Exclusive PDC10 Nights Get-together at Microsoft office & key PDC10 announcements

Live blogging right now from the Microsoft Bangalore office at occasion of PDC10 Night and it was fun to hear welcome note from Moorthy Uppaluri [General Manager, Developer & Platform Evangelism Microsoft Corporation (India)] and he did shared Microsoft vision for cloud computing and WP7 and how market is getting influenced by the devices as very soon device sales is going to outnumber the pc sales. Is this an inflection point where we are seeing a shift from PC to device…from server to cloud?

During the PDC, we are going to hear and see about latest technology innovations from Microsoft and the first one to come up is IE9. IE9 gets a substantial push with HTML5 as browsing experiencing will change from what we see today..e.g. watching a HD video in browser with simultaneous browsing in same window!....Steve Ballmer [SB] continues ahead by saying that WP7 is different kind of phone. Wp7 available from 16 different operators in 30 different countries is yet not available in India though and no defined timeline yet for its release. Microsoft seems to be focusing on WP7 marketplace and getting more apps to compete against the Apple iphone and Google Android based phones. Further down the line Bob Muglia talks about Microsoft Azure and why they are focused on Platform as a service cloud model and the benefits of putting the apps into Microsoft windows azure and how azure acts as OS for PAAS cloud. Bob talks about windows azure appliances which will be available from partner hardware vendors enabling deployment of private clouds based on azure. PAAS cloud model enables a developer to concentrate more on what developer is good i.e. focus on his app and code and leave the infrastructure High availability, scalability and IT infrastructure management worries to cloud operator.

Here are the details of some interesting PDC announcements:

 Making it easier to move existing applications and run them more efficiently, Microsoft is providing a bridge to PaaS from IaaS.

 • Windows Azure Virtual Machine Role eases the migration of existing Windows Server applications to Windows Azure by eliminating the need to make costly application changes and enables customers to quickly access their existing business data from the cloud. Today at PDC 2010, Microsoft announced Virtual Machine Role support for Windows Server 2008 R2 in Windows Azure. A public beta will be available by the end of 2010.

 • Server Application Virtualization enables customers to deploy virtualized application images onto the Windows Azure worker role (single role, single instance) rather than the VM Role. Through this approach, customers can more easily migrate their traditional applications to Windows Azure without the need to rewrite them or to package them within a VM. Once the application is deployed with server application virtualization on Windows Azure, customers can benefit from the automated service management capabilities of Windows Azure including automatic configuration and ongoing operating system management. Server Application Virtualization for Windows Azure will be available as a community technology preview (CTP) before the end of 2010, and the final release will be available to customers in the second half of 2011.

 • Constructing VM role images in the cloud. Microsoft is enabling developers and IT professionals to build VM images for VM role directly in the cloud. This will be offered as an alternative to the current approach of building images on-premises and uploading them over the Internet. This update will be available in 2011.

• Support for Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 SP2 in the VM Role. Microsoft supports Windows Server 2008 R2 in the Guest OS. In 2011, Microsoft will add support for Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 SP2.

Hope you find this information interesting and thanks Microsoft for this special invitation.


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VMware Project Sydney aka VCloud Request manager launching tomorrow

VMware VCloud Request manager which is launching tomorrow i.e. Oct 12, is very much adding the functionality which was missing in VCloud Director 1.0 and enables you to take control of vCloud Director based Private Clouds, via following

1. Adding sophisticated approval workflows to provisioning requests.

2. Automatically tracking software license usage as vApps are commissioned and decommissioned, and

3. Enforcing standardized settings on vCloud Director “Organizations” through the use of policies called “Blueprints”.

It is targeted to Enterprises building private cloud based on Vcloud director and enables self service provisioning and tracking 3rd party software licensing usage. Project Sydney runs on win2k8 64bit system with oracle 10g/11g and uses MS Active Directory. It will be available for public in Q4 2010. I don't see it much different from what SCVMM self service portal 2.0 [Microsoft Private cloud solution] provides already today.

For more details stay tuned to VMware website tomorrow and very soon product will be available for testing. Happy cloud computing till then.

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How Easy to configure ISCSI Target with Powershell integration

So as we know that Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 has been RTM and MSDN and Technet subscribers can evaluate Microsoft ISCSI Target 3.3 for Development, Test and all other non-production purposes. You can install ISCSI target on any windows server 2008 R2 system [Physical or Virtual] and then present storage from same as Vdisks. The Microsoft ISCSI Software Target 3.3 can only be installed on Windows Server 2008 R2 but not any other OS.

The cool functionality of new ISCSI target 3.3 is integration with powershell and in below screencast you will see how easy it is to automate Target creation, configuration and presentation of Vdisks to initiator servers using powershell in less than 2 minutes.




3 line powershell script which does the magic

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New-IscsiServerTarget -TargetName "yyyyy" -InitiatorID IPAddress:zzzzz

New-IscsiVirtualDisk "C:\xxxxx.vhd" -size 50MB

Add-VirtualDiskTargetMapping "yyyyyy" "C:\xxxx.vhd"
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Hope you find this information interesting and dont forget to try ISCSI Target 3.3 yourself!

 
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