Virtualisation and Interoperability

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I often think that Microsoft is a bit like the English language, a lot of people speak it, a lot of people don’t and for many people it’s a second or third language they need for work e.g. air traffic controllers.  In technology few of us run a totally Microsoft environment, a few more will have nothing to do with Microsoft for almost religious reasons but the majority have some of this and some of that and are working hard every day to get everything to work.

So I am pleased that there are three really important announcements to make support issues for the majority of us a little easier:

  • The Server Virtualisation Validation Platform (SVVP) has been updated and Microsoft in conjunction with VMware will now support Windows Server 2012 running on VSphere 5.0 update 1 and 5.1.  That means you can phone Microsoft support when a VM running Windows Server 2012 doesn’t work properly on either of those versions of VSphere.  For example you might want to see how reverting to snapshots of virtual your domain controllers  works properly when the domain controller is running at the Server 2012 domain functional level and you are running that on top of VSphere 5.0 update 2 + ESXi 5.0 update 2  or later, both of which exchange information via a Virtual machine GenID. 
  • A couple of weeks ago at TechEd it was announced Oracle will be supported to run either on Hyper-V or on Azure, that means the database, WebLogic servers, Oracle Linux and support for Java.
  • Open Management Infrastructure (OMI). A couple of months ago I interviewed the lead architect for Windows Server, Jeffrey Snover (the man behind PowerShell) as part of TechDays Online and he was talking about the work we are doing on OMI,  a standards based framework to enable cross platform management of all devices in the same way as WMI is used to manage Windows.  While tools like System Center already do a pretty good job at managing multiple platforms, from switches to phones to hypervisors and application software, OMI will make this possible without agents and enable management tools to work to or from the open source world.

Combining these three development means you can get proper support, and effectively manage the  heterogeneous hell that can arise in your data centre, as a result of acquisitions, migrations or because your policy is to have best of breed solutions for your business needs.   What this means  for us IT professionals is that those of us who have multiple disciplines will be in more demand and so being skilled in say Hyper-V and VMware or Oracle and SQL Server will only be good for you.