Port 25: The Open Source Community at Microsoft : Community, Virtualization

PDC 2009: Availability of the Windows Azure Platform

Peter Galli — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 18:14:00 GMT

Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's Chief Software Architect, used the company's annual Professional Developers Conference here in Los Angeles to announce the availability of the Windows Azure platform.

That platform consists of Windows Azure, the operating system as-a-service, and SQL Azure, a fully relational database in the cloud. The Service Bus and Access Control services, formerly known as the .NET Services, now run directly within Windows Azure and are known as Windows Azure platform AppFabric Service.

Microsoft will continue to offer Windows Azure as a Community Technology Preview until the end of this year, after which it will switch to a production service under which Azure's cloud services will be made available to enterprises. But users will get a fee pass in January, since charges will only start accruing in February.

In his opening keynote, Ozzie also announced that a small number of customers will go into production today, including Automattic, Inc., the maker of WordPress, which is now live on Azure. Matt Mullenweg, founder of Automattic, Inc., took the stage to demonstrate MySQL, PHP, and Apache support on Windows Azure, as well as to announce that his company is launching a new site that runs on SQL Azure.

Ozzie also used his keynote to made clear that reaching all developers was top of mind for Microsoft.

"To most developers, to developers like you, Windows Azure appears as a model based extension to Visual Studio, enabling you to build apps that leverage your skills in SQL, IIS, ASP.NET, and .NET Framework. Alternatively, and of course it's your choice, you might leverage your skills by using MySQL and PHP within Azure, or you might instead take advantage of our new Azure tools for Java and Eclipse. Reaching all developers is incredibly important to us," he said.

Windows Azure now supported any kind of Windows code and programming model, and any kind of multi-role, multi-tier service design pattern, supporting extremely flexible binding and arbitrary relationships between roles, Ozzie said.

"Because you wanted it, we've broadened far beyond just the .NET programming model, and the Web role, worker role service design pattern. We added support for FastCGI, enabling high scale Web apps to be written in any of a variety of programming languages. And, in sessions this week, you're going to see the Windows Azure team quickly building and deploying Java apps, running under Tomcat. You'll see PHP apps under MySQL," he said.

Earlier this year, Microsoft enabled .NET full trust and native code applications. This functionality allowed developers to spawn xcopy deployable processes. As a result, Java applications can now be packaged and run.

Today, we announced that we are delivering a solution accelerator for Tomcat, an open source software implementation of the Java Servlet and JavaServer Pages technologies, as well as launching a Java SDK for Windows Azure Storage (tables, blogs, and queues). External endpoints (inbound traffic) to worker roles have also been enabled, which enables applications that receive internet traffic that aren't running under IIS.

During his keynote Ozzie also introduced Vivek Kundra, the Federal Chief Information Officer at the White House, who spoke via live feed from Washington D.C., and who encouraged developers to take advantage of the vast amount of public data to create applications using this new Microsoft technology.

"I'm really excited about what NASA is doing in cooperation with Microsoft with the launch of the Pathfinder Innovation Challenge ... anybody can participate and look at the data that has been democratized through NASA on the Azure platform, that allows people to look around the red planet, slice and dice, and cube, and create information, and advance our understanding of the universe," Kundra said.

This commitment to all developers is not new. When Ozzie first announced the Windows Azure platform at PDC last year, Sam Ramji blogged that developers will also be able to choose from a range of open source development tools and technologies, and be able to access Azure services using a variety of common internet standards, including HTTP, REST, WS* and Atom.

"The Azure platform's goal is to support all developers and their choice of IDE, language and technology. We are also providing programmable components that can be consumed by other applications, and Microsoft is funding and sponsoring open source software development kits to enable Java and Ruby developers to take advantage of Azure. This is significant as this is the first time we are delivering cross-platform software development kits at the same time as Microsoft Developer Network software development kits," he said.

And, earlier this year, Microsoft introduced the PHP SDK for Windows Azure, an open source effort for which Microsoft has provided funding, with development by RealDolmen, whose goal is to provide high-level abstractions that enable PHP developers to interoperate readily with Windows Azure.

The PHP SDK for Windows Azure focuses on REST and provides PHP classes for Windows Azure blobs, tables and queue, helper classes for HTTP transport, AuthN/AuthZ, REST and error management, as well as manageability, instrumentation and logging support.

Next up at PDC 2009 was Bob Muglia, President of Microsoft's Server and Tools Business, who noted that Microsoft is converging on a common developer platform for both servers and services, that will enable developers to continue using familiar .NET Framework and Visual Studio tools and technologies, as well as third party tools such as Eclipse, to create and monetize applications that run on the server and as services in the cloud.

Muglia also announced the company's plan to offer Windows Server Virtual Machine support on Windows Azure, enabling customers to more easily support virtualized infrastructure across the continuum of on premises and cloud computing.

In addition, Muglia announced the new release of ASP.NET MVC beta 2, a free, fully-supported framework that enables developers to rapidly build standards-based Web applications through rich AJAX integration and enhanced extensibility.

In other related news, SugarCRM, a provider of commercial open source customer relationship management software, today also announced that it will offer its CRM applications on Windows Azure to enable its customers and value-added resellers to benefit from the real-time scalability, high availability and on-demand infrastructure of Azure.

"With Windows Azure, Microsoft has built a true cloud computing platform going well beyond the simple hosted infrastructure that most service providers offer today. Windows Azure enables SugarCRM value-added resellers to create and deploy unique solutions for customers around the globe. This new service is another key component of the Sugar Open Cloud, the SugarCRM cloud strategy for delivering simple, affordable CRM anywhere based on customer need," said Larry Augustin, CEO of SugarCRM, in a press statement.

Microsoft and Novell: Three Years and Going Strong

Peter Galli — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 19:19:00 GMT

Today, Microsoft and Novell marked the third anniversary of the collaboration agreement during a gathering of IT executives at the Society of Information Management SIMPosium 09 conference in Seattle.

As many customers are running heterogeneous IT environments and are looking to their software vendors to address their interoperability needs, over the past three years Microsoft and Novell have been working together to help these organizations future-proof their IT operations by optimizing mixed source IT infrastructures to better support today and prepare for tomorrow.

This collaboration and the resultant joint solutions have already enhanced reliability and efficiency within mixed IT systems environments. These technical solutions help customers centralize or streamline management functions, reduce internal support requirements, and enable greater interoperability without having to dedicate time and resources to devise workarounds.

The Microsoft-Novell Interoperability Lab also remains focused on addressing our customers' priority interoperability concerns, and this technical collaboration has already produced real-world solutions spanning Virtualization, Systems Management, Rich Media and Server Workload Validation.

Those customers who choose to use Windows and Linux together can leverage not only SUSE Linux Enterprise Server from Novell, but also its support offerings, to ensure business continuity, while customers have added peace of mind as a result of the intellectual property (IP) provisions of the agreement between the two companies.

The success of this relationship is also underscored by steady sales, even in the current difficult economic environment: as of July 31, 2009, Novell has invoiced $226 million in certificate revenue, or 91percent of the total $247.5 million investment.

Microsoft and Novell have jointly recruited more than 475 new customers to receive certificates from Microsoft for three-year priority support subscriptions for Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) since the agreement was formalized in November 2006.

To date, more than 20 of these joint customers have also opted to take advantage of Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) Subscription with Expanded Support, which offers upgrades, updates and technical support for customers' existing paid and unpaid Linux deployments, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), while they transition to Novell SLES. Customers most commonly cite value and quality as key factors driving their choice of Novell over Red Hat.

Migration from Red Hat and other Linux offerings to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server also helps these customers optimize the capabilities of their IT systems for the future by allowing them to leverage real-world solutions like Microsoft Hyper-V and Microsoft System Center Operations Manager.

You can read more about all this in an article published to Microsoft PressPass, while a number of customer case studies are also available.

GroundWork Open Source Joins Microsoft's System Center Alliance

Peter Galli — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 13:31:00 GMT

GroundWork Open Source, Inc., a commercial open source company that produces network management software, last week announced the availability of the GroundWork Connector for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager.

The company has also become a member of the System Center Alliance.

GroundWork Monitor, which already has more than 1,500 plugins available, integrates with System Center Operations Manager and extends monitoring and management coverage to non-Windows systems, applications and devices.

The new GroundWork Connector pulls information from System Center Operations Manager and displays it within GroundWork Monitor Enterprise, giving customers a deeper visibility into the availability and performance of all critical infrastructures on a single console. The connector gives insight into applications, databases, virtual machines and network devices that may be running on Linux, Unix, Windows or embedded operating systems.

I talked to David Dennis, the company's senior director of marketing and business development this week about the move, which he feels is a great follow-up to the release of the System Center Cross Platform extensions earlier this year.

That release broke new ground for using System Center in heterogeneous environments. "In the field, we have more and more users asking about how they can integrate the management of Windows with open source tools for managing network infrastructure, Unix, Linux, and the applications that run on top of them," he told me.

The dialog also no longer seems to be about choice between Windows or Open Source but rather "I want both - now how do I make them work together," he says. Even though GroundWork Open Source is an open source company, about half of the operating systems managed by GroundWork Monitor are running Windows.

"The combination of System Center Operations Manager and GroundWork Monitor provides a full-featured alternative to traditional systems management frameworks, but with greater openness and at a much lower price point," Dennis says.

Virtualizing Free Linux Distributions in Windows Server 2008 R2

Peter Galli — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Jason Perlow, a columnist over at ZDNet, has written a comprehensive review on virtualizing free Linux distributions in Windows Server 2008 R2.

In his Tech Broiler column, Perlow notes that the updated Hyper-V bare-metal hypervisor virtualization layer in Microsoft's upcoming Windows Server 2008 R2, which is due to be released August 14th to MSDN and Technet customers, now has support for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3.

"Additionally, Linux support and performance has greatly improved over the initial Hyper-V release. Microsoft also recently released its Hyper-V Linux Integration Components (Linux ICs) under the GPLv2 Open Source License," Perlow says.

The Linux ICs for Hyper-V, which are in Release Candidate status, provide synthetic device drivers that enhance I/O and networking performance when Linux OSes are virtualized under Hyper-V.

"The source code for the Linux IC's were accepted into the Linux Driver Project and should become part of the Linux Kernel within two subsequent releases and code merges - 2.6.32 is expected to be when they will be integrated, and all Linux distributions using that kernel code base going forward should be Hyper-V enabled out of the box. Yes, you heard that correctly, Microsoft is now an official Linux Kernel contributor," Perlow says.

You can read the rest of Perlow's column here.

More on the Hyper-V Linux Integration Components

hjanssen — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 20:24:00 GMT

Well, there is no easy way to say this, so I am simply going to start this blog with the following line.

Microsoft just submitted source code for the Hyper-V Linux Integration Components to the Linux Kernel Community Under GPL v2.

Well, there's a conversation starter! Are you still all sitting in your chairs???

Let me summarize:

Yes, our device driver code was released directly to the Linux Kernel
We released the code under GPL v2
We are working with Greg Kroah-Hartman so it is ready for the next release of the Linux Kernel, version 2.6.32
We will continue to update the driver code to enhance interoperability on an ongoing basis, but it's our hope that other developers in the community will find the code useful and worthy of collaboration.

Fallen off your chair yet?

Microsoft developed the Linux device drivers to enhance the performance of Linux when virtualized on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V. My team and I were responsible for testing and validating the driver components that were contributed for this first release.

Now, my team and I will be responsible for further developing this code going forward. (Yes, that does mean that I have gone back to leverage my very early roots as a Kernel programmer. Let the world be warned!!!!). Haiyang Zhang has been working on this code with me, and he will continue to work with me on this going forward.

When I joined Microsoft three years ago, the primary reason was to put my money where my mouth was. You see complaining about something is easy, but it becomes a little more complicated when somebody offers you the opportunity to be part of helping change what you have complained about.

So, three years after taking the job that made me put my money where my mouth was (and still often is!), I for one am EXTREMELY happy to see one of the most significant fruits of our work here in the Microsoft Open Source Technology Center (OSTC). But I have to say, even I would have been hard-pressed to think three years ago that we would consider contributing to the Linux Kernel.

As you know, two years ago Microsoft announced a partnership with Novell, and Tom Hanrahan ran the lab on a day to day basis till about 9 months ago. Since then I have had the pleasure of running the technical side of the execution of that lab under Tom Hanrahan for the OSTC. One of the primary tasks for that lab is to make sure Windows runs well on top of XEN and Linux runs well on top of Hyper-V, and we do this in very close cooperation with Novell.

We do most of this work as an extension to Mike Neil's Hyper-V team.

As part of this, we were asked to help develop and maintain a crucial part of this work called the Linux Integration Components. This code is designed so that Linux can run in an "enlightened mode" on top of Hyper-V (enlightened mode is roughly the Hyper-V equivalent of "paravirtualized mode" for the Xen hypervisor). Without this driver code, Linux can run on top of Windows, but without the same high performance levels. It is this device driver code that we are releasing today, directly to the Linux Kernel.

We're not talking a few hundred lines of code here; we're talking about roughly 20,000 lines of code.

Is this a Dump and Run from Microsoft? Absolutely not! We plan to enhance the functionality of this code, and we will continue to work with the Linux Community to support the drivers and to ensure continued interoperability.

As you can imagine, this was the result of a lot of hard work: Hiyang Zhang, who has been co-writing this code; Hashir Abdi, who has been testing all this stuff; as well as Vijay Tewari and Mike Sterling from the Hyper-V team who have been taking care of the Hyper-V side.

And last, but certainly not least, Greg Kroah-Hartman, who has been helping me to make all this code land in the right area in the kernel. He has patiently worked to help me correct my obvious mistakes and to get the code contributed into the kernel.

So where are we today? Well, Greg Kroah-Hartman will make the code visible to the outside world today. (For those who want to get a head start, the code will sit under <your kernel tree>/drivers/staging/hv). After it becomes visible, I will write a few more blogs this week that should help you to understand, build and run them.

The titles I am thinking for these blogs are:

Where do the Linux ICs reside in the kernel tree and how do I build them?

And

How do I install, configure and run the Linux IC's?

I had almost forgotten how wrapped up you can be once you start writing code again. So I have not gotten much sleep this past week, but it has been a joy to get back into coding again!

Microsoft Releases Device Driver Code to the Linux Community

Peter Galli — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 16:48:00 GMT

In what many may see as a surprising move, Microsoft today released 20,000 lines of device driver code to the Linux community under the popular General Public Licence v2.

The code includes three Linux device drivers, and has been submitted to the Linux kernel community for inclusion in the Linux tree.

The drivers will be available to both the Linux community and customers, and will enhance the performance of the Linux operating system when virtualized on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V or Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V.

In an article posted to Microsoft's PressPass site, Tom Hanrahan, director of Microsoft's Open Source Technology Center, notes that this is a significant milestone because it's the first time the company has released code directly to the Linux community. "Additionally significant is that we are releasing the code under the GPLv2 license, which is the Linux community's preferred license," he said.

In the same article, Sam Ramji, senior director of Platform Strategy at Microsoft, points out that Microsoft communities and open source communities are growing together, which is ultimately of benefit to customers. An example of this is the Linux community, which has built a platform used by many customers. "So our strategy is to enhance interoperability between the Windows platform and many open source technologies, which includes Linux, to provide the choices our customers are asking for," he said.

Ramji also alluded to the fact that people are often surprised when they hear how much open source community and development work is happening across Microsoft, which is largely due to the fact that these collaborations focus more on getting the work done and engaging with the various communities on a one-to-one basis and less about promoting them.

One example of how Microsoft participates with, and contributes to, open source is its relationship with the PHP Community. The company's involvement includes contributing to the PHP Engine, optimizing PHP 5.3 to perform strongly on Windows, and working to improve the performance of numerous PHP applications on Windows. Then there is the ongoing participation in various Apache Software Foundation projects, such as Hadoop, Stonehenge and QPID.

"In short, we're focused on building sustainable business strategies for open source at Microsoft ... we see open source playing into three key areas, one of which is the use of 'inbound' open source and the open source development model to make our software development processes more efficient."

"Good examples of this include what we did recently with jQuery in Visual Studio 2008, the implementation of OpenPegasus connectors and adaptors into System Center Operations Manager, and work that the Microsoft High Performance Computing team did with the Argonne National Lab (ANL) to source its MPICH2 implementation, which is a portable implementation of the Message Passing Interface (MPI) used in cluster computing and super computers," Ramji said.

We'll be posting a number of other articles on the release of the device driver code to the Linux community over the week, several of which will be penned by Hank Janssen from Microsoft's Open Source Technology Center, so look out for those.

Microsoft, Red Hat to Offer Joint Technical Support

Peter Galli — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 16:30:00 GMT

Microsoft and Red Hat announced this morning that they have recently signed agreements to test and validate their server operating systems running on one another's hypervisors.

This is deeply significant as it means that customers will be able to confidently deploy Windows Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), virtualized on Microsoft and Red Hat hypervisors, knowing that the solutions will be supported by both companies.

In short, Red Hat has joined Microsoft's Server Virtualization Validation Program, and Microsoft is now a Red Hat partner for virtualization interoperability and support.

Microsoft will also be listed in the Red Hat Hardware Certification List once the Red Hat certification process has been completed later this year.

Microsoft will also publish Linux Integration Components for RHEL when the testing and validation is complete and, according to Mike Neil's blog on this news, Red Hat is expected to provide Windows Hardware Quality Labs drivers for a variety of Windows Server versions.

"This means that those customers with valid support agreements will be able to run these validated configurations and receive joint technical support for running Windows Server on Red Hat Enterprise virtualization, and for running Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V or Hyper-V Server 2008," Neil says.

So, while Microsoft and Red Hat will continue to compete, customers have asked us to work together on technical support for server virtualization. These agreements respond to that request by giving them a new level of integration between Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Windows Server for their heterogeneous IT environments.

Customers with valid support agreements will now be able to call either Microsoft or Red Hat to have their issues resolved. If the first vendor contacted cannot resolve the issue, they will refer the problem to the other vendor for resolution; assuming the customer also has a valid support agreement with that vendor.

In the event that the second vendor cannot resolve the problem alone, Microsoft and Red Hat will work together to come to a resolution for the mutual customer.

What's more, once RHEL is validated as a guest on Windows Server 2008, Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 - which will include cross platform monitoring - will support RHEL server versions 4 and 5 in the second quarter of this year so that customers can manage the applications and operating systems in the guest VM.

This will allow customers to monitor end-to-end data center applications that are distributed across both Windows Server and RHEL, whether these servers are physical or virtual, thereby improving the visibility organizations have of these distributed applications, and reducing their operational costs by providing a single tool to manage these across operating systems.

Also, to be clear given that questions are going to be asked about how this compares to the existing relationship between Microsoft and Novell, this agreement with Red Hat is specific to joint technical support for our mutual customers using server virtualization. So, in that regard, think of it as one dimensional, whereas Microsoft's partnership with Novell is multi-dimensional.

For more on all this, you can read Mike Neil's blog, the press release here, and watch the public webcast.

Two Years and Counting....

Peter Galli — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 04:16:00 GMT

It is two years this month since Microsoft and Novell struck their ground-breaking technical collaboration agreement, a move that has effectively ensured greater interoperability between Windows Server and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

This technical collaboration has already resulted in a number of milestones, including two new offerings announced today: the availability in the first half of 2009 of an Advanced Management Pack for SUSE Linux Enterprise for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2, and a free beta download of Novell's Moonlight, a rich media application.

Some analysts, vendors and enterprises have said the company that develops effective cross-platform management tools will have an advantage and strategic differentiator over its competitors who do not. Microsoft is already doing that.

The Microsoft Operations Manger 2007 Cross Platform Extensions enable the assessment and management of Windows and Linux servers from a single, unified console, eliminating the costs and complexities of having multiple management consoles. The Advanced Management Pack extends this Linux monitoring capability.

Also, given the current tough economic environment, this solution helps reduce training costs since staff only need to be trained on one management tool for both Windows and Linux environments.

Attendees at the Microsoft TechEd EMEA conference in Barcelona earlier this month got to see a technical preview of the Advanced Management Pack, whose release will coincide with that of Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2.

A beta of Novell's Moonlight, an open source implementation of Microsoft Silverlight, will also be released going forward as an open source plug-in for the Firefox web browser. Moonlight brings Linux-based users the same high-definition media capabilities currently available for the Windows and Apple environments.

So, expect to see a lot more solutions in the next year that promote interoperability and help ease customer pain-points across their heterogeneous environments.

Developers, developers, developers...

Peter Galli — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 22:50:00 GMT

It's all about developers, all the time - well, at least for the next week here in Los Angeles at Microsoft's Professional Developer Conference.

The first day of the show started off with an opening keynote by Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie, who welcomed the more than six thousand attendees, thanking them for their commitment to the company and for all their hard work, saying that "without you, there would be no Microsoft."

He also pointed out that, although there had never been more platform choices for developers than are available today, Microsoft's platforms remained the most compelling for a number of reasons.

These included the fact that the company always builds its own key applications to ensure that its platform works well, end-to-end, for its customers; that, because of the scope of Microsoft's reach, its key platforms have a good chance of reaching critical mass, providing a stable foundation for developers; and that the company never loses sight of the fact that its partners have to be successful in order for it to thrive and flourish.

There is also new value to be had for users, developers and businesses, through the combination of the best of software with the best services, Ozzie said, before announcing the Azure Services Platform, which he described as a new service in the cloud and a new Windows offering at the Web-tier level. "Think about this as Windows in the cloud."

In a white paper, which can be downloaded here, titled "Introducing the Azure Services Platform," author Dave Chappell notes that in the Community Technology Preview version of Windows Azure, which was made available to PDC attendees today, developers can create .NET-based software such as ASP.NET applications and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) services.

To do this, they can use C# and other .NET languages, along with traditional development tools such as Visual Studio 2008. And while many developers are likely to use this initial version of Windows Azure to create Web applications, the platform also supports background processes that run independently - it's not solely a Web platform, Chappell says in the paper.

Both Windows Azure applications and on-premises applications can access the Windows Azure storage service, and both do it in the same way: using a RESTful approach. The underlying data store is not Microsoft SQL Server, however. In fact, Windows Azure storage isn't a relational system, and its query language isn't SQL. Because it's primarily designed to support applications built on Windows Azure, it provides simpler, more scalable kinds of storage. Accordingly, it allows storing binary large objects (blobs), provides queues for communication between components of Windows Azure applications, and even offers a form of tables with a straightforward query language, Chappell says.

Azure will compete with Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) as a scalable hosting environment on which developers can build and host their applications. The systems currently being built for cloud-based computing are also setting the stage for the next 50 years, and developers should expect to see more Microsoft applications coming to Windows Azure as the system scales out.

So, for now, the new platform has Windows Azure at the center, with Live Services, .Net Services, SQL Services, SharePoint Services and Dynamics CRM Services above it.

And, as Sam Ramji said in his blog post, the Azure platform's goal is to support all developers and their choice of IDE, language and technology. Microsoft is providing programmable components that can be consumed by other applications, and Microsoft is funding and sponsoring open source software development kits to enable Java and Ruby developers to take advantage of Azure. This is significant as this is the first time the company is delivering cross-platform software development kits at the same time as Microsoft Developer Network software development kits.

Microsoft is also funding these open source projects, under the BSD licensing model, in collaboration with Thoughtworks Inc. and Schakra Inc., and they will be run on open source portals RubyForge and SourceForge.

Amitabh Srivastaba, the Corporate Vice President of Cloud Infrastructure Services, told attendees that Windows Azure was a scalable hosting environment for developers to deploy their applications to the cloud, and would use multiple layers of security, including an optimized hypervisor and hypervisor enforced isolation.

Windows Azure also separates the applications from the underlying operating system so that both are managed separately. In fact, at the heart of Windows Azure, is a fabric controller, which manages the lifecycle of a service, from deployment to upgrade and configuration changes. The fabric controller views the entire datacenter as fabric or shared hardware resources that can be managed and shared with all the services that run there.

So, in short, the fabric controller maintains the health of the service. "When you want to change your service, you specify the desired M state, and the fabric controller very carefully makes the necessary changes. The fabric controller manages services, not just servers.This is a crucial point because this allows us to automate the lifecycles of a service," Srivastaba said.

Also, Windows Azure, leveraging the vast computing power available in Microsoft's datacenters across the world, will help reduce upfront capital costs, as well as management and operational costs, Bob Muglia, the senior Vice President for Server and Tools, told attendees, before likening the significance of the launch of Azure to that of Windows NT in 1992.

The Azure software is also at an early stage and will probably change as a result of direct feedback from developers, and Microsoft will be unlocking more and more of the platform's underlying services to developers over time.

When it is released commercially, the Windows Azure business model will treat costs primarily as a function of two key factors: application resource consumption and the specific service level provided.

Ozzie will be back on the keynote stage Tuesday to talk about Windows 7, developing for Windows and the Web, and the services built to bridge the Web, the PC, and the phone, and a world of devices. He will be joined by Steven Sinofsky, the Senior Vice President for the Windows and Windows Live Engineering Group; Scott Guthrie, the Corporate Vice President of the .NET Developer Division; and David Treadwell, the Corporate Vice President for Live Platform Services.

Virtual PC 2007 Released as a Free Download

MichaelF — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 17:22:00 GMT

Just a quick note to let Port 25 readers know that yesterday Microsoft released Virtual PC 2007 as a free download.

With Virtual PC one can run multiple os's on a single physical machine which should be compelling for those developers needing to test and debug across multiple platforms. From community feedback I know a number of readers are generally interested in virtualization and I'd be curious to hear about your experiences after giving this a try.

Ben Armstrong's Blog is a good resource for information regarding Microsoft and Virtualization (Here is some info on Linux and Virtual PC from his blog).

On an unrelated note Mary Jo Foley wrote about Ian Murdock's visit to campus today and I have to say I'm really looking forward to his presentation. I mentioned it before but this is one of the things I really enjoy about this job: I get to meet all sorts of interesting and intelligent people (both in person and virtually) many of whom I'd never expect to meet as a result of working at Microsoft. Miguel de Icaza...Ian Murdock? Who would have guessed?

-michael

Microkernels Revisited?

MichaelF — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 14:57:00 GMT

In the IT industry it is axiomatic that whatever is new will be old, and will then be new again! Consider the “Service Bureau” approach that was used in the mainframe days, in which an organization’s computing needs were taken care of by a “Service Bureau” that maintained the infrastructure, served up the applications and provided the support for the users. The Service Bureau typically served many organizations needs, had to keep their customer’s data separate and provide an SLA to each one of their customers. Sound suspiciously like SaaS (Software as a Service) doesn’t it? Service bureaus were not as sexy as SaaS and they never completely went away. With the advent of PCs, computing was available at the individual level – which meant that small teams could manage their own IT infrastructure, applications and support for the users. This freed them from constraints (and some cynics say from discipline!) on their ability to adopt and adapt new software technology. The software on PCs grew capable of handing mission critical applications allied with the raw compute power provided by networked distributed PCs. The small teams began to feel the pain of managing and maintaining such infrastructure, and the PCs were serving not just these small teams but entire enterprises. With the commoditization of hardware and the adoption of common software standards, the “Service Bureau” idea re-emerged as “SaaS”, and was immediately attractive to the customers. Of course, I am oversimplifying, but I think I can use my blog writers license here. The new avatar (SaaS) is better for the users because it doesn’t force the compromises the old avatar (Service Bureau) on its customers. The idea is the same but the implementation is improved immeasurably!

I think I have identified a similar new, old, new cycle in OS technology (ladies and gentlemen, please save the standing ovation for later!). Of course, I have to insert the “don’t-try-this-at-home-kids” warning. I am not an operating systems expert – I just play one on blogs!

Heard about microkernels? They were all the rage back in the late 80s/early 90s (that’s in the nineteen hundreds). This is how Wikipedia defines them “A microkernel is a minimal computer operating system kernel providing only basic operating system services (system calls), while other services (commonly provided by kernels) are provided by user-space programs called servers.”

Microkernels were a reaction to the bloat introduced into operating systems, which started out lean but then added all kinds of services as part of the operating system. This meant that operating systems were not as portable as they used to be, because all services had to be ported over – whether to a new processor or to a new board. There were attempts made to make operating systems that were minimal that also had the effect of making them portable – because to port an operating system, all you had to do was port the teensy weensy kernel. I know this because one summer as a mere stripling I was working at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay which had just got a bunch of tapes of one of the first microkernel based operating systems called Mach. Some highly talented academic and industry folks were building a Unix workstation (from the hardware up) and wanted to do the least amount of work to do it! To someone using the workstation it was hard to distinguish between that system and a vanilla (think Sun/DEC) Unix workstation. But the speed with which the port could be done was astounding or so the people working there assured me.

Mach, which came out of Carnegie Mellon University, was much more than the portable operating system thing I made it out to be– it was a radical new way to look at OS’s. The idea was to abstract away the non-essentials of an OS and leave a very small microkernel to be dealt with. This had far reaching impact on how portable both the kernel and the services written on it could be from hardware platform to hardware platform. An interesting fact, Rick Rashid who was the Prof leading the MACH team, came to Microsoft and is now the SVP responsible for MS Research. Hmm, worked on Mach, was at Carnegie Mellon and then came to Microsoft to become SVP! Looks like my career is on track here!

Then two things happened:

suddenly there was only hardware platform that mattered (the one that Linux and Windows run on) and
Linux and Windows were certainly not microkernel based – think MACROkernel. There were both monolithic operating systems, at least as far OS researchers go. Ok, some people will argue that they are really “hybrid” kernels with a kernel and a user mode division, but microkernels they certainly were not!

So the old (microkernel) went out, and the new came in (macrokernel – it’s not a term, just something I invented!).

Ah ha! You say. When is the old going to come back?

I think it has already sneaked in by another name - virtual machines. I don’t mean Virtual Machines as they have been defined by Xen, Microsoft and VMWare. I mean in the computer science understanding of the term virtual machines which implement “virtualization”. According to Wikipedia (what would I do without it!) “In computing, virtualization is the process of presenting a logical grouping or subset of computing resources so that they can be accessed in ways that give benefits over the original configuration”. Hardware abstraction layers (think Xen) and virtualization engines (think network-seen-as-one-computer) are just different aspects of virtualization.

This probably needs some more explanation. A concrete example would be even better. One dropped into my lap as I was writing this blog. My attention was guided towards a company called 3Tera which claimed to be building a “Grid operating system”. They make the claim that they take an existing web application and without changes drop it onto a grid, so that the web application is able to be scaled by the provision of on-demand resources dictated by consumer demand. They are platform independent i.e. it doesn’t matter to them that the application runs on Windows or Linux.

The reason that they are able to do this is because they have redefined a conventional OS using the concept of virtualization. That gave me the idea of how I could diagrammatically show you what this means.

The new microkernel does very few things, it just manages the allocation of today’s OS’s (which are just applications to the new microkernel) on to a grid of commodity hardware. This grid could be a single computer or more likely a widely distributed network of computers. All this is possible because the two dominant OS’s Windows and Linux rely on the same commodity hardware. This allows for the capability of a mainframe (in terms of manageability, security & protection, partitioning) while retaining the advantages of using cheaper distributed computers.

The dream of “a view of computing resources is not restricted by the implementation, geographic location or the physical configuration of underlying resources” will be realized. It is also realized by utilizing in full the investment made in today’s OSs – which do their thang much as they do now!

So what? You ask. Patience, young Jedi!

(Peering into my trusty crystal ball)

Operating systems will be sets of services. OS’s will be chosen based on some favorite service, without giving though to “platform lock in”.

Operating systems components will be componentized. So that a Linux daemon will (gasp!) be able to use a Windows security component, via the use of standardized protocols. Without it knowing that it is.

Clustering and failover will not be high end luxuries, but will be baked into all OS’s – and schedulers will schedule multiple OS’s across Internet scale networks

……….VB programmers will be able to make the equivalent of the salaries they were making during the dot com boom. Ok – so that will never happen!

I think these predictions are probably going to raise some level of discussion. (Understatement, understatement!).

Why Virtualization Is So Darn Popular

MichaelF — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 17:35:00 GMT

Just returning from Linux World in San Francisco, and virtualization was once again the topic du jour. A lot of you outside of the technology vendor-sphere (where we like to speak in weird acronyms and corporate buzzwords), might wonder why Microsoft and many others can’t stop talking about virtualization. Go to any IT conference today and it’s highly likely there will be at least some sessions, if not a bevy of keynote speeches, on the topic of virtualization. These are usually accompanied by marketecture diagrams of lego-block like pictures showing different operating systems all running in some combination on top of a single physical server. Having once worked at IBM, I’m long familiar with the idea of virtualization, often called ‘logical partitioning’ in IBM mainframe speak. However, the reason why there’s so much discussion around virtualization today is because it is becoming much more widely available at a much better value than it has in past. Intel and AMD have improved their microprocessors to make them virtualization aware (in the past, virtual machine managers had to do all sorts of silliness to get around the very virtualization unaware x86 instruction set). This has allowed virtual machine software developers to build powerful technologies, often called hypervisors, that can reside in the operating system itself, allowing for much more efficient, reliable and seamless virtualization of one operating system or systems on top of the ‘host’ operating system.

Cool science project or is there any real use for this stuff? Let me give you a simple example of how we’ve used this here in our Open Source Labs. We provide quite a few different types of Linux distributions of various version levels and hardware architectures for testing and analysis, probably over fifty or so all told. Typically, you would use a single server (or even a single PC) for each operating system, which would mean about fifty different machines. Each of those machines requires power, cooling, new parts, maintenance, and so on. The costs add up quickly; in some data centers I’ve seen, power and cooling can be over half of the total operations costs year over year. In our lab, we can run almost all of these Linux distributions on one server, a four-way Opteron-based HP server with eight gigs of memory and a lot of disk. This is for testing, so I wouldn’t run this many virtual guest images on anything with heavy production workloads, but you get the idea. Bottom line, I save money and time (particularly in systems management).

I’ve also spoken with customers who are using virtualization for disaster recovery and backup scenarios, new deployment scenarios where a call center or branch office can be ‘installed’ with virtualized images in a fraction of the time as traditional server installs, and scenarios where testing and quality assurance groups can do large, diverse and automated testing of hardware and software across dozens of types of operating system configurations. IDC forecasted that 45 percent of new servers purchased this year will be virtualized.

Virtualization is a critical part of the Microsoft strategy, and we have been in this business for a while with our Virtual PC and Virtual Server 2005 products. Today, Virtual Server 2005 R2 is available as a free download. We’ve also opened up the specifications of our Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) Image format with Virtual Server 2005. You can use this specification to learn how to access (read & modify) the data stored in a VPC or Virtual Server virtual hard disk. The VHD format spec is available under a royalty-free license.

We are making even larger investments with our ‘Viridian’ hypervisor and System Center Virtual Machine Manager (code named ‘Carmine’) projects. These are the names for our Windows Server Longhorn virtualization hypervisor and virtualization management product, respectively. You can download the beta of System Center Virtual Machine Manager today. From what I’ve seen thus far in the development of these products, you can expect some great software from us in this area. You may want to check out Mike Neil’s post about how we announced and demoed much of this at WinHec this year – Mike also has a link to a video of the WinHec virtualization demos from Bill Gates’ keynote.

Related to this, we recently announced an important partnership between Microsoft and XenSource. XenSource is the company around the open source Xen project – the leading virtualization technology in Linux. Peter Levine, CEO of XenSource, discussed our partnership in his Linux World San Francisco keynote. Together with XenSource we will be working on enabling great virtualization between Windows and Linux, which is significant for customers running heterogeneous environments looking to consolidate servers and to take advantage of the new deployment scenarios – like I described above – in the future. This work will be part of our Longhorn server plans, taking advantage of our virtualization technology, Viridan. I’m personally very excited by this partnership and this is an indicator of how we think about our long term product roadmaps vis a vis interoperability.

There is a lot happening in this area of virtualization and I think it’s one of the most important change agents in our industry. Sure there will be all sorts of hype, which is typical of where we’re at in this adoption curve, but I’ve seen how this can save money/time in my own labs and I’ve talked with customers who are finding similar advantages. Exciting times indeed.

-bill

Microsoft, Xen and Hypervisor Partnerships

jcannon — Tue, 18 Jul 2006 21:37:00 GMT

By now, many of you have seen the article, Microsoft Gives Linux a Virtual Hug.

If not, I recommend checking it out.

It describes Microsoft’s partnership with Xensource (www.xensource.com). For those who do not know anything about the technology and what they would use it for, I will give a brief description. Many years ago when processors where not so fast, memory was expensive and general computing hardware was not very powerful, we needed all we got to make a single computer run as fast as we could. Now, today, we are in an area where a lot of people and companies have hardware that is very powerful (And some could argue relatively cheap) that many have machines that are way more powerful than what they need. So they end up with machines that are underutilized. So, what can we do to squeeze the last bit of performance out of the hardware we bought? In comes a technology called hypervisor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypervisor), which in laymen terms is a method (Either hardware or software implemented, or a combination thereof) that allows multiple operating systems to run at the same time. This, as I stated, can reduce hardware operating costs and adds a level of security and stability. (One operating system can not crash another one running on the same machine for example). Interestingly enough, Hypervisor is a relatively old technology, and was used early on in the 1970’s in mainframes.

I personally do not claim to have any insight to the articles meaning. (And we in the lab were not involved) But I think it indicates a trend here, the trend is that Microsoft is looking at OSS. Another example is of the OSS lab we work at here in Microsoft, which something many people did not think would happen any time soon. (If ever) As some of you might have read from my earlier blogs, I am very new at Microsoft, and I would have never expected to work here myself. As my colleagues can attest, I still walk the hallways talking about ‘them’ (Microsoft) and ‘us’ (OSS). So seeing changes like this are very exciting to me.

I was reading Slashdot, and the responses to the above article. And I have to smile about some of them. There is a wide array of peoples opinion on the interpretation of this, the usual “Microsoft’s latest attempt to dominating the world” to people who seem surprised and excited about this direction.

Here in the Lab, we are taking what we do with our work very seriously, and all that comes out of the OSS world, we look at from many different angles. This group is very new inside Microsoft, and already we are making an impact. Several years ago the perception was that Microsoft was discounting OSS, and who would have predicted than that there would ever be an OSS research group at Microsoft.

There are many things we can continue to learn from each other, and we at the OSS Lab are very much looking forward to help erase FUD on both sides of the isle.

As always, comments/suggestions etc appreciated.

- Hank Janssen