Get Ready For a Busy Couple of Months
I’m a big fan of DPM, as I mentioned last week. I was really happy to see the Beta release of DPM 2012. However, I’m MORE excited to see that we’ve announced the RELEASE CANDIDATE of Virtual Machine Manager 2012.
VMM2012 has been in Beta for a while and it’s the first piece of the System Center suite to make it to RC status.
Given the clip at which we’re getting new info on the SC suite, not to mention the upcoming BUILD conference that promises lots of new info on Win8, it can’t be long before we see the RTM versions of System Center products. It’d be nice to see them rev all of the new products at the same time, but that might be a bit too much to ask for.
So who’s played with VMM2012? This is a dramatically improved product over the current version and is definitely a step in the right direction in Microsoft’s fight against VMware.
New peek at Windows 8
I guess we shouldn’t be surprised to see more and more details emerge about Windows 8 as Microsoft is preparing for its annual BUILD conference next week. The more I hear about the next release, the more excited I get about the future of Windows Server, Hyper-V and the System Center stack.
The Win 8 Engineering team put together a fantastic blog post about some of the new features of Hyper-V and I wanted to call out a couple:
- Create VMs with 32 vCPU and 512GB of RAM. I’m glad we’re making some headway in scalability. A lot of people are holding off on virtualizing their Tier 1 apps because of 4 vCPU limit. Granted, don’t take that to mean that performance is going to scale linearly as you add more vCPUs, but now we’ll have the ability to test out larger and larger workloads. RAM is the hot button issue now, especially with VMware’s vRAM limitations. This is probably the single biggest issue that I have with vSphere. I think it’s a great product, but paying more then more you use is asinine.
- Live Storage Move. That’s a bit of an awkward name, but the concept is sound. Having the ability to move a running VM from one storage location to another with no interruption is cool, but I don’t see a tremendous demand for it in my space (small-medium business). The majority of the customers I interact with have 1, maybe two SANs and rarely, if ever, have the need to move VMs from location to location. I suppose this is great for larger customers that need this flexibility every now and then, but not on a day-to-day basis.
- Support for Wireless networks. Ok, this is a cool one for those of us out in the field and interacting with customers or partners. Creating a second boot partition and installing Win Server 2008 R2 worked fine, except I couldn’t get it to connect to a wireless network without jumping through some hoops. For everyone out there running Hyper-V in production, remember, just because it supports wireless networks, doesn’t mean you should USE wireless networks.
Add all of this, together with Hyper-V Replica and you can see just how much work Microsoft has put into the next version of Windows and Hyper-V.
What else do you all see? Anything interesting from the video?
Don’t forget, we’ll see more next week at BUILD!
Yay, I Did It!
Finally! I managed to pass the Desktop Virtualization MCP exam. I’m now an MCITP – Virtualization Administrator on Windows Server 2008 R2. For whatever that’s worth. 
DPM 2012 Beta Now Out In The Wild
It’s been interesting to see how much traction Data Protection Manager 2010 has been getting over the last year. It seems like I’m having far more conversations around the capabilities and functions of DPM recently. From a capability standpoint, it’s an absolutely solid product for backing up Windows-based workloads. On top of that, creating a solid backup, replication, and DR strategy with DPM is incredibly easy.
Now, we have more reasons to be excited. The Beta version of DPM 2012 has been released today and adds a whole slew of capabilities. Here are the highlights from the DPM Team Blog:
Provides centralized management
- Centralized monitoring
- Centralized troubleshooting
- Push to resume backups
- Manage DPM 2010 and DPM 2012 from the same console
- Media co-location
- Integration into existing ticketing systems, workflows and team structures.
- Enterprise scale, Fault tolerance & Reliability.
- Generic data source protection
- All common Operations Manager 2007 R2 deployment configurations supported
- Remote administration, corrective actions and recovery
- Certificate based protection
- Prioritize issues with SLA based Alerting, consolidation of alerts and alert categorization
- Role based administration
- Support for item level recovery, even when DPM is in a VM
VMlimited
Ok, if you haven’t seen this yet, you need to watch this video from Microsoft.
Yes, my friends, this is what happens when you choose a virtualization company that is stuck in the past. Great work from Microsoft, especially right as a competitor is hosting their big conference.
Only Me.
Yes, only I could go through the entire process of installing WordPress, getting some customization in place, write an intro piece, and then completely abandon the project for an entire month. (By the way, I lost that match I referred to in my post.)
Here’s the realistic goal: From here on out I’ll post 2-3 times a week, MINIMUM.
I have a couple of posts queued up so I should be able to keep this going for a while. Plus, there’s a lot of cool stuff coming up in the near future that should keep me occupied.
Hello world!
I suppose this is the part where I tell you a little bit about why I started this.
I’m currently on vacation. I’m in one of the most amazing cities in the world and about to start playing a (very amateur) tennis tournament in the morning and I’m apprehensive about having to play one of the top ranked guys in my division. I’m attempting to take my mind off of the impending epic failure of my morning match so I decided “Why not start a blog?!” Makes perfect sense, right?
Now that I’ve gone through and cobbled together a basic, but working site, I need to come up with a topic for said blog. Since I’m on vacation, why not start a blog about work?! So that’s what I’ve done. This is my blog about virtualization technology and all the wonders it brings.
If you’re familiar with the technology landscape, you know there is an epic battle being waged between the massive virtualization vendors for control of the universe virtualization market. I definitely have picked my side and this blog will center around Microsoft’s virtualization platform.
I am fairly new to Microsoft’s virt platform so this will be a learning experiment for you and me both.
This site is ONLY for my own commentary and opinions. None of the statements made on this blog should be construed to be the official word from Microsoft!
Now that that’s out of the way, it’s time to start diving in.
Certification
