September 2008 Archives

It's been awhile since we've posted a video. This one is actually from Intel, from the Microsoft Management Summit back in the spring, and it's a demonstration of Hyper-V running on an HP server with a quad-core Intel Xeon processor.

Keith Mayer, Chief Technology Officer at BrightPlanIT (a Microsoft partner) walks through the demo. If you haven't taken the Hyper-V dive yet, or you want to see someone who clearly knows what they're doing navigate the management interface, check it out.

Hyper-V got a little bigger (for lack of a better word) this week. You can download an update for Hyper-V that will allow it to support 24 logical processors, as well as raise the maximum number of virtual machines from 128 to 192. Will you need this much Hyper-V power? Probably not, but there is some interesting math that shows how much money you can save when virtualization scales up like this.

Dan Woodman breaks down the numbers on his blog. If you have a physical server running 20 VMs with Hyper-V, you can cut the cost of Windows Server 2008 by nearly 50 percent. At 192 virtual machines, you get down to $62 per Windows Server license.

I just asked our in-office virtualization guru how this plays out for Microsoft. It seems that all of this virtualization is going to cost Microsoft some licensing fees. Of course, there's no guarantee that any Hyper-V user would have bought 20 more physical machines and their licenses. It's likely users are virtualizing more now because they can. And of course, Microsoft stands to potentially gain from the sale of virtualization management tools like System Center as well.

Windows High Performance Computing Server 2008 has released to manufacturing. Ever wonder what goes into a product like this? How about a beta last November, then a series of CTPs, then a second Beta in May, and then a couple release candidates. Oh, and 600MB of technical specifications, 500K lines of code, 250 customer-based design changes, and 3000 beta downloads. Yeah, that's about it.

The HPC market is not the most inviting place for Windows people, as Ryan Waite, Product Unit Manager for Windows HPC Server, pointed out in his blog post about the release.

Yes, there are a lot of skeptics. The HPC industry uses mostly Linux or UNIX servers. To even suggest Windows could be successful in HPC is blasphemy. To build our second release we went to customers, especially customers who didn’t use Windows. We conducted over 100 customer visits. We did internships, where we would work on site with HPC admins and developers. We created a customer advisory board with leading HPC experts from computational finance, engineering, government, academia and the life sciences and they were brutally honest with their feedback. We assisted several ISVs with their ports to Windows and conducted five separate week-long performance deep-dives with ISVs where we not only helped port, analyze, and tune their codes but we helped with improving concurrency in general. In the process we ate a lot of humble pie while learning how people really use their HPC servers: job schedulers, deployment tools, cluster administration tools, compilers, debuggers, and MPI stacks.

You can find more information, and read about Cray becoming an OEM partner for Windows HPC at the new HPC site.

As we've previously mentioned when talking about the Server Core edition of Windows Server 2008, it lacks a GUI. That means you need to know your command-line tools. Nirmal Sharma reviews a few of the important ones over at ServerWatch. It's a handy reference you may want to bookmark or maybe print out.

If you're following the goings on in virtualization and you want to see what you missed at VMworld out in Las Vegas this week, ServerWatch has you covered there as well. Check out the Virtualization Watch section for reports from the show.

Windows Server 2008 includes improvements to failover clusters that are aimed at simplifying clusters, making them more secure, and enhancing security. There is a step-by-step guide for configuring a two-node failover cluster available for download on TechNet.

This guide describes the steps for installing and configuring a file server failover cluster that has two nodes. By creating the configuration in this guide, you can learn about failover clusters and familiarize yourself with the Failover Cluster Management snap-in interface in Windows Server® 2008 Enterprise or Windows Server® 2008 Datacenter.

Remember that the failover cluster feature is not available in Windows Web Server 2008 or Windows Server 2008 Standard.

 

Andy Patrizio at InternetNews took a look at the Windows 7 timeline and pegged June 2009 as the expected delivery date. We all know that is very subject to change. You can look for the Professional Developer's Conference in late October as the launch platform for the first public beta of Windows 7.

Microsoft has previously said that Windows 7 would ship in early 2010, and given Vista's January 2007 ship date, that date matches the above Microsoft statement. Its beta cycles are usually about a year in length, so a June ship date would be cutting it close. Then again, it has had a long time to work on it - Vista released to manufacturing in late 2006 - and it's not changing much.

Last month we learned that the server version of Windows 7 would not be a major release. It will instead be known as Windows Server 2008 R2. That leaves open questions as to how different either Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 will be from Vista.

Microsoft has posted videos of the keynotes and breakout sessions from this week's Get Virtual Now event. The keynote speakers included Steve Ballmer, Bob Kelly, Bob Muglia, Tom Bittman, and Kevin Turner. The breakout sessions focused on desktop virtualization, Hyper-V, infrastructure optimization, disaster recovery, security, and server management.

There are a couple of product demo videos planned for the page as well, though they aren't live at press time.

The videos are the next best thing to being there, but that doesn't men you can't attend an event as Get Virtual Now hits the road in October and November. You can see the event schedule and register at the Get Virtual Now site.

Internationally, the event hits the road next week and will be crossing the globe until November. See the schedule at the Microsoft site.

Richard Adhikari of InternetNews has a round-up of the virtualization news that came out of Microsoft this week, including the forthcoming Hyper-V Server 2008. Richard mentioned the Live Migration demo that was done for the announcement in Bellevue yesterday:

Live migration, which involves moving a virtual machine from one physical server to another while its running, has been one area in which Microsoft is playing catch-up. VMware has offered live migration since 2004, while Citrix-owned XenSource, supplier of the open source Xen hypervisor, has done so since last year. The next version of the Microsoft Hyper-V server will have the live migration capabilities, Microsoft said.

Also of note is the fact that VMware's annual VMWorld festival takes places in Vegas (baby, Vegas) next week. We'll be scanning ServerWatch for news from Amy Newman, the site's managing editor, who will be in Vegas reporting on the conference.

There's a lot of news this morning on the Hyper-V and virtualization fronts, with a Microsoft launch event planned for later in the day. You can get the bullet points of the important news at the Windows Virtualization Team blog, but here are the highlights:

• Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008, a new hypervisor-based server virtualization product, will be released within 30 days and be available at no cost via the Web. Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 provides a simplified, reliable, and optimized virtualization solution that allows customers to consolidate Windows or Linux workloads onto a single physical server. Hyper-V Server 2008 allows customers to leverage their existing patching, provisioning, management and support tools, processes and skills.

• System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 will be released within 30 days. System Center Virtual Machine Manager enables customers to configure and deploy new virtual machines and centrally manage their virtualized infrastructure, whether running on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2, Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 or VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3. System Center Virtual Machine Manager is part of the System Center suite of products, which provides centralized, enterprise-class management of physical and virtual resources across desktops and datacenters

• There is a “Get Virtual Now” event series is designed to educate more than 250,000 IT professionals on Microsoft virtualization products, deployment tools and partner solutions. The series of more than 125 events started Aug. 3 in South Africa, and by early 2009 will have covered more than 50 other countries.

Also of note: Microsoft’s global server OEM partners report that nearly 100% of their customers who order Windows Server 2008 with hardware are also choosing to have Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V included with their order.

Ryan Bass explained the basics of getting started with Hyper-V on Enterprise Networking Planet this week, specifically if you're moving from the beta or release candidate to the final release version. His article gives you an idea how easy it is to get Hyper-V installed and started: the installation instructions are just five easy steps.

There is that one all-important caveat to remember:

The biggest barrier to getting started with Hyper-V is hardware. Unfortunately, you won't be able to use older equipment because Hyper-V requires a 64-bit processor with hardware assisted virtualization and hardware data execution protection.

If you are more of a visual person, Ryan also has a video on Creating a Virtual Machine with Hyper-V.

Datamation published a brief Q&A with Sam Ramji, senior director of platform strategy at Microsoft, today. Ramji oversees Microsoft's initiatives in Linux and all things open source, which at first glance might seem a like a strange job for someone at Microsoft. But the reality is that Linux and other open source products are out there and it's better for everyone if there's some communication between the two groups and interoperability between the software.

Q: At a recent Microsoft Worldwide Partner conference, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer seemed to be saying that Microsoft will work with open source, but will never actually produce open source software. Is that a correct reading of the company's attitude?

I’m glad you asked this, because it’s incredibly important that we accurately articulate Microsoft’s open source strategy. Microsoft believes that the next ten years of software will be a time of growth and change where both open source and Microsoft communities will grow together. We believe that in an increasingly interconnected world, more people have more opportunity; to use more technology; to do more things than ever before. We support those choices and are expanding interoperability between open source technologies and Microsoft technologies.

Back in February, Ramji wrote about how open source influenced Windows Server 2008, with features such as modular architecture and feedback-driven development.