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Microsoft Releases System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 RTM

October 21, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Microsoft has released System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008, its enterprise management console for its hypervisor platform Hyper-V. You can download a free trial version here.

From Softie Keith Combs’ blog:

Highlights of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008

Support for VMs Running on Windows Server 2008
- System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 was designed to fully utilize the foundational features and services of Windows Server 2008 and Microsoft Hyper-V™ Server. This includes Hyper-V’s 64-bit architecture, attack hardened security model, fail-over cluster support (see below) and others.
- Virtual Machine Manager 2008 (VMM) supports the management of hosts running Hyper-V and VMM can actually enable Hyper-V remotely from the VMM 2008 console.
- VMM 2008 integrates with new clustering support in Windows Server 2008 to allow for fault-tolerant and cluster aware virtual machines to be created
- VMM 2008 supports all Hyper-V functionality while providing VMM-specific functions, such as Intelligent Placement, the Self-Service Portal, and the integrated Library.
Multi-Vendor Virtualization Platform Support
- In addition to support for Hyper-V, VMM 2008 integrates multi-hypervisor management into one tool with its support for virtual machines running on VMware ESX infrastructure and Microsoft Virtual Server.
- VMM 2008 provides comprehensive support for VMware VI3 including moving virtual machines among virtual hosts with no downtime via VMotion, through integration with VMware’s Virtual Center.
- VMM 2008 specific features such as Intelligent Placement, consolidation candidate recommendations and others can be run against virtualized infrastructure on any supported platform.
- Windows PowerShell™ scripts for customization or automation are also supported across Hyper-V, VMware ESX or Virtual Server implementations
Host Cluster Support for “High Availability” Virtual Machines
- With greatly expanded support for failover clusters, VMM 2008 improves its “high availability” capabilities for managing mission-critical virtual machines. VMM 2008 is now fully cluster-aware meaning that it can detect and manage Hyper-V host clusters as a single unit.
- New in this version of VMM is automatic detection of virtual hosts that are added or removed from the cluster – thus easing the burden on the administrator to manage this function.
- In VMM 2008, creating a high availability virtual machine (HA VM) has never been easier. Gone are the complex multi-step manual processes from before – now, an administrator clicks a simple checkbox which designates a VM as highly available. Behinds the scenes, VMM orchestrates the creation of that HA VA which includes instructing the Intelligent Placement feature of VMM 2008 to recommend only hosts that are part of a host cluster for the newly minted HA VM.
- Improved HA VM management features of VMM 2008 include the Failover Cluster Management Console for various cluster-related tasks such as designation and management of cluster reserves, letter-less disk drives, guest clusters, among others.
- VMM 2008 also supports VMware host clusters in which the nodes of the cluster are VMware ESX Servers.

xkoto Debuts GRIDSCALE for Microsoft SQL Server

October 1, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

xkoto, the database virtualization company, today announced GRIDSCALE for Microsoft SQL Server, a product that improves application performance, scalability and reliability in SQL Server environments.

GRIDSCALE for Microsoft SQL Server is an active-active solution that virtualizes the database infrastructure. It enables businesses to distribute application loads horizontally across multiple instances of SQL Server, resulting in better reliability and performance than that of more costly and complex legacy clustering solutions. With GRIDSCALE for SQL Server, businesses can eliminate planned and unplanned outages, rapidly scale application load across SQL Servers, and implement cost-effective disaster recovery solutions.

With GRIDSCALE, database administrators can perform hardware upgrades and software updates without having an impact on system performance or uptime. Plus, GRIDSCALE eliminates the limitations of clustering configurations, such as shared storage, partitioning and mirroring.

xkoto underwent performance and functional testing of GRIDSCALE for SQL Server in one of Microsoft’s technology centers. Results showed near-linear scalability for read-intensive workloads, such as those used for online commerce applications. GRIDSCALE also received high marks on availability tests, which simulated hardware failures, network outages and site-wide disaster.

Unlike traditional clustering, which relies on multiple databases tied to shared storage, GRIDSCALE employs a shared-nothing architecture with a dynamic number of database servers for continuous availability. Each database server operates completely independent of the others, maintaining its own complete and consistent copy of the database. The GRIDSCALE server appears as a single, fully functional database to all applications, which are unaware that any one of several database servers may be used to fulfill their requests.

GRIDSCALE for SQL Server initially supports ODBC, JDBC, and .NET connectivity. In addition to its support for SQL Server, xkoto added functionality for DB2 in the latest version 4.1 version of GRIDSCALE.

xkoto

Microsoft Bashes VMware With A New Website; “Get The Facts” Revisited?

September 23, 2008 by Toon Vanagt 3 Comments

Thanks for reading us. We are bundling all our VMworld 2008 coverage in one handy page, go check it out now for more reports and videos!

Microsoft had people dressed up like medieval Venetian models at the hotel entrance of last week’s VMworld conference in Las Vegas. They distributed dollar chips and flyers to anybody wearing a VMworld bag, with on it the website address VmwareCostsWayTooMuch.com, which led VMware customers and partners to a landing page, on which the headlines all redirect to the Microsoft Hyper-V portal.

The guerilla marketing tactics actually worked, with coverage from publications like NetworkWorld, ZDNet Blogs, Channel Marker, Virtualization Information, Burton Group’s Data Center Strategies blog, and others.

We ignore whether this smear marketing stunt was inspired by the US presidential campaign, but it was certainly not the first time Microsoft engages into heads-on advertising. Last time around it was targeted against Linux. However, we were never aware of Microsoft distributing any leaflets with GetTheFacts.com at the entrance of LinuxWorldExpo or LinuxTag. It is also quite funny to observe that Linux distributions (starting with SUSE) are now supported as Guest Operating Systems on Hyper-V and that Redmond advertises this feature extensively.

Microsoft even provides integration components and technical support for customers running select Linux distributions (limited to SUSE for the moment) as guest operating systems. IF history repeats itself, VMware can be reassured that in a few years this type of Microsoft campaign results in supporting a competing technology.

It took the VMware conference staff a little while to get notified about the leaflets and some more time before they got the hotel staff at The Venetion to stop the flyers from being handed out at the entrance of their annual user conference, attracting over 14.000 attendees to Las Vegas. It is estimated at least 4.000 flyers were distributed in the elapsed time.

The distributed 1 dollar chips were actually valid inside The Venetian Casino. This guerilla marketing initiative has cost at least 4.000 dollars in casino money, but the website and distribution must have cost a lot more.

It is hard to believe The Venetian did not make the connection between selling a few thousand ‘Dollar chips’ to Microsoft and concurrently renting their entire event facilities and rooms to VMware. Especially with those video cameras and security personell all over, it can be assumed Microsoft had obtained some sort of permission before handing out those free chips at the hotel entrance.

What do you think about this remarkable anti-VMware propaganda? Does it make MS look desperate as the new kid on the hypervisor block? Does it suit a multinational that runs entirely on ‘expensive‘ licenses to attack a ‘partner’ at its annual user conference over that very cost element? Do the facts that they present on their marketing website actually make sense? What boomerang effect can they expect? How would Microsoft react if Sun would hand out flyers at the gates of TechEd or DevDays with a catchy URL: GetOfficeForFreeAndStopPayingMicrosoft.Com. We look forward to seeing who will register that available domain. 🙂

As we all know, hypervisors are a commodity nowadays and just like Xen and Hyper-V, it must be said that ESX comes free of license cost too. At Virtualization.com, we like to think the value and related cost are no longer in that free naked hypervisor, but in the integrated management and extended tool sets that surround it.

If you were among those first 4.000 VMworld attendees, feel free to tell us how much you made with your Microsoft dollars on the gambling tables and if that was enough to cover/upgrade a VMware license?

AMD and Microsoft Team Up On Virtualization

September 22, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

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

vMAN Over At DMTF Is Immune To Kryptonite And Now Powered by OVF Version 1.0

September 16, 2008 by Toon Vanagt 2 Comments

Like superheroes with a weak spot (remember Superman and green Kryptonite), large providers of green data center technologies and virtualization software had an Achilles’ heel with their vendor lock-in, which scared away quite a few prospects. Today the major players have all agreed to drop their distinct proprietary formats and aim to adopt the Open Virtualization Format 1.0 as soon as possible (most are already compliant upon release). We first learned about OVF during our interview with Ian Pratt and the release of this open standard is a great step forward. The short lead time of ‘only’ one year proves the industry has understood that open standards are the way to go.

Above is our exclusive video interview recorded at VMworld in Las Vegas, where DMTF president Winston Bumpus revealed the release of OVF 1.0 and their larger Virtualization Management Initiative (vMAN). vMAN provides IT managers the freedom to deploy pre-installed, pre-configured solutions across heterogeneous computing networks and to manage those applications through their entire lifecycle. This Initiative delivers much-needed open industry standards to the management of virtualized environments. Ultimately, the group’s goal is to eliminate the need for IT managers to separately install, configure and manage interdependencies between virtualized operating systems and applications, by enabling automated management of the virtual machine lifecycle.

This new specification created by Dell, HP, IBM, Microsoft, VMware and XenSource is about to become an industry standard and aspires to help ensure portability, integrity and automated installation/configuration of virtual machines. We did not have the time to transcribe the interview yet, but already took a few of Winston Bumpus’ quotes from the DMTF press release.

“With the increasing demand for virtualization in enterprise management, the new spec developed through this industry-wide collaboration dove-tails nicely into existing virtualization management standardization activity within the DMTF…
OVF extends the work we have underway to offer IT managers automation of critical, error-prone activities in the deployment of a virtualized infrastructure.”

By collaborating on the development of the OVF specification, the DMTF group aims to make it easier for IT organizations to pre-package and certify software packaged as virtual machine templates for deployment in their virtualized infrastructure and to facilitate the secure distribution of pre-packaged virtual appliances by ISVs and virtual appliance vendors.

SteelEye Brings Disaster Recovery Solution to Hyper-V

September 15, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

SteelEye Technology (previous coverage), a provider of business continuity and disaster recovery solutions for multi-vendor IT infrastructures, recently announced SteelEye DataKeeper support for Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V.

DataKeeper is a highly optimized data replication solution for Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008. The product is sold in two versions: DataKeeper delivers data replication services as an extension to Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 while DataKeeper Cluster Edition further extends the capabilities of Windows Server Failover Clustering. Both editions support real-time replication of Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V virtual machines between physical servers across either LAN or WAN connections.

By keeping a running Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V virtual machine in sync with a standby VM in an alternate location, DataKeeper enables disaster recovery without the data loss typically associated with traditional backup and restore technology. Real-time continuous replication of active Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V VMs helps ensure that in the event of a disaster, the standby server can be activated with minimal to no data loss.

DataKeeper Cluster Edition allows administrators to build “shared-nothing” and geographically dispersed Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V clusters. By eliminating the requirement for shared storage, the administrator can protect against both planned and unplanned downtime of servers and storage. The use of DataKeeper in tandem with Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V VMs allows for non-disruptive disaster recovery testing. By simply accessing the replicated VMs in the disaster recovery site, the administrator can segment a virtual network separate from the production network and start the replicated VMs for disaster recovery testing. Complete disaster recovery testing can be performed without impacting the production site at all.