SwisherTech

I attended Microsoft’s “getVirtual Now” in which Microsoft’s latest virtualization solutions were presented. The conference took place at the Hyatt Regency in Santa Clara, CA on October 13, 2008.

Microsoft’s northwest general manger James Parking kicked off the day’s festivities. The subjects to be covered were Hyper-V, virtualization in Microsoft’s IT, and application virtualization.

The section on Hyper-V was presented by Steve Wilder and Manjnath Ajjampur. Wilder was the key presenter of this segment and Ajjampur was the man behind the demonstrations. The highlighted points I received from their presentation were not engaging. One of these points was Hyper-V can use a Virtual Services Provider (VSP) and a Virtual Services Client to create a virtual switch for client VMs to pass network traffic through memory. Some uneventful demonstrations followed for creating the virtual switch and creating Virtual machine templates.
The biggest thing on my mind during this presentation was if Microsoft had a solution to compete with VMware’s V-Motion. I apparently was not the only one thinking this because the question came up in the Q&A. Wilder responded with “it will be part of the next windows server release.” Somewhere around the beginning of 2010 and the products name is “Live Migration.”

The second segment was geared more towards the business folks. The presenter was Paul Selsor one of Microsoft’s IT managers. He presented on the topic of consolidating Microsoft’s data centers and how the process of server allocation has been changing. Years prior when developers needed a server for a project it was ordered and installed with no questions asked. Now server usage is being audited to see if the server would be a viable fit for virtualization. Here are some interesting numbers that came out of his slides:

Technet 100% virtualized

MSDN 100% virtualized

Microsoft.com 50% virtualized

Selsor also mentioned Windows 7 Alpha 1 would start deployment to Microsoft IT branch offices on 10/14/2008.

The last segment of the conference was on application virtualization. Microsoft’s Desktop Optimization Pack includes App-V (formally known as SoftGrid). This was probably the most exciting part of the conference for me. They showed how App-V could be used to deploy applications in an isolated virtual container. To deploy the applications to the users it was as easy as dragging the application package to the correct OU in a lookalike active directory panel. Thin client virtualization was also brought up with the use of Citrix’s Zen Desktop.