2012 is going to be a good year... for Microsoft...

I've been somewhat silent on the blog for the past couple of months mainly for two reasons. 1. Work has been keeping me too busy to take the time to update the site, and 2. I've been reading and researching into this little known gem called Windows Server "8".

After this weeks MMS 2012 Conference hosted by Microsoft at the Venetian Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, Microsoft has announced that Windows Server "8" will now be known as Windows Server 2012. Not a huge shocker with regards to the name but the feature sets and workloads in comparison to Windows Server 2008 R2 are exponential.

NJVC (my company) was fortunate to be invited to participate in the rapid deployment program (RDP) which myself and another colleague were equally fortunate to travel to Seattle and see first hand what the hype was all about.

From a virtualization standpoint, Microsoft is going to be doing just about everything that VMware is currently doing with their Enterprise Plus licensing model out of the box with their Enterprise and Datacenter licensing model. To recap, a previous post. Microsoft Datacenter licensing is about $5,000 per processor and VMware Enterprise Plus is about $4,500 a processor. However, if you want to host large quantities (four or more) VMs, you need to buy Datacenter Licensing in addition to VMware. This is where costing always tend to sway in favor of Microsoft but before 2012, the feature-sets couldn't compete with VMware.

Server 2012 has two additional features that their Hyper-V role can do that I am really excited to learn more about Shared Nothing Live Migration (SNO Live Migration) and Virtual networking.

• SNO Live migrating is simply a process that doesn't require any shared resources to migrate a VM between hosts. i.e. the only thing that is needed is a comms connection between hosts. It works pretty well in demonstrations, and I think this will really go well with SMB sized organizations and even large enterprises that service numerous regional based infrastructures as well.

•  Virtual Networking is not the same as what virtualization gurus call virtual networking. This feature allows VMs to share the same IP space and the VMs still communicate over the wire between resources. They've essentially taken the vSwitch model where you can use an adapter as a virtual switch and extended that concept to the IP that is assigned to that adapter and uses that IP as a shared switching source (how I'm not sure) and allows VMs spun up on that adapter to share the same IP.while avoiding collisions and other issues that you would otherwise encounter when housing duplicate IPs.

With regards to the RDP, I will be working closely with Microsoft on the RDP effort and another neat feature of Windows Server 2012, IP Address Management. Prior to 2012, you had to use third party products and solutions to manage your IP space (i.e. Bluecat or InfoBlox), with 2012, that is also a native in-the-box role that can be enabled and managed via Windows. I can't speak to many of the details barring our NDA with Microsoft but as details develop (and I can share them), I will.

So back to MMS 2012. This year is also a big year for System Center. Microsoft has also announced System Center 2012 launches and that includes extensions into their orchestration, runbook automation, patch management, image provisioning, deployment, operations management and virtualization management products. These products coupled with the use of Hyper-V has allowed Microsoft to be one of the very first vendors to offer a scalable (and somewhat affordable) software stack that allows companies to easily provision and scale their own private cloud infrastructures.

I look forward to researching into this more and more (especially as cloud computing gains in popularity by the day in the IT world). Information on these products can be found below. Thanks for reading.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/readynow/ - Both Windows Server and System Center 2012