A Vision of Virtualization

Businesses today face the challenge of getting the most out of their hardware investments, while increasing their flexibility to respond to changing business demands, even in the face of disaster. Virtualization allows companies to run multiple operating systems concurrently on a single physical server, providing for much more effective utilization of the underlying hardware. Each operating system is contained within a single virtual machine image, which can be moved from one server to another, run alongside other images on the server, or placed in storage to support testing or backup and restore procedures. This flexibility enables IT professionals to meet the goals of both reducing cost and risk by maximizing resource utilization and recovery, while increasing flexibility to respond to changing business demands.

Virtualization in the mainstream server market is starting to see rapid adoption based on the compelling business benefits that it provides. Technical advances in the areas of compatibility, reliability and scalability of server virtualization solutions are resulting in reduced cost, increased flexibility and continuity to sustain operations in the face of required server maintenance and even system failures. Microsoft Windows Server 2003 R2 delivers technical features and software licensing that are designed to help customers take advantage of the benefits of server virtualization technology in today’s business environment.

Bringing the benefits of virtualization to the enterprise

Virtualization technology continues to be a hot topic in the industry and is a key technology for reducing the cost and complexity of IT management, and Microsoft has committed significant resources to making virtualization more broadly accessible and affordable for customers.

Microsoft sees customer benefit along five critical lines:

• Software infrastructure: Products such as Microsoft Virtual Server today and the upcoming Windows Server virtualization (available as part of Windows Server “Longhorn”) create agility and better utilize server resources.
• IT management: The System Center product family provides significant cost savings for customers by easing consolidation onto virtual infrastructure, enabling better utilization of management resources and providing a unified set of management tools for physical and virtual workloads.
• Applications: Microsoft products such as Systems Management Server (SMS) and Softricity SoftGrid are reducing the cost of deploying, updating and supporting applications, accelerating responsiveness, and turning applications into dynamic, real-time services available from any system.
• Interoperability: Microsoft builds interoperability into its products so that customers can connect to other platforms, applications, and data easily without customization or high-priced consultants. Microsoft does this by taking a multifaceted approach to interoperability by design that takes into account customer-driven industry collaborations, standards that promote common technologies, proactive licensing of intellectual property and the creation of technologies that bridge different systems.
• Licensing: Microsoft has improved its Windows Server System licensing policies to help drive the adoption of virtualization with more cost-effective, flexible and simplified licensing that promotes easier deployment of software in virtual machines.

Together, these solutions provide a comprehensive and well-managed virtualization solution for customers across datacenters and desktops.

Traditional IT systems live within boundaries: operating systems are tied to hardware they are installed on; applications are confined to the OS on which they are installed; and resources, such as computing power in a server or network bandwidth, have to be dedicated to service these applications. Today, we look at virtualization as a key technology to help customers achieve self managing dynamic systems. Across the platform, operating system, applications and management layers we’re delivering functionality and capabilities that enable our customers to significantly reduce operating costs, drive up server utilization and achieve better ROI through full featured virtualization solutions.

With self managing dynamic systems, application workloads can take advantage of resources dynamically, consuming more as they need and releasing them when they are done. This automation requires advanced management technology in addition to virtualization. This will drastically reduce the high cost of management currently plaguing the IT industry, freeing resources for continued growth and development. As demand grows, additional capacity can be added in required increments, and immediately added to the pool of available resources.

Infrastructure utilization and consolidation

Optimizing the use of physical IT assets is becoming imperative as datacenters reach their capacity for power and space. Microsoft recognizes that the problem intensifies for companies whose servers run at low utilization rates. Server utilization rates of less than five percent are not uncommon, and many customer usage rates fall within 10-15 percent. Hardware virtualization technology is used to consolidate multiple physical machines onto a lesser number of physical machines. Virtualization can also be used to re-host legacy environments especially as older generation hardware becomes more difficult and costly to maintain. And because software is abstracted from the hardware, virtualization is a good solution for disaster recovery environments as well.

On track to be available within 180 days of the release of Windows Server codenamed ‘Longhorn’, Windows Server virtualization is part of Microsoft’s ongoing effort to provide the best-possible server operating system platform for customers. Windows ‘hypervisor’ is a thin layer of software running directly on the hardware which works in conjunction with an optimized instance of Windows Server ‘Longhorn’ that allows multiple operating system instances to run on a physical server simultaneously. This approach allows customers to experience greater scalability, higher performance, higher reliability, better flexibility and goes hand-in-hand with the evolution of powerful processors.

Managing the virtualized datacenter

Resource management tools have long been part of operating systems, dating back to the mainframe era. As virtualization has gained broader adoption on industry-standard hardware, it has become an important resource management tool to increase server utilization, lower operational costs and increase availability and IT responsiveness.

Microsoft believes the combination of virtualization platform and management capabilities will deliver business agility and dynamic resource utilization with greater levels of efficiency. To this end, Microsoft is investing in management tools like System Center Virtual Machine Manager (now in beta) to manage virtualized datacenters running either Virtual Server 2005 or Windows Server virtualization. By providing integration with the rest of the System Center family of products, customers now have a unified set of tools for managing the complete infrastructure both physical and virtual environments plus the application stacks on top.

Customers tell us they’re not looking to bring in specialized tools and skills to handle their virtualized elements of their datacenter. They want to make use of existing people skills. With System Center Virtual Machine Manager, IT administrators can extend the investments and skills they’ve already developed in their physical infrastructure management to manage their new virtual infrastructure.

Virtualization also offers benefits in terms of business responsiveness. Currently, when a business owner calls in for a new service that requires a new server to be deployed, it typically takes two weeks to three months to bring that new hardware online. Virtual Machine Manager can bring a new virtual server online in just a few minutes.

Application virtualization

Application virtualization technology can help reduce the amount of application compatibility testing typically needed when deploying new applications, upgrades and patches, therefore reducing the demand on your human resources. Applications are served centrally and delivered directly to the user’s desktop in an isolated, virtualized image, minimizing application-related alterations to the operating system and compatibility challenges with other applications.

Virtualized applications can be dynamically sent over the network, effectively whenever and wherever a user needs them. This approach creates the option of a centrally managed software service in which applications are available when and where needed and are easily updated.

With application virtualization and software streaming, Microsoft can now deliver virtualization at the application layer. This is an important part of Microsoft’s virtualization strategy across the platform, operating system, applications and management layers to help customers achieve self-managing dynamic systems. Customers will now have access to new Microsoft solutions to address application compatibility challenges, ease migration to Windows Vista and Windows Server, code-named ‘Longhorn,’ and dynamically deliver application functionality.

Managing costs with virtualization

Whether you have five servers or 5000, server virtualization can help you reduce costs, respond to changing business demands, and improve the uptime and reliability of your critical software systems.

Enterprises have been on a treadmill of complexity and cost that limits the value IT delivers to the business. Virtualization is a key technology to help liberate IT but must be implemented as part of a broad approach of enabling self-managing dynamic systems. The goal or end-state of a highly flexible, virtualized infrastructure is self-managing dynamic systems that take business policies as an input and use those criteria to manage the access of self-contained applications to the underlying hardware resources. This approach will solve the problems of high management cost, unresponsive infrastructure and underutilized capacity.

Virtualization also reduces costs by consolidating under-utilized servers and providing a much more efficient mechanism for developing and testing software. Virtualization also provides the flexibility to rapidly provision new servers and to test and roll out (and, if necessary, roll back) patches or other changes to business-critical applications.

As more and more components of the IT infrastructure—such as storage, servers, and network—become virtualized, the flexibility of the system grows substantially. By enabling business policy to be used as a driver for the systems and resources that are available, you can make the move from flexible systems to truly dynamic systems. To support this infrastructure flexibility with software licensing flexibility, Microsoft took the industry-leading step to revamp our Windows Server and Windows Server System application (SQL, Exchange, etc) licenses to make them virtualization compatible. For example,

• Run up to four virtual instances of Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition on one licensed physical server or hardware partition.
• Windows Server System applications running in a virtual environment are now licensed per virtual processors instead of physical processors.
• Starting October 1, 2006, new servers licensed with Windows Server Datacenter Edition (and previous licenses with new version rights) will have license rights to run an unlimited number of virtualized Windows Server instances. By simply licensing the server’s processors with Windows Server Datacenter Edition, customers will be able to run Windows Server Standard Edition, Enterprise Edition, Datacenter Edition or a mix of the three editions without having to track the number of virtual machines or pay for additional Windows Server licenses.

Going forward

The complexities associated with today’s distributed IT systems are driving businesses to spend as much as 70 to 80 percent of their IT budget just to maintain what they have. In addition to driving up the costs of operations, the complexity of these systems is at the source of many challenges across the entire IT lifecycle. Microsoft’s Dynamic Systems Initiative seeks to help manage the complexity by providing ‘intelligence’ at different layers (application, management, and infrastructure) to create a self-managing dynamic systems environment where automation can handle most of the administrative and management tasks. By investing in virtualization at several different levels and providing a range of solution options, Microsoft can create a dynamic virtualized infrastructure and make IT a true value generator for your organization.