I recently attended one of the stops of Microsoft’s Get Virtual Now tour. Microsoft describes these tours as follows:

“Spend a day learning how a well-designed virtualization strategy can help you control costs, improve service levels, and drive business agility. See solutions built on the Windows Server® 2008 operating system with Hyper-V™ technology, System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007, and Microsoft Desktop and Application Virtualization. And learn how you can leverage end-to-end virtualization to unlock benefits from the data center to the desktop. “

There are three sessions that go on during these tour stops as well as a hands-on lab and a vendor pavilion. Here are the three main sessions:

• Session I: Server Virtualization and Management
• Session II: How Microsoft Builds Dynamic Data Centers
• Session III: Understanding Virtualization at the Desktop Level

As I sat through these sessions, I made a few notes. Here are the high level bullet-points:

• Microsoft mentioned Citrix/Xen several times during the introductions of Hyper-V. Later on in the presentation, Citrix was mentioned as helping Microsoft Hyper-V with 3rd part guest VMs (specifically SUSE was mentioned).
• When choosing which type of HDD to use with your Hyper-V VMs, keep in mind that Pass-Thru disks do not support snapshots.
• In some cases, a Hyper-V VM can appear to run faster than a physical server. The reason for this is because Hyper-V passes off disk requests to the SCSI controller that has a buffer. This “tricks” the VM into thinking the data is written to disk when it actually is in the SCSI buffer. This is probably a rare situation though.
• System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) generates PowerShell scripts to perform tasks. You can save these scripts in a Library for later use or automation. Pretty cool I think!
• Microsoft’s internal IT (MSIT) provisions virtual servers by default for all server requests (unless a business case dictates otherwise).
• MSIT replaced 1000 physical servers with VMs in 2 years.
• technet.microsoft.com and msdn.microsoft.com run 100% Hyper-V
• SCVMM has a “self service” web page that allows users to perform certain VM actions (like suspend, resume, reboot, etc).
• SCVMM can manage VMWare ESX VMs (through APIs of VirtualCenter).

Technorati : Citrix, Hyepr-V, Microsoft, SCVMM, VMWare, Virtualization, Xen
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