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Windows 7 for XP ProfessionalsUpdating Support Skills from XP to Windows 7by Bink.nu's Raymond Comvalius
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Microsoft Corp. today announced that some business customers around the world have saved on average $470,000 (U.S.) per year through IT projects using Microsoft virtualization software. Microsoft’s business customers have been able to use virtualization to help reduce operations and capital expenses via reduced electrical power consumption and cooling within datacenters, reduced hardware acquisition costs, automation of desktop and server management, and centralized application deployment.
The cost of running IT systems has increased as electrical power, cooling and physical space has become constrained. In his 2008 refereed journal article, “Worldwide electricity used in data centers,” Jonathan Koomey, Ph.D., of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Stanford University concluded that total datacenter power was about 1.5 percent of all U.S. electricity use in 2005, with 80 percent of that amount going toward powering and cooling servers. A separate report, by Gartner Inc., stated that “the effective use of virtualization can reduce server energy consumption by up to 82 percent and floor space by 85 percent” (Gartner: “Energy Savings via Virtualization: Green IT on a Budget”; Nov. 12, 2008)...................Continue At Source
Well the good news is that the rumor is now confirmed as a recently updated WinHEC 2008 agenda touts a session dedicated to this particular functionality with one subtle difference - targeted at Windows Server 2008 R2.
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Matthijs ten Seldam has produced a very cool tool that enables you to import your existing virtual machines from Virtual PC and Virtual Server in Hyper-V.
VMC to Hyper-V Import Tool, VMC2HV for short, imports the configuration from a Virtual Machine Configuration (VMC) file. Both Virtual PC and Virtual Server use VMC files to store the hardware and other properties of a VM. It reads the VMC file and maps all relevant properties to those for a Hyper-V VM. For those properties that did not exist, it provides additional options. Those properties that no longer exist are ignored.
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Kicking off a global series of “Get Virtual Now” events that will reach more than 250,000 customers and partners, Microsoft Corp. today announced strong customer and partner adoption of Microsoft virtualization software, new tools and programs to drive partner success.Microsoft also announced the upcoming availability of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008, Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.5 and the new Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 as a no-cost download during today’s keynote addresses streamed live at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/events/virtualization/default.mspx.Microsoft executives will further outline virtualization solutions for customers and also demonstrate the live migration capabilities of the upcoming release of Windows Server 2008 R2.“Now is the time for customers to get virtual,” said Bob Kelly, corporate vice president of infrastructure server marketing within Microsoft’s Server and Tools Business. “With desktop and datacenter virtualization offerings available from Microsoft and its partners, customers are adopting Microsoft solutions because they have better value and will make IT operations more dynamic. At a lower cost than other datacenter virtualization solutions, Microsoft software meets customers’ needs from the desktop to the datacenter in an integrated offering on the platform they know.”.................................Continue At Source
For a prospect customer there's nothing better than a real-world implementation to realize the potential or a certain technology. And this is very true in an almost unexplored technology like virtualization.
Microsoft, which eats its own dog food since the Virtual Server 2005 era, just announced the complete migration of both MSDN and TechNet, two of the most popular web sites in the world, on virtual machines.
Microsoft kept the back-end database on physical boxes, but moved 100% of its IIS7 frond-ends on Hyper-V RC0 VMs with 4 virtual CPUs and 10GB RAM. The virtualization hosts (no mention of the brand obviously) are powered by 2 Intel quad-core CPUs and 32GB RAM (2GB are reserved for the Windows Server 2008 parent partition).
The performance report after this migration is very interesting:
Are you having a growing number of virtual machines that may not be patched on a regular basis because they are offline? Wouldn't it be nice to have a way to maintain them with the most up-to-date security patches? Now, you have a free solution! Yes - FREE!
Introducing Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool (Beta)
The Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool manages the workflow of updating large numbers of offline virtual machines according to their individual needs. To do this, the tool works with Microsoft® System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007 (VMM) and with software update management systems (at present, either Microsoft Windows Server® Update Services 3.0 (WSUS) or Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007).
The tool uses "servicing jobs" to manage the update operations based on lists of existing virtual machines stored in VMM. Using Windows Workflow Foundation technology, a servicing job runs snippets of PowerShell scripts to work with virtual machines.
Sage Research said 96% of the respondents use Windows on their virtual servers and 52% are running Linux.
Virtual machines need an operating system with which to run, and the operating system most frequently being used in the current wave of virtualization is Windows, according to a survey sponsored by Sage Research and published in its recent Sage/CMB market Pulse newsletter. Sage Research is the technology practice branch of custom market research firm Chadwick Martin Bailey. Sage surveyed Chadwick Martin Bailey's panel of technology service providers and panel of professional technology users and found 96% of the respondents use Windows on their virtual servers.
Many sites use more than one brand of operating system to run virtual machines. The runner-up was Linux, with 52% of the respondents using the open source operating system. Unix was third at 30% and Solaris fourth at 29%. The figures do not add up to 100% because sites in some cases are using multiple brands of operating system in their virtual machines.
The Mac OS was used by 12% of respondents and NetWare by 6%.
The findings were a broad brush stroke picture of server virtualization. They did not specify how many virtual machines of each kind was running on the virtualized servers or who the virtualization software supplier was.
Just poking around the Microsoft VHD site and there have been some new VHDs added. New on the VHD site recently are: Biztalk Server 2006, Windows Server 2008 Beta 3, Exchange Server 2007 SP1 Beta 2 and Windows Vista Enterprise 30-day Eval Edition. There is also a new VHD available for Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express.
Lot's of things to look at - so have a good time checking them out.
Microsoft internal IT uses Virtual Server for over 18 months now, some 1250 VMs
Savings:
Consolidation Ratio 8 to 12 million USD saved by consolidationFrom 30 racks to two racksPower form 525 Amps to 8 Amps!Storage from 19 TB to 11 TB
Update: see all stats in this pic (www.virtualization.info)
Microsoft's Dave Northey's Blog: I was reading this article about the up-and-coming ESX Server 3i from VMware.
It calls out a bunch on "new features" that we have either been doing for ages, or have announced that we will have in Windows Server Virtualisation (WSV), when we ship Windows Server 2008 - I'm confused (seems like someone is trying to introduce a load of FUD - Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt).
They call out 64GB virtual machines and 128GB physical machines. We'll do 64GB virtual machines with WSV and 64-bit Windows will work with systems with up to 1 Terabyte of physical memory. The reason for this, if you're interested is that our hypervisor is 64-bit and ESX is still 32-bit.
They call out support for virtualisation-aware (para-virtualised) Linux operating systems. We are working with both Novell and XenSource, so we'll do that too (we already support both RedHat and SUSE Linux on Virtual Server).
There's more, but the 'funniest' is the reference to expanded hardware support (storage and networking). Both Virtual Server and WSV use native Windows device drivers - have a look at http://www.windowsservercatalog.com, you'll see that we already support over 6,500 storage items. Both our server virtualisation offerings (Virtual Server and WSV) are completely hardware independent - as long as there is a Windows device driver, you're OK. VMware has a very small, limited sub-set of hardware that they can run on.
Just thought I'd call it out - there's a lot of FUD out there - don't believe any of it.
via www.winbeta.org
As Microsoft officials confirmed last week, Microsoft is planning to make a first test version of its hypervisor technology available simultaneously with Windows Server 2008 Release Candidate (RC) 0.
This week, David Greschler, Microsoft’s Director of Integrated Virtualization Strategy, also confirmed that a beta version of Viridian — a k a Windows Server Virtualization — will be built into Windows Server 2008 when that product is released to manufacturing.
Previously, Microsoft officials had been cagey about how they planned to get the Windows Server 2008 hypervisor to customers, given that the final version of that hypervisor isn’t due to ship until six months after Windows Server 2008. Some had speculated Microsoft would make the hypervisor a download and deliver it to customers in that form.
Instead, it sounds like the gameplan is to simply push out to customers the update to the Viridian beta bits that will be part of the final Windows Server 2008 release. The first iteration of Viridian, due out with Windows Server RC0, is a Community Technology Preview (CTP) build, not a full-fledged beta build.
Microsoft officials are still declining to provide an exact date as to when they plan to make Windows Server 2008 RC0 and the Viridian CTP 1 available to more than the select group of Technology Adoption Program (TAP) partners who got them last week. But sources say Microsoft is now targeting the week of September 17 to get the Windows Server RC0 build out to a broader group of testers.“The most interesting stuff around virtualization right now centers on the looming price war to come in the next 60 to 90 days,” said Yankee Group Analyst Laura DiDio. “Microsoft (believe it or not) though far from being the best of breed offering, has a much less expensive product than VMWare. VMWare, which is the market leader with approximately 60 percent marketshare is by far the most expensive product on the market.
“However, they (VMWare) plan to implement an unspecified price cut by year’s end which will coincidentally (or not) coincide with Microsoft’s release of the Viridian beta,” DiDio continued. “Right now, a list price apples to apples comparison of Microsoft vs. VMWare shows that Microsoft’s Virtual Server costs 50 percent less in a Single Server entry level configuration.
“The big irony here is that the reason VMWare is so much more expensive is because anytime a corporate customer purchases VMWare’s virtualization offering they also have to buy a Windows Server license (or a Red Hat or Novell server license if using Linux) on top of paying for the VMWare offering,” she said. “Microsoft — and the Linux vendors like Red Hat include virtualization for free as part of the baseline server OS. VMWare’s management offering is also priced higher.”