Microsoft Cloud Computing - now and tomorrow
The current Windows Server version is Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1. Until today Windows Server was a great OS for a server and its devices, but the new Windows Server 2012 is a cloud optimized OS and represents a big leap forward, helping IT progress on virtualizing network and storage infrastructure for multitenant support.
Ever since Cloud Computing has becoming the new IT Paradigm, many companies are exploring this new frontier and many of them want to make their data center into private clouds, so they can leverage the advantages of faster, more flexible allocation and provisioning of server, storage, and software resources. EMC and VMware has long been the first choice for organizations looking for virtualization component saturating almost the entire market with their solutions, but Microsoft is investing a great deal of energy to be the go-to provider. It is not the first time that Microsoft has stepped in after other have already started and gained terrain; more than one occasion in past Microsoft has proved to eventually dominate the space it jumped into late: the enterprise server space, the internet browser space, the video game console space (xbox), etc..
Windows Server 2012 and its new hypervisor version (Hyper-V 3) will help Microsoft become that first stop for customers as it steps up to be extremely competitive with VMware than ever before. Along the biggest advantage related to its price, with Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012, Microsoft has many new and better functionality story to tell.
Windows Server 2012 has the ability to scale in an efficient and cost-effective manner across a private cloud and securely connect to external cloud services, so that IT Pros can proficiently manage their infrastructure, maximizing uptime and minimizing downtime.
Using Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V, organization can delivery fully isolated, multi-tenant clouds, enable high scale and low data center and provide the most manageable, extensible and interoperable platform for cloud.
Following some new enhanced features:
· Multi-tenancy, Isolation & Quality of Service (QoS)
o Hyper-V Network Virtualization
o Hyper-V Extensible Switch
o QoS bandwidth management
o Resource Metering
· Massive Scale & Performance
o Support for up to 160 logical processors per host
o Support for up to 2 TB of memory per host
o Support for up to 32 virtual processors per virtual machine
o Support for up to 512 GB of memory per virtual machine
o New VHDX virtual hard disk format with support for up to 16 TB per virtual disk and support for next-generation hard disks with larger disk sectors
o Hyper-V Pass Through Disks have no maximum limit other than what is supported by the guest OS
o Hyper-V Single Root-I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV)
o Hyper-V Offloaded Data Transfer (ODX)
o Guest Fiber Channel
· Complete VM Mobility
o Live Migrate VMs with nothing but a network connection
o Live Storage Migration with no downtime storage
o Concurrent Live Migrations and Concurrent Live Storage Migrations
o Live Migration Prioritization
o Hyper-V support for SMB2.2 file based storage
o Hyper-V replica
After years of playing catch-up to VMware the upcoming version of Hyper-V is wowing the Microsoft faithful with unique new features, and gaining the attention of VMware users.
Hyper-V exceeds VMware in three areas: support for cheap server-attached storage and Just A Bunch Of Disks (JBOD) with features such as Share Nothing Live Migration; site-to-site failover for disaster recovery with a feature called Hyper-V Replica; and virtual networking with a feature called Hyper-V Extensible Switch. In addition, Hyper-V now scales to massive sizes, supporting more logical processors and allowing each virtual machine access to more virtual CPUs.
Right now, "you have to store virtual machines on a SAN This changes in Windows 8. Hyper-V will be able to store virtual machines on a file server. Microsoft invested in remote direct memory access (RDMA) and built a new version of the Server Message Block file server protocol, dubbed SMB 2.2, which uses RDMA. This lets Hyper-V access files on another machine's file server, and allows users to build an active/active cluster between server-attached storage devices. So if a file server fails, it automatically fails over to another one
Live Migration will be supported between the server-attached storage devices, too, a feature Microsoft calls Share Nothing Live Migration. This is something "no one else in the market is really able to do today," Schutz says. Share Nothing allows a virtual hard drive and a virtual machine to be transferred between server-attached disks over a network connection.
VMware disagrees that Share Nothing Live Migration is unique to Hyper-V but admits that the ability is not a feature included with vSphere. "VMware supports it through a product called vSphere Storage Appliance (VSA), which makes server-attached storage appear to the vSphere hosts as shared storage. VSA fully supports VMware vMotion and High Availability.
Microsoft is going to have to push hard to convince customer who are comfortable with VMware to switch, but it's obvious that the company is aggressively looking to do just that. Time will gladly award Microsoft has a company with the Cloud Computing solution that you can BANK ON IT!!!!