Virtualization, Cloud, Infrastructure and all that stuff in-between

3rd day out at TechEd, sorry for the delay in posting – have had lots of session time and work to slot in either side, plus it takes quite a long time to write this up, I hope you’re finding it useful.

I attended a number of sessions around SCVMM and Hyper V today, as well as some good chats with some people from the product teams. – the “ask the expert” booths are brilliant for this kind of thing as they are usually well staffed with people from the development or PS teams so you can usually get an answer to a complicated question; or be pointed in the right direction.

First session was Windows vista to Windows 7 desktop virtualization roadmap with Fei Lu, key points for me were;

• Microsoft are investing significant effort in application and desktop virtualization, the driver for this is that it makes it easier for people to deploy newer OS’es by de-coupling/virtualizing the integration between hardware/OS/applications/data – the pay-off for Microsoft is that they sell more licences and speed up adoption, to my mind this helps keep the traditional rich OS/app desktop in the game with adopters of Web 2.0 type on-line applications
• Wide range of products in this space now, Terminal Service/Desktop VM/central VDI and application virtualization which can all be mixed & matched to provide the required solution.
• Folder redirection/roaming profiles with good off-line caching is being positioned as data virtualization.
• VM Mobility and DR are popular scenarios for MS customers
• Windows 7 will provide even more off-line caching features for data and settings – data virtualization.
• The Kidaro acquisition becomes MED-V “Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization” which manages distributing VMs to PCs and provides offline use and desktop integration (more on this in a later session)
• VDI is also a popular scenario, Microsoft will not write an enterprise scale connection broker, they have partnered with Citrix to deliver this, Microsoft may provide a small scale connection broker in future.
• VDI and APP-V is nice solution for simple centralised desktop management, (I did hear later than there is no x64 support for APP-V as far as I know though)
• New VDI scenarios with Windows 7 RDP protocol support multi-monitor and bi-directional audio.
• Fei ran a very brave demo of speech recognition over RDP to a beta version of a Windows 7 VDI farm.. worked pretty well, and also played back some HD quality video which was pretty impressive (no details on bandwidth available/used though).
• In future Microsoft are considering a pure hypervisor based client device, and the ability to download a VM image and run it and support portability of the image to/from a VDI farm.
• Windows 7 will be able to boot a VHD directly, which must use the same code/logic as Server 2008 and Hyper V use to manage the parent partition.

Next up was a more detailed look at MED-V (Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization) this is the Kidaro product, integrated as part of the MDOP licencing programme, key points.

• It Manages and distributes virtual machines to client devices for local execution (think: running  Virtual PC on a Vista machine with centralised management and distribution of the .VHD files.
• PC needs MED-V client  (.MSI installer).
• Integrates start menu and seamless windows from the guest OS to the host like you get with VMWare Workstation’s Unity feature
• capable of distributing VMs over the network (delta based replication) or on media like USB/DVD.
• Policy control for expiry of a provided virtual machine; managing when it can be used etc.
• Maps printers back to local host
• Didn’t mention clipboard redirection explicitly but I assume it’s there?
• Configure which guest OS applications are published to the host OS start menu (nice)
• Integrated support for sysprep and setup scripts for things like domain membership if you have transient or persistent VMs.
• A very clever feature can redirect a MED-V presented IE window back to the guest OS instance of IE via an internal VPN tunnel (pretty sure that was what was said); based on the URL they are trying to reach. Which is good for a scenario where you are using a company supplied and secured MED-V VM on a home PC – ensuring that personal browsing does not traverse a company VM or VPN connection.
• MED-V isn’t available yet; beta out early Q1 2009 and RTM likely to be available 1st half of 2009.

Next up was a session on System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) which is used to manage virtual machines on both Hyper-V hosts and VMWare ESX (Xen maybe too in the future)

• VMWare Virtual Center is required to manage ESX hosts and clusters, SCVMM proxies control requests for ESX hosts via virtual center (using the API and PowerShell it would seem).
• SCVMM can manage multiple VMWare Virtual Center instances as well as Hyper-V and present a single pane of glass across the whole estate with centralised provisioning etc.
• SCVMM provides a Performance & Resource Optimisation feature (PRO) which is similar to VMWare’s DRS functionality
• PRO Can distribute VM load across multiple Virtual Center instances; which VMWare VC can’t do itself (but assume can’t vMotion this way so would have to shutdown and move).
• Can only use DRS or PRO – not both as they will fight each other.
• Can use SCVMM without SCOM but it can’t do the PRO stuff without SCOM as it doesn’t have performance data.
• There SCVMM is available now will be a new release to support Server 2008r2 and Hyper-V quick migration (vMotion equivalent).
• All in, looks to be a good product with some nice integrations but until Hyper-V is more prevalent managing mixed environments isn’t a huge requirement (to me) it’s not necessarily anything you can’t do out of the box now with VMWare Virtual Centre and some Windows VM monitoring via SCOM but definitley worth having in the arsenal for when Server 2008r2 brings live migration to Hyper V as adoption will pick up.

Next session was on connecting Active Directory to cloud services; this focused on the work Microsoft have done to build a hub and spoke federation architecture to allow cross-authentication between internal directory services (in this case Active Directory) and external service providers.

• the core of this is Microsoft Live ID, this service is essentially a broker hub for passing around authentication tokens and requests.
• Will be released in 2009; CTP available now, beta early 2009.
• Built on “Geneva” technology which seems to be a wider development of AD-FS
• Key point is tokens/claims are passed around the cloud and your service providers but authentication is always done via your home directory (i.e AD)
• Wizard based setup to enroll users/groups to the Federated Hub service.
• Release will be targeted at Active Directory as the authentication source, but framework is open so other vendors could write providers (Netware, Linux etc).
• Need to find out more about “Geneva” which is geared to complex enterprise scenarios.
• Will maybe build in more granular control for your administrators to specify what service providers your credentials can be used on, you never send passwords etc. just tokens but you may not want your internal users using this service to authenticate to non-business (i.e dating/social networking) sites that also participate in the Live ID federation hub.

Last session of the day was on the new Server 2008r2 Cluster Shared Volume (CSV) feature.

• Disks on traditional windows clusters could only be owned and accessed by one host over the storage area network (FC/iSCSI etc.) at a time; if other nodes try to mount the disk they can’t and there can be a risk of corruption.
• This is a multi-access shared disk volume, a bit like VMFS or ZFS.
• Hyper V is the only supported workload (but others may work)
• This is how they will enable live migration in Server 2008 R2 Hyper V
• 1 co-ordinator node manages access to the CSV and owns it.
• nodes send their read/write data to the CSV volume by the most efficient path (determined by the controller node?) this can be down the storage path or over a Ethernet network between the nodes (using faster Win2008 R2 SMB protocols)
• Can provide an extra degree of fault tolerance for access to the volume if a FC-path or network fails as it can route around it.
• you can assign priorities to certain paths to the storage.
• It’s still NTFS, all the tools chkdsk etc. still work and ACL’s etc.
• Supports MPIO, Fibre channel, iSCSI.
• This looks promising but I’m not sure about this data routing idea – surely you’d rather keep your server, storage and networking separate for security and performance reasons… but it is a clever idea and I can see that it could provide burst capacity if you were to saturate a storage path on an individual host, you could hand it off to another host to proxy it for you via an alternative path.

During the day we also got to speak to some of the Ask the Expert people around Hyper V – we discovered

• They’re unsure if Hyper V supports Windows Network Load Balancing
• You can’t do NIC trunking with Hyper V like you can with ESX; it’s 1 NIC — 1 vSwitch which means you can’t consolidate your VM network traffic into a pool.

That wrapped up day 3 and was followed by the UK TechEd party at Opium Cinema; it was a pretty good turn-out and the drinks flowed into the small hours.

Today was a full compliment of sessions, with some good sessions on Hyper V, Windows 2008 failover clustering and Forefront.

Steve Riley started off the day with a session on virtualization and security, whilst pretty high-level without getting into too many specifics he did a good job of expressing Microsoft’s view on Hyper V security.

the key points for me were;

• Each VM has a 1:1 connection to the hypervisor; there is no sharing of memory or VM-bus connections.
• Microsoft will not be opening the hypervisor kernel to 3rd party developers to provide IPS/IDS/malware type functionality as other vendors are (i.e VMWare) as they believe this to be a more flexible approach (despite being panned by analysts over this).
• The interfaces to/from enlightenments are well documented and public, no security by obscurity.

Then there was a session on Hyper V architecture, where Jeff Woolsey demonstrated building virtual machines.

There were some cost comparisons between VMWare and Hyper V; I’ve skipped over these as like any vendor the numbers were somewhat skewed.. you can easily make your own comparisons, Hyper V will probably be cheaper – but when you pick the numbers apart they’re not as far away as Microsoft say – VMWare are just as guilty of doing this, so I’ll move on.

Key points for me were;

• IDC say by 2010 there will be just 17% virtualized servers in the world, Microsoft want to drastically increase this
• HyperV comes with Win2008 x64 edition only (std/ent/DC all have the same Hyper V instance – only difference is the RAM/CPU limits in the host OS)
• 1Tb physical memory supported, 64Gb per VM (x64)
• supports 24 logical CPUs and 192 running VMs on a single server
• Hardware AMD-V/HT/DEP is required to run Hyper V
• TAP/RDP/MSIT customers are all running Hyper V – “the red phone never rang” and they didn’t have any critical issues; I’ve participated in TAP programmes in the past and true to their word Microsoft provide excellent, direct developer support to TAP participants.
• Hyper V is running 50% of current microsoft.com; and in middle of HW refresh to complete the change over – 1Bn hits/day that’s impressive.
• MSIT now have a VM 1st policy previous 10-14 day SLA for server provision is now down to minutes/hours – storage provisioning is the only delay internally.
• TechNet.microsoft.com is 100% Hyper V since beta 1M hits/day
• MSDN, 100% Hyper-V 3M hits/day
• Hyper V role – swaps boot WinOS for Hypervisor (slides underneath)
• Hyper V supports standard windows driver model for HV (better than ESX) and more flexible.
• WMI providers for management built in allows remote mmc’s and SCVMM etc.
• I/O is traditionally virtualization biggest headache (with Virtual PC, Virtual Server)
• No emulation for I/O  (as per Virtual Server) anymore
• Driver enlightenment is the solution VMBus/Virtual Service Provider [VSP]/Virtual Service Client [VSC]
• VSC – guest OS enlightenment/driver
• VSP – server side driver/assistant

All in, an interesting session; I can see where Microsoft are going with the product and I like it – they have a good end-end solution with the System Centre integration and are heavily pushing this at the moment as the hypervisor is less established than VMWare.

VMWare have some other good complimentary tools like site recovery manager, lab manager, stage/lifecycle manager that Microsoft still have to catch up with, but they’re definitely getting there, for me an equivalent HA/DRS functionality is missing for hyper V in production now and by the time WS2008 R2 is out I would expect ESX4 to debut and move the game on further.

The lack of 3rd party direct integration to the hypervisor disappoints me, to my mind that would prevent some comprehensive IPS and networking solutions (like the Cisco NX1000 vSwitch) although it does keep control entirely in the Microsoft camp.

I attended a good technical session on Windows Server 2008 fail-over cluster troubleshooting, key points for me were;

• Support is now less driven by the HCL. but a configuration validator that ships with Windows, similar to other best-practice analyser tools  (exBPA etc.) provides a supported/not support statement; there is a new FCCP programme which certifies vendor solutions for Win2008 clustering – which seems the same as the previous HCL approach.  HP were missing from the list of partners, but it is being worked on. otherwise all the usual suspects were there.
• Full validation of a cluster requires downtime as it needs to take disks offline to analyse – which could be a bit of an issue; if you need to make a change you then need to schedule downtime to run the analysers and get the warm and fuzzy supported feeling.
• Microsoft are building a shared clustered file system like ZFS/VMFS
• No longer a requirement to power down/mask a node when adding disks – they don’t auto-mount/signature
• NIC teaming is supported on any interface
• cluster debug logs have moved to the Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) framework – binary format, queried by tools or event viewer.
• No event log replication; cluster manager aggregates log info
• 2008 R2 will supplement cluster.exe with a PowerShell equivalent, and that will be the way forward.
• Cluster Logs are always in local time (as determined by control panel) cluster logs are always in GMT – useful to know!
• configurable debug/informational levels for cluster service
• No cluster service account any more; runs as Local System – excellent.

Finally there was a technical session around the new developments in ForeFront for Exchange/Stirling.

Stirling is a codename for a development of the Antigen acquisition a few years ago into a full security suite – edge/internal protection although multiscan engines and SSL VPN type services, this session focused on the developments for Forefront for Exchange.

Key points for me were;

• Exchange hosted services to provide a MessageLabs equivalent type service – large distributed spam/AV scanning at the network edge, being extended to sync up with on-site Exchange services and infrastructure
• Microsoft are deploying infrastructures in several geographic locations, sometimes to meet local legal/compliance reasons – for example Germany/Canada
• Back-scatter protection – tagging legitimate outbound mail with a rotating cryptographic key, if NDR’s are received from spam sent illegitimately on your behalf they will not have this tag so will be dropped by the spam/AV filter.
• Can sync spam/AV policy between in-house/cloud/hosted Exchange services to keep a uniform protection policy

All in, a good 2nd day, looking forward to day 3.

Sorry for the delayed posting; I didn’t take my laptop on the 1st day and I twittered my thoughts thoughts the day – hopefully you can see them on my home page but here is a more considered version of my experiences so far..

The wireless is not as good this year – I’m struggling to get a connection and have had to resort to a wired connection in the work area which is a shame.

The keynote had a lot of Green IT and virtualization messages, VMWorld had almost exactly the same message (and a mature product 🙂 ) at VMWorld last year – there were some interesting parallels.

As usual, well organised and easy to move around the conference centre, good facilities – I note TechEd will be moving to Berlin next year, will be interesting as the Barcelona site seems ideal, Amsterdam was too big but this feels about right – but bit of variety can’t do any harm!

VMWare have a stand in the exhibitors hall, sadly they don’t have their ESX4 demo available – they are hoping to be able to have it running by Weds.

Reading between the lines from sessions like the keynote and OS deployment tool schedules – I strongly suspect that Windows 2008 R2 will be released with Windows 7 between June 09 and June 2010 – yeah, it’s a big window… but it seems to be consistent.

Windows Server 2008 R2 is currently under development, beta out shortly

Interesting new Server 2008 r2 features:

• Will support Hyper V live migration of VMs
• 2008 R2 will be x64 only, no x86 version
• Branch Cache – file and http cache for branch offices – hope to catch some more details on this, as I assume it needs client-side support – Windows 7 seems to be mentioned in conjunction with it
• BitLocker to go – encryption for removable volumes (HDD based backups etc.)

Interesting new tech from the keynote

• Exchange online – the ability to {seamlessly} migrate users from your internal Exchange 2007 server to one hosted within Microsoft’s cloud (is this Azure? – I’ll try to find out) works by setting up an AD sync job and then can move the mailbox out/back again – clever, launching spring 2009
• System Center Configuration Manager 2007 R2 will beta at the end of November 2009 – looks to bring good SLA and cross-platform (Linux etc.) support
• SQL Gemini – fast and flexible client side BI analysis tools – looked very clever from the demo
• App-V (think SoftGrid for servers) will be coming, more info in 2009 – virtualized Exchange/SQL etc. would be interesting

In general, it does seem a bit toned down from the last time I came in 2006, less big announcements but I think that’s a hangover from the lessons learnt around the Vista hype machine and still a lot of good technical content.