Tools to Aid Virtualization Adoption
By CXOtoday Staff
Mumbai, Sep 05, 2008 1249 hrs IST

As a part of this initiative, the company launched the Microsoft Integrated Virtualization ROI tool designed to help customers quantify the cost advantage from deploying its virtualization offerings versus competitive solutions.

It also announced the availability of a solution accelerator, an offline virtual machine servicing tool, to help customers automate the process of updating virtual machines, thereby allowing them to manage the updating of large numbers of offline virtual machines according to individual needs.

Pallavi Kathuria, director (server business) of Microsoft India said, "The current reality is that less than 5% of global servers are virtualized. We also observed a constant dilemma amongst customers and partners around getting a comparative view of the ROI involved in adopting virtualization solutions available in the market today. These tools will help demystify virtualization and help customers experience the value of this solution."

The tool developed by ex-Gartner TCO/RoI experts at Alinean Inc. allows partners and customers to examine current production server, development/QA lab, desktop and application virtualization opportunities - thereby enumerating the potential savings, service level, agility benefits, and overall RoI.

The Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool is built on Windows Workflow Foundation and the Windows PowerShell interface to manage the workflow of updating large numbers of offline virtual machines according to their individual needs. To do this, the tool works with Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007 and with software update management systems (at present, either Microsoft Windows Server Update Services 3.0 or Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007.) The tool uses servicing jobs to manage the update operations based on lists of existing virtual machines stored in VMM. Using Windows Workflow Foundation technology, a servicing job runs snippets of PowerShell scripts to work with virtual machines.


Related links:
Microsoft's Virtualization Plans