Virtualization for Small and Medium Business Challenges

Small and medium businesses know how challenging it is to keep IT infrastructure costs low while providing high availability and responsive service for customers. They typically do not have the budget to hire specialized IT staff to handle procurement, provision resources for their data center and desktops, protect data, manage upgrades and patches, and field help-desk calls. In addition, there usually is not enough funding for the technologies that have traditionally been required for high availability of key business applications, such as active/active fail-over, sophisticated clustering, or faulttolerant hardware.

Benefits

Server and desktop virtualization can change all this—lowering IT infrastructure costs, providing more responsive service to customers, and enabling higher business continuity—all with existing IT staff levels.

• Reduce costs: By increasing server utilization, small and medium businesses can consolidate physical servers and cut capital costs. Centralizing provisioning and management, and automating many tasks, can also significantly lower IT support costs while improving the productivity of IT staff.

• Ensure business continuity: Virtualization enables small and medium businesses to have the same kind of high availabilitythat, in the past, only larger enterprises could afford. These companies can protect the data and IT resources that run their business with simple provisioning, improved data protection, higher levels of availability, and streamlined backup and disaster recovery—without investing in a large replication infrastructure. In addition, many small and medium businesses are turning to their solution providers to provide off-site disaster recovery.

Below are the different Virtualization Types.

Server Virtualization

Server virtualization creates a separate operating system environment that is logically detached from the host server. This enables organizations to increase server utilization rates, allow applications to leverage a greater density of computing resources, and facilitate benefits such as high availability and disaster recovery.

Desktop Virtualization

Desktop virtualization allows companies to host desktops in virtual machines in the data center, enabling each end user to obtain access via a remote graphics protocol. Alternatively, desktop virtualization can also enable you to create a separate operating system environment on the user’s desktop, enabling several operating systems and their corresponding applications to run on simultaneously on the user’s desktop.

Application Virtualization

Application virtualization separates the application layer from the operating system on a desktop. This reduces application conflicts and enables centralized, simplified patch management and updates.

Presentation Virtualization

Presentation virtualization isolates computing processes from the graphics and input/output functions, making it possible to run an application in one location (say on a server in the data center) but have it be viewed and controlled in another location (say on a client PC in a branch office).

In Conclusion

Beyond the potentially dramatic cost savings from server hardware and server maintenance to power consumption, virtualization can also greatly enhance an organization's business agility, IT departments everywhere are being asked to do more with less, through full resource utilization. Virtualization technologies offer a direct and readily quantifiable means of achieving that mandate.

Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V Resource Kit

This book provides an in-depth, 360-degree view of Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, this is the best book I’ve read so far on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, and it explains all the features and functionality of Hyper-V in great detail, with no ambiguities. It also explains best practices extensively, and goes a step further by explaining other considerations of Hyper-V that most books or articles don’t dive into. It all so covers System Center Virtual Machine manager, System Center Operations manager and System Center Data Protection manager in good depth with regards to Hyper-V.

Now, without further ado, “Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V Resource Kit Review”

Part 1 is the getting started part; it consists of the first three chapters. Chapter 1 gives you an introduction and makes a business case for virtualization. Chapter 2 gives you a comprehensive overview of Hyper-V, one of my favorite chapters in this book is chapter 3, it gives you the complete architecture of Hyper-V, and it goes deep! this chapter explains Windows Hypervisor, parent & child partitions, and explains all the virtualization stack components in great detail.

Part 2 gets to the meat of the subject; it consists of six in-depth chapters that will help you to have a firm understanding of Hyper-V. Chapter 4 covers installation and configuration, this chapter provides step-by-step installation and configuration procedures for Hyper-V. Chapter 5 dives into the advanced features of Hyper-V, such as using advanced virtual hard disk features, virtual machine snapshots, integration services, pass-through disk, fail-over clustering, etc. Chapter 6 is dedicated to the security features in Hyper-V, it reviews where the Hyper-V files, services, firewall rules are installed and what each file/s do. This chapter will also help you design and implement a robust security model for your virtual infrastructure. Chapter 7 discusses the best practices for Hyper-V as well as server and virtual machine optimization and operational considerations; this is a great chapter. Chapter 8 explains about migrating Virtual server 2005 R2 and virtual machine to Hyper-V and explains consideration before migrating. Chapter 9 takes a look at Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V, it looks at the new Hyper-V features, explains about live Migration and how to use it.

Part 3 explains how to manage and maintain your Hyper-V infrastructure. Chapter 10 gives you a Hyper-V management overview; it explains about management solutions such as Hyper-V MMC and System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM), it also explains disaster recovery solutions such as System Center Data Protection manager and Windows Server backup. It ends with the overview of monitoring solutions, which tell you about performance monitor and System Center Operations Manager. Chapter 11 explains everything about Single Server Management, from customizing Hyper-V management view and settings right down to performing backup and recovery and monitoring heath & system performance, this is a must read for anyone that will be managing Hyper-V. Chapter 12 explains about Server Farm Management using System Center Virtual Machine manager, it also takes you through a step-by-step installation of System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM). Chapter 13 dives into backup & recovery, it goes a little deeper than chapter 10 and explains backup & recovery options extensively, as well as how to backup a virtual machine running Active Directory, it will also help you really understand how Hyper-V VSS (Volume Shadow copy Services) work. Chapter 14 is all about server migration using SCVMM, explains in-depth all the migration options that are available in SCVMM, what I liked the most was the Online/Offline Physical to Virtual migration. Chapter 15 is all about Systems Center Operations Manager (SCOM), and the management packs that are available for Hyper-V, as well as how to install management packs and monitor Hyper-V servers using SCOM. Chapter 16 is one of the most interesting chapters in this book, if you will install Hyper-V on a Core Server, which by the way is best practice, because it limits the attack surface. You then will most probably want to install PowerShell for management. PLEASE NOTE: Microsoft is working on official version of .NET and PowerShell for Server Core installations, so install PowerShell on Windows Server Core at your own risk for now. This chapter is all about managing Hyper-V with PowerShell on the Full Windows Server, it discusses about the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) classes, and explains how to use the Hyper-V library.

Part 4, this is the last part in this book, and is dedicated to server virtualization project methodology. It explains different server virtualization scenarios, and then goes into virtual desktop infrastructure. It then goes deeper by explaining project methodology such as envisioning, assessment, planning, designing and then piloting a Windows Server Hyper-V project. This part is a must read for architects and project managers, or anyone who will be involved in the earlier stages of the project. Chapter 17 starts off with data center scenarios, then is followed by scenarios for Branch Offices, Test Labs and software development, talks about considerations that architects and project managers should seriously take into account. These considerations are host design, management design and operational considerations, as well as much more. Chapter 18 explains fully what Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) is; it helps you identify major components of VDI and defines common VDI scenarios, it will give you a complete overview of the Microsoft VDI solution, and how Microsoft is working with Citrix to make this solution as flexible as possible. Chapter 19 is a chapter that discusses project envisioning in great detail, it explain how to create a vision all the way to how to create a budget. Chapter 20 talks about the discovery phase of the project, about collecting baseline information and collecting inventory information and discusses tools that can do all of that. Chapter 21 shows us how to identify the best candidate for server virtualization, it also explains about the hardware limitation and how to establish a performance threshold. It also show you how to identify the cost savings and a lot more. Chapter 22 is another one my favorite chapters in this part. It is about the planning and design phase of Hyper-V, its explains how to define Hyper-V server configurations, then it goes into consolidation planning which includes grouping of visualization candidates, and equipment reuse. Then its goes on to explain the additional design and planning tasks which include Virtual Infrastructure Management, Monitoring, Backup and Recovery. Chapter 23 is the last chapter in this book; it discusses the pilot phase of the project, pilot objectives, scope, architecture and risks. It also shows you how to establish project milestones and the success criteria, this chapter will also show you how to create a deployment plan, support plan, issues tracking plan, migration plan, training plan and so on.

In conclusion, this book, Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V Resource Kit, is the ultimate Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V book ever written so far, it contains gold nuggets that most books don’t have. The chapters are developed in such a way that they help you fully grasp all the complex concepts of Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V. This book will be available from the 10th of June 2009. Windows® Server 2008 Hyper-V Resource Kit

That’s all from me and thanks for reading. I truly hope you’ll find joy in learning and mastering Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V. Please feel free to ask me any questions. Thanks.