPM 2007 SP1 on the Hyper-V host itself, to realize a self-contained solution.
This approach sounds very risky (what happens if DPM needs a major upgrade that requires the OS reboot?) and probably has a negative impact on the host performance.

This is exactly the kind of issues that may compromise the stability of any hypervisor. It becomes a concrete risk as long as the Windows Server 2008 copy that runs on the Hyper-V parent partition allows the installation of any file.

Microsoft is not the only one that needs to discourage such practice: VMware dropped its Console Operating System (COS) in ESXi, and will do the same in future versions of ESX, also because some customers continue to install 3rd party tools inside it, generating unnecessary support activity.

Labels: Microsoft

While IDC is basically saying that Microsoft will rule the hypervisor segment during 2009, an interesting bit of information emerge from a SearchServerVirtualization.com article.

Covering the competition between VMware and Citrix on hypervisors fault tolerance, the author also mentions Microsoft and reports a quote from Zane Adam, Senior Director of Virtualization Product Management and Marketing, that said:

We don't see this [fault-tolerance software for Hyper-V] as an area of high demand right now, but we are watching this closely.

This may mean that Microsoft has no plan to implement any form of fault tolerance for Hyper-V 2.0, expected somewhere in 2010.

Labels: Microsoft

After the Yankee Group another major analysis firm releases its forecasts for 2009: IDC.
IDC is always brave in its predictions about virtualization, but this year surpassed all expectations.

In its latest report, Worldwide System Infrastructure Software 2009 - Top 10 Predictions, the company says that The Hypervisor Market Will Be Turned Upside Down by Microsoft in 2009:

…Microsoft is working diligently on the version 2 product and will likely address the most critical shortcomings, and with the next release (targeted for 2010) should get the product to the classic Microsoft design point: that being good enough for the vast majority of the market needs.

In the interim, we can still expect that the number of footprints that Hyper-V makes (despite the product’s current maturity level) will be staggering and will turn the volume metrics of the market upside down.

These footprints are likely to penetrate all size class customers. Within the largest customers, many of which have already committed a substantial amount of their infrastructure to VMware solutions, expect use of Hyper-V to be within test, development, and noncritical and lower priority workloads at first…

Please note that IDC talks about a “hypervisor market” implying that a “virtual infrastructure market” exists as well and that may have different protagonists.

This is not the only prediction about virtualization included in the report:

• High Availability of Applications and Data Will Become a Key Driver for the Next Phase of Virtualization Software Adoption
• Standalone Virtual Server Management Tools Will Be Gobbled Up by Automated Systems Change, Configuration, and Operations Automation Platforms
• The Convergence of Software Complexity, Virtualization, and Cloud Computing Will Produce Precipitation in the Form of Software Appliances
• Hypervisors for Client Hardware Will Become Increasingly Available in 2009, Impacting Traditional Desktop Management Concepts

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Predictions has been updated accordingly.

Labels: IDC, Market Trends,