Hyper-V Cloud Jam Session
The amp was turned up to 11 at the Hyper-V Jam session held at last month's Hosting Summit in Bellevue, WS. Doug Keeley, CEO and Chief Storyteller of The Mark of a Leader hosted partners from HP, Juniper Networks, and Parallels in a session that drew a parallel between the challenges musicians face to create unique music and the challenges hosters face to differentiate themselves as unique service providers. As Keeley explained, all musician have at their disposal the same palate of 12 notes, yet they have to arrange those notes and add instruments to differentiate their sound. The same can be done with the Microsoft's Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 as hosting providers add layers of products and services, creating unique offerings to their customer audience.
Birger Steen from Parallels, a global leader in Cloud services automation and virtualization software, talked about their mission to enable service providers to profit from the cloud with several of their offerings. Steen talked about Parallels Automation, stating that Parallels Automation for Office 365 can help Office 365 syndication partners connect their billing system to the Office 365 back end billing and provisioning systems. He also stated that Hyper-V and System Center can help hosting providers make their offerings very elastic and granular.
Paul Gavin, Product Manager for HP discussed how the Microsoft and HP alliance benefits hosting providers by their development of the joint management stack, HP Cloud Foundation for Hyper-V, which enables hosters to go to market more quickly with HP providing the physical infrastructure, and Microsoft providing the virtual infrastructure. The technology provides deep engineering integration across infrastructure and applications with low TCO and rapid deployment.
Abner Germanow, Director of enterprise marketing for Juniper Networks rounded out the partner perspective with their solution to enable networks for a virtualized world. Combining the power of Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V virtualization technology, Juniper solutions unleash the potential of virtualizing resource-intensive workloads in the data center. Germanow expressed confidence in Juniper Networks ability to solve the network problem and provide hosters infrastructures as desired.
Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 is leveraged easily by partners because it plugs into customers' existing IT environments seamlessly. As a stand-alone product it provides a reliable and optimized virtualization solution, improving server utilization and reducing costs. Some of the new features that are available in Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 are live migration, cluster shared volume support and expanded processor and memory support for host systems. Since Hyper-V Server contains only the Windows Hypervisor, Windows Server driver model and virtualization components, it provides a small footprint and minimal overhead. To learn more about Microsoft Hyper-V technology, click here.