Dugie’s Pensieve

*grins*  I like this.  Patrick over at the Windows Server Division Blog has done a really nice ”roundup” of Vmware Whitepaper responses from most of the the IT Publications.  A snippet from his post “VMyths” is below:

For those of us interested in virtualization, we now have a new definition of white paper, to say the least. It appears the Dan’s pre-VMWorld 2006 blog was good enough to qualify and package as a white paper. Not only did Mike Neil reject VMWare’s claims today, but there have been many questions in the press about the motivation of the white paper. At best, it’s been mixed reviews for the white paper.
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The resulting press coverage from the virtualization licensing announcement acknowledges that virtualization software challenges all current licensing and support agreements - not just Microsoft’s, but all commercial software vendors. It’s interesting to look back at some of those industry quotes and customer comments, and then contrast them to VMware’s points.
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The research firm surveyed about 1,770 enterprise and smaller companies and found that use of server virtualization grew from 29% in 2005 to 40% in 2006

Queue the voice over to Leonard Nemoy in “In Search Of…” It was always one of my favorite shows.

Feb. 28 update: InfoWorld goes so far as to call the white paper FUD

Patrick
 

VMware has published a HTML whitepaper, ”Microsoft Virtualization Licensing and Distribution Terms“.  I imagine most people have read or at least heard of it by now.  Regardless of your Virtualization Vendor of choice, it is recommended reading, and covers the good, the bad, and the very ugly. 

So I wanted to post my own commentary and feelings on this, it’s taken me a while to put pen to paper — and although this post isn’t polished, I wanted to blog before I was over it and moved on.  

Firstly, I think anyone who thinks Virtualization is easy is kidding themselves — we all know that Virtualization, Licensing, Vendors, VMware, Microsoft and Distribution is a very painful combination.  Although it’s gotten better, I still reckon the first two points alone can make you scratch your head.  VMware have got some very valid points, and nailed it in their whitepaper.  Ok so maybe they used a 500 pound sledge hammer when a rubber mallet would do.  :)  I’m sure out of the rouble, some constuctive goodness will come out of all this.

Secondly, lets quickly go back 12 months in Microsoftland, and take a 10,000 ft look at what I think were interesting highlights:

• January 2007 - Microsoft publishes the Windows Server Virtualization Calculator 
• December 2006 - Nearly a dozen VMs publicly available for download on Microsoft.com 
• December 2006 - KB 897614 Updated Twice - Windows Server System not supported within Virtual Server
• Novemeber 2006 - VHD Test Drive releases 4 images
• November 2006 - The IE6 Appliance makes a brief debut, disappearance and back again – with the EULA clause for VHD only
• October 2006 - Microsoft hints at licensing changes 
• October 2006 - VHD Specification is now publicly available for download without registration
• August 2006 - KB 897614  and KB 867572 Supported operating systems in Virtual Server 2005 R2 both updated. 
• July 2006 - Microsoft announces unlimited Virtual Macines with Data Centre 
• Febuary 2006 - A big 6 months of announcements before that

Yeah I know it’s only the tip of the Microsoft iceberg, but it shows the idea.  There has been positive (and ok, some zealots will argue ‘tiny’) steps in the right direction — regardless it is improvement/progress.  Compare this to 18 months ago (October 05) when there was no support for virtualized Exchange; even on Microsoft Virtual Server.

Fast forward to now.  Do I think Microsoft have got it right just yet - hell no.  Are they getting better and making progress, you bet.  Is there room for improvement, yeah for sure!   

Is it going to be another Internet Explorer/WindowsN scenario, I don’t think so.  I personally think there is enough evidence that Microsoft is making a serious commitment to virtualization.  Is it enough?  Well obviously no, not just yet.  Windows Server Virtualization availability is still a long way off.  Virtual Machine Manager looks to be really good, but it’s still in beta.  …and there are a lot of new and old virtualization players with established solid products and solutions.  Just because a product isn’t supported, doesn’t necessarily mean people will stop using it and getting value from it :)

…but a lot can happen in only a few months.  Who knows, maybe we will all have to eat some humble pie sooner than we think?!

So what now?  Well I don’t think the VMware whitepaper is the complete story of doom and gloom it makes out.  Obviously all forms of virtualization licensing and interoperability is going to get better.  It has to. I don’t think the market/customers will tolerate anything less.  I’m pretty sure Microsoft will be taking feedback hopefully from everyone in the Virtualization community and moving forward.  With any big change you’ve got to start somewhere, and at least Microsoft has made a start.  I’d like to at least see a few other software vendors make any sort of similar commitment. 

Here’s the exciting burning question, how much better will Virtualization interoperability get?  How aggressive is that curve going to be?  I want to see that curve so steep, you can just feel the gforces kicking in!   

I guess this marks the beginning of a crazy roller coaster ride about to take off, who else wants to jump aboard and see what happens?  Agree/Disagree leave comments, interested to hear what you think.

Bahhhh!!!  Kleefy beat me to it.  No point repeating what’s already been said, so here’s the snippet from the Canadian IT Professionals blog :)

One of the people I really wanted to talk to was Jeff Woolsey - a lead program manager on the Windows Server Virtualization team.  He was the guy who did a wicked demo of Windows Server Virtualization during Bill Gates keynote.

Here’s the quick index of the podcast and the link for your listening pleasure.

00:00 - (all) - Intros
00:45 - (Rick) - Why should IT Pros and Developers care about virtualization?
02:15 - (Rick) - What sort of Management solutions should you have to manage both physical and virtual worlds?
04:38 - (Rod) - How does virtualization fit into the concept of Infrastructure Optimization?
06:12 - (Rick) - Are there benefits using virtualization to small and medium sized businesses?
08:20 - (Rick) - What sort of performance expectations should we have for virtualization using our current technology and where is it going in the future?
11:32 - (Rod) - What is the upper limit on resources with Windows Server Virtualization?

Link to Podcast (Length 13:01)

I know the title is a bit weird, but it sounds better tan the boring “Microsoft Virtualization Roadmap”.  Volker has pointed to a great post from Mike Neil (Thanks Volker!).   Mike is the General Manager Virtualization Strategy at Microsoft and  who better to tell us how the Microsoft Virtualization jigsaw fits together.

You can read all about it in Mike’s post “Where we’re headed with virtualization” and a snippet is below:

Does this mean everything will be virtualized in 5 years? Not likely due to continuing innovation at the hardware and software level, and the fact that no solution applies to everyone. That said, virtualization will become the default setting in the operating system – whether that’s Windows or other OSes in the market.

I’m off to Seattle in just under two weeks to the MVP Summit (and to visit and geek it up at the Microsoft Campus).   I can hardly wait!!

But before I get there, I have 20 hours of travel time including stopovers.  I’m taking copies of Phillip Pullman’s Dark Material’s trilogy (I promised myself to read more books this year) to help pass some of the time.

So anyone got some good tips for surviving the flight?

Now this is cool.  Using the free MySAN iSCSI Server from Nimbus you can turn a regular windows server into an iSCSI target.  Say for example and iSCSI target for Virtual Server Host clustering.  Some of you will remember String Bean’s WinTarget before it was acquired by Microsoft.

Anyway, to use the Nimbus product, you need to register before you download it.  It is currently in RC1 and it doesn’t appear to be able to assign multiple hosts to a single target jsut yet — I did a quick search, and it looks like this will be fixed in the next release.

I haven’t had a proper chance to really evaluate it at the moment (see my next post), but when I do, I’ll blog it back here.  See, told you it was cool.

A snippet of the Compatibility and Minimum System Requirements are below:

MySAN is open and vendor-agnostic iSCSI target software. It can be used on any server running Windows Server 2003. It supports virtually any type of hard drive based storage device.

• Windows Server 2003 SP1
• .NET 2.0 installed (free download from Windows Update site)
• 800 Mhz or higher processor
• 512 MB of RAM
• 20 MB of disk space for MySAN application data
• Separate Windows volume(s) to serve as MySAN iSCSI targets
• Ethernet network connection

I’ve been meaning to blog this for a while now.  It’s no secret that Liz and I are huge fans of our Media Centre.  I mean really, who (other than my wife) asks for their own Xbox 360 as a Birthday present, then use it as an exclusive Media Centre Extender?  It’s probably the only Xbox that has never had the DVD drive opened!

Anyway, I digress.  The reason for the post, is my Media Centre hosts a Virtual Machine with Virtual PC called “Divx”.  As the name suggests, it’s primary purpose is to take the the ~220 DVDs that I own and convert them into Divxs — and this takes time and CPU.

Using VMs on my Media Centre works very well for me.

The Media Centre is almost silent, it’s on 24 hours a day, and has [nearly] more storage than I know what to do with.  My desktop however is not, I enjoy sitting at my desk with the computer off.  It’s a comfortable place to sit and read, and I enjoy having the computer off and a chance to get away from emails and feeds.

So using my home baked VM solution I combine scheduled tasks and that mighty find tool ThreadMaster.  With the these tools, I throttle the CPU usage enough so that it doesn’t interfere with mission-criticality of the regular media centre duties.  From time to time I RDP into the VM and check the progress.  By using RDP into the VM, I ensure I don’t upset anyone who may be using the Media Centre at the time.  I’m sure everyone has been in that moment and knows what I mean.  Now I know I could use Virtual Server instead of Virtual PC, but there is a certain amount of comfort in the simplicity of this solution.

I imagine one day this style of virtual machine “Home Appliance” may even become more mainstream — who knows running your own mail server in a VM on your media centre may be perfectly normal in a few years?  Or maybe Virtual Machine technology will have evolved enough to run your Media Centre in a Virtual Machine.  Who knows?

But for the time being this is working really well.  Just thought I’d share this silly little bit of trivia with everyone.

Some more (and pretty exciting) Virtualization goodness from recent days gone by:

• SWsoft’s virtualization./partitioning software (aka Virtuozzo ) is now supported by Microsoft - It’s been 12 months since I checked out Virtuozzo, time to revisit this
• Chris Wolf, covers how to disable time synchronization under Virtual Server — it not as graceful as under VMware, but it can still be a life saver
• Longhorn February CTP is out, and yes Longhorn runs under VirtualPC
• SQL 2005 allows unlimited virtual instances on servers fully licensed for SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition
• Yes you can install Virtual PC 2007 fully unattended,  Eric has more info — just remember your NIC will go offline for a few seconds during the install
• MCPMag has a good primer on scripting Virtual Server

I was at the Microsoft ISV Summit in Melbourne yesterday.  While I was there I had a great opportunity to speak ISVs about the benefits and possibilities Virtualization.  There was lots of good discussion and exchange of ideas — So I’ll post a few bullet points in another post.

While I was there I got the chance to catch-up with Dave Lemphers & Shane Morris and chill for lunch (and some of that great Melbourne Coffee).  It was great, even a bit scary to see these two creative geniuses at work.  I am sooooo glad they use there superpowers for good and not evil :)

Gotta go and take over the world, report back in a bit.

It’s here Virtual PC 2007 is released and available for download (30 Meg).

I’m off to install it now, thanks to Volker, Ben, Mike and John for the news, a quick snippet from Ben’s post (or check outmy first impressions) is below:

• Support for x64 Windows as a host operating system
• Support for hardware virtualization support
• Support for Windows Vista as a guest and host operating system 
• Support for PXE network booting of virtual machines
• Support for the use of fullscreen virtual machines on multi-monitor systems (VM still stays on just one monitor though)