Is 4 Cores of raw physical processing power not enough for you? Do you often find your servers bogged down from never ending number crunching?
Never fear, Intel hears your cries for extreme power. Intel is readying it’s launch of Nehalem-EX processors for this month. The new processors will boast 8-cores, 16 threads and support for up to 8 processor sockets on a single board.
Up until this last year, the virtualization options available from Microsoft lagged woefully behind VMWare. This is led people like me to really ignore Microsoft’s virtual offerings. However, Redmond is quickly playing catchup with the release of Windows Server 2008 R2 and the upgrades to the integrated Hyper-V virtualization options, as well as other platforms such as MED-V, Virtual PC and App-V. This is causing a lot of other administrators to take a second look.
Over at the blog Clustering For Mere Mortals, David Bermingham has a great write up comparing the features, pros and cons of the latest version of Hyper-V vs VMWare vSphere (previously ESX)
How do I recover my virtual machines in the event of a complete site loss? The good news is that virtualization makes this process a whole lot easier since a virtual machine is just a file that can be picked up and moved to another server. While up to this point VMware and Microsoft are pretty similar in their availability features and functionality, but here is where Microsoft really shines. VMware offers Site Recovery Manager which is a fine product, but is limited in support to only SRM-certified array-based replication solutions. Also, the failover and failback process is not trivial and can take the better part of a day to do a complete round trip from the DR site back to the primary data center. It does have some nice features like DR testing, but in my experience with Microsoft’s solution for disaster recovery they have a much better solution when it comes to disaster recovery.
Head on over to his site to get the full rundown.
Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MED-V), is a component of the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) for Software Assurance customers. It allows administrators to provide a virtualized desktop image to users and manage them from a central console. The upcoming Service Pack 1 for MED-V will expand support for Windows 7 (both 32 and 64-bit) as a host platform. Considering most large companies held off on upgrading to Windows Vista and opted to wait for Windows 7, this technology will help boost the migration since they can do so and run older programs that may no longer be supported or have not been certified for Windows 7.
In V1 SP1, MED-V continues to employ Virtual PC 2007 as the virtualization engine but unlike the consumer “Windows XP Mode” it does not require hardware-assisted virtualization like Intel VT or an AMD-V to be present in the processor. This allows even those with lower end or older processors to take advantage of enterprise desktop virtualization.
Microsoft has put together a screencast demonstrating running a MED-V workspace using a V1 SP1 client in the Windows 7 environment.
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