Cloud Computing! It’s one of the biggest opportunities for IT Professionals in recent years.  But wouldn’t it be great if there was a simple, effective way to get the skills and training you need to take advantage of this opportunity, and also get the recognition and rewards that you deserve?

This is where Microsoft can help give your career a boost.

Visit the Microsoft Virtual Academy training portal now and register to receive free and easy access to training for IT Professionals who want to get ahead in cloud computing. This content was developed by leading experts in the field, and the modules ensure that you acquire the essential skills and gain credibility as a cloud computing specialist in your organization.

MVA courses include:

• Introduction to SCVMM, Architecture & Setup
• Creating VMs,Template & Resources in VMM
• Managing Windows Azure
• SQL Azure Security
• Identity & Access
• Data Security and Cryptography

The Solution Incentives reward partners for driving sales of specific Microsoft solutions, chosen for their growth and market potential. The program creates opportunities for partners to build new sustainable revenue streams and increase their value to customers.

What partner types can participate?
Solution incentives are customer segment and partner-type agnostic. Partners need to meet eligibility requirements and each opportunity being registered needs to meet the eligibility criteria described in the Program Guide, to be eligible for incentives.

What if the Solution Partner also transacts the order?
Whether the Partner is only advising the customer, or advising and transacting, there will be no difference in the solution incentives calculation and payment.

For more information, check out the following documents:

Management and Virtualization

Download the Summary and FAQ Download the Program Guide

Windows 7

Download the Summary and FAQ Download the Program Guide

Application Platform (Microsoft SQL Server)

Download the Summary and FAQ Download the Program Guide

Microsoft Lync

Download the Summary and FAQ Download the Program Guide

New to PSX? Check out the PSX resources here.

Good news!

If you pass any Virtualization exam between March 1, 2011 and June 30, 2011 you will receive a complimentary TechNet Subscription. First 1,000 participants only! Registration is required. T&C apply.

Click here for more info

Qatar January 24, 2011 Venue: La Cigale Hotel, Doha

Kuwait February 1, 2011 Venue: JW Marriott, Kuwait City

The ‘cloud’ is definitely an often used (and misused) buzz word in today’s technology industry. So what exactly is a cloud? What is a cloud made of? Is it any different from hosting? These are some of the matters that I will address in this post.

So what is a cloud?

Wikipedia defines Cloud Computing as “internet-based computing, whereby shared servers provide resources, software, and data to computers and other devices on demand, as with the electricity grid. Cloud computing is a natural evolution of the widespread adoption of virtualization, service-oriented architecture and utility computing. Details are abstracted from consumers, who no longer have need for expertise in, or control over, the technology infrastructure “in the cloud” that supports them.” (retrieved Jan 6, 2011)

Let’s take a closer look and break it down a bit.

“…shared servers provide resources…”

So the cloud is made of shared servers working together in a manner that results in the abstraction of the underlying infrastructure from the user or the consumer.

“…on demand…”

The cloud is elastic, which means, it can scale to any extent to help you manage utilization “spikes”, just like an electricity grid. If your business application or website suddenly requires more resources or above normal utilization due to that marketing campaign you just launched, the cloud will be able to provision and make available resources to you “on the fly” during your time of need and then “de-provision” these resources when utilization is back to normal. Because the cloud abstracts the underlying infrastructure, this entire process is invisible to the consumer.

“…a natural evolution of the widespread adoption of virtualization, service-oriented architecture and utility computing.”

By now, you would have realized it. If you need shared servers working together, abstracted from the user, dynamically scalable to any business demand – you need virtualization. But, does simply having the leanest, meanest hypervisor in the market help you implement the cloud? No. It is as important that you have a robust management solution. If your abstracted infrastructure cannot understand how a utilization spike on your application looks like, how will you be able to provide “on demand” services to your users? If your cloud infrastructure does not have visibility on the health of your ‘service’, how can it predict or understand a need to scale up dynamically?

Without doubt, management is an indispensable component of the cloud. I explained this in greater detail in an earlier post.

This is why System Center, with components like Operations Manager, Virtual Machine Manager and Opalis are key players in your journey to hosting your own ‘private’ cloud.

“Details are abstracted from consumers, who no longer have need for expertise in, or control over, the technology infrastructure ‘in the cloud’ that supports them”

This re-affirms the abstraction of the underlying infrastructure. The business does not need to know what hardware, operating environment or hypervisor you’re running on. All the business cares about is the ‘service’. To be able to ensure availability the ‘service’ at any scale that the business requires dynamically, abstracting everything else is a key characteristic of the cloud.

Hosting vs. Cloud:
So is the cloud what my hosting provider offers me?

Well, it depends. Many hosting providers today state that they bring you the cloud. In reality, some of them actually do, others don’t. The key message here is that mere server hosting is not cloud. Only when the benefits I discussed above are realized, then behold — we have a cloud.

If your “cloud” hosting provider states something like they will give you a ‘dedicated’ HP blade server with 2.5GHz Processor, 4 GB RAM, 80 GB SAN storage, 80 GB backup storage, a dedicated Cisco firewall and a 1 TB monthly traffic included – chances are they have missed the cloud by a mile!

Why? Because they are simply not providing you a cloud – shared servers that provision resources on demand. Instead, they are just giving you a hosted server. There is no elasticity, no dynamic resource provision and no abstraction. In a real cloud, you wouldn’t know what hardware spec you’re running on, simply because it doesn’t remain constant – just as your business doesn’t remain constant.

Interesting. So why should I care about the cloud?

My colleague Michael Mansour lists out top 10 reasons why the cloud is changing the consumer and business landscape. His post is definitely worth a read.

***

‘Stop Press’ Humor: Wikipedia also defines ‘cloud’ as a visible mass of water droplets or frozen ice crystals suspended in the atmosphere. Certainly not the cloud we’re talking about!

“Virtualization without management is more dangerous than not using virtualization in the first place.”
– Tom Bittman, Gartner VP & Analyst

So you realized that you need to virtualize. The idea of being able to run multiple workloads on a smaller number of boxes sounded interesting to you. You saw how virtualization can save you many a buck in hardware maintenance, energy, cooling, rack space, and were fascinated by it.

Server consolidation – now that’s a term you liked to hear. Sounds like its going to simplify things up, doesn’t it? The idea of putting more eggs in one basket. Yes, it reduces cost, but how are you going to ensure that these baskets are strong enough to hold your eggs and that they wont break under pressure?

So you let the ‘Hypervisor wars’ begin – Hyper-V, VMware, you decided and chose your weapon. “What next?” you say. Well, the battle has not yet begun. Today, the hypervisor is more like a commodity, whatever you choose, it will let you virtualize – the art and science of creating a thin layer that abstracts operating system environments from the underlying hardware.

Some hypervisors provide more features than the others. The choice is simple. What matters to you is (1) which of these hypervisor features do you really need for your business, and (2) is the feature that you get worth the cost and complexity that particular hypervisor brings with it?

I am of the view that any technology you implement should contribute to the business of your organization. If it does not support the business, then that technology is useless to your organization. If you, for example, chose VMware to virtualize your (otherwise primarily Microsoft) datacenter just because it offers ‘memory overcommit’, a feature which you will probably never use in the first place, (because is not recommended for production), then you know exactly what I’m talking about.

You could go online and spend hours scouring pages and pages of information comparing hypervisors from Microsoft and VMware, but what you’re looking at is basically a piece of code between 1.7 and 3.6 GB in size.

So what does really matter?

What really matters is Management. The ability to manage and monitor every service you offer in your datacenter, end-to-end, physical or virtual. What your users see is not the hypervisor, it is way beyond that – the users see the service that you’re offering. And a robust management tool helps you ensure that services you offer are healthy so that you meet your SLA.

Imagine being able to have to look at one single monitoring dashboard that will proactively alert you of problems on hardware, operating system environments, virtualization layers, apps running on physical servers, and apps running on virtual servers. Imagine being able to look at one interface to discover that your hardware is overheating, or your server power supply is not redundant, and then look at the same interface to discover there is a shortage of disk space on your physical host server or if an application service is stopped. Imagine looking at the very same interface to know that the outbound mail queue on your Exchange Server machine that you virtualized on Hyper-V (or VMware) is building up faster than it should, or discovering that a service on one of your Linux servers virtualized on Hyper-V is failing.

That, my friends, is what I call robust end-to-end management. Microsoft System Center provides you just that. Don’t virtualize without it.

Let’s take one step forward. Let’s say you’re a local bank and you have virtualized your web servers on Hyper-V. You’ve deployed System Center components for managing your gear. Let’s say that you get most hits on your website during the day. During your “peak” operating hours you need 3 machines in a load balancing configuration to handle the load. During “off peak” hours you barely have any traffic, so all you need is one server. In the absence of virtualization or management, you would still leave 3 physical machines running 24/7 to handle the load.

But when you have virtualization with System Center, things are different. System Center Operations Manager is monitoring your servers (physical and virtual) 24/7. You can configure System Center to raise an alert when the number of transactions on your application running on IIS on the first server exceeds a threshold ‘x’, and trigger an event that results in automatically starting the 2nd virtualized web server, and the third, and so on as the number of transactions increase. Similarly, when the number of transactions drop, the additional servers can be powered off automatically, freeing up processor, memory and other resources on the host machine, which can potentially be used by other services that require additional servers to be powered up during ‘off peak’ hours. Hence, you are able to run more servers than the capacity of your Hyper-V host machine by dynamically provisioning and de-provisioning servers and efficiently utilizing your resources. Because your management tool can now see inside your virtual machines. What this means, basically, is that you get ‘more bang for the buck’.

And this is what I’d call a ‘Dynamic Datacenter’. And that’s where we’re taking you with System Center and virtualization. We’re not arguing over who’s got the smallest hypervisor; we’re giving you the much bigger picture and what really matters to you and your datacenter at large.

VMware’s vCenter, on the other hand, does not see “inside” the guest. It cannot monitor the number of connections/sec on your web service, or the length of your Exchange mail queue or the number of transactions on your database. It just sees your VM from a hypervisor perspective and does not know how the application on that VM is performing (or even if it is running). And that’s not sufficient from a service level perspective.

Even if you run VMware, System Center can still work together with it and manage your VMware environment – but of course this is an integration with vCenter. You still have an island of a management tool that you’re joining together with System Center. When it’s an all-Microsoft platform, you definitely have the Microsoft advantage. Everything’s integrated by default and everything works.

Thanks for reading and be sure to subscribe to this blog for more to come.

I thought I’d share this great video by Jim Harrison on considerations to make when planning to run Microsoft Forefront Threat Management Gateway (TMG) (or ISA Server, for that matter) on a virtualized environment.

In this video, he discusses:

• Performance, security and management considerations
• Why it’s not recommended to place TMG on the parent, and how to configure the parent partition
• High Availability with TMG in a virtual environment
• Configuration changes for internet-facing hosts.

Also read Jim’s whitepaper on security considerations for virtualized ISA/TMG deployments.

Mannai Trading, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner on Server Virtualization and many other competencies, held an event jointly with Citrix and HP on 7th April at the Intercontinental Hotel, Doha, Qatar. The event mainly focused on Desktop Virtualization.

Nabil Khalil, Deputy General Manager at Mannai, Alex Filocca and Raja Slaiman Haidar from Citrix, Rajat Rallan and Bechara from HP were some of the speakers at the event.

The event was well attended and gave us the opportunity to keep the Qatar customer community to be informed of the strategic alliance between Microsoft and Citrix in the VDI space.

For more information on the Citrix Microsoft partnership, visit www.microsoftandcitrix.com

I’d like to share some exciting news about Windows XP Mode and Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization.  The team is removing the virtualization processor requirement for Windows XP Mode on Windows 7 Professional and Windows 7 Ultimate systems.  Windows XP Mode continues to use hardware virtualization such as Intel Virtualization Technology (Intel® VT) or the AMD-V™ chipset when available but it no longer requires them. 

Microsoft has released an update that enables PCs without hardware virtualization to also take advantage of Windows XP Mode.  This change simplifies the customer experience and makes this benefit accessible to many more PCs.

Enterprise customers should consider using Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MED-V), part of the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack for Software Assurance.  MED-V provides deployment and manageability features which are designed to address the needs of enterprise customers.

When will this happen?

The removal of this requirement has been publicly announced today, March 18^th 2010 with the update available on the Windows XP Mode download page at the same time. 

How does this impact MED-V?

MED-V 1.0 SP1 builds on Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 to help enterprises with their upgrade to Windows Vista and Windows 7 when applications are not yet compatible. 

MED-V 1.0 SP1 does not require hardware virtualization.

The user experience provided by MED-V is similar to “Windows XP mode” – even though a different virtualization technology is used.

MED-V 2.0 will leverage Windows Virtual PC and will benefit from the update above. Availability date for MED-V 2.0 is yet to be announced.

[ Read the press release ]

As of today, we have three Gold Certified partners based in Qatar, qualified and certified in the Server Virtualization competency within the Microsoft Partner Network.

1. Information & Communication Technology WLL

2. EBLA Consulting

3. Mannai Trading Co.

Information & Communication Technology WLL (ICT) is the first Microsoft partner in Qatar to complete the requirements to be certified on Server Virtualization solutions.

All partners above have completed the required training at the Partner Academy. Mannai Trading and EBLA Consulting have sent their consultants to the Dynamic Datacenter Workshop held earlier this year in Dubai. All of the above partners have the required experience in deploying advanced server virtualization scenarios with Microsoft technologies and have a number of notable customer references in Qatar.

At Microsoft, virtualization means helping IT departments maximize cost savings and improve business continuity. Our solutions address both physical and virtual infrastructure, and can be easily managed through a single console. Microsoft virtualization provides a completely virtualized infrastructure for your enterprise, from data center to desktop.

The Microsoft Partner Network recognizes qualified solution providers and helps them create new opportunities, increase demand, and achieve their business objectives. The network allows partners to leverage unique resources to help drive business innovation and form a trusted foundation for strategic decision making, increased agility, and long-term competitive advantage.