Hyper-V: Hyper Adoption

I'm attending Microsoft Management Summit 2012 this week and had an interesting observation in one of my sessions. I always ask (and make a little joke out of asking) "Who is using VMware?"  and as you would expect, the majority of the room raise their hand. No surprise. I asked the same question during one of my sessions at MMS and I received the same result.

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• markbowker's blog

The Many Synergies of Dell's Acquisition of SonicWall

You have to give Dell a lot of credit.  As the company recognized changes in the industry, it was willing to move beyond efficient PC/server manufacturing and distribution into new technologies and labor-intensive services.  In my domain, this led to the acquisition of SecureWorks and Force10.  Today, Dell took another step into end-to-end solutions by grabbing security veteran SonicWall. 

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• joltsik's blog

Data Center Networking Discontinuity Impacts Network Security

Data center consolidation and server virtualization are creating data centers of massive scale, and thus radically changing the data center environment. Unfortunately, legacy data center networking equipment was not designed for this type of scale and dynamic use case. ESG calls this state data center networking discontinuity.

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• joltsik's blog

Enterasys OneFabric Makes Sense

Just what is a "network fabric?" Generally, the term is used to describe a low-latency, loss-less, converged, flat network architecture for data centers. That said, the term has been co-opted by marketing types so its hard to know what "network fabric" means anymore.

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• joltsik's blog

Virtualization saves Microsoft almost $50 million yearly

The following is a guest blog by freelance editor and self-confessed keyboard geek Marco Chiappetta. In the eat-your-own-dogfood category, Microsoft recently released a pair of documents that showcase its use of Hyper-V in its own datacenters. Microsoft has been chanting for years about how much more affordable Hyper-V implementations are than VMware and few people dispute that. But they do argue that you get what you pay for, particularly with VM density, memory over-commit and management features.

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• Microsoft Subnet's blog

Hyper-V gains another open source cloud: OpenNebula 3.0

Version 3.0 of the open source cloud management platform OpenNebula has been launched and with it will come support for Hyper-V. For those keeping track, Open source cloud-computing platforms supporting Hyper-V now number two OpenStack and OpenNebula.

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• Microsoft Subnet's blog

Microsoft Hyper-V and Cisco Nexus 1000V: A Proverbial Win-Win

Cisco and Microsoft made a fairly significant announcement this week around Windows 8, Hyper-V, and Nexus 1000V. Why did I use the word "significant" here?

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• joltsik's blog

Microsoft bashes VMware at VMworld, again

In what has become an annual tradition, Microsoft celebrated the start of the VMworld show in Las Vegas this week with more satirical bashing of VMware. This year Microsoft launched a Web site called VMlimited in which it likens VMware to a guy who still thinks it's circa 1977. However, Microsoft's viewpoint doesn't jibe with the news of new partnerships and wares streaming out of the VMworld show this year.

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• Microsoft Subnet's blog

What's Next for Virtual Switching?

According to ESG Research, most organizations host 5 to 10 VMs per physical server today. This is likely to increase moving forward as enterprise implement servers with multiple CPU cores, gigabytes of memory, network interconnects, and additional network bandwidth.
As this happens, we will also see more direct VM to VM traffic within each physical server.

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• joltsik's blog

Microsoft boosting Hyper-V replication in Windows Server 8

Workloads running in Hyper-V will be far more reliable after the release of Windows Server 8 because Microsoft is boosting the ability to replicate mission-critical databases and other applications.

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• Jon Brodkin's blog

Microsoft issues first patch for IE9 amidst 34 holes closed today

As expected, today's Patch Tuesday is a whopper. Microsoft released 16 security updates (nine critical and seven important) addressing 34 vulnerabilities, including the first patch for Internet Explorer 9 and a rare patch for Hyper-V.

The remaining patches fix vulnerabilities in Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer, .NET, SQL, Visual Studio, Silverlight, VML  and ISA.

For nine of the patches, reboots are required and for the rest, well, a reboot may still be wise, Microsoft says.

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• Microsoft Subnet's blog

Question: Will Vendors Open Up About OpenFlow at Interop?

It's the week before Interop so you are likely to face a fortnight of public relations buzz from the networking industry. We'll hear plenty about FCoE and its supporting parts (Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE), Data Center Ethernet (DCE), there should be lots of hoopla about "flat networking" standards (Trill, SPB) as well as proprietary alternatives, and we'll likely face a barrage of new product announcements as well.

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• joltsik's blog

Microsoft provisions Systems Center Essentials for the cloud

“Every time something bad happens in the world like a volcanic eruption, an earthquake, a tsunami, there’s a tremendous peak for us for processing power,” said Peter Zoll, CIO of statistical model maker I-MAG STS Corp. “We need a lot of processing power because we have hundreds of millions of equations to deal with … [so] the cloud is a godsend.”

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• Robert Mullins's blog

Microsoft Hyper-V Is Ready For Tier-1 Application Workloads

Large and small organization have embraced server virtualization technology as a way to consolidate workloads like web applications and file/print services but what about Tier-1 application workloads? You know, transactional applications that depend upon high performance and multi-tier application communications? Virtualizing these types of applications is just beginning, even at organizations with lots of server virtualization experience.

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• joltsik's blog

Get Ready for Multiple Virtualization Platforms

My colleague Mark Bokwer and I are at a Virtualization, Cloud Computing, and Green IT conference in Washington DC this week. In one of the panels we hosted, an IT executive from a cabinet-level agency mentioned that the agency was qualifying Microsoft Hyper-V even though it already has an enterprise license in place with VMware. When asked why the agency was doing this he responded, "we are a Windows shop and have a great relationship with Microsoft.

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• joltsik's blog

All change for Virtualization in R2…

A common question now is how does Microsoft license SQL Server in the Virtual environment? In the early days of virtualization SQL Server was not an ideal candidate for consolidation due to the resource intensive nature of its processing. But now with the advent of superior Hardware and the support of Hyper-V and VMWare, many companies are looking at SQL Server virtualization to save hardware costs and provide flexibility. Well, the classic answer to the question is that “it depends” but also “it changes”…

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• Brian Egler's blog

Hyper-V eating VMware’s lunc -- er, snack

As the VMworld 2010 conference gets underway this week in San Francisco, players in the world of virtualization will be taking another read on the impact of upstart Microsoft on the incumbent VMware in the market for virtualization hypervisors and related management software. The take from this reporter’s perspective is that Microsoft is making inroads, but in a different portion of the market from VMware.

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• Robert Mullins's blog

It's time to virtualize Microsoft Exchange (but not with Hyper-V)

Microsoft isn't accustomed to being in second place in any market, but that's the situation it has had to accept as it challenges VMware for supremacy in the x86 virtualization world.

Microsoft has undoubtedly made significant progress in the last couple of years, bolstering its virtualization and management capabilities with Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager. Microsoft thinks it offers enterprises everything they need to virtualize mission-critical workloads, but not everyone agrees.

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• Jon Brodkin's blog

Startup solves Microsoft's Hyper-V storage problem

One of Hyper-V's biggest problems, the high cost of storage associated with VM server sprawl, is being fixed by an add-on product from Virsto Software, a storage virtualization startup with an all-star management team, in Sunnyvale, Calif.

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• Microsoft Subnet's blog