Windows Server Blog

Next Stops for the Windows Server 2012 Community Roadshow: Australia, United States, Croatia, and the Philippines!

Wed, 07 Nov 2012 22:57:49 GMT

Hi again, here is your weekly update on upcoming events for the Windows Server 2012 Community Roadshow from my colleague Christa Anderson. We are super pumped about this series of Roadshow Events and this has been a super valuable event series for our customers and partners. If you want to learn more about Windows Server 2012 from our amazing Microsoft MVPs this is the event for you. Did I mention it is Free?

Kevin Beares

Hi, this is Christa Anderson, Community Lead for the Windows Server and System Center Group. As we move into November, the roadshow continues. Next week we’re hitting yet more cities, this time in Canberra, Denver, Zagreb, and Manila.

Register now for an event in Canberra, Australia on November 12
Register now for an event in Denver, Colorado on November 12
Register now for an event in Zagreb, Croatia on November 16
Register now for an event in Manila, the Philippines on November 16

Reserve your spot now to get free technical Windows Server 2012 training from Microsoft MVPs, some of the smartest people in the business! We also are locking in many more cities to deliver training. So, if you don’t see a place near you in the list on the Web site, please request it here. https://ws2012rocks.msregistration.com/CityRequest.aspx. If you’re an MVP who’d like to present about Windows Server 2012 for the roadshow, then you’re welcome to create an event on the same site.

We’ve got events scheduled through January. Please check the site to find an event date in a city near you. For more information on the Roadshow, to register, or to find out if there is an event coming to a city near you, go to ws2012rocks.msregistration.com

Thanks,

Christa Anderson
Community Lead, Windows Server and System Center Group

Windows Server 2012 Essentials reaches general availability!

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 21:16:07 GMT

Microsoft has just announced that Windows Server 2012 Essentials is generally available for purchase through volume licensing, retail and reseller channels. This is a great opportunity for Microsoft partners to deliver a solution designed to meet the needs of their small business customers by offering the following benefits:

Protect and secure your business
Access your resources from virtually everywhere by using almost any device
Leverage the power and flexibility of cloud-based services on your terms

Here are three helpful sites to help you take the next step with the product:

Jon Roskill’s blog for partner resources and training
Software evaluations to check out the product
Previous blog post for additional background

Cheers!

Jeffrey

Next Stops for the Windows Server 2012 Community Roadshow: Croatia and Australia!

Fri, 02 Nov 2012 04:20:31 GMT

Hi again, Here is another update on upcoming events for the Windows Server 2012 Community Roadshow from my colleague Christa Anderson:

Kevin Beares

Hi, this is Christa Anderson, Community Lead for the Windows Server and System Center Group. The Windows Server community roadshow continues, making its way next week to Croatia and Sydney, Australia. Reserve your spot now to get free technical Windows Server 2012 training from Microsoft MVPs, some of the smartest people in the business!

We also are locking in many more cities to deliver training. So, if you don’t see a place near you in the list on the Web site, please request it here. Windows Server 2012 Community Roadshow City Request

Additionally, we have great news: The Windows Server 2012 Community Roadshow has been extended through January! Please check the site to find an event date in a city near you. For more information on the Roadshow, to register, or to find out if there is an event coming to a city near you, go to Windows Server 2012 Community Roadshow Registration

Thanks,

Christa Anderson
Community Lead, Windows Server and System Center Group

Next Stop for the Windows Server 2012 Community Roadshow: China, Germany, and Bosnia and Herzegovina!

Fri, 26 Oct 2012 22:46:22 GMT

Hi, this is Kevin Beares, as promised two weeks ago in our post, Windows Server 2012 Training has begun!!! Register Now! ... We will continue to bring you more information on the roadshow as new dates and cities are locked in. Here is a message from my colleague Christa Anderson, Community Lead for the Windows Server and System Center Group:

Hey everyone,

We’re running The Windows Server 2012 Community Roadshow through December. This is a great chance to get free technical training on Windows Server 2012, delivered by our MVP community. Here’s what’s coming next:

Get on the waitlist for now for an event in Shanghai, China on October 27
Register now for an event in Shanghai, China on October 28
Register now for an event in Berlin, Germany on October 31 (details in German here)
Get on the waitlist for an event in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina on November 2
Register now for an event in Hamburg, Germany on November 2 (details in German here)

We also are locking in many more cities to deliver training. So, if you don’t see a place near you in the list on the Web site, please request it here. https://ws2012rocks.msregistration.com/CityRequest.aspx.

The Windows Server 2012 Community Roadshow continues through December. Please check the site to find a Roadshow date in a city near you. For more information on the Roadshow, to register, or to find out if there is an event coming near you, go to ws2012rocks.msregistration.com

Thanks,

Christa Anderson
Community Lead, Windows Server and System Center Group

Windows Server 2012 Training has begun!!! Register Now!

Wed, 10 Oct 2012 22:30:00 GMT

In case you aren’t up on current events: Windows Server 2012 ROCKS! Do yourself a favor and get educated on all that it can do for you. Kevin Beares will tell you how.

Cheers! Jeffrey

Hey, this is Kevin Beares, Senior Community Lead for the Windows Server and System Center Group. Over the next few weeks and months, you’ll probably hear from me a couple of times about The Windows Server 2012 Community Roadshow. We are bringing Windows Server Training to our customers and partners through our amazing Microsoft MVPs. I should also mention that this is Free Training on Windows Server 2012!!!!

Register now for an event on October 12^th in Southfield, Michigan
Register now for an event on October 18^th in Sydney, Australia
Register now for an event on October 19^th in Tempe, Arizona
Register now for an event on October 22nd in Irving, Texas
Register now for an event on October 24th in Colombo, Sri Lanka

Over the last two years, we have worked with our MVPs to create and deliver real world training all across the globe via a Roadshow on Windows Server 2012 and supporting products like Windows Small Business Server 2011, Windows Small Business Server Essentials 2011, and Windows MultiPoint Server 2011. From May, 2011 through January 2012, The SMB MVP Community Roadshow hit over 60 cities worldwide and reached more than 3,000 partners and customers. Then, over the spring, we had the first leg of the The Windows Server 2012 Community Roadshow where we reached 18 countries, 55 cities and more than 4,000 customers and partners.

Now, we are beginning the second and more in-depth leg of the Windows Server 2012 Community Roadshow. We already have more than 36 MVPs from 17 countries lined up and on point to deliver in depth real world training on Windows Server 2012.

We also are locking in many more cities to deliver training. So, if you don’t see a place near you, please request it here. https://ws2012rocks.msregistration.com/CityRequest.aspx.

In this second phase of The Windows Server 2012 Community Roadshow, our MVPs will explore four technical topics. These are in no way marketing presentations. So, if you attend, we plan to expand your mind on these subjects: Server Virtualization, Managing Your Core Infrastructure, VDI and Remote Access, and Web & Application Platform. The MVPs will share demos that highlight new enhancements in Windows Server 2012 and their expertise in building private cloud, how to increase efficiency and availability, how to leverage open application and web platforms and how to provide secure access to personalized work environments from anywhere.

Thanks,

Kevin Beares
Senior Community Lead, Windows Server and System Center Group

Windows Server 2012 Essentials released to manufacturing, available for evaluation today!

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 16:03:53 GMT

Windows Server has an awesome dynamic range. It runs everything from the largest internet sites to the smallest businesses. With all of the discussion about being a CloudOS, you might wonder whether this represents a change. The answer is a definitive ‘no’. We believe that the cloud offers dramatic advantages to everyone. In today’s post, Sinead O’Donovan announces the RTM of Windows Server 2012 Essentials and discusses some of the many great new features including its ability to bring the advantages of the cloud to small businesses.

--Cheers! Jeffrey

Hi, I’m Sinead O'Donovan, Director of Program Management on the Windows Server Essentials team.

Windows Server 2012 Essentials is a significant milestone in our efforts to help cloud-enable small businesses and home offices. It is designed to help you protect business data, to allow highly secure access to the information you need from virtually anywhere by using almost any device, and to offer the flexibility to choose which applications and services you want to run on-premises and in the cloud—we have even made it easier than ever before to run Essentials itself in a hosted environment. Excitement about the release of Windows Server 2012 Essentials has been growing. In 8 weeks of public previews, we’ve had more than 23,000 downloads—far surpassing pre-release downloads of past versions.

Today I am pleased to tell you that Windows Server 2012 Essentials has reached the release to manufacturing (RTM) milestone. We are delivering the product to our hardware and ecosystem partners, and it will be generally available in all channels on November 1, with OEM partners shipping server systems by the end of the year.

I would like to encourage you to try Windows Server 2012 Essentials for yourself by visiting the Evaluation Center today to download a trial copy—and if you’re an MSDN or TechNet subscriber, you can download Essentials from those sites as well.

Let me share some quick product highlights with you:

Enable a dynamic, modern work style with access from your devices by using Remote Web Access (RWA), and take advantage of Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8 devices for a superior experience with rich modern “My Server” apps.
Enjoy peace of mind knowing that your data is well-protected by complementing your on-site backups with Windows Azure Online Backup, as well as utilizing integrated support for the new Windows 8 File History feature.
Choose the email and collaboration option that’s right for you, whether that’s in the cloud with Office 365 or a hosted service provider, or running on a local server.
Quickly and easily respond to increasing data capacity needs with support for Storage Spaces, which allows you to create elastic, resilient storage for your files and folders.
Run the line-of-business applications that you depend on by leveraging our greatly improved application compatibility, now with a single logo certification for all Windows Server 2012 editions.
Purchase with confidence knowing that your technology investment can easily grow to Windows Server 2012 Standard if the needs of your business grow.
Deploy today with full support for 19 languages, all releasing simultaneously.

We have seen some great initial press reviews of Windows Server 2012 Essentials, too. For example:

“The right tool for the job… Server Essentials makes client backups so simple that not doing them borders on criminal. Combined with the Microsoft Online Backup service [Windows Azure Online Backup] (and possibly with replication based on Hyper-V), the backup features make for a much more disaster-resistant small network. And the integration with Office 365 and Exchange (but mostly with Office 365) greatly reduces the complexity of user administration.”
-Ars Technica, A server for the rest of us: hands-on with Windows Server 2012 Essentials

“…ideal for a small business or a home office.”
-ZDNet, Windows Server 2012 Essentials: Beta preview

You can find more information on the Windows Server 2012 Essentials product page, and discover deeper technical information on the Windows Server 2012 Essentials TechCenter. If you are a Microsoft Partner, be sure to visit the Microsoft Partner Network and take advantage of the training opportunities we have available, including the upcoming Disti Bootcamps. And, of course, we would like to continue the great dialog we’ve started with you during the previews, so please continue to share your experiences and provide us with your feedback in the Windows Server 2012 Essentials Forum.

Thank you,
Sinead O'Donovan

Windows Server 2012 is here -- and so is the Cloud OS

Tue, 04 Sep 2012 15:06:00 GMT

Today’s launch of Windows Server 2012 puts a spotlight on the transformational shift underway across the entire IT ecosystem. This transformation is being driven by an exponential growth of devices used for smarter, more personalized applications, which in turn create an explosion of data and the need for more computing power. It is a world of connected devices and continuous services, and it’s all powered by servers.

Click here to read Satya’s full post.

Software Defined Networking, Enabled in Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012 SP1, Virtual Machine Manager

Wed, 22 Aug 2012 15:24:00 GMT

Unlocking Network Flexibility, Efficiency, and Multi-tenancy for the Cloud

When we talked with customers about their datacenters, we found that virtualization was not fully living up to its potential. Customers readily acknowledged the benefits of machine virtualization, but they wanted even more IT agility. In particular, customers wanted the ability to easily migrate VMs across the datacenter or even across cloud sites. Unfortunately, too many pieces of the IT puzzle rely on a server’s IP address; moving a VM is one thing, but giving it a different IP address is another thing completely. To deliver on the promises of virtualization, you need to virtualize both the machine and the network. We have discussed Hyper-V Network Virtualization in a previous post. To fully realize the agility and flexibility benefits of network virtualization, you need to centrally coordinate lots of moving parts. What you need is Software Defined Networking.

In today’s blog, Sandeep Singhal, GM of the Windows Networking team, and Vijay Tewari, Group Program Manager in the SCVMM team, talk about our Software Defined Networking (SDN) solution. It uses industry standard protocols and works with industry partners to deliver you an end-to-end solution.

Cheers! Jeffrey

We are very excited about the promise of Software Defined Networking (SDN) for enabling automation, flexibility, and reliability in the multi-tenant cloud. Traditionally the control plane of networking has been proprietary, resulting in datacenter environments that are unable to respond effectively to the dynamically changing needs of today’s cloud workloads. By enabling network control via software, we give customers the ability to configure and reconfigure their networks to match the changing requirements of their workloads, without compromising multi-tenant isolation and performance that would be expected from traditional networking.

Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012 SP1, Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) enable everyone to take advantage of the power of SDN in your datacenters. Our integrated solution provides unparalleled automation, flexibility, and control. The solution supports scalability for even the most mission-critical deployments. At the same time, we provide a standards-based and open platform that is supported by a rich partner ecosystem. Best of all, everything you need to deploy SDN is built right into these products, so you do not need to acquire separate management tools or product licenses.

Of course, these attributes of our SDN solution did not come about by accident. Windows Server 2012 builds on our years of experience running massive datacenters for properties such as Hotmail, Bing, and Windows Azure. This foundation of experience is why we can confidently say that Windows Server 2012 is the first operating system specifically built for the Cloud – for enabling the public, private, and hybrid cloud.

In this post, we introduce Software-Defined Networking and talk about its origins within our own datacenters. We then discuss how Windows Server 2012 and VMM deliver an end-to-end SDN solution and how partners are extending the solution. We then discuss our own experience using SDN and how you can get started deploying this exciting technology today.

What Is Software-Defined Networking (SDN)
Traditionally, networks were defined by their physical topology, how the servers, switches, and routers were cabled together. That meant that once you built out your network, changes were costly and complex. Certainly, this type of networking is simply not compatible with the notion of a lights-out datacenter or a cloud environment that needs flexibility to support varying workload demands.

With Software Defined Networking (SDN), software can dynamically configure the network, allowing it to adapt to changing needs. An SDN solution can accomplish several things:

Create virtual networks that run on top of the physical network. In a multi-tenant cloud, a virtual network might represent a tenant’s network topology, complete with the tenant’s own IP addresses, subnets, and even routing topology. Through SDN, virtual networks can be created dynamically, and they can support VM mobility throughout the datacenter while preserving the logical network abstraction.
Control traffic flow within the datacenter. Some classes of traffic may need forwarding to a particular appliance (or VM) for security analysis or monitoring. You may need to create bandwidth guarantees or enforce bandwidth caps on particular workloads. Through SDN, you can create these policies and dynamically change them according to the needs of your workloads.
Create integrated policies that span the physical and virtual networks. Through SDN, you can ensure that your physical network and endpoints handle traffic similarly. For example, you may want to deploy common security profiles, or you may want to share monitoring and metering infrastructure across both physical and virtual switches.

In summary, SDN is about being able to configure end hosts and physical network elements, dynamically adjust policies for how traffic flows through the network, and create virtual network abstractions that support real-time VM instantiation and migration throughout the datacenter. This definition of SDN is, in fact, broader, than the definition currently used by many industry players who only focus on configuration of physical network elements. Our broader SDN definition includes programmability of end hosts, enabling end-to-end software control in the datacenter. Our definition also supports real-time changes in response to VM placement and migration. As we will see below, the integration of VM management and network control is important to facilitate automation and reliability in large-scale datacenters.

Origins of Software Defined Networking
As mentioned above, we at Microsoft have years of experience running massive datacenters for properties such as Bing, Hotmail, and Windows Azure. This experience taught us several important principles about datacenter network design:

Automation is critical: We have found that the vast majority of network outages arise because of human error. Networks need to be configured and managed in an autonomous fashion.
Multi-tenancy demands network flexibility: In environments such as Windows Azure, customers expect to have easy ways to on ramp their workloads. They don’t want to change IP addresses or other network settings in order to move to the cloud. The cloud needs to be able to give each tenant the illusion of a dedicated network, even though it is shared by multiple tenants. Interestingly, we have found the need for multi-tenancy even in single-=use datacenters. For example, we often need to run a production SharePoint environment as well as a test SharePoint deployment simultaneously within the same datacenter. As much as possible, our test deployment needs to mirror the production deployment, but it is critical for the test deployment to use its own Active Directory and DNS infrastructure. Of course, we don’t want to deploy physically separate servers for the production and test environments—that would be unreasonably expensive!
Centralized control drives simplicity and reliability: In our experience, virtual machine placement needs to be driven from a central management entity that understands workload needs, hardware capacity, and virtual networks. This manager drives policies to the end hosts and, therefore, is also best positioned to coordinate the network changes required to support that VM placement. This approach reduces the possibility of policy inconsistency in the network, reduces delays associated with propagating SDN policies, and simplifies configuration and management.

In fact, based on this datacenter experience, our colleagues in Microsoft Research published seminal work defining new ways to create virtual and physical networks. This effort heavily influenced our approach to SDN in Windows Azure and Windows Server and in fact, was the foundation for much of the SDN work being done across the industry.

An End-to-End Solution in Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012 SP1, Virtual Machine Manager
Windows Server 2012 and VMM provide an end-to-end SDN solution for public, private, and hybrid clouds. By building all the pieces as part of a solution—the hypervisor, the SDN control surface on the end host, and the management software—we ensure a set of seamless experiences for datacenter administrators. All of the solution components work together to provide the most scalable and flexible platform for the cloud.

Our SDN approach consists of several different capabilities.

Hyper-V Network Virtualization delivers network flexibility for the cloud by providing the ability to create multi-tenant virtual networks on a shared physical network. Each tenant gets a complete virtual network, including multiple virtual subnets and virtual routing. (Some network virtualization solutions out there assume the tenant only has a single subnet!) On each host, Hyper-V uses dynamically updatable SDN policies to associate a tenant network and properly direct traffic to the destination. The SDN policy also determines which VM’s these tenant VM’s are allowed to communicate with, providing the requisite isolation. As a result, Hyper-V Network Virtualization allows tenant workloads to be placed anywhere in the physical datacenter. Tenant networks even can use private IP addresses (which might overlap with addresses used by other tenants), allowing tenants to rapidly migrate their existing workloads to the cloud by bringing their own IP addresses. In fact, Windows Server 2012 supports interoperable cross-premise connectivity, so you can seamlessly link your subnets in the public cloud back to your local network.

VMM plays a key role in automating configuration of SDN policies for Hyper-V Network Virtualization. In VMM, you define and create tenant virtual networks as needed. Note that because these networks are defined entirely in software, no reconfiguration of the physical network is needed. VMM takes care of placing VM workloads and applying the necessary SDN policies to the hosts to create those virtual networks. By applying VM placement decision and the SDN policy updates together, VMM provides a high degree of automation and centralized control, in keeping with our datacenter experience. In addition, this integrated control plane speeds up policy distribution, reducing downtime and enabling more flexible VM placement and optimization.

Our SDN solution is further enabled through rich traffic control policies on the Hyper-V virtual switch. On a per-VM basis, you can configure security policies that limit the types of traffic (and destinations). You can reserve bandwidth to particular VMs, ensuring that mission-critical services can always access necessary network capacity. You can even apply bandwidth caps, allowing you to avoid traffic starvation or enforce a variety of charging models. What’s more, these network control policies are dynamic, so they can be adjusted in real-time.

VMM allows customers to unify the individual virtual switches on each Hyper-V host in the datacenter into a distributed logical switch that is dynamically programmed with SDN traffic control policies. For example, you can define a profile for a set of VMs. That profile might include the security and bandwidth controls that should be applied. As it brings VMs up, VMM automatically programs the host virtual switch with the appropriate profile. The profile moves from host to host as the VM is migrated. The administrator is essentially defining a single logical datacenter switch, with VMM automating deployment of per-host and per-VM policies, ensuring consistency of SDN policies, and (as we have seen before) providing central control.

With Windows Server 2012, we are excited to introduce the Hyper-V Extensible Switch. The switch provides a platform through which our partners can extend SDN policies within the switch. In fact, one of the most common use cases for this extensibility is to integrate the virtual switch with the rest of the physical network infrastructure. A unique aspect of this extensibility is that multiple partners can extend the switch at the same time. For example, InMon has built an extension that allows traffic monitoring to be done on the Hyper-V switch in the same way it is done on physical switches. Another partner, NEC, has integrated the Hyper-V switch with their OpenFlow controller. The NEC OpenFlow controller defines exactly how traffic from the source VM to the destination VM should be routed through the network; NEC solution is completely compatible with Hyper-V Network Virtualization, which defines the origin and destination VMs within the virtual network. The NEC solution allows for easy configuration of virtual appliances such as load balancers, intrusion detection systems, and network monitoring solutions.

VMM handles the lifecycle and configuration of Hyper-V switch extensions. In fact, these switch extensions essentially become part of the SDN language that VMM speaks to Hyper-V. As VMs migrate across the datacenter, VMM and Hyper-V ensure that state information associated with the switch extension is also migrated to the new host. VMM ensures that the destination host has the switch extensions required by the guest VM or tenant network. This level of seamless extensibility is unique to the Hyper-V / System Center SDN solution.

Of course, our end-to-end solution recognizes that Hyper-V hosts are not the only components of a datacenter network. VMM is able to dynamically provision key network elements such as load balancers, site-to-site VPNs, and Hyper-V Network Virtualization gateways. At the end of the day, SDN is about end-to-end automation, flexibility, and control throughout the data center.

Built for Partners, Built with Partners
Our SDN solution is, from the ground up, designed with partners in mind. It is open and flexible, allowing partners to offer value added capabilities. Moreover, the SDN solution supports a close relationship between software and hardware. Even though it is software-driven, SDN needs to take advantage of capabilities provided by network cards, switches, and routers.

We disagree with many in the industry who say that SDN should “commoditize” the network infrastructure. In our view, SDN should provide the automation, flexibility, and control to allow you easily to take advantage of the capabilities of the infrastructure. In fact, SDN should create new innovation opportunities for network hardware. Customers can only benefit from new innovations across their datacenter.

Within our SDN solution, we have already touched on how partners can build extensions for the Hyper-V Extensible Switch. In fact, multiple extensions can co-exist in the hypervisor switch, and they can all work in tandem with our other SDN elements, Hyper-V Network Virtualization and rich traffic control policies. We support our partners with certification tests, interoperability plug fests, development tools, and close engineering support.

This spirit of partner cooperation is evident throughout our SDN solution. Hyper-V Network Virtualization builds on IETF standard protocols (Generic Routing Encapsulation, or GRE), and together with partners from a variety of network silicon and switch manufacturers, we have published guidance on how GRE enables network virtualization. This standards-based approach means that network cards and network switches can support and accelerate tenant logical network traffic. In fact, our design includes tenant ID information in the packet, enabling network equipment to do tenant-specific accounting, policy control, or advanced processing.

Our open approach has enabled several partners to announce solutions that work with Hyper-V Network Virtualization. For example, nAppliance and IVO Networks have both announced plans for network appliances that provide Hyper-V Network Virtualization gateways. Stay tuned for more partner announcements shortly!

In addition, VMM supports pluggable interfaces, allowing it to configure arbitrary load balancers, site-to-site VPNs, and network virtualization gateways. VMM can therefore interoperate with other SDN solutions or network control servers.

Production Tested, Production Used
As we have discussed, our SDN solution grew out of our experience running large datacenters and cloud services. Needless to say, we have been able to validate our solution in these environments. Within Microsoft, we are running a large, multi-tenant private cloud used for several mission-critical workloads. Hyper-V Network Virtualization is in active use within that cloud today, orchestrating communication for tens of thousands of VMs running on over 4000 physical hosts. As you might expect, our SDN algorithms and protocols are in active use within the Windows Azure datacenter, supporting our Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering that was announced last month.

At the same time, throughout the development of Windows Server 2012 and VMM, we have been working closely with enterprise and hoster customers to validate and deploy our SDN solution. Many of these customers are already running production services using these cloud components.

Ready for You – and Built Right In!
Software Defined Networking (SDN) holds the promise to revolutionize cloud networks by bringing a new level of automation, flexibility, and control to the network environment. As we have seen, our SDN approach takes an integrated, end-to-end view which brings simplicity, performance, and reliability to the solution. At the same time, we have built our solution using open standards and pluggable interfaces. Just as important, we have been developing a rich partner ecosystem, so you can integrate best-of-breed capabilities across the industry with Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012 SP1, Virtual Machine Manager.

Most important, all of the tools you need to deploy Software Defined Networking are built right in to Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012 SP1, Virtual Machine Manager. You do not need to buy separate management tools or acquire separate product editions. Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012 SP1, Virtual Machine Manager deliver the best value for public, private, and hybrid clouds.

With the Release to Manufacturing (RTM) and impending launch of Windows Server 2012, our SDN solution is ready for you to deploy. We are looking forward to hearing about your experiences building public, private, and hybrid clouds on our SDN platform.

Appendix: Some Resources for Getting Started with SDN
Windows Server® 2012 Hyper-V Network Virtualization Survival Guide helps you get started deploying SDN and network virtualization in your datacenter.

The Hyper-V Network Virtualization Overview gives you a technical overview of the feature and how it works.

The Internet RFC titled NVGRE: Network Virtualization using Generic Routing Encapsulation gives you the details behind the packet encapsulation format Hyper-V network virtualization uses for virtualizing network traffic.

The Hyper-V Extensible Switch article gives you an architectural overview about Hyper-V switch extensions. You can also learn about Writing Hyper-V Switch Extensions.

This blog article about Cloud Datacenter Network Architecture describes how you can put everything together in order to build a cloud that uses SDN.

Sandeep K. Singhal, GM, Windows Networking

Vijay Tewari, Principal Group Program Manager, System Center Virtual Machine Manager

Windows Server 2012 Release Candidate Essentials available now

Tue, 21 Aug 2012 12:50:00 GMT

Great news! We reached another important milestone on the road to the final release of Windows Server 2012 Essentials: the Release Candidate (RC) is available now for download and evaluation.
If you haven’t started exploring the product yet, this new pre-release version is an ideal time to begin. You can find more information about this release on the Windows Server Essentials and Small Business Server Blog.

Cheers!

Jeffrey

Windows Server 2012 released to manufacturing!

Wed, 01 Aug 2012 15:29:00 GMT

Howdy! Today is the day we’ve all been waiting for. I’m proud to announce that Windows Server 2012 has been released to manufacturing. That means the final code is complete and we are delivering it to our hardware and software vendor partners this week. We will also make the software available to our volume licensing customers in the next couple of weeks.

Get out your calendars and free up some time on September 4. That’s when Windows Server 2012 will be generally available for evaluation and purchase by all customers around the world. On that day we will also host an online launch event where our executives, engineers, customers and partners will share more about how Windows Server 2012 can help organizations of all sizes realize the benefits of what we call the Cloud OS. You will be able to learn more about the features and capabilities and connect with experts and peers. You’ll also be able to collect points along the way for the chance to win some amazing prizes. You don’t want to miss it. Visit this site to save the date for the launch event.

On behalf of the Windows Server engineering team, I can tell you it has been a thrill and honor for us to deliver this product. Most importantly, we thank the many thousands of you who have provided your input and guidance throughout the process of designing and building it. So far the hands-on feedback on the product from you, industry analysts and press has been phenomenally positive. I attribute that to the fact that, from the outset, we committed ourselves to building Windows Server 2012 around the needs and goals of our customers and partners. It feels great to ship software that so squarely addresses customer objectives, both in the here and now and in the future.

Cheers!

Jeffrey

Download the beta release of Windows Server 2012 Essentials today!

Wed, 11 Jul 2012 15:19:00 GMT

What an exciting time to be part of the Windows Server team! Earlier this week we announced the RTM and general availability of Windows Server 2012 in conjunction with the Windows 8 team's announcement of their dates. Since then we’ve seen a steady stream of exciting news coming out of Toronto where the 2012 World Wide Partner Conference is being held. Today I'm happy to host Joe Nalewabau from the Windows Server Essentials team to make yet another exciting announcement. By now you should be picking up on some reoccurring themes that keep showing up in these blogs:

We spent a lot of time listening to our partners and customers.
We focused on simplicity and flexibility.
Users are more productive – they can do what they want with fewer steps.
Our Partners have more ways to deploy than ever before – Windows Server 2012 Essentials is a perfect example of that.
Our focus on partners and customers allowed us to work across groups effectively to reduce the seams and deliver a coherent and comprehensive solution.
We love our partners and customers and can’t wait for you to deploy Windows Server 2012 and enjoy the release that you’ve all been asking us for.

Cheers-- Jeffrey

Hi, I’m Joe Nalewabau, Group Program Manager on the Windows Server Essentials team, and today I’m excited to introduce the beta for Windows Server 2012 Essentials (Essentials 2012).

The beta is a significant engineering milestone for the team. We’d obviously like to get as much feedback on the product as possible and you can see and give feedback on the beta through the Windows Server Essentials 2012 Beta Essentials forum. We are working hard to deliver Essentials 2012 this year and so your feedback on the beta will be critical to us over the next few weeks as we work towards a release candidate and an eventual RTM.

As David Fabritius mentioned in his post last week, Essentials 2012 represents a significant milestone for the product. We have made some changes to the way that we think about the first-server market (SMBs, home offices, etc.) and the products that we offer in this space based on feedback from our customers and partners. This post will provide some high-level insight on how the engineering strategy as we built Essentials 2012. We will follow up with additional blog posts containing deeper information about specific features in the coming weeks.

From an engineering perspective, we planned Essentials 2012 around four core principles:

Simplicity and flexibility for customers and partners
Better together with Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8
Increased device support
Continued integration with Cloud Services

Simplicity and flexibility for customers and partners

Historically, the engineering team has developed and supported a number of solution products based on Windows Server. The current in-market products developed and supported by our team include: Windows Small Business Server (SBS) 2011 Standard, Windows SBS 2011 Essentials, Windows Home Server (WHS) 2011, and Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials. We also support previous versions of SBS Standard and WHS.

These products are not targeted at the traditional IT Pros. We spend a lot of time creating simple and integrated experiences that will work for non-IT Pros with the help of our broader partner ecosystem of OEMs, Value-Added Resellers and the Small Business Solution Specialist Community.

We approached simplicity and flexibility for customers in Essentials 2012 in a number of ways:

Simplified product line-up. After considerable debate and feedback from our customers and partners we decided to simplify the overall product line-up to a single product. During this simplification process, we decided to bring together as much core functionality from our other products as possible in Essentials 2012 (e.g., media features from Home Server and Storage Server Essentials). This simplification, along with the flexibility described later, will enable partners to design and deploy the best solution for customers based on their specific business needs.
Simplified moving past 25 users. One of the major pieces of feedback about SBS 2011 Essentials was that once a customer had grown beyond the 25 user limit they had to migrate to Windows Server Standard. After the migration, key SBS-specific features that they had come to depend on (e.g., client backup, Remote Web Access), were no longer available.

We wanted to address this issue in Essentials 2012 and so we now allow customers to do an in-place upgrade to Windows Server 2012 Standard. Now customers are running Windows Server 2012 Standard without any of the licensing limitations of Essentials 2012, but the majority of Essentials 2012 functionality continues to operate and is fully supported for up to 75 users and 75 devices. (Note that while there are no restrictions placed on the number of users/devices that can be added to a Windows Server 2012 Standard environment, there are maximum supportability limits for the Essentials 2012 features.)
Flexibility for customers to choose how they want to consume email (on-premises, hosted, or cloud). A major area of flexibility for Essentials 2012 was providing partners and customers with the choice of where they wanted their email service to be located. In SBS 2011 Standard, email was installed and always assumed to be on premises. In SBS 2011 Essentials, we had an add-in for Office 365 connectivity, but no integration was possible with an existing Exchange Server running locally on a second server.

In Essentials 2012, you will be able to choose where email services reside from the following choices:

On-Premises. Essentials 2012 will integrate with an on-premises Exchange server running on a second server, which can be either physical or virtual.
Office 365. If customers have an Office 365 account they can choose to use this for their email.
Hosted Exchange. Hosted Exchange providers can offer add-ins to Essentials 2012 that will allow customers to select this option. We know that there are many different types of hosted email providers. While we have focused on hosted Exchange email providers, we engineered the product to be email service agnostic which allows non Exchange based email providers to be integrated through this mechanism (note that this specific feature is not available in the beta).

Better together with Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8

Windows Server 2012 enables an amazing number of scenarios and key technologies for customers. In Essentials 2012 we looked through the huge number of Windows Server features and chose specific ones to deeply integrate. I’d like to call out a few major technologies or processes from Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8 that we have integrated:

Storage Spaces. Storage Spaces offers a number of compelling scenarios for first-server environments including easy capacity expansion and resiliency for physical disk failures using commodity disk hardware. The ability to simply add a disk drive and increase capacity has long been a request across from customers and partners and in Essentials 2012 we have integrated Storage Spaces through wizards and alerts to make sure it is simple and easy to use.
File History. File History is a new Windows 8 technology that allows you to store changes made to files on your client machine and then easily find and restore previous versions. In Essentials 2012, we have made it simple to configure Windows 8 clients to turn File History on and point the File History folder to the Essentials 2012 server. This is a great experience for Windows 8 clients. This capability is turned on for them and they get the added safely of having their File History stored on the server.
Application Compatibility. In the past, several SBS customers reported not being able to get support from Line of Business (LOB) application providers as SBS was not listed as a supported OS even though SBS was built on a supported Windows Server operating system. We have worked hard to ensure that Essentials 2012 is a part of the overall Windows Server 2012 Application Logo Certification program. Applications that pass the Windows Server 2012 Application Logo Certification requirements will also meet the requirements of working on Essentials 2012. We also significantly expanded the Essentials 2012 application compatibility testing environment. These efforts should allow ISVs to offer much better support statements going forward for Essentials 2012.

Of course, customers also get a whole range of Windows Server 2012 technologies for free which makes the release even more compelling.

Increased Device support

Another area of focus for the team was around extending our level of support for devices. We know that customers using our existing products have multiple devices and they want to access information and/or control their server from these devices. In Essentials 2012 we have expanded our device support in a number of different ways:

Remote Web Access (RWA). RWA is an existing feature that many of our customers love. In Essentials 2012, we made a number of improvements with one of the biggest being making sure that RWA works well on touch first devices including the iPad and Windows 8 based touch devices. RWA also supports media streaming from the server and we have improved the access to files and folders on the server.
Native Windows 8 Metro application. We are building a Windows 8 Metro application for accessing Essentials 2012 servers. The existing client LaunchPad will continue to be available for Windows 8, but we wanted to build a Windows 8 native application to allow people to quickly and easily access and control their server. We are very excited about this application as it allows for some very cool scenarios – especially around people who are travelling and need to access files and folders or media from their server. This is our first client application that supports an off-line mode for people who are travelling – another request from customers. In addition, we implemented many of the Windows 8 standard interfaces in this application which allows for a range of new scenarios natively from Windows 8, e.g., simple uploading and searching of files on Essentials 2012.
Updated Windows Phone application. We have updated the existing Windows Phone 7 application to work with Essentials 2012 servers – including the ability to access files and folders on the server (this functionality was not available in the previous version).
Web Services for extensibility. This is more of a developer facing feature, but we are very excited about the possibilities this opens up. Essentials 2012 has a set of web services that allow developers to write a new set of client applications for the server. As an implementation note, we use these services inside the Windows 8 Metro and Windows Phone applications. Developers can now write different applications/gadgets, etc., to interact with an Essentials 2012 server.

Continue integrating with Cloud Services

Another major focus for us is continuing to integrate with cloud services. Based on research and feedback from our customers we know that many people are looking for ways to integrate with cloud services and we wanted to ensure that Essentials 2012 had great integration with Microsoft’s offerings:

Office 365 Integration. In SBS 2011 Essentials, we had deep integration with Office 365 through the Office 365 Integration Module. We have integrated this module directly into Essentials 2012 and updated the support to display more information about Office 365 as well as update our functionality, e.g., bulk importing of Office 365 accounts into Essentials 2012. Office 365 is completely optional – this is an option that people can choose as an email service when they configure their server.
Microsoft Online Backup Service. Essentials 2012 has integration with the Microsoft Online Backup Service which makes it simple for customers to register their server and do online backups of it. This provides an additional layer of protection above the existing Server backup mechanisms.

Essentials 2012 has a rich SDK that allows customers and partners to integrate additional services into the server. We made sure that existing add-ins for SBS 2011 Essentials and WHS 2011 continue to run in Essentials 2012.

Summary

We are excited about Essentials 2012 and thrilled to be able to get the beta in your hands. The engineering team is eagerly looking forward to hearing your feedback which will help make Essentials 2012 a great release.

Windows Server 2012 final release timing

Mon, 09 Jul 2012 13:54:00 GMT

Today Microsoft is kicking off an exciting week at our Worldwide Partner Conference in Toronto. Windows Server 2012 will be a focus of attention at the event, of course, and it is nearing final release. In fact, at the conference we are announcing that Windows Server 2012 will be released to manufacturing in the first week of August. The code will be complete and we will begin delivering it to our hardware partners. Then, the product will be generally available to customers worldwide through multiple channels in September.

You, our customers and partners, have downloaded pre-release versions of Windows Server 2012 more than 500,000 times - more than any other server from Microsoft before. We can’t wait to get the final version out the door to you!

At WPC Microsoft also announced release timing for Windows 8. See the Windows blog for more information.

--Cheers! Jeffrey

The Windows Server 2012 Information Experience

Mon, 02 Jul 2012 16:20:00 GMT

I recently had a conversation where someone was talking about the difference between people vested in their community and those that aren’t. He said that when you walk by and see some trash on the ground, someone vested in their community will stop and pick it up and throw it into the trash, whereas someone else wouldn’t. He pointed out those communities that had a lot of people vested in them tended to be clean and crime free whereas other communities where people didn’t contribute got worse and worse and the people in those communities suffered. The point he was making was that active participation in a community was an enlightened form of self-interest. You invest a little and in doing so, you establish a norm for others who follow your example and step-by-step things get better and better.

Each of you belongs to the Windows community. You can choose to be vested in the community or not. Many of you have already chosen to participate in the community and have made Windows one of the most robust communities out there. I’m particularly excited by the Windows PowerShell Survival Guide (http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/183.windows-powershell-survival-guide-en-us.aspx), a rich, curated offering of information about Windows Powershell.

But the reality is that getting the benefits of that community is not as easy as it could be and participate could be higher. In today’s blog, Kathy Watanabe, Senior Director of the Server and Cloud Division Information Experience team, describes some of the innovative thinking and tools that we are delivering in Windows Server 2012 to help the community help itself. You can do your job much better by leveraging the wisdom and knowledge of the community - so take some time to learn how to use these tools. But don’t stop there. Start - or increase - your participation in the community. It has never been easier.

Cheers! Jeffrey

With Windows Server 2012, the Information Experience team rethought how we deliver a great information experience to our customers. It is based on a few primary principles:

Content aggregation. We integrated links to our content and to content created by the community (more on that later). This provides rich, broad, and diverse product and scenario guidance, where you will find answers as you plan, deploy, and operate Windows Server 2012 in your enterprise. One of the platforms that illustrates this concept of content aggregation (or curation) is the PowerShell Script Explorer, which provides curated access to scripts.
Community. The idea of a community—you—is central to shaping Windows Server 2012 guidance. We created the information experience based on your feedback, and we depend on you to extend it.
Solutions and scenarios. We provide these in the IT Pro space (in the TechNet library) and in the developer space (on Windows Server Development). These scenarios and solutions are continually updated, to reflect your evolving network needs.

Content Aggregation (Curation)
There are several types of content aggregation offerings. We describe two in this section:

A tool called Microsoft Script Explorer
TechNet Wiki-based “survival guides”

Microsoft Script Explorer
One important piece of our content aggregation offering is a tool called Microsoft Script Explorer. Microsoft Script Explorer for Windows PowerShell helps scripters find Windows PowerShell scripts, snippets, modules, and how-to guidance in online repositories such as the TechNet Script Center Repository, PoshCode, local or network file systems and Bing Search Repository.

Leveraging the Concepts of a Semantic Web for Curation
A semantic web takes the information that is typically hidden inside product documentation, blog posts, support forums and so forth – and enables that information to be defined in a predictable manner – which, of course, enables discovery of that information. A great example of this is a PowerShell Script. Scripts are typically just text hidden inside web pages; search engines such as Bing / Google and Yahoo can’t discriminate whether you are looking for a page containing the words “PowerShell Script” or for pages that actually contain valid PowerShell scripts.

The illustration below attempts to illustrate that PowerShell Scripts can be stored in a number of different places – inside local file systems, network shares, web sites, online forums and script repositories. When the scripts exist inside a web page such as in a blog or a threaded discussion we believe HTML 5’s Micro-Data will enable us to include additional meta-data that will describe the specific parts of the page that contain scripts and information related to the scripts name and purpose that will better enable search. For repositories such as TechNet and POSH we believe OData provides a great programmatic means of accessing these repositories.

The PowerShell Script Explorer surfaces content from major repositories, blog sites and forums by smartly aggregating (or curating) that content. The illustration below shows the high-level design of Script Explorer. The dotted line in the middle illustrates the divide between code and repositories that run/exist inside a corporate network as opposed to those outside of the corporate network. One of the most interesting aspects of Script Explorer is something we have called the Aggregation Service. This service is responsible for helping aggregate scripts from different sources based on your requirements. The service can take content from any number of repositories, regardless of what protocol they use or what format the scripts are exposed in and then aggregate the functionality and expose that data as an OData based feed.

As you can see in the illustration, there are typically two instances of the Aggregation Service running. The first (on the right-hand side) runs on Windows Azure and is responsible for aggregating feeds from different Internet based repositories such as TechNet or Posh. The second (on the left-hand side) runs along-side Script Explorer and takes responsibility for retrieving scripts from the external aggregation service as well as internal resources such as your local file system and any corporate repositories you want to stand up.

The Aggregation Service includes a standard way to write new providers enabling you to search alternative sources of scripts and have them exposed directly inside Script Explorer simply by changing the configuration file. Furthermore, this idea is extensible; you can create/shape your own provider, to use your favorite search engine or to us a schema other than the one used by PowerShell Script Explorer. For more information on creating a new repository or creating a new provider take a look at the sample posted on Codeplex.

Survival Guides
Another curation offering is the survival guides. The Survival Guides are a TechNet Wiki offering of links to information around a specific product, technology or set of scenarios. Created and managed by the community (including Microsoft), survival guides map information by lifecycle, area, scenario, or other criteria with links to top information. Links can point to any content and often include a mix of information from different Microsoft sites and community sites like blogs, wikis, and YouTube.

Survival guides provide community stewarded, up-to-date information conveniently organized for users and professionals. The Windows PowerShell Survival Guide, System Center Survival Guide, Hyper-V Survival Guide and others on the TechNet Wiki also are helpful for planning training, deployments and finding more information by experts in different regions. Contributors benefit from increased recognition.

Join the TechNet Wiki and share your favorite links, add thoughtful comments or better yet, create a new survival guide for a product or technology that you have a passion for!

Community
Community is a big part of the information experience, as we work together with you to extend and expand the guidance offerings. Here are the ways we are contributing, how our efforts impact your experience, and how you can get involved:

Events and error guidance, guidance added by the Community
Forum 2 Wiki. Your common forum questions with our responses are posted to the Wiki
Suggestion Box. Recommend areas where you’d like us to add information
Script Center. A host of great PowerShell scripts by all of you (and us!).

Events and Errors
Community sourced error and events harness the troubleshooting experiences of community. Using topics that address a single error or event, customers can find current troubleshooting information on the TechNet Wiki using search or, in the near future, forwarding from the Windows Event Viewer. When Event Viewer forwarding goes live, contributors will be able to create new topics that can be found by the forwarding system and used automatically.

This approach helps you, our customers. Since the content is on a Wiki, it can be continuously updated to reflect the latest techniques, insights and best practices. Since the Wiki shares a powerful profile system in common with the TechNet Forums, Blogs, Galleries and other Microsoft places, contributors are recognized and can achieve Wiki fame by creating or revising articles that reach thousands of views.

Join the TechNet Wiki and share your troubleshooting experience. You can update Event ID 1058 – Group Policy Preprocessing (Network) or over 50 others or create your own. Contributing is easy and appreciated by everyone!

Forum 2 Wiki
Forum Curation. This effort converts some of the highest-viewed forum threads on different TechNet forums into TechNet Wiki articles to increase clarity. In some of our customer roundtables (and feedback from others in the community), we learned forum answers are sometimes “lost” in the cacophony of multiple responses, tangential information, and updates to previous answers. Answers can also be difficult to find.

For an example, visit Renaming a Windows Server 2008 Active Directory Domain or try one of these.

By moving into an article on the TechNet Wiki, community can easily modify information inline rather than through additional comments. Content can be tagged, stewarded and easily shared with others. This increases discoverability and clarity for customers and can increase recognition for contributors (a common theme in community, no?).

You can make a difference. When on your favorite forum, convert a popular thread into a Wiki article. Include links from the forum to the Wiki article and the Wiki article back to the forum as a way to acknowledge sources and the work of community. Then ask your networks to review and update.

Suggestion Box
Suggestion Box. The Suggestion Box is a place where you can share ideas and suggestions, prioritize them, and help deliver community content. Our goal here is to help identify information needed by the community and to work together with community members to curate, develop, or point to that information, whether it’s on member blogs, forums, TechNet Wiki articles, Microsoft.com or other sites. The information experience can only improve with community feedback.

While the current iteration of the Suggestion Box does not share the same profile as the TechNet Wiki and other Microsoft community platforms, it is easy to suggest new ideas, vote on existing ideas, or volunteer to deliver content for an existing request. It also provides a prioritized list of ideas for times you want to contribute, but need an idea. This helps you get the content you need (and the recognition you deserve for contributing).

Script Center
For a similar experience focused exclusively on scripts, visit the Script Center. Download resources and applications for Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2008, SharePoint, System Center, Office, and other products. New resources are added frequently, so check often and see what's new. Join us!

Scripting Games. The Scripting Games are the premier learning event of the year for IT Pros, developers, and others who want to learn Windows PowerShell. Managed by Scripting Guy Ed Wilson, the Games are a great way to jump into the PowerShell scripting community (or raise your status as an expert in PowerShell) in a fun, accommodating and rewarding way. Meet other community members, write cool scripts and receive feedback from a distinguished panel of guest judges.

The Scripting Games helps community by raising awareness, fostering engagement and networking, learn some neat tricks and coding techniques, and win some cool prizes. Check out Ed’s top ten reasons to participate and mark your calendar for next year’s event!

Solutions and Scenarios
The integration of our products and technologies into a holistic solution to real customer problems drove our information experience. As we shaped these scenarios, we considered the new value propositions offered by Windows Server 2012:

Building Your Cloud Infrastructure: Scenario Overview
You can leverage new features around network and storage virtualization that, when combined with improved server virtualization, enable the building of your cloud infrastructure based on Windows Server 2012. This will help with your strategy in delivering Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) or building hosted services.
Dynamic Access Control: Scenario Overview
You can apply data governance across your file servers to control who can access information and to audit who has accessed information.
Hosting-Friendly Web Server Platform (IIS): Scenario Overview
Rapid and efficient scaling of your web applications makes for a cloud-ready web platform. Enhanced security, application initialization, NUMA-aware scalability, and the sharing of resources across sites allows for this rapid scaling with minimal management overhead.
Increasing Server, Storage, and Network Availability: Scenario Overview
New experiences in Windows Server 2012 work together to improve availability, performance, and reliability at the single-server and multiple-server (scale-up and scale-out) levels.

Thanks for reviewing just some of the exciting information experiences we’re creating for Windows Server 2012. We hope you enjoy them!

Open Management Infrastructure

Thu, 28 Jun 2012 17:47:00 GMT

Many years ago, Microsoft joined with other companies to define the Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL), a set of standards to abstract the devices on a PC (and later, a server) for the OS. The HAL is the unsung hero of the computing industry, allowing an amazing level of choice and interoperability in the x86 ecosystem. It is one of the critical hidden technologies behind why all this stuff “just works.”
With Windows Server 2012, Windows has shifted its focus to become a Cloud OS, so a new abstraction layer is required – a Datacenter Abstraction Layer or DAL. Microsoft is, once again, joining with other companies to define the DAL. Instead of starting from scratch or advancing proprietary standards, we are embracing standards-based management to accelerate the process so we can get the ecosystem and our customers to the cloud as quickly as possible.

As we looked at the task of getting the industry to adopt standards-based management, we saw a couple of challenges.

The first challenge was to convince the industry that standards-based management was credible and able to do complete management. We proved that with our big investments in standards-based management in Windows Server 2012. In this release, we are fully committed to standards-based management as the primary management path; DCOM is provided only for backwards compatibility.

The next big challenge was to help the industry implement standards-based management. The existing open source implementations have a number of problems that stopped the ecosystem from embracing this approach.

In today’s blog, Otto Helweg and Wassim Fayed, Program Managers in the Windows Management team, describe what we did to address that concern. It is truly an exciting time to be working in the computer industry – as a community, we are all about to take this to the next level and our customers are going to reap huge rewards. What could be better than that?

Cheers! Jeffrey

Microsoft and The Open Group are going big on standards-based management with a new, free, open source technology called Open Management Infrastructure or OMI (formerly known as NanoWBEM). We are working with Arista and Cisco to port OMI to their network switches for our Windows Azure and cloud data centers. Jeffrey Snover did a technology demonstration at TechEd Europe in which he used a common set of standards-based tools to manage a base-motherboard controller on a server, a Windows operating system, and an Arista switch running OMI.

The public availability of OMI means that you can now easily compile and implement a standards-based management service into any device or platform from a free open-source package. Our goals are to remove all obstacles that stand in the way of implementing standards-based management so that every device in the world can be managed in a clear, consistent, coherent way and to nurture spur a rich ecosystem of standards-based management products.

Today, datacenters comprise a slew of heterogeneous devices supplied by different hardware and platform vendors and requiring different tools and management processes. Companies are forced to write their own abstraction layer or to be locked into a single vendor, which limits their choice and agility. This problem can be solved only by moving the industry to adopt the right standard for datacenter devices and platform abstractions.

In addition, the growth of cloud-based computing is , by definition, driving demand for more automation, which, in turn, will require the existence of a solid foundation built upon management standards. For standards-based management to satisfy today’s cloud management demands, it must be sophisticated enough to support the diverse set of devices that are required and it must be easy to implement by hardware and platform vendors alike. The DMTF CIM and WSMAN standards are up to the task, but implementing them effectively has been a challenge. Open Management Infrastructure (OMI) addresses this problem.

Easy and Diverse Device Support
Let’s start with a little history. Windows has long been a leader in implementing CIM, beginning with WMI (Windows Management Infrastructure). The Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) Common Information Model (CIM) is an open standard that defines how managed elements are represented as a common set of objects and defines the relationships between them using associations.

When WMI was first introduced as an out-of-box install for Windows NT 4.0, it implemented early versions of the standards and schemas. WMI used DCOM for remote management, because no standard protocol was defined at that time. In Windows Server 2012, we invested heavily in standards and remote management, synching WMI with the latest DMTF standards and protocols.

The CIM standard is sophisticated and flexible enough to use as a management model for all devices – particularly datacenter devices. Although these DMTF standards have been around for years, they have been a challenge to implement, and existing implementations have been too large for mobile and embedded devices. To address these challenges, Microsoft has built a highly portable, small footprint, high performance CIM Object Manager called OMI that is designed specifically to implement the DMTF standards. We then worked with The Open Group to make the source code for OMI available to everyone under an Apache 2 license. OMI is written to be easy to implement in Linux and UNIX systems.

Partners that adopt OMI will get the following:

DMTF Standards Support: OMI implements its CIMOM server according to the DMTF standard.
Small System Support: OMI is designed to also be implemented in small systems (including embedded and mobile systems).
Easy Implementation: Greatly shortened path to implementing WS-Management and CIM in your devices/platforms.
Remote Manageability: Instant remote manageability from Windows and non-Windows clients and servers as well as other WS-Management-enabled platforms.
API compatibility with WMI: Providers and management applications can be written on Linux and Windows by using the same APIs.
Support for CIM IDE: Tools for generating and developing CIM providers using tools, such as Visual Studio’s CIM IDE.
Optional PowerShell Support: If OMI providers use a set of documented conventions, Windows PowerShell will discover them and auto-generate cmdlets from them (This is how many of the 2300+ cmdlets in Windows Server 2012 are implemented).

OMI Details
For developers, OMI’s small footprint (250KB base size with a working set memory usage of 1MB) and high quality code will help reduce the complexity of developing a high performance, stable standards-based management stack. For IT pros, OMI greatly amplifies your effectiveness and productivity by increasing the number and types of devices you can manage and by unifying the management experience with standard-based management and automation tools, such as Windows PowerShell and System Center, and other management solutions.

OMI includes the following components and tools in its implementation of a CIM server.

Extensibility
OMI uses a provider model to enable developers to extend OMI to their specific device or platform. Historically, providers have been very hard to write, which made them costly and unstable. OMI leverages a greatly simplified provider model that is also being used by WMI in Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8. In short, OMI simplifies implementation for the developer by providing the following:

Next Generation Provider Interface
Compatible with the new WMI provider interface in Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8
Generation of provider skeletons (omigen)
Generation of concrete CIM class data structures and code
Provider registration tool (omireg)

The development model begins by specifying what needs to be managed. From the specification, the omigen tools generates a set of C data structures and code that implements management model. The developer adds their code to the skeleton and registers the provider.

OMI is for Embedded and Mobile Systems
Embedded and mobile device management might be one of the most demanding tasks for a management technology, because they have the most significant processor and memory constraints. We figured that if we could build a management technology that meets their needs, OMI should be well suited to address the management needs of any device. Therefore, to keep OMI small and ideal for embedded systems, the following design characteristics were implemented:

Server object size less than 250 kilobytes
Server implemented entirely in C
Provider interface is C
Repository-less server
Concrete provider classes yield less code
Iterative size optimization
Diskless operation

Security
Security matters. Ever since Bill Gates’s famous Trustworthy Computing memo, we committed ourselves to the Secure Development Lifecycle Model. Security is a primary factor in all aspects of our development and coding process. Despite OMI’s small size, OMI implements the following security capabilities:

HTTPS (SSL)
HTTP Basic Authentication
Local Authentication
Pluggable Authentication Module (PAM) support
Out-of-process providers

Run as requestor
Run as server
Run as designated user

Great! How Do I Get OMI?
Microsoft has partnered with The Open Group to create a hardware, software, and developer community to leverage, support, and enhance OMI. You can download OMI and/or get more details from The Open Group’s project site: http://omi.opengroup.org. In the near future, you will see this site and community grow and support more detailed documentation, contribution facilities, as well as OMI focused developer conferences.

For specific questions, please reach out to ottoh@microsoft.com

Welcome to the Era of the Cloud OS for Infrastructure!

Mon, 11 Jun 2012 16:06:08 GMT

In case you couldn't make it to Orlando this morning, Satya Nadella, President, Server & Tools Business, kicked off TechEd North America 2012 with a keynote outlining Microsoft's vision for the new era of the cloud enabled OS. We encourage you to go read about it on the new Server & Tools blog here. Don't forget to sign up for RSS or bookmark the new blog to keep up on all the latest Server & Tools news and information.

We hope you enjoy it!

The Server & Cloud Platform Team

TechEd North America attendees waiting patiently for Satya's keynote this morning in Orlando, FL

Bing.com runs on Windows Server 2012!

Thu, 07 Jun 2012 17:11:00 GMT

Updated 7/25/2012:
The .NET team posted a deep dive into the runtime improvements in the .NET Framework 4.5, specifically in the CLR Garbage Collector. These are the same improvements that we posted on earlier, which the Bing team saw on Windows Server 2012. It is great to see the .NET team making optimizations that enable server apps to run at cloud scale, using Windows Server 2012.

Microsoft has been running services on the Internet for quite some time now, but things fundamentally changed a few years ago leading up to Steve Ballmer’s famous quote, "This is the bet for the company. For the cloud, we're all in." We have all the oars in the boat pulling in the same direction and learning from each other to deliver the best cloud products. We are taking the lessons from running cloud services and feeding them into our products to make them better. During our planning for Windows Server 2012, we spent a lot of time with our cloud services to understand what worked well and where their pain points were. When you run services at the scale we are running things, every little problem gets amplified and every improvement helps enormously. These learnings are translated into dozens and dozens of features in the areas of performance, automating everything, supporting datacenter topologies, continuous availability, and minimizing mean-time-to-detection (MTTD)/mean-time-to-recovery (MTTR). In today’s blog, Mukul Sabharwal, a software development engineer on the Bing team, describes a few of the features of Windows Server 2012, their effect on the Bing Service, and why Bing is adopting and deploying Windows Server 2012 as fast as they can. As you’ll see, Windows Server 2012 is truly a cloud-optimized operating system.

Cheers,

Jeffrey

With the recent announcement of the Windows Server 2012 Release Candidate (RC), we at Bing.com considered how we might benefit from some of the operating system’s new features. Bing.com is a cloud service that runs on thousands of computers spanning many datacenters across the globe. Performance is a key component in running a successful cloud service such as Bing. Bing serves thousands of user queries every second, and users demand both relevancy and speed in those results.

Our deployment of Windows Server 2012 leveraged four key new features, in particular:

Built-in Microsoft .NET Framework 4.5, included with Windows Server 2012, including the background garbage collection and associated improved latencies
Improved performance at startup, enabled by the multicore JIT functionality of .NET 4.5
Ability to collect call stacks for 64-bit .NET JITted applications
Evaluation of Hyper-V 3 (the version of Hyper-V in Window Server 2012)

Pre-installed .NET Framework 4.5
Our rendering tier runs entirely on managed code, relying on the power of the .NET Framework and the accompanying web frameworks, ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC. One of the primary reasons for writing managed code is the improved developer productivity and run-time safety afforded by the CLR. These also have performance costs; for example, Garbage Collection (GC).

Server background GC
.NET 4.5 introduces Background GC for Server applications. Background GC was released in .NET 4 for client-side applications, and it was a hit, which is why we were really excited when Windows Server 2012 brought it to the server. And of course, we were gleeful when we saw the results!

This graph of InternalRequestLatency shows the time our application spends doing non-I/O work. (Just so you know, we set goals around making our 99th percentile faster.)

In the following graph, note that the majority of these gains come from spending less time dealing with the managed memory we create (garbage collecting) as part of servicing a request. (Note that the dates are coordinated with all the graphs in this post.)

Another measure of optimal performance—and an indicator of server health for ASP.NET applications—is the number of requests that are queued in the ASP.NET pipeline. This is shown in the following graph. Note the sharp decline on 5/25!

Upgrading to Windows Server 2012 can have this same positive impact for your managed applications. Less time spent garbage collecting is more time spent serving user requests. The end result is less latency and better throughput for your services.

Multicore JIT
Another great feature that is available in Windows Server 2012 via .NET 4.5 is JIT-compiling by using multiple cores. The feature is a profile-guided optimization; a background thread compiles methods that are likely to be required by the executing thread, and in an ideal case, the application methods are already JIT compiled when they are needed to run.

This feature is already enabled for ASP.NET applications, which makes it trivial to upgrade—do nothing, and let your ASP.NET applications get multicore JIT automatically.

You may be wondering: Why do startup times matter for server-side applications? The hope is that you restart your services only when needed, and at a time of your choosing so that it can be done during off-peak hours. But what if your application crashes?

The case for startup time is critical for service availability. When a service goes down and can recover quickly, it can be the difference between a total system outage vs. a degraded (but functional) experience.
And the startup time improvements, you ask?

This 50 percent reduction in startup time gives our operational staff relief that in case a service goes down, it’ll start back up twice as fast!

Taking call stacks on your production servers

Sample-based profiling in production
Also new to Windows Server 2012 is the ability to collect call stacks for 64-bit .NET applications that are JIT compiled.

We use performance counters as our primary monitoring mechanism, and as the first line of notification to our operational staff. They range from the ones we’ve discussed here (time in GC, and ASP.NET requests queued) to other important ones such as %CPU time and number of exceptions thrown.

Performance counters are extremely valuable for detecting performance degradation because they give insight into operational health. However, they are usually not sufficient to diagnose the “root cause” of a performance problem. So let’s say a performance counter spiked. For example, our %CPU time doubled, which in turn impacted latency. What’s our next step? With Windows Server 2012, our next step is now to enable low-overhead sample-based profiling.

Windows Server 2012 introduces the ability to perform sample-based profiling on 64-bit, JIT-compiled .NET applications via the Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) system. If you’re familiar with ETW, you’ll know that it’s a system-wide service that does not require process restarts; it’s non-invasive (in other words, no attaching to a process), and depending on the events you subscribe to, it also has low overhead: approximately 10 percent CPU cost when profiling is active.

The upward trend of %CPU time spent only increased from 80 percent to 90 percent. This translates to roughly equal percentage degradation in latencies, as shown in the following graph.

A 10 percent hit to performance can be acceptable at times when it is critical to diagnose the “root cause” of a performance problem.

We’ve spoken here about sample based profiling, but this feature extends to many other types of ETW events, including context switch events and ReadyThread events. For example, not only can you analyze CPU-bound problems, but also you can attempt to resolve problems that are stemming from I/O or thread-scheduling. (Note that enabling context-switch analysis is much more costly than profiling, with close to a 30 percent impact on CPU in our applications case.)

Sometimes there are problems that are only reproducible in a production environment, at scale. The ability to turn on a low-overhead logging facility that can profile your system is an incredible advantage —and with Windows Server 2012, managed applications now have the full support and parity with their native counterparts.

(Note that while Windows Server 2008 introduced the ability to take call stacks on sample profile ETW events, it did not work for 64-bit applications that were JITted.)

Hyper-V 3 and guest NUMA support
Before Windows Server 2012, virtualization implied overhead, even with all the accompanying benefits. Specifically, the cost of a software indirection imposed by virtualization was not acceptable. Moreover, the limitation on virtual cores (4) proved to be a throughput bottleneck in our synthetic lab testing.

However, with Windows Server 2012 comes Hyper-V 3, and with it a host of “scale” features. In particular, we were particularly excited about guest NUMA support. The ability to detect the NUMA topology is critical for making intelligent decisions about memory allocation; minimizing cross-node memory accesses is sometimes the key ingredient to making applications faster.

With the new Windows Server 2012 implementation, and with the accompanying NUMA efficiency from within a guest operating system, we are reevaluating using Hyper-V 3. We anticipate that Hyper-V will allow us to meet our performance targets, while also delivering large cost savings.

Cloud business and cloud-optimized operating system
Bing.com has already seen significant improvements by switching to Windows Server 2012 with the public RC. We basically cut %CPU time usage in half for critical servicing of managed applications (including GC) and startup times when restarting services. We achieved significant performance gains by making process monitoring easier and building it into the operating system. And we are exploring how we can use NUMA efficiency with Hyper-V 3 to enhance our service with virtualization. Bing.com-—a recognizably successful and large-scale, enterprise cloud service—represents how we built Windows Server 2012 to be a truly cloud-optimized operating system.

Bing.com is a cloud service. It’s a fast cloud service, and it runs on thousands of computers that span many datacenters across the globe. And now it’s optimized with Windows Server 2012.

Summary
The promise of the new Windows Server 2012 features intrigued the Bing.com team as we considered migrating to the latest operating system. What began as exploratory evaluations of the impact of a migration quickly led to a full-scale deployment, which benefited greatly from the built-in .NET 4.5 functionality, multicore JIT functionality, and potentially, the much-improved Hyper-V 3 functionality.

Now that you understand the inner workings of these Bing.com optimizations, one last reminder before you depart: All Bing.com search results worldwide are being served by Windows Server 2012!

Built-in .NET 4.5, included with Windows Server 2012, including the background garbage collection and associated improved latencies
Improved performance at startup, enabled by the multicore JIT functionality of .NET 4.5
Ability to collect call stacks for 64-bit .NET JITted applications
A clear future to Hyper-V 3 adoption

Windows Server 2012 Release Candidate available now

Thu, 31 May 2012 18:21:00 GMT

Great news! We reached another important milestone on the road to the final release of the cloud optimized OS: Windows Server 2012 Release Candidate (RC) is available now for download and evaluation.

If you haven’t yet started exploring the wide range of new features and capabilities, this new pre-release version is an ideal time to begin. With nearly 300,000 downloads to date of the beta release, the excitement around this new Windows Server is unprecedented. I encourage you to join the worldwide community of IT professional and developers who are already familiarizing themselves with Windows Server 2012 and gearing up take advantage of all it has to offer. Thanks in advance for participating in this last opportunity to provide us with your feedback so we can deliver you the highest quality release.

I also encourage you to fully explore this blog, if you haven’t already. It’s a great on ramp to the new Server, providing insights directly from the people who have built it, as well as links out a rich set of blogs and content across Microsoft digital properties. Below I’ve provided a list of posts since the March 1 beta announcement.

We look forward to showcasing Windows Server 2012 at our June TechEd events in Orlando and Amsterdam and at a Community Roadshow in a city near you.

Cheers,
Jeffrey

Windows Server 2012, PowerShell 3.0 and DevOps, Part 2…

Windows Server 2012, PowerShell 3.0 and DevOps, Part 1…

Announcing the Windows Server 2012 Community Roadshow

Introduction to Windows Server 2012 Dynamic Access Control

Improved Server Manageability through Customer Feedback: How the Customer Experience Improvement Program makes Windows Server 2012 a better product for IT Professionals

Windows Server 2012 Remote Desktop Services (RDS)

Introducing the Server and Cloud Partner and Customer Solutions Team Blog

Building Cloud Infrastructure with Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012 SP1

SMB 2.2 is now SMB 3.0

Introducing Windows Server “8” Hyper-V Network Virtualization: Enabling Rapid Migration and Workload Isolation in the Cloud

Windows Server “8” Beta: Hyper-V & Scale-up Virtual Machines Part 2…

Windows Server “8” Beta: Hyper-V & Scale-up Virtual Machines Part 1…

Standards-based Management in Windows Server “8”

Microsoft Online Backup Service

Building an Optimized Private Cloud using Windows Server “8” Server Core

Rocking the Windows Server “8” Administrative Experience

Where to Find Previous Windows Server “8” Posts

Windows Server 2012, PowerShell 3.0 and DevOps, Part 2

Wed, 30 May 2012 19:09:00 GMT

This concludes my two part series. In my first post, I provided some background information about PowerShell and DevOps. In this post, I’ll provide you a bunch of specifics. PowerShell 3.0, like Windows Server 2012, has a ton of new features and enhancements so I’ll only scratch the surface.

--Jeffrey

While PowerShell has always been focused on the goals of DevOps, PowerShell 3.0 and Windows Server 2012 take this to a new level. With Windows 2012, we shifted our focus from being a great OS for a server to being a cloud OS for lots of servers and the devices that connect them whether they are physical or virtual, on-premise or off-premise. In order to achieve this, we needed major investments in:

Automating everything
Robust and agile automation
Making it easier for operators to automate
Make it easier for developers to build tools

Automating Everything
Windows Server 2008/R2 shipped with ~230 cmdlets. Windows Server 2012 beats that by a factor of over 10 shipping ~ 2,430 cmdlets. You can now automate almost every aspect of the server. There are cmdlets for networking, storage, clustering, RDS, DHCP, DNS, File Servers, Print, SMI-S etc. – the list goes on. If you’ve read blogs about Windows Server 2012, you’ve seen how many things can be done using PowerShell. If you haven’t kept up to date, check out Jose Barreto’s File Server blog posts, Yigal Edery’s Private Cloud blog posts, Ben Armstrong’s Virtual PC Guy’s Blog posts, the Clustering and High-Availability blog posts or Natalia Mackevicius’ Partner and Customer blog posts and you’ll see what I mean. Windows Server 2012 is, by far, the most automatable version of Windows ever.

There are already a large number of hardware and software partners that are shipping PowerShell cmdlets and those that haven’t released them yet are working to quickly deliver them in the next versions of their products. This was very clear at the recent MMS conference in Las Vegas and I think you’ll see even more support at TechEd. You should definitely make sure that any product you buy delivers a full set of PowerShell cmdlets. If it doesn’t, you should think twice and do some due diligence to make sure you are getting a product that is current and is still being invested in. If they didn’t do PowerShell, what other things they missing? The good news is that a lot of the products will support PowerShell by the time Windows Server 2012 ships and that the products that have delivered cmdlets found it easy to do and mention the very positive customer feedback they get. EVERY product that ships PowerShell cmdlets, increases their investment in PowerShell in their next release.

Robust and agile automation

Workflow
We integrated the Windows Workflow Foundation engine into PowerShell to make it simple and easy to automate things that take a long time, that operate against a very large scale, or that require the coordination of multiple steps across multiple machines. Traditionally Windows Workflow has been a developer-only tool requiring visual studio and a lot of code to create a solution. We’ve made it an in-the-box solution that operations can easily create a solution using their existing PowerShell scripting skill. Workflow provides direct support for parallel execution, operation retries, and the ability to suspend and resume operations. For example, a workflow can detect a problem that requires manual intervention, notify the operator of this condition and then suspend operations until the operator corrects the situation and resumes the workflow.

Operators can use any of the available Workflow designers to create workflows. However we took it a step further and simplified authoring by extending the PowerShell language with the workflow keyword. Any operator or developer can now easily author a workflow using the tools that ship in all Windows SKUs. The behavior of a workflow are different than a function and it has a few more rules but if you know how to write a PowerShell function, you are 80% of the way to being able to write a workflow. Authoring workflows using PowerShell is much easier than working with XAML and many of us easier to understand than Workflow designer tools. You also get the benefit of being able to paste them into email and have someone be able to read/review it without having to install special tools. Below is an example workflow which operates on multiple machines in parallel collecting inventory information in parallel on each of the machines.

The command below will get this inventory information from a list of servers contained in servers.txt and output the results to a file. If any of the servers is unavailable, the workflow will attempt to contact the server every 60 seconds for an hour.

Workflow is exactly what DevOps practitioners need to reliably and repeatably perform operations. One of the key techniques of DevOps is A/B testing where two versions of software are deployed and run for a period of time. They are measured against some goodness metric (e.g. increased sales) and then the winning version is deployed to all machines. The workflow capabilities allow PowerShell to perform operations against a large number of machines over a large period of time making it easy to automate A/B testing.

Scheduled jobs
We also seamlessly integrated Task Scheduler and PowerShell jobs to make it simple and easy to automate operations that either occur on a regular schedule or in response to an event occurring. Below is a workflow which is meant to run forever. It collects configuration information (disk info) and then suspends itself. The workflow is started and given a well-known name “CONFIG”. We’ll resume this workflow using Task Scheduler. In the example, we register a ScheduledJob to run every Friday at 6pm and after every system startup. When one of the triggers occurs, the scheduled job runs and resumes the workflow using its well-known name. The workflow then collects the configuration information, putting it into a new file, and suspends itself again.

Robust Networking
In previous releases, PowerShell shipped with remoting disabled by default and required operators to go to each machine and issue the Enable-PSRemoting cmdlet in order to remotely manage it. As a Cloud OS, remote management of servers via PowerShell is now the mainstream scenario, so we’ve reduced the steps required and enabled PowerShell remoting by default in all server configurations. We did extensive security analysis and testing to ensure that this was safe.

In Wojtek Kozaczynski’s blog post on Standards-Based management, he described how we made WS-MAN our primary management protocol and kept COM and DCOM for backwards compatibility. WS-MAN is a Web-Services protocol using HTTP and HTTPS. While these are effectively REST protocols, PowerShell establishes a session layer on top of these to reuse a remote process for performance and to take advantage of session state. These sessions were robust in the face of modest network interruptions but would occasionally break when operators managed servers from their laptops over Wi-Fi networks while roaming between buildings. We’ve enhanced the session layer of WSMAN. By default, it will survive network interruptions up to 3 minutes. Disconnected Sessions support was added to PowerShell sessions which give users the option to disconnect from an active remote session and later reconnect to the same session, without losing state or being forced to terminate task execution. You can even connect to the session from a different computer (just like a remote desktop session).

Easier for operators to automate
We wanted to significantly lower the skill level required to successfully automate a complex solution. Ultimately we want to create a world where operators think about what they want, type it and get it. Every customer’s needs and scenarios are different so they need to script their own solutions. Our goal is to make it simple and easy to author scripts gluing together high level task oriented abstractions. The number one factor in making it simple is cmdlet coverage. That is why having ~2,430 cmdlets makes Windows Server 2012 so much easier to automate. A number of these cmdlets are extremely effective in dealing with the messy, real-world life of datacenters. We have cmdlets to work with REST APIs, JSON objects and even to get, parse and post web pages from management applications if required.

PowerShell 3.0 simplifies the language and utility cmdlets to reduce the steps and syntax necessary to perform an operation. Below is an example showing the old way of doing something and the new simplified syntax.

PowerShell3.0 improves the authoring tools operators use to create scripts and author workflows. PowerShell-ISE now supports rich IntelliSense, snippets, 3rd party extensibility and a Show-Command window which makes it easy to find exactly the right command and parameters you need to accomplish a task.

Easier for developers to build tools
Developers have always loved scripting with PowerShell because of its power, its use of C language conventions and its ability to program against .Net objects. PowerShell 3.0 cleans up a number of seams in dealing with .NET and objects and expands to allow developers to use PowerShell in a much wider range of scenarios.

Tool building enhancements
PowerShell 3.0 now has an Abstract Syntax Tree (AST). This allows new classes of intelligent tools to create, analyze, and manipulate PowerShell scripts. One of the Microsoft cloud services depends upon a very large number of PowerShell scripts to run all aspects of the service. Their development team used the AST to develop a script analysis tool to enforce a set of scripting best practices for their operators. The public AST is the reason why IntelliSense is freakishly powerful. It uses the AST to reason about the actual behavior of the program.

We modified a number of key areas of PowerShell to make them easier for developers to use and extend to write their own tools. This includes access to our serializer, API improvements, and an extensibility model for PowerShell_ISE.

Scripting enhancements
PowerShell 3.0 now uses the .NET Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) technology. PowerShell monitors how a script is executing and will compile the script or portions of the script on the fly to optimize performance. Performance varies but some scripts run 6 times faster in 3.0.

Intellisense (and tab completion on the command line) now work with .NET namespaces and types.

It is able to reason about the program and use variable type-inferencing to improve the quality of the IntelliSense.

We extended our hashtable construct with two variations which make it much easier for developers to get the behavior they want:

Platform building enhancements
We have streamlined the process to support delegated administration scenarios. PowerShell 3.0 allows you to register a remoting endpoint, configure what commands it makes available and specify what credentials those command should run as. This allows you to let regular uses run a well-defined set of cmdlets using Admin privileges. We’ve simplified the process of defining which cmdlets are available to using a declarative session configuration file.

PowerShell 3.0 is also available as an optional component of WINPE.

Windows Server 2012 and PowerShell 3.0 are excellent DevOps tools
DevOps is a new term and there is some disagreement about what it entails but at the heart it is all about making change safe through automation and bridging the gap between operators and developers. There is a lot to do in this area but Windows Server 2012 and PowerShell 3.0 make excellent progress towards accomplishing those goals. PowerShell won’t be the only tool in your DevOps toolbox but it should be in every DevOps toolbox. Download the beta today and find out for yourself.

Cheers!

Jeffrey Snover
Distinguished Engineer and Lead Architect for Windows Server

Windows Server 2012, PowerShell 3.0 and DevOps, Part 1…

Tue, 29 May 2012 16:55:00 GMT

In the first of a two part series, I provide some background information about PowerShell and DevOps. In the second post, I’ll provide you a bunch of specifics. PowerShell 3.0, like Windows Server 2012, has a ton of new features and enhancements so I’ll only scratch the surface.

--Jeffrey

The first time I heard DevOps was a podcast describing the 2009 Velocity conference. While most of the industry was struggling to deploy releases a few times a year, John Allspaw and Paul Hammond rocked the house with the talk “10 Deploys Per Day: Dev And Ops Cooperation at Flickr”. They made the case for delivering business results through changes in culture and tools, and gave birth to a new term: DevOps. The problem is that developers think they are responsible for delivering features and operators are responsible for keeping the site running. The gap between developers and operators leads to finger-pointing when things go wrong. Successful business requires an IT culture of joint accountability and mutual respect: developers thinking about the needs and concerns of operators and operators thinking about the needs and concerns of developers.

Their talk described how businesses required rapid change but that change is the root cause of most site-down events. Shunning the traditional “avoid change” approach, they advocated minimizing risk by making change safe through automation. This is the job of DevOps – safe change. This was the Taguchi quality approach applied to IT operations. Taguchi observed that the root cause of poor quality was variation. The solution was to first figure out how to do something repeatably. Once you could do that, then you can make small modifications in the process to see whether they make things better or worse. Back out the changes that make things worse. Keep doing the things that make things better. The key is repeatability. Repeatability allows experimentation which drives improvement. We get repeatability in IT operations through automation.

We started PowerShell by publishing the Monad Manifesto which articulated the problems we saw, our approach to solving them and the components we would deliver. We envisioned a distributed automation engine with a scripting language which would be used by beginner operators and sophisticated developers. PowerShell’s design was driven by the same thinking and values that drove the birth of DevOps:

Focus on the business
Make change safe through automation
Bridge the gap between developers and operators

Focus on the business
PowerShell has always focused on people using computers in a business context. PowerShell needed to be consistent, safe, and productive. Much has been made of the similarities between PowerShell and UNIX but in this regard, our ties are much closer to VMS/DCL and AS400/CL.

Consistent: Operators and developers don’t have a lot of time to learn new things. A consistent experience lets them to invest once in a set of skills and then use those skills over and over again. PowerShell uses a single common parser for all commands and performs common parameter validation delivering absolute consistency in command line syntax. PowerShell cmdlets are designed in a way that ubiquitous parameters can provide consistent functions to all commands (e.g. –ErrorAction, –ErrorVariable, –OutputVariable, etc)

Safe: An Operator once told me that occasionally he was about to do something and realized that if he got it wrong, he would be fired. In PowerShell, if you ever execute a cmdlet which has a side-effect on the system, you can always type –WhatIf to test what would happen if you go through with the operation. We also support –Confirm, -Verbose and –Debug. Despite these safeguards, things can go wrong and when they do, PowerShell spends a lot of effort to speed up the process of diagnosing and resolving the error.

Productive: Every aspect of PowerShell’s design maximizes the power of users (ergo the name). PowerShell makes it easy to perform bulk operations across a large number of machines. PowerShell also makes it easy to have productive engagements between your operators and developers because it allows them to speak a common language and to help each other with their scripts.

Make change safe through automation
There has been a lot of discussion about whether PowerShell is a .Net language, a scripting language, or an interactive shell. PowerShell is a distributed automation engine with a scripting language and interactive shell(s). Interactive shells and a scripting language are critical components but the focus has always been on automation through scripting. Automation is the process of reducing and/or eliminating operations performed by a human. A script documents what is going to happen. People can review a script and you can modify it based upon their feedback. You can test the script, observe the outcome, modify the script and if modification is good, keep it and it if is bad back it out. In other words, scripting provides the repeatability required to apply the Taguichi method to IT operations. Once you have an automated process, you can safely apply it over and over again. These processes can now be performed reliabily by lower skilled admins. These steps aren’t possible when you use traditional GUI admin tools.

Bridge the gap between developers and operators
Our goal has always been to deliver a single tool which could span the needs of operators doing ad hoc operations, simple scripting, formal scripting, advanced scripting and developers doing systems-level programming.
PowerShell spends a ton of effort trying to project the world in terms of high level task-oriented abstractions with uniform syntax and semantics. We call these cmdlets. And this is what operators want to efficiently and effectively manage systems. In order to copy a file using APIs, you would do this:

Have you ever wondered why PowerShell uses curly braces {} (and other C constructs) instead of BEGIN/END as other scripting languages do? We did that because we wanted to make it easier to adopt by developers of other C-based programming languages: C++, Objective C, Java, JavaScript, Perl, PHP, etc. We did some testing and determined that operators were able to readily adapt to this syntax. We also wanted to provide a smooth glide path between PowerShell and C# . This provides career mobility for operators who might want to transition to being a developer.

Most importantly, we wanted to develop a tool which could be used by BOTH operators and developers to bridge the gap between the groups and allow them to create common scripts, learn from each other and work together.

Windows Server 2012 and PowerShell 3.0 are excellent DevOps tools
DevOps is a new term and there is some disagreement about what it entails but at the heart it is all about making change safe through automation and bridging the gap between operators and developers. There is a lot to do in this area but Windows Server 2012 and PowerShell 3.0 make excellent progress towards accomplishing those goals. PowerShell won’t be the only tool in your DevOps toolbox but it should be in every DevOps toolbox. Download the beta today and find out for yourself.

Cheers!

Jeffrey Snover
Distinguished Engineer and Lead Architect for Windows Server

Announcing the Windows Server 2012 Community Roadshow

Thu, 24 May 2012 16:24:49 GMT

We’ve put a lot of work into Windows Server 2012, and are happy to see the positive feedback from press and those who’ve downloaded the beta. We look forward to presenting Windows Server 2012 at our June TechEd events in Orlando and Amsterdam. In this blog, Christa Anderson, a Program Manager in our Partner and Customer Ecosystem team, talks about an opportunity for those that can’t make it to those events.

-Cheers! Jeffrey

Not everyone who wants to learn in-depth about Windows Server 2012 can make it to TechEd. Therefore, in cooperation with our co-sponsors Dell and HP, we’re sponsoring the Windows Server 2012 Community Roadshow, a complimentary series of events held around the world to present on some of the key infrastructure improvements we’ve made in Windows Server 2012, including:

Server Virtualization
Networking
Storage
Server Management and Automation

Even better, this road show will be presented by Microsoft MVPs: independent technology experts and experienced presenters. MVPs speak regularly at third-party and Microsoft industry conferences such as TechEd, so we’re thrilled to have so many MVPs presenting in this road show.

You can sign up at no cost for technical sessions in your area from the Windows Server 2012 Community Roadshow web site. Some events are already full, but you can get on the wait list by clicking the SOLD OUT link and following the instructions.

This is a great opportunity to learn about core infrastructure improvements in Windows Server 2012 from independent technical experts. Go register!

Christa Anderson

Introduction to Windows Server 2012 Dynamic Access Control

Tue, 22 May 2012 19:05:00 GMT

We constantly strive to reduce the steps required for you to get your job done. One of the reasons Windows Server 2012 is a such great release is that we spent so much time listening to our customers and understanding their scenarios and concerns. When development teams start from a technology/feature mindset, it can be hard to work across groups because helping another team usually means that you have to give up something you wanted to do. We were able to achieve a very high level of technology integration and cross-group cooperation because we all shared a common understanding of our customers and their scenarios. Teams were eager to help each other succeed in delivering those scenarios. When you have lots of teams working together towards a common goal, you can really change the game and tackle some really hard problems. Today’s blog is a good illustration of that.

Anyone that has been involved in securing data or accessing data security knows that the traditional security models and mechanisms are not always flexible enough to address today’s concerns and scenarios. Whether it's compliance requirements, increased business impact of disclosed data, or management of the sheer scale of data – it is clear that the capabilities provided by the current access control mechanism can be improved so that it is easier for administrators and users to address these challenges. A number of teams worked together to deliver Windows Server 2012’s Dynamic Access Control. I think you’ll find that it, like so many other things in Windows Server 2012, is just what you were asking for.

If you haven’t downloaded the beta yet, take some time to read this blog and watch some of the videos it points to and then schedule some time on your calendar to download the beta and try it out.

Nir Ben-Zvi, a Program Manager on the File Server team, wrote this blog.

--Cheers Jeffrey

Hello, my name is Nir Ben-Zvi and I work in the Windows Server team. I’m very excited to introduce to you the new Dynamic Access Control feature set.

I’ll start with a brief introduction and insight into the planning process, discuss the new Central Access Policy model and describe the end-to-end File Server solution that we built into Windows Server 2012. I will also touch on how we enable an incremental deployment model so that you do not need to move your entire environment to Windows Server 2012 in order to use the feature set. I will touch on work with partners in this area, too.

You can find a Dynamic Access Control overview demo here.

Introduction

In today’s complex IT environments data is being created on distributed systems at a staggering rate and accessed through a plethora of devices. Compliance with regulatory standards and the need to secure leakage of business critical and personal data present major challenges for businesses and corporate IT. The key pillars for data compliance and leakage prevention are controlling who has access to information and having the ability to report who actually accessed specific information.

Not surprisingly, this was the exact situation that we observed when we started planning for Windows Server 2012 a few years ago. A few of the points that we repeatedly heard from customers during the planning period included:

Centrally manage access to information based on business and compliance needs
Access to information needs to be audited for compliance and analysis purpose
Sensitive information should be protected wherever it goes
Content owners should be responsible for their information - IT admins are not librarians
Maintaining information worker productivity is key

We then looked at the different personas within an organization and how they participate in meeting the regulatory and business requirements for data compliance, in order to provide the right set of technologies and solutions that help address the data compliance challenge.

The range of personas involved starts with the CSO/CIO office that identifies the business and regulatory compliance needs. It continues with the IT administrators that manage the systems and the business owners that control the actual information. Last, the organization would like to keep the impact on the information worker to a minimum (ideally with no impact at all).

To help organizations reach their data compliance, we eventually focused on the following areas:

Identify the information that needs to be managed to meet business and compliance requirements
Apply appropriate access policies to information
Audit access to information
Encrypt information

These focus areas were then translated to a set of Windows capabilities that enable data compliance in partner and Windows-based solutions.

Add the ability to configure Central Access and Audit Policies in Active Directory. These policies are based on conditional expressions that take into account the following so that organizations can translate business requirements to efficient policy enforcement and considerably reduce the number of security groups needed for access control:

Who the user is
What device they are using, and
What data is being accessed

Integrate claims into Windows authentication (Kerberos) so that users and devices can be described not only by the security groups they belong to, but also by claims such as: “User is from the Finance department” and “User’s security clearance is High”
Enhance the File Classification Infrastructure to allow business owners and users to identify (tag) their data so that IT administrators are able to target policies based on this tagging. This ability works in parallel with the ability of the File Classification Infrastructure to automatically classify files based on content or any other characteristics
Integrate Rights Management Services to automatically protect (encrypt) sensitive information on servers so that even when the information leaves the server, it is still protected.

Central Access Policies

One can look at Central Access Policies as a safety net that an organization applies across its servers. These safety net policies enhance (but do not replace) the local access policy (e.g. Discretionary ACL) that is applied to the information. For example, if a local DACL on a file allows access to a specific user but a Central Policy restricts access to the same user, the user will not be able to get access to the file (and vice versa.)

The initiative to deploy and enforce a Central Access Policy may come for different reasons and from multiple levels of the organization:

Compliance policy: This policy relates to compliance and business requirements and is targeted at protecting the right access to information that is being managed. For example: Allow only a specific group of people access to information that falls under the “US-EU Safe Harbor” regulation.
Departmental authorization policy: Each department in an organization has some special data handling requirements that they would like to enforce. This is very common in distributed organization. For example: The finance department wants to limit all access to finance information only to the finance employees.
Need to know policy: This is a policy that ensures that access is allowed on a need-to-know basis. Examples include:

Vendors should be able to access and edit only files that pertain to the project that they are working on.
In financial institutions, information walls are important so that analysts do not access brokerage information and brokers do not access analysis information.

Central Audit Policies

Central Audit Policy is a powerful tool to help maintain the security of an enterprise. One of the key goals of security audits is regulatory compliance. Industry standards such as SOX, HIPPA, PCI, etc. require organizations to follow a strict set of rules related to information security and privacy. Security audits help establish the presence (or absence) of such policies and thereby prove compliance (or non-compliance) with these standards. Additionally, security audits help detect anomalous behavior, identify and mitigate gaps in security policy and deter irresponsible behavior by creating a trail of user activity that you can use for forensic analysis.

Windows Server 2012 enables administrators to author audit policies using expressions that take into account what information users are accessing and who the user is so that an organization can target audit to specific information wherever it resides. This opens the doors to richer, more targeted and easy-to-manage audit policies. It enables scenarios that until now were either impossible or too difficult to enable. For example you can now easily author audit policies such as the ones listed below:

Audit everyone who does not have a high security clearance and yet tries to access “high impact” information.
Audit all vendors when they try to access documents related to projects that they are not working on.

This helps regulate the volume of audit events and limit them to only the most relevant information/users so that you can monitor access to information across multiple servers without generating an unmanageable volume of audit events.

In addition, the information tagging is recorded in the audit events so that event collection mechanism can provide contextual reports such as: Who accessed all the “high impact” information in the last three months.

The File Server solution

Based on this infrastructure we built a full end-to-end Windows-based solution for Windows Server 2012 Active Directory, Windows Server 2012 File Server and Windows 8 client. This solution allows you to:

Identify data using automatic and manual classification of files.
Control access to files across file servers by applying safety net Central Access Policies. For example, you can control who can access health information within the organization.
Audit access to files on file servers by using Central Audit Policies for compliance reporting and forensic analysis. For example, you could identify who accessed highly sensitive information during the last three months.
Encrypt data by automatically applying Rights Management Services (RMS) encryption for sensitive Microsoft Office documents. For example: you could configure RMS to encrypt all documents that contain Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) information.

In order to support deployment across multiple file servers in the organization, we are also providing the Data Classification Toolkit that enables configuration and reporting across multiple servers.
The current Beta for the Data Classification Toolkit is available for download here.

The concept of incremental deployment

One of the core design principles of Dynamic Access Control is incremental deployments. You can start using the feature set as soon as possible to solve targeted business problems for information access and audit.

You can use most of the Dynamic Access Control capabilities with the Windows Server 2012 File Server and an upgraded Active Directory domain schema. Adding a minimal number of Windows Server 2012 domain controllers will enable user claims and so on. Each part of the system that you upgrade provides you with more capabilities but it is up to you to set the pace.

Partner solutions

Partner solutions and line of business applications can further use the Windows infrastructure investments for Dynamic Access Control, providing great value for organizations that use Active Directory. A few examples of partner solutions that we have already demoed at the //build/ conference last year include:

Data Leakage Prevention (DLP) integration for automatic content classification
Central audit analysis
Rights Management Services (RMS) authorization using Central Access Policies
Many others…

We plan to show many additional partner integrated solutions in the upcoming TechEd US conference (Jun. 11-14, 2012) Twitter hashtag #MSTechEd

A few additional resources that you might find useful:

TechNet manual (Beta): http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831717.aspx

Data Classification Toolkit (Beta): https://connect.microsoft.com/site715

Hands on lab: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsserver/hh968267.aspx (Using Dynamic Access Control to automatically and centrally secure data)

Dynamic Access Control at MMS 2012: http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Dynamic-Access-Control-Demo-and-Interview

Nir Ben-Zvi

Improved Server Manageability through Customer Feedback: How the Customer Experience Improvement Program makes Windows Server 2012 a better product for IT Professionals

Thu, 17 May 2012 18:38:00 GMT

I once talked to a doctor who told me about a recent patient that had serious medical symptoms for over a year before visiting the doctor. He said that if the patient had mentioned these symptoms when they first arose, the prognosis was very good but now the patient was in trouble. That reminded me of some advice I once heard, “Never hold anything back from your doctor”. Doctors have exactly one job: to help you. They can only help you with problems that they know about so if you aren’t completely open and honest with them, you are only hurting yourself. The other thing is that by sharing your situation with a doctor, the doctor gains knowledge and skills to help other people as well. This model and thinking applies to our Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP) for Windows Server 2012 Beta. That is where we ask you to allow us to collect data about the health and usage of your servers. We frequently receive questions about CEIP; ‘what is CEIP?’ and ‘how is CEIP data used?’. In this post, Karen answers these questions along with the most important question ‘why should I enable CEIP?’

Karen Albrecht, a Program Manager on the Windows Server Telemetry team, authored this post.

--Cheers! Jeffrey

When we talk to the server community about the Windows Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP), most people say ‘Never heard of it’. Those that have heard of it sometimes don’t enable it because they ‘don’t want to share their data’. In this blog article we will explore what CEIP is and what benefits you may receive by enabling it on your deployed Servers. We will also discuss several new features in Windows Server 2012 that make it easier to enable CEIP.

Let’s start by answering the question ‘What is CEIP?’ For those who have never seen CEIP before, using Windows Server 2012 Beta you can get there through Server Manager -> Local Server -> select the Customer Experience Improvement Program link.

CEIP is the program by which we learn how you use Windows Server 2012, in order to improve the product based on your feedback. You can join the Windows Server 2012 CEIP program in several ways. First, for pre-release beta software, such as the Windows Server 2012 Beta, CEIP is enabled by default to help us improve the software before its’ final release. Alternatively, in released products such as Windows Server 2008 R2 we provide notice through the CEIP user interface (shown above) so you can elect to opt-in to the program.

We know that you need to get the most out of your servers, especially when it comes to server performance and network bandwidth. The CEIP report collection and transfer process are light weight in order to meet this need. Windows records CEIP usage information using a high-speed tracing component, Event Tracing for Windows (ETW). ETW enables Windows Server 2012 to write out CEIP usage data no noticeable impact to server performance. CEIP usage information is transferred to Microsoft in a two part process using the Consolidator and Uploader scheduled tasks. The consolidator exports CEIP data into a compressed binary format that is ready for transfer. The binary is typically less than 1 MB in size so that the transfer has minimal impact to network bandwidth. The uploader scheduled task runs every once every 24 hours and transfers the CEIP binary data to the Microsoft frontend servers using the Windows Telemetry Protocol.

Another question we are often asked is ‘What data is collected by CEIP’? The data consists of basic information about how your server is configured and used; roles installed, features installed, settings used, and information about hardware. CEIP does not intentionally collect Personally Identifiable Information (PII). So, CEIP reports do not contain your contact information, such as your name, address, or phone number. This means CEIP will not ask you to participate in surveys or to read junk e-mail and you will not be contacted in any other way. The Microsoft Customer Experience Improvement Program privacy statement discusses, in detail, the data collected by CEIP and how we use it.

Moving on to the heart of the question, ‘What do I get for sending this data to Microsoft?’, you might be surprised in the ways Windows Server uses your data to improve the product. There are many examples beyond what is listed here. However we narrowed it down to the following to give you a flavor of some of the ways CEIP data is used to improve the product.

Increased server reliability: In the Windows Server 2012 Developer Preview and Windows Server 2012 Beta pre-release versions, Reliability Analysis Component (RAC) features are enabled to determine the root cause of Windows server crashes, Windows server hangs, and application crashes. RAC combines CEIP data with Windows Error Reporting (WER) data in order to reconstruct a full view of the system state at the time of the crash or hang. By analyzing the combined data in these two programs we can identify high occurrence issues in order to triage and fix them so that you have a more reliable platform release over release. To learn more about the data collected by WER, see the Microsoft Error Reporting Privacy Statement.
Improved programmability for server administration scripts: For large scale deployments, IT administration is often done using PowerShell and WMI scripts because scripting simplifies manageability at scale. When a commandlet or WMI interface changes or is removed, it can be painful to rewrite scripts to accommodate the platform changes. In Windows Server 2012 we are using CEIP to address this by monitoring deprecated API usage so that APIs are not removed until it has minimum impact to you. As an example, in Windows Server 2012 the Win32_ServerFeature WMI interface had been considered to be deprecated and being replaced with MSFT_ServerManagerDeploymentTasks. (For those who haven’t used it, Win32_ServerFeature detects installed roles and features.)

As part of the deprecation process, we added CEIP data to record interface usage and based on the latest Windows Server 2012 Beta CEIP data, we found that 47% of customers are using Win32_ServerFeature. Using this data, we are able to identify migration off of Win32_ServerFeature so that it is not formally removed from the product until migration to MSFT_ServerManagerDeploymentTasks can be done without impact to you.
Diversity of Windows Certified hardware: One of the frequently asked questions we get is ‘What CEIP data does Microsoft share with partners?’ There are certain scenarios where a subset of CEIP data (but no PII) is shared with IxVs (independent hardware or software vendors) as part of hardware certification. An important part of the Windows server offering is supporting high quality drivers for a diversity of devices in market. The challenge is to understand what devices are most commonly used in market. CEIP data is used to model hardware profiles and map diversity of different devices in order to inform certification strategy for IxVs. Using this data, IxVs determine the breadth of drivers to certify (based on what is in market) and prioritize which devices get certified first (based on popularity).
Improved product experiences: CEIP data is used on a day-by-day basis to understand a broad range of feature configurations so that we can prioritize work according to your usage patterns. For example, in order to reduce the cost to setup new servers, CEIP records what settings you use. This allows us to refine default settings by tuning them to reflect most common usage patterns so it is faster for you to setup a new server. Another example of internal usage is in testing. In order to increase test coverage of real world test patterns, we analyze CEIP data to understand how the product is used. This ensures that both design and testing are driven with your usage patterns in mind. There are many, many more examples of how CEIP is used to drive customer feedback into the product but in the interest of time, let’s move on to how to configure CEIP.

After the release of Windows Server 2008 R2, we did an assessment of CEIP adoption and found that 5-7% of servers in market were reporting CEIP. While working with customers on CEIP adoption we found that although servers were opted-in we weren’t getting data from them. We did a root cause analysis and learned that the main reason servers weren’t reporting is because they are deployed in firewalled environments. To send CEIP data, servers need to be able to communicate over HTTPS (default port 443) and need to have proxy settings configured (if the server is in a network that uses a proxy server). In working with Technology Adoption Program (TAP) customers, we found that frequently one or more of these settings were not configured, thus preventing CEIP data from reaching Microsoft.

To make it easy to send CEIP data, Windows Server 2012 Beta ships several new features that allow you to get past the blocking issues so you can ‘set and forget’ CEIP. To participate in the CEIP program, the simplest way to deliver CEIP data to us is to use a new feature called Windows Feedback Forwarder (WFF). WFF is a service that proxies CEIP data from machines in a domain to Microsoft. WFF will proxy CEIP data Windows products including Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 or higher. WFF will also proxy data for any Microsoft product that is enabled to ‘send customer feedback’.

The forwarder can sit within the domain or as an edge server. Machines in the domain are configured to send data to the forwarder via group policy. When an individual machine is triggered to collect data, it sends the data to the forwarder over HTTP and the forwarder relays the data to Microsoft over HTTPS.

To install Windows Feedback Forwarder

Using the User Interface (UI)

On any Windows Server 2012 machine, launch Server Manager and then launch the Add Roles and Features wizard.
In the Add Roles and Features Wizard, navigate to the Features page, select Windows Feedback Forwarder.
Specify an incoming port number (default port number is 53533). If the domain has an internet proxy, specify the proxy information. Finish the install.
In Server Manager, select ‘All Servers’ in the left hand navigation pane. In the ‘Servers’ tile, right click the server that you installed Windows Feedback Forwarder on and select ‘Windows Feedback Forwarder Configuration’. Keep the dialog open for the next step.

OR Using PowerShell

Launch PowerShell and run ‘Add-WindowsFeature WFF’
In Server Manager, select ‘All Servers’ in the left hand navigation pane. In the ‘Servers’ tile, right click the server that you installed Windows Feedback Forwarder on and select ‘Windows Feedback Forwarder Configuration’.
Select the ‘Forwarding Settings’ tab and specify an incoming port number (default port number is 53533). If the domain has an internet proxy, specify the proxy information. Click ‘Apply’.
Keep the dialog open for the next step.

To deploy the Windows Feedback Forwarder group policy

The easiest way to configure machines in a domain to send CEIP data to your Windows Feedback Forwarder is to deploy a group policy. There are 2 options to deploy the group policy. You can either use the Windows Feedback Forwarder configuration dialog or you use the Group Policy Management Console to create and link the group policy object.

Use Windows Feedback Forwarder configuration dialog

In the Windows Feedback Forwarder configuration dialog select the group policy tab.
Enter the domain name that you want to deploy the group policy object to and click ‘Find’. Note: you may have to enter credentials at this step depending on the settings of the current user context.
After the list of organizational units is populated, select one or more organizational units.
Click the ‘Apply’ button

Manually create a group policy object

In the Windows Feedback Forwarder configuration dialog, select the ‘Forwarding Settings’ tab. Copy the Windows Feedback Forwarding URL and store it temporarily.
In GPMC create a new group policy object and set:

An alternative method to enable CEIP is the Windows Automatic Feedback dialog, which is a new multi-machine opt-in experience that ships in Server Manager. It enables you to configure multiple individual machines to send CEIP data within just 3 clicks.

Launch Server Manager and select ‘All Servers’ in the left hand navigation.
In the ‘Servers’ tile select ctrl+a to select all servers -> right click and select ‘Configure Windows Automatic Feedback’
Clicking Enable both Customer Experience Improvement Program and Windows Error Reporting will enable both on all servers connected to that Server Manager console

We would love to know what you think of this program and how we can improve it to provide the best experience for your deployments and Windows Server usage. Please give us your comments below.

Karen Albrecht
Program Manager
Windows Server Telemetry

Windows Server 2012 Remote Desktop Services (RDS)

Wed, 09 May 2012 00:12:00 GMT

The other day I was in a conversation where I drew the distinction between reliable and robust. I hadn’t really thought about it precisely but when asked to articulate the distinction I said that robust was “reliable across a wide range of conditions”. A lot of what Klaas describes in his blog about RDS reminds me of that definition. Remote Desktop Services in Windows Server 2012, is reliable across a much wider range of conditions. It works better across a wide range of networking configurations, it works better across a wide range of hardware devices and configurations (physical or virtual) and it works better across a wide range of administrative scenarios. Oh yeah, it also adds a bunch of great new features. I think you are going to enjoy what you see here.

Klaas Langhout, a Director of Program Management in our RDS team, wrote this blog.

--Cheers! Jeffrey

For Windows Server 2012 we listened to our customers and partners and added the most desired features and resolved the top pain points in Remote Desktop Services (RDS). Following a description of RDS, I’ll summarize some of the many dramatic improvements we have made.

For those people that are not familiar with RDS, it is the workload within Windows Server that enables users to connect to virtual desktops, session-based desktops and RemoteApp programs. The key value that RDS provides is the ability to centralize and control the applications and data that employees need to perform their job from the variety of devices that the employee uses. This provides “work anywhere from any device” while ensuring that your control and compliance needs are met.

In the previous release, we received consistent feedback that:

RemoteFX was very popular however its underlying protocol (RDP) did not provide a great experience over Wide Area Networks (WANs)
Session and virtual machine infrastructures were complicated and costly and
The administration experience was not simple.

Windows Server 2012 addresses each of these issues.
For Windows Server 2012 we have made RemoteFX dramatically better over a WAN as well as balancing between scale (host side cost) and reduced bandwidth. Specific improvements include:

Adaptive Graphics. We support a mix and match approach, determining and using the right codec for the right content instead of one size fits all. We included codecs optimized for multimedia, images, and text. We improved caching as well as added progressive rendering. Progressive rendering allows RemoteFX to provide a responsive experience over a highly constrained network.
Intelligent Transports. We support UDP as well as TCP. UDP provides a better experience over a lossy WAN network but, is not always possible dependent on the routers, and firewalls involved. RDP will automatically use TCP when UDP cannot be used to ensure connectivity and the best possible experience.
Optimized Media Streaming. We utilize a new codec to reduce bandwidth consumption for media content (in some cases a 90% bandwidth reduction) while also providing a great end user media experience.
Adaptive Network Auto Detect. In this release, the end user no longer has to set the network in the Remote Desktop Connection client: the client auto-detects the network type and, also adapts as the network changes.
DirectX11 Support with vGPU. In Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1, we first introduced the RemoteFX Virtual GPU (vGPU), which provided DirectX 9 application support and Aero theming for virtual machines running on Hyper-V servers with physical GPUs. In Windows Server 2012, the vGPU feature is expanded and all Windows 8 virtual machines can take advantage of a DirectX 11 capable GPU, either emulated in software (softGPU) when no GPU is present in the host or para-virtualized and hardware-accelerated (vGPU) when a DirectX11 compatible video card is present in the host. We do support multiple GPU’s within one server and are seeing greater engagement with OEM’s to provide systems that support this.
Single Sign-On. In Windows Server 2008 R2, it was possible to configure an RDS deployment so that users will need to enter their credentials only once when connecting to RemoteApps and hosted desktops. However, this configuration was very cumbersome. In Windows Server 2012 we dramatically simplified this by eliminating the need to use multiple certificates. We also made it possible to use locally logged on domain credentials so that users connecting from managed devices can connect seamlessly without any credential prompts.
Email and web discovery of Remote Applications and desktops. Users now can find the correct remote workspace to connect to by just providing their email address. This removes the requirement to remember a long website URL. In addition, Remote Desktop Web Access now supports other browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, and Safari.
Multi Touch. We support full remoting of gestures (e.g. pinch and zoom) between the client and host with up to 256 touch points. This provides for a consistent experience when using a touch enabled device locally or, over RemoteFX. As more apps are written supporting touch as the primary interface, this will become more important.
USB Redirection. In Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 we supported USB isochronous remoting only for vGPU enabled virtual machines. We have added support when using sessions and physical hosts which provides a consistent experience independent of physical, session, or virtual machine based host.
Metro-style Remote Desktop. In the app store we have added a new Metro-style application to provide an immersive touch-first remoting experience. Discoverability of remote resources, touch optimization, easy reconnect to your favorites, are just some of the specific features added.

The second main improvement area is in overall infrastructure simplification and cost reduction. Cost and complexity is a major roadblock for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and hosted desktop deployments of all sizes. In Windows Server 2012 we made many improvements to address this problem, such as:

Robust Pooled Virtual Desktop Collection model. “Pooled virtual desktop collection” model refers to the idea that a large number of virtual machines can be managed as a single entity by using a single virtual desktop template. This model is very attractive in VDI because it allows IT admins to provide a work desktop to multiple users without having to maintain a full OS for each user. In Windows Server 2012 we fully support this deployment model. Virtual machines can be created in batch from a virtual desktop template, patched by only modifying that virtual desktop template, and recreated/refreshed automatically by the RD Connection Broker. This dramatically reduces the cost and complexity of supporting a large number of users.
User Profile Disk. A major blocker for the “pooled virtual desktop collection” model has been lack of personalization: Since the pooled virtual desktop collection is based on a common virtual desktop template, the user’s personal documents, settings, and configurations would normally not be present. User Profile Desk was added to solve this problem for either virtual machine-based or session based desktop deployments. As the user logs on to different virtual machines within the pool or different RD Session Hosts within the session collection, his/her User Profile Disk gets mounted, providing access to the user’s complete profile. Since User Profile Disk operates at a lower layer, it works seamlessly with existing user state technologies such as Roaming User Profiles and Folder Redirection.
Wide range of high-performance and low cost storage options. RDS is built on top of Hyper-V and Windows Server 2012 storage, so the enhancements made throughout the hypervisor and storage stack in Windows Server 2012 benefit all RDS deployments. To name a few, we support:

VDI over SMB, SANs, or direct attached local storage
Pooled virtual desktop collections can be configured with storage tiers to optimize IOPS
Highly scalable and resilient configurations with Clustering and with Storage Spaces
All these improvements provide a dramatic reduction in costs while maintaining performance and management benefits of central storage.

Fairshare of resources in RD Session Host. In Windows Server 2012, RD Session Host server allocates CPU, Disk I/O, and Network I/O such that a single user cannot consume resources that would negatively impact other users on the same host. Each user will get a “fair share”. This is done with minimum overhead so the CPU, disk, and network resources are used to maximum capacity.
GPU Optional. In Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 we had a requirement on a physical GPU for the new RemoteFX features that shipped in that release. In Windows Server 2012 the physical GPU is optional for VDI where it provides value if you are running applications that could benefit from hardware offload such as a CAD/CAM application.
Removal of a dedicated RD Session Host server running in redirection mode. We have removed the RD Session Host server running in Redirection mode which was a required component in previous versions. This functionality is now incorporated into the RD Connection Broker. This reduces the number of components to deploy and manage.

The third and final focus area for improvements made in RDS has been in overall management simplification. This is targeted at improving the E2E management experience as well as enabling partner solution creation. Improvements include:

RDS Management Interface integrated into Server Manager. RDS now includes a single management interface through which you can deploy RDS end to end, monitor the deployment, configure options, and manage all your RDS components and servers. This management interface is built into the new Server Manager, taking advantage of many new Windows Server 2012 management capabilities such as multi-server deployments, remote configuration, and orchestrated configuration workflows. This interface replaces older tools such as Remote Desktop Services Manager, RemoteApp Manager, and RD Session Host Configuration. The management tools for RD Gateway and RD Licensing are still provided separately since these roles are often deployed independently.
Scenario-Focused Deployment. The new Server Manager provides a scenario-focused wizard that dramatically simplifies the task of bringing up a complete RDS deployment. This wizard sets up all the roles needed for an RDS deployment, configures each server role correctly to communicate with the other roles, and walks you through creating your first virtual desktop or session collection as well. The wizard comes in two flavors:

Quick Start is optimized for deploying Remote Desktop Services on one server, and creates a collection and publishes RemoteApp programs.
Standard Deployment allows you to deploy Remote Desktop Services across multiple servers, allowing for a more customized deployment.

Active/Active RD Connection Broker. In previous releases the RD Connection Broker role service has supported an active/passive clustering model. This provided high availability in the case of component failure, but it did not address high scale requirements. In this release, we have eliminated the need for clustering and switched to an active/active model. With this model, two or more RD Connection Brokers can be combined as a farm to provide both fault tolerance and load balancing. This prevents the broker from being a single point of failure and also allows ‘scale out’ as load demands.
PowerShell support. All platform functions and capabilities can be controlled through a comprehensive and rich PowerShell layer. IT administrators can use this layer to build sophisticated automation that helps fit RDS into their IT infrastructure and workflows. We also anticipate third-party vendors to use this new extensibility layer to address unique new scenarios and integrate Windows Server 2012 RDS into management tools.

Remote Desktop Services in Windows Server 2012 provides a single infrastructure, and consistently great remoting experience even over WAN while offering three deployment choices: Session, Pooled virtual desktop collection, Personal virtual desktop collection to reduce the cost appropriate to the needs of the user. The administration is simplified and platform hooks are provided for partner extension to provide additional value and solutions.

Customers are excited about RDS with Windows Server 2012 and some have already rolled out a pre-release version into production taking advantage of these new benefits! We are proud of the work we have done and look forward to providing more information as we drill into the specific features in blogs posts to come at the RDS Blog.

- The Entire Remote Desktop Virtualization Team

Introducing the Server and Cloud Partner and Customer Solutions Team Blog

Mon, 07 May 2012 18:44:00 GMT

You’ve heard me talk time and time again about how much time we spent with customers and partners during the planning of Windows Server 2012. Well we didn’t stop at the end of planning. In today’s blog, Natalia introduces herself, her team and their blog which will document some of the details of our customer/partner engagements and how they are succeeding with Window Server 2012.

--Cheers! Jeffrey Snover

Hi, my name is Natalia Mackevicius, the Group Program Manager of the Windows Server Partner and Customer Ecosystem. Back in October, I covered my role and outlined how my team has applied the all-important voices of customers and partners to the planning and development of Windows Server 2012: Windows Server 8: Driven by the Voice of the Customer and Partner

Today, I’m pleased to introduce the Server and Cloud Partner and Customer Solutions Team Blog. Over the coming months, this blog will be used to share examples of how our customers are implementing the new capabilities of Windows Server 2012 and highlight opportunities for partners to develop hardware and software for Windows Sever 2012. These examples will be tied back to the Windows Server Blog and the Product Team blogs for more detailed technical information on the features themselves.

Here are a few things we are going to include in our blog:

Discuss how early adopter customers are using Windows Server 2012 technologies to solve current pain points and/or address new opportunities and scenarios
Provide early information on customer adoption and best practices from the Engineering validation programs we run.
Discuss the Windows Server 2012 scenarios and the technical integration points for partners, such as API’s, hardware and applications
Provide an overview of the reference architectures or types of technologies that are being developed by partners to complete and/or extend Windows Server 2012 solutions, as they become publically available.

We hope that you find this blog useful. We will try to provide a regular rollup of what we have covered on the Server and Cloud Partner and Customer Solutions Team Blog from here so that you don’t miss anything.

We welcome your comments and questions. Join the discussion!

Please let me introduce to my team’s first blog post: Windows Server 2012 Technology Adoption Program - TAP

Natalia Mackevicius
Group Program Manager
Partner and Customer Ecosystem

Building Cloud Infrastructure with Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012 SP1

Thu, 03 May 2012 18:15:00 GMT

Operating Systems are platforms delivering experiences, features, and APIs that developers can build upon. Today, many developers take already shipping versions of Windows and deliver cloud computing solutions. Windows Server 2012 is a cloud-optimized OS, which means that developers can deliver much better cloud computing solutions with much less effort. System Center 2012 already delivers great cloud computing solutions using Windows Sever 2008/R2. In this blog, Anders Vinberg, a Technical Fellow in our Management Division, describes how the Virtual Machine Manager component in System Center 2012 SP1, now available as a community technology preview, builds on the cloud optimizing features of Windows Server 2012 to take that solution to the next level.

--Cheers! Jeffrey

With the official naming of Windows Server “8” as Windows Server 2012 and the launch of System Center 2012 at MMS a few weeks back, Microsoft has now delivered a solution to our customers for building their private clouds and to hosters for building their own Infrastructure-as-a-Service public cloud offerings. It is instructive to recap the meaning of moving to the cloud model and the core tenets of a cloud as was laid out in the keynote by Brad Anderson at MMS, and then take a look at how this is done with Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012 SP1.

The Cloud Model
First off, it is important to note that cloud computing does not necessarily mean that the workload is running outside a customer’s premises. The workloads could be deployed on infrastructure that is on a customer’s premises, or on their partners’ premises but completely controlled and managed by the customer. That is a “private” cloud. Workloads could also be deployed and run on a hoster’s premises on shared infrastructure that is used by other tenants. That is a “public” cloud. In both cases, cloud computing is a way of consuming capacity with the attributes of resource pooling, self-service, elasticity and usage-based metering.

The Cloud Personas
As the cloud model decouples the infrastructure from the services it supports, it also decouples two distinct processes: provisioning and consumption. And there are two corresponding personas:

Service provider (the datacenter admin)
Service consumer (an application owner)

These two personas look for quite distinct attributes, each in their domain:

The separation of concerns between the provider and consumer offers great simplicity and agility. It is a foundation for the trend toward democratization of computing. We often hear that the consumer should not have to be aware of the details of the physical infrastructure, but we can make a stronger statement: the consumer is not allowed to be aware of the physical infrastructure, because that would constrain the daily work of the provider. The provider may need to replace an old machine with a new one that is more efficient, and should not have to involve or even inform the consumer, as long as the abstractions and service level agreements are satisfied. This decoupled model does not fit with all existing IT processes or with all existing apps; in a coming blog we will discuss how Windows Server and System Center accommodate a mix of work styles.

Cloud Attributes Realized
Let’s look at each of the four cloud attributes and see what Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012 provide customers.

Pooled resources: This means that we deal with resources at an aggregate level rather than at the level of individual servers. The cloud exposes a pool of capacity for use by services that require the capacity, and this abstraction decouples the virtualized workloads from the physical infrastructure, allowing dynamic workload placement and independent infrastructure management.
While modern large-scale clouds often use strictly homogeneous hardware and require that software adapts, this is often not practical in enterprise computing where existing software may have specific hardware requirements; our cloud model supports heterogeneous resource pools, where the system automatically matches software requirements to hardware characteristics.
Having pools of resources implies that multiple tenants (customers) will have their workloads on this environment and the infrastructure must provide the necessary isolation between fenced-off resource pools. Such multi-tenancy is not just for public clouds: even in a private cloud, the self-service model that gives consumers flexibility to deploy services with little oversight requires robust isolation between pools to prevent accidental impact on a neighbor.

Windows Server 2012 enables resources to be pooled via a variety of capabilities such as the Hyper-V extensible switch, Network Virtualization, Quality of Service (QoS) and network isolation policies. In addition, with enhancements in live and storage migration, the Windows Server platform enables resources to be moved easily across the datacenter, to optimize the use of datacenter resources.
System Center 2012 through the Virtual Machine Manager component can aggregate compute, network and storage resources and expose them as a construct called a “Cloud”. It supports managing these Clouds at scale, and dynamically placing workloads in them, with role-based access control mechanisms for multi-tenant isolation and delegation of clouds to consumers. In SP1, Virtual Machine Manager uses the platform capabilities of network virtualization and live and storage migration for more flexible pool management and to load-balance the environment so that customers SLA’s are met proactively.

Self-Service: In the cloud model, service consumers can use a self-service experience, typically a web-based portal, to access the capacity they have been allocated, self-provision workloads from standing up a single VM to deploying a complex service, and manage the life cycle of those workloads.

Windows Server 2012 goes a long way in enabling full datacenter automation. Self-servicing implies that all datacenter operations must be fully automatable, otherwise manual labor will be required every time a workload is placed on a cloud. Windows Server 2012 is fully automatable via PowerShell and WMI, exposing the necessary interfaces to enable this scenario.
System Center 2012 builds on the automation capabilities in Windows Server 2012 and provides portals and management capabilities to enable self-service. The Service Manager component provides a service catalog that drives a self-service portal for IT approval workflows such as allocating capacity. The App Controller component provides a self-service experience for administering virtual machines and services, covering both private cloud and the Windows Azure public cloud. The Operations Manager component provides the operational intelligence for the environment, and the Orchestrator component provides run-book automation. Lastly, the Data Protection Manager component of System Center implements business continuity policies.

Elastic: Cloud Elasticity means that the infrastructure can support the changing needs of the organization, deploying new services as needed, allocating more resources to services that experience heavy load or de-allocating resources to save power when the load is light. With cross-cloud management, workloads can also move between private and public clouds, providing extra capacity, geo-scale reach, or other characteristics as needed.

From the Windows Server platform perspective, elasticity is enabled by allowing multiple services running on different infrastructures to be interconnected via IPSec VPNs. Windows Server 2012 has new support for IKEv2 VPNs in the box, allowing it to easily interconnect private and public clouds.
In addition, elasticity also means that it should be possible to easily move any workload across the cloud to public cloud providers. In current technologies, this is very hard to achieve because workloads tend to have a lot of networking assumptions embedded into them, such as fixed IP addresses and subnets. With Windows Server 2012 Network Virtualization, it is now possible to move a workload around while keeping its own IP addresses and decoupling it from the provider’s IP space.
System Center 2012 SP1 uses a platform capability for network virtualization in its network constructs. When a workload “network” is defined, System Center allows cloud consumers to deploy such networks on any cloud or on any physical network infrastructure that is made available to them.
VMM not only allows elastic allocation and release of resources to services within a cloud, but also allows adding or removing capacity to the cloud itself, giving the appearance of unlimited capacity of the cloud as viewed by the service consumer.

Usage Based: In the cloud model, customers are billed or at least get informed on their cloud resource usage based on their actual resource consumption.

Windows Server 2012 provides capabilities for detailed and granular metering information for core metrics such as CPU, memory, storage and network. In Windows Server 2012, these metrics follow the VM as it migrates in the environment.
System Center 2012 aggregates these consumption metrics and allows the cloud operator to show back or bill back based on their policies.

A detailed walkthrough of the various features and capabilities that make Windows Server 2012 a cloud-optimized OS can be found in the white paper Building an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Cloud Using Windows Server 8.

Scenarios
As we can see from above, there are many aspects of a cloud. In this blog we will focus on the Service provider persona and specifically on how providers can stand up their private cloud infrastructure as it pertains to using SMB 3.0 as storage for VMs and using Hyper-V Network Virtualization with Windows Server 2012 Beta and the community technology preview (CTP) of System Center 2012 SP1 Virtual Machine Manager (VMM). In future posts we will delve deeper into the other aspects of the cloud.

Standing up Cloud Infrastructure with System Center 2012 SP1
Let’s start by looking at how Hyper-V network virtualization is provisioned and managed from VMM. In System Center 2012, VMM introduced Logical Networks which abstracts the various definitions of networks in enterprise datacenters, allowing datacenter administrators to use the vernacular of the application owners who express their connectivity using terms as “I want my VM to connect to the CORP network”. A logical network could be defined differently for each datacenter site and automation in VMM ensures that when the VM is deployed the appropriate configuration is applied. With SP1, we introduce another abstraction over this called “VM networks”. Logical networks now pertain to the fabric networks and VMs and Services now only connect to “VM Networks”. A VM network can be realized by a VLAN, direct logical network or with Windows Server 2012 with Hyper-V Network Virtualization.
In the System Center 2012 SP1 CTP VMM only supports creating VM networks with Hyper-V network virtualization using Generic Routing Encapsulation (GRE) which is the long term preferred mechanism. In the final release of System Center 2012 SP1, we plan to support creating VM networks using IP Rewrite which is easier to deploy in existing environment and doesn’t require a change of network infrastructure, but does require a provider address (PA) for each customer address (CA) you allocate. I strongly urge you to read the great blog on Hyper-V Virtual Networking to get an understanding of how this technology works.
The PAs are allocated from the Logical network space so you should create a Logical network as you did previously and allocate an IP address pool from which VMM can pull addresses for the PA space. Next you need to create a VM Network, which is the network that will be used by the actual services being deployed. VM networks can be created with just a few clicks from the new node in the VM’s and Services view in the VMM console. A detailed step-by-step guide for this can be found here.

In the example above you can see that both the Tailspin network and the Wingtip Network have overlapping IP ranges. They are realized and automatically provisioned using Hyper-V Network virtualization, providing full isolation without any special hardware or additional software. When creating a VM, it can now be connected to this VM network, thereby allowing it connectivity to other VM’s on the same VM network, while keeping the VM isolated from other VM networks that belong to different customers even though they are using the same subnet.
For service providers who need to provide isolated environments to their service consumers (tenants), this capability is invaluable and provides the flexibility to enable the tenants to bring their own IP addresses to the public cloud environment. In the CTP, if you want the VM on a VM network to communicate with entities not on the VM network you will need to set up a gateway between these networks. This can be done using a Windows Server instance with the appropriate routing rules and you can expect a future guide to walk you through the process of how to set it up. In addition, System Center will allow this to be done seamlessly as we move forward with development.
Storage is another vital component of a cloud and virtualization project. With Windows Server 2012 we now have the ability to use SMB 3.0 file shares for hosting Hyper-V VM’s in a clustered and standalone environment. This helps drive the cost of cloud down while adding flexibility and making management easier. (You can read more about storage for cloud here.) System Center 2012 SP1 makes it very easy to use. The screen shots below depict how you can add a file share as storage for a cluster and for a standalone host, and VMM configures the Access Control Lists appropriately for this configuration.

Standalone Host

Hyper-V Cluster

Once a VM is deployed onto a host and particular storage sub-system, the service provider desires flexibility to move the workload to different hosts or to use different storage to ensure that VMs are up even when the host needs to be serviced or the storage environment needs to be maintained. With Windows Server 2012 and VMM we now offer multiple options for live migrating the VM and its associated storage. You can:

Live migrate the VM within a cluster (which normally has shared block or file storage)
Live migrate the VM in and out of a cluster
Live migrate the storage of the VM from one storage sub-system to the other
Live migrate the VM from one host to the other (with no shared storage)

Just imagine the flexibility that this provides you as a datacenter administrator. The screenshot below depicts these various options from within VMM.

As you can see on the left side of the above screenshot, a VM called Tailspin_VM2 runs on a standalone host HV104. The dialog on the right shows that it can be migrated from this standalone host into nodes of the HVClusterA cluster (hv103n3, hv101n1 and hv102n2) as well as to the standalone HV105. System Center automatically detects there is no shared storage between HV104 and HVClusterA and tags these migrations as “Live (VSM)”, indicating that storage would be migrated too, and not just the virtual machines.

Note that System Center also gives you the option to storage migrate the VM’s storage within the host with no downtime for the VM. This is useful if for example you are running out of local storage on a particular drive and want to move the VM’s storage onto a different drive with more capacity on the host.

Now the perceptive would have noticed that we show only “Live” to HV105! Why is that? No it’s not a bug. To get an understanding of that let’s take a look at the storage property for HV104 (the host the VM is currently on) and HV105. As you will notice, each of these hosts see the same SMB 3.0 share and hence VMM can migrate the VM (without having to move the storage).

Summary
In this blog we discussed the cloud model and the two different cloud personas (“Service provider” and “Service Consumer”). We also described how Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012 SP1 deliver this model. We highlighted how Windows Server 2012 and the Virtual Machine Manager component in System Center 2012 SP1 provide the ability for service providers to utilize SMB 3.0 storage for VM’s and create isolated networks using Hyper-V Network Virtualization. Over the next few months we will provide additional details of how VMM can facilitate resource pooling and tenant administration, and how it can utilize the plethora of capabilities in Windows Server 2012.