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Microsoft Hyper-V

Microsoft Deepens Partnership With HP

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Microsoft today announced expanded product, sales and services initiatives with HP aimed at helping businesses more easily adopt and deploy virtualization. Microsoft has expanded its work together with HP to sell and market storage, server and networking consolidation solutions and desktop virtualization solutions to small-, medium-sized- and large-business customers worldwide.

Today’s announcements include the following:

  • In the U.S., Microsoft is working with HP to offer products, training and deployment services for storage, networking and server consolidation that are designed to help customers decrease costs, increase business agility, improve data access and protection, and increase employee productivity.
  • Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 and Microsoft System Center are supported on the new industry-standard HP Virtual Connect 10Gb Flex-10 module, which works with the Flex-10 NIC on the recently introduced HP ProLiant BL495c virtualization blade server. Together these technologies help enable customers to significantly lower costs with their server and network consolidation, business continuity, and dynamic datacenter projects.
  • The HP and Microsoft Frontline Partner Program in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) has registered 60 percent of eligible partners across 36 countries to receive access to virtualization training, sales tools, marketing materials, workshops, and incentives targeting small and medium-sized businesses.
  • Performance and Resource Optimization (PRO) features will be delivered in the HP ProLiant PRO Management Pack for Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager, running on HP ProLiant and BladeSystem servers, in December 2008. PRO is a feature of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 that enables dynamic management of virtual machines and the associated host platforms.
  • HP provides comprehensive services, built on Microsoft technologies, for customers to virtualize their desktops and data centers. The services address strategy, design, transition, operation and continual improvement. HP offers virtualization workshops and proofs-of-concept as the first step for virtualization projects. HP also provides education and support for technology staff as well as services to develop a strategic technology road map using best practices to consolidate and manage infrastructure.
  • HP Business Service Automation will enable automation of change and configuration management processes across virtual and physical environments for Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V environments, and will integrate with System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 for managing advanced platform capabilities, while decreasing downtime associated with uncontrolled change. HP is scheduled to release a beta in the first quarter of 2009.

AMD and Microsoft Team Up On Virtualization

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AMD today announced the availability of robust new virtualization solutions powered by a combination of technologies from AMD and Microsoft. This new deployment model uses AMD Opteron processors with AMD Virtualization technology together with Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V. Mid-market companies in particular, which have traditionally been slower to implement virtualization, can take advantage of the combined AMD and Microsoft product offering to help reduce cost, complexity and energy consumption.

Resource consolidation achieved through virtualization can deliver the low energy consumption, and superior utilization and manageability demanded by today’s businesses. AMD Opteron processors and Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, a hypervisor-based virtualization feature of Microsoft Windows Server 2008, allow OEMs, VARs and Solution Providers to offer a valuable server virtualization combination to help increase their competitive edge and market opportunity. AMD-V technology and Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V also help enable businesses to scale according to demands, boosting the efficiency of workloads.

Advanced Micro Devices

Dell’s Latest Virtualization Play

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Dell has announced a series of products and updates around their virtualization offering. Here’s the takeaway:

  • New Dell PowerEdge full-height blade servers
  • Pre-installed integration and support of Microsoft Hyper-V for centralized management of virtualized environments
  • Advanced EqualLogic integration across multiple hypervisors
  • New services help customers simplify the design, deployment, security and management of virtualized environments: Infrastructure Consulting Services for Microsoft Hyper-V deployments, Site Recovery Manager (SRM) + Lifecycle Management for VMware environments

More information in the press release.

The most exciting news is that the company added to its EqualLogic product line a new, highly-scalable array – the PS5500E – and introduced advanced software features, including the EqualLogic Auto-Snapshot Manager/VMware edition to improve data protection for virtual server environments.

The PS5500E builds upon Dell’s EqualLogic family with 24 or 48 terabytes (TB) of raw capacity in a 4U array – more than doubling the density and tripling the capacity of its predecessor model, the PS5000E, with equivalent hard disk drives. With the PS5500E, an EqualLogic SAN can scale up to 576 TB under a single management interface. This new array can be combined in the same SAN group with the existing EqualLogic systems. It provides an ideal solution for consolidating common tiered business data and applications such as file services, moderate I/O email, databases and virtual server environments. It can also be deployed for capacity-intensive near-line storage tiers and for disaster recovery sites.

You may be interested in the fact that Dell has also set up a dedicated section on its website about Microsoft Hyper-V.

Dell

Microsoft Announcements: Hyper-V Server To Compete With ESXi, Windows Server 2008 R2 Will Sport Live Migration Feature

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Microsoft is doing a big virtualization splash today with their much-hyped ‘Get Virtual Now’ event in Washington. The Hyper-V 1.0 hypervisor was officially released, but that wasn’t much of a surprise, unlike the launch of a new version (free of charge) dubbed Hyper-V Server 2008. It’s a standalone server virtualization tool that enables firms to consolidate Windows and Linux workloads onto a single physical server.

You guessed it: it’s direct competition to VMware ESXi, and it’s going to make waves. The new product will be supported by the upcoming System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008, to be released within 30 days as well.

Another surprise: the next version of Hyper-V which will be included with Windows Server 2008 R2, will have a live migration feature, something Microsoft was often criticized for because it lacked it. According to Mary Jo Foley, the release is slated for 2010.

Microsoft

Microsoft Exchange Managed Services Provider Azaleos Adds Hyper-V Support

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MS Exchange managed services provider Azaleos has announced its OneServer Virtual Edition now supports Microsoft Hyper-V Server, adding virtualization capability to Exchange email servers.

According to Azaleos’ announcement, Exchange virtualization can consolidate server and storage resources, simplify administration, and streamline high availability and disaster recovery. Already offering support for VMware ESX, Azaleos’ Exchange support gives customers the choice of either virtualization platform, or even a physical server.

According to another statement from Azaleos, “Microsoft Exchange Server typically does not require the full processing capabilities of an entire server, [making it] ideally suited for virtualization where its needs can be combined with other workloads.” This is also an early example of how email hosts can adopt Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtualization capabilities.

Managed services available on OneServer Virtual Edition include real-time monitoring and reporting system ViewXchange; remote command and control service ManageXchange; turnkey mobile device management and monitoring solution MobileXchange; anti-virus and anti-spam service ProtectXchange; disaster recovery service RestoreXchange; and archival and storage service ArchiveXchange.

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.