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Microsoft Unveils New Licensing, Expanded Product Support Policies to Ease Path to Virtualization

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Microsoft just made a couple of noteworthy announcements.

Update: more background information on the Windows Virtualization Team blog.

Beginning Sept. 1, 2008, customers will be able to move any of 41 Microsoft server applications between servers within a server farm as often as necessary without paying additional licensing fees, and they can take advantage of expanded technical support.

As you probably already know, Microsoft also will begin a worldwide series of “Get Virtual Now” events this month that will showcase Microsoft virtualization products and partner solutions, reaching more than 250,000 IT professionals.

Microsoft is updating its software licensing terms for 41 server applications, including Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Enterprise edition, Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 Standard and Enterprise editions, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Enterprise and Professional editions, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, and Microsoft System Center products.

The company is waiving its previous 90-day reassignment rule, allowing customers to reassign licenses from one server to another within a server farm as frequently as needed. For many customers, the change will reduce the number of licenses they need to support their IT systems, increase agility, and simplify the tracking of application instances or processors because customers now can count licenses by server farm instead of by server.

Microsoft has also updated its technical support policy for 31 server applications so that customers can receive technical support when deploying those applications on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Microsoft Hyper-V Server or any other third-party validated virtualization platform. Now customers can get the same level of product support in a virtualized environment that they are accustomed to with non-virtual environments.

To enable this support policy, Microsoft launched the Server Virtualization Validation Program last June. The program is open to any software vendor to test and validate its virtualization software to run Windows Server 2008 and previous versions of Windows Server. We just reported that Cisco and VMware are joining the program.

iStor Introduces integraSuite Management Center

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iStor Networks today announced (PDF) that it has started shipping its new management interface, integraSuite/MC Management Center.

iStor’s storage virtualization technology eliminates the requirement for managing individual RAID groups and their LUN configurations. Instead, integraSuite presents a pool of storage that is easily carved up into individual customized volumes, reducing administrative, support, and other operational costs.
iStor’s virtualized storage supports multiple RAID levels across drives, allowing the storage Quality of Service level to be tailored to each individual application. integraSuite facilitates flexible storage configurations by managing integraStor’s storage virtualization engine which can fully utilize all drive capacity in a pool of mixed drive configurations. When new larger disk drives are added to a system with older, smaller capacity drives, the newer larger capacity can be fully utilized. It’s just as easy to grow volumes and migrate RAID levels on the fly during disk I/O with just a few mouse clicks.
integraSuite includes a Java-based Graphical User Interface (GUI), Command Line Interface (CLI), and Microsoft’s Virtual Disk Services (VDS) interface.

Check Point Ships VPN-1 Virtual Edition

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Check Point Software Technologies today announced VPN-1 Virtual Edition (VE) and claims it is the first company to provide unified security management for both physical networks and virtual applications.

Virtualization of multiple servers into a single appliance creates an entirely new type of environment that requires new ways to protect segregated applications and information from one another without the use of physical security appliances. Check Point’s VPN-1 VE restores the separation and security of applications as if they were still located on separate servers. VPN-1 VE also integrates completely into a customer’s overall Check Point security infrastructure, making it possible to manage Check Point appliances and software for open servers, “Secured by Check Point” appliances and VPN-1 VE from a single interface — reducing the cost and strain of management.

Check Point lists the following benefits for VPN-1 VE:

  • Secures virtual environments with a preconfigured solution that is tailored for VMware ESX or ESXi environments to help ensure an easy, optimal deployment
  • Eliminates the need for additional security appliances to protect virtual applications, thereby lowering costs
  • Integrates with the same unified interface as other Check Point security gateways
  • Strengthens auditing, compliance and risk management with unified logging for the entire security infrastructure, including virtual environments
  • Enables quick deployment for provisioning or disaster recovery

Check Point VPN-1 VE is available immediately and can be purchased through the Check Point worldwide network of VARs as well as from VMware directly. Pricing can be consulted here.

Check Point Software Technologies

VMware, Cisco Join Microsoft Server Virtualization Validation Program

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Microsoft’s Server Virtualization Validation Program, which was first announced in November 2007, and launched last June with the patricipation of Citrix, Sun, Novell and Virtual Iron, signed up two notable new members.

Cisco has announced its membership and is already included on the SVVP website, and VMware signed up pretty late so they’re not on there yet (but Chris Wolf had already confirmed the news). Microsoft and VMware had been working diligently for several months on the completion of their support agreement and VMware’s inclusion in the SVVP, and this will evidently drive virtualization adoption even further the coming months and years.

The costs associated with joining the program include membership in TSAnet at Mission Critical level, so that the vendor and Microsoft can share support information, incremental costs, if any, to perform the validation tests, and a nominal expense (currently $250) to qualify each ‘configuration’ that is submitted for validation.

Microsoft

Corticon Technologies Embeds Composite Information Server in EDC-Multi Source

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Corticon Technologies and Composite Software today announced Corticon has embedded the Composite Information Server in the Corticon Enterprise Data Connector (EDC)-Multi Source.

Corticon’s EDC-Multi Source enables access to relational databases, legacy data sources, web services, XML, message queues as well as leading packaged applications such as SAP, Siebel, PeopleSoft and Oracle through Composite Application Data Services.

Corticon’s EDC-Multi Source provides a direct connection from the rules engine to relational databases and other enterprise data sources. This allows it to automatically retrieve data required to execute a decision service or update data sources directly during rules processing, improving performance and simplifying integration. Consistent with Corticon’s model-driven approach, Corticon EDC features code-free modeling in defining data access connections, providing a level of abstraction that accelerates the creation and maintenance of decision services.

Corticon Technologies

DataSheet Proposal for Xen 3.3 Hypervisor Published

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Stephen Spector published a post yesterday on the Xen blog featuring a proposed data sheet (PDF) for the upcoming Xen 3.3 release, which we said was in final testing stage in the beginning of this month.

Update 26 August: Xen 3.3.0 is available for download.

The complete list of new features in Xen 3.3 includes:

Performance and Scalability

  • CPUID Levelling
  • Shadow 3 Page Table Optimizations
  • EPT/NPT 2MB Page Support
  • Virtual Framebuffer Support for HVM Guests
  • PVSCSI — SCSI Support for PV Guests
  • Full 16-bit Emulation on Intel VT
  • Support for memory overcommit allowing more VMs per physical machine for some workloads

Security

  • PVGRUB Secure Replacement for PYGRUB
  • IO Emulation “stub domains” for HVM IO
  • Green Computing
  • Enhanced C & P State Power Management
  • Graphics Support
  • VT-d Device Pass-Through Support

Miscellaneous

  • Upgrade QEMU Version
  • Multi-Queue Support for Modern NICs
  • Removal of Domain Lock for PV Guests
  • Message Signalled Interrupts
  • Greatly improved precision for time-sensitive SMP VMs
XenSource