Virtualization news.

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I've mentioned Jeff Woolsey from the virtualization team a few times. And I've praised his clarity e.g saying "You may provide this information to customers. However, the only request that I have is that you please do not copy and paste this onto a BLOG"

In the last couple of days he has sent 2 messages marked:

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DISCLOSURE: BLOG TO YOUR HEARTS CONTENT!
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So I shall ...

On Monday June 11th, we released Virtual Server R2 SP1 and people can download it HERE.  Here’s a reminder of the new features in R2 SP:

  1. Support for hardware-assisted virtualization technology (AMD-V and Intel VT)
  2. Support for greater than 64 virtual machines on x64-based hosts. Virtual Server R2 SP1 now supports up to 256 GB of physical memory and can run up to 512 virtual machines.
  3. VHD Mount command-line tool and APIs
  4. Interoperability with Volume Shadow Copy Service
  5. Support for additional guest and host operating systems
  6. Service publication using Active Directory Service Connection Points
  7. Host clustering (AKA Quick Migration) white paper
  8. Virtual SCSI fix for Linux guests
  9. Larger default size for dynamically expanding virtual hard disks. Virtual Server now defaults to creating 127 GB virtual hard disks by default.
  10. VMRC ActiveX control and Internet Explorer security zones
  11. New VMRC client option to enable video stretch in full screen mode
  12. IVMGuestOS::Get_OSName property returns more operating system information

We also have some new virtualization resources

Windows Server Virtualization Calculator (Version 2). The new calculator lets you interactively build virtual machines running multiple Microsoft server products to estimate the licenses and costs for Windows Server by edition (Standard, Enterprise and Datacenter) and many Microsoft server products. It starts with configuring your server based on virtualization technology, sockets and clustering requirements, and then builds the virtual machines.
On his blog, Alessandro Perilli concludes "Microsoft Virtualization Calculator becomes a mandatory tool in any virtualization project, and its highly recommended." It received over 7700 views in May, and the first calculator is being adapted by Dell and HP.

The second is Licensing Microsoft Windows Server 2003 R2 to Run with Virtualization Technologies. Jeff says "I don’t know about you, but I’m sick and tired of a certain company (rhymes with ZMWare) complaining that we license Windows differently for Virtual Server and third party virtualization. That’s simply not true and this document spells out the licensing most clearly. This document covers VMware ESX Server, VMware VMotion, SWsoft Virtuozzo, and Microsoft System Center Virtualization Machine Manager. This document also Intentionally compares VMotion, System Center Virtual Machine Manager and Microsoft Host Clustering (AKA Quick Migration) to build awareness with VMware customers that we have similar management and “VM movement” capabilities".
People think Alessandro knows his stuff and he says it is "Highly recommended reading before starting any virtualization project."

Finally there is a document "Starting Today with Microsoft’s Virtualization Roadmap." This document is currently only available internally, but Jeff believes we’re working to make this publicly available. it covers the large-scale virtualization story of Virtual Server on Datacenter => Managed by SCVMM => Upgrading to WS2008 w/ Viridian.

 

We had some confusion at a Technet event this week about Windows Server Virtualization (Viridian). So for clarity. Viridian will ship within 180 days of Server 2008. To make that date - with the required quality we have postponed Hot-Add, and live-migration (we still have "quick migration").  The key word is postponed. Not "Cut". Not "Dropped". The plan of record is still that Windows Server Virtualization will have these features , but the version that ships within 180 days will not.  Somewhere this got mixed up with prognostications about Service packs which I might have contributed to In a perfect world we'd see these features in "Virtualization SP1", which would go into beta when Virtualization itself releases, and ship 3 to 6 months later. But predicting if the dates will line up to allow that would be to layer guesstimate on guesstimate. So for clarity, there is no plan to link Virtualization with Service packs for Server 2008.

 

Technorati tags: Microsoft, windows, longhorn, virtualization, beta, Windows Server Virtualization, Viridian