Our customers often deploy Microsoft server workloads, such as SQL Server, SharePoint and Exchange, on Microsoft Hyper-V and System Center, and want to know how other customers have deployed these workloads and if there are deployment guidelines from specific solution partners that can help optimize for scale and business continuity.

A case in point is our customer Avanade. Avanade wanted to reduce their datacenter costs and turned to Microsoft Virtualization, even for their most demanding workloads. Avanade designed a series of tests to evaluate virtualization of SQL Server in production environments. In one test, Avanade was impressed to see Hyper-V support 6,000 Microsoft Dynamics CRM users on the SQL Server 2005 cluster. “We felt extremely comfortable standing behind our corporate strategy to virtualize our biggest workloads—our upgrade to Microsoft SQL Server 2008, Exchange Server 2007—all those applications people were saying just couldn’t be done,” says Andy Schneider, Infrastructure Architect at Avanade. Avanade was able to virtualize its databases and consolidate them on fewer servers connected to a 50TB storage solution from NetApp. Overall, they reduced servers by 85% and improved performance by 50%.  

Speaking of NetApp, they recently released a whitepaper (click here

Hi, I'm Jordan Plawner, storage networking product planner from Intel.

Today I'm doing a recap of the Intel Server and Ethernet Adapters and Windows 2008 R2 1m iSCSI IOPs announcement and HyperV performance webcast.  The number of comments and ongoing discussions by end users have been impressive.  There were two themes that ran through the blog questions and comments that I want to address.

1^st:   What does 1 million IOPs on a single 10GbE port performance mean?  What this performance means is that you do not have to worry about iSCSI performance.  There is no server I/O bottleneck.  If you are going with an iSCSI SAN use the native infrastructure built into the server, OS and adapter.  If you are deciding between iSCSI and FC, know that at the very least the performance on the client side is a wash.  Server-side ease-of-use and cost if unquestionably in ISCSI’s favor.

Over this same time period there have been additional claims of reaching a similar magnitude of IOPs at various I/O sizes by HBA’s.  Most of those use more than 1 8G or 10G port, so read the fine print.   One HBA company claimed 930k IOPs over 1 10GbE port, which pretty much makes the point that performance has far exceed what people need and HBA’s with proprietary protocols...

Hyper-V customers are running both SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux as guests. We have provided Linux integration components for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, but customers did not have the same level of performance with Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a guest since the IC’s were not supported for RHEL.

We are excited to announce the availability of Linux integration components for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL 5.2, 5.3, and 5.4) which provides synthetic network and storage drivers enabling RHEL to work with the optimized devices provided by Hyper-V.  We’ve already submitted these drivers to the upstream Linux kernel in July 2009 (read here for more information) and are looking forward to these being integrated with a future version of RHEL.  In the meantime, Microsoft will provide full support for these drivers.  Red Hat provides best effort support for these components. Customers interested in understanding how these are supported by Red Hat prior to their inclusion natively into to their distribution can read the details at the Red Hat Knowledge Base article.

To download this new version of the Linux Integration Components, visit this link on the Microsoft Download Center.

Mike Sterling

Hyper-V Program Manager, Microsoft

Earlier today we announced important updates for IT pros considering Windows 7 deployment. Specifically, we released Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) 2010, which includes App-V 4.6, supporting Windows Server 2008 R2 x64 for RDS and Office 2010. The App-V support for Office 2010 means you can do a one-touch deployment and don't have to wait for Office 2010 to deploy Windows 7.

Additionally we released the MED-V 1.0 SP1 Release Candidate, which creates managed virtual machines running previous versions of Windows and Internet Explorer so users can upgrade to Windows 7. The RTM version of MED-V 1.0 service pack 1 will be available in April, but you can start today by downloading the release candidate.

For more information about App-V and MED-V, check out the following blogs.

• Springboard site
• Karri offers some details of App-V 4.6 on the MDOP team blog 
• Ment Van Der Plas talks App-V deployment with System Center Configuration Manager and Sequencing Office 2010.
• Tim Managan talks about App-V and Windows7 integration on his blog.
• Ruben Spruijt, App-V MVP, describes the power of App-V’s Shared Cache in his blog.
• Kevin Kaminskis discusses Sequencing 64-bit apps on his blog.
• Rodney Medina talks about how App-V is helping his customers deploy Windows 7 in his...
  
  
• RT: Happy Data Privacy Day from System Center
  

  As many of you are using Hyper-V to host Exchange, SQL and Sharepoint, I'm sure many of you think about backup and recovery of those workloads. If you do, then you'll be interested to read Jason's blog post in honor of Data Privacy Day, which is today if you didn't already have parties planned ;-). Jason's post asks the question "how private is your backup?" and the ways System Center Data Protection Manager 2010 can help. Here's an excerpt:

  Is your data protected on Tape?   Are the tapes encrypted?  

  It seems like a simple question, and the process is straightforward.  You check the box that says “Encrypt Tapes”.  But so many folks forget or choose not to.  Sometimes, these kinds of settings are mandated at corporate, but seem to be forgotten by the time that the backup administrator actually is clicking the boxes.

  Thankfully, DPM 2007 and DPM 2010 are PowerShell controllable.  So, consider running a PowerShell script that reaches out to the list of DPM servers and setting the “Encrypt Tape” option after the fact.  This way, no matter how the initial jobs are done, you can push out corporate policies to ensure that your backup tapes are private.

  We covered this and several other easy PowerShell DPM management scenarios in a webcast quite a while ago...