Microsoft Hyper-V Launch Event in Bellevue

enrique.g.castro-leon@intel.com — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 03:03:42 GMT

I had the privilege to get invited to the Microsoft Virtualization Launch event in Bellevue, Washington on September 8, 2008 on occasion of the release of Microsoft Windows Server* 2008. I attended the keynote presentations and a number of technical sessions. I was especially interested in calibrating my experience from the few months before working with Hyper-V as an architect and integrator in putting together a demo that was delivered for the Intel Developer Forum, which took place in San Francisco on August 19-21. Please refer to "[p-11499]" for a detailed account.

The solidity of the product during the months I worked with it was impressive. I've seen behaviors in previous products are technically correct. However, oftentimes with new products (and also with presumably mature products) the system just checks out for a time, or the results of certain operations are ambiguous, yielding a subjective feeling of "mushiness" that does not inspire confidence. None of this happens with the Hyper-V manager user interface. The response was always crisp and the system was good at informing the user about what is happening. At the outset, if the BIOS settings are not correct for running virtualization, it will remind you in very certain terms to turn on hardware support for virtualization and the execute disable bit, even to the point of asking you to power cycle the system before resuming. The claims by Microsoft engineers during the conference about OS and VMM stability are consistent with my own experience.

Hyper-V comes with an extensive set of tools designed to facilitate large-scale deployments, yet they are useful to small enterprises. Examples mentioned: Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) and integration with System Center. The available tools support the complete deployment life cycle.

Microsoft invited Thomas Bittman, a VP and distinguished analyst from Gartner. His vision for virtualization is similar to the one painted extensively a book I co-authored. The alignment of his ideas with those in the book caught my attention. See "[p-11383]". His thesis is that the impact of virtualization comes not from the technology itself, the capability to consolidate workloads and save energy, but from the changes in business models it brings.

"It is now less about the technology and more about process change and cultural change within organizations," said Mr. Bittman. "Virtualization enables alternative delivery models for services. Each virtualized layer can be managed relatively independently or even owned by someone else, for example, streamed applications or employee-owned PCs. This can require major cultural changes for organizations."

Kirk Skaugen talking about HyperV

josh_hilliker@mail.intel.com — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 21:32:17 GMT

The Server Room Blog

Microsoft Hyper-V Launch Event in Bellevue

Kirk Skaugen talking about HyperV