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This presentation discusses how the Windows Server 8 operating system helps IT professionals go beyond virtualization.

Cloud optimize your IT with Windows Server 8 When you cloud optimize your IT with Windows Server 8, you take advantage of the skills and investments you have already made in building a familiar and consistent platform. With Windows Server 8, you gain the benefit of all the Microsoft experience behind building and operating private and public clouds delivered as a dynamic, available, and cost effective server platform. Windows Server 8 delivers this value in four key ways: 1. 2. 3. It takes you beyond virtualization. Windows Server 8 offers a dynamic, multitenant infrastructure that goes beyond virtualization technology to a complete platform for building a private cloud. It delivers the power of many servers, with the simplicity of one. Windows Server 8 offers you excellent economics by integrating a highly available and easy to manage multi-server platform. It opens the door to every app on any cloud. Windows Server 8 is one of the broadest, most scalable, and elastic web and application platforms, giving you the flexibility to build and deploy applications on-premises, in the cloud, and in a hybrid environment utilizing a consistent set of tools and frameworks. It enables the modern workstyle. Windows Server 8 empowers IT to provide users with flexible access to data and applications anywhere, on any device while simplifying management and maintaining high security, control, and compliance.

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The following slides examine the Beyond Virtualization pillar in more detail.

In developing Windows Server 8, Microsoft has made strides in advancing the features, functionality, and benefits of Microsoft Hyper-V technology. With new feature enhancements, Hyper-V now offers a dynamic multitenant infrastructure that goes beyond virtualization to provide maximum flexibility for building private clouds, offering private cloud services, and building multitenant infrastructures. With Hyper-V in Windows Server 8, enterprises can provide private clouds within their IT environments so they can adapt dynamically to changing business needs. Hyper-V provides high performance and scalability to meet the demands of business users, supporting Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and the ability to provide chargebacks. Administrators can use these features of Hyper-V to automate their systems through software-based policy controls, and can take advantage of the Hyper-V tools and functionality to lower overall costs of their private cloud environment. Hosting providers also can use the tools to not only serve the large enterprise customers, but also the mid-market and small business customers that are also looking to take advantage of cloud computing. Hyper-V helps hosting companies by providing the ability to isolate tenants and create billing solutions for these tenants, and by providing additional services for sources of new revenue. For Microsoft, going beyond virtualization centers on three key areas; providing a complete virtualization platform, increasing the scalability and performance both for hosted and guest systems, and easily and simply connecting the cloud services. Microsoft has enhanced technologies and built new features in Windows Server 8 to focus on these areas. For example, network virtualization allows us to abstract from the physical network and remove the constraints of virtual LANs (VLANs), provide IP portability and let customers bring their own IP, make it easier to isolate tenants, and ensure highly secure isolation between divisions and organizations. Live storage migrations and live migration in general is enhanced in Windows Server 8. We have also included NIC teaming as well.

The complete virtualization platform is about delivering a fully isolated multitenant environment that includes tools to guarantee SLAs, enable chargebacks, and support self-service delivery. Microsoft does this through network virtualization, available through Windows Server 8 and enhanced through Microsoft System Center tools. This enables you to scale beyond VLANs and build multitenant, efficient networks with no limits, whether those networks are internal, hosted private cloud, or a mixture of both. Associated with these networks, you want enhanced quality of service, and the ability to control access. You want to ensure this application has a guaranteed minimum bandwidth if it is associated with an important business function, and not have other applications stealing bandwidth from this application. The new quality of service components in Windows Server 8 guarantee the minimum services bandwidth across all network topologies. This includes storage, which is very important in Windows Server 8 because it can now use server message block (SMB) shares for workloads such as Microsoft SQL Server database software and Hyper-V. Quality of service becomes important, and you can have the flexibility to adjust the quality of service bandwidth control for those types of applications.

Going deeper into one of these featuresnetwork virtualization provides us insight into how it will be used throughout organizations whether on-site, hosted, or a mixture of both. Isolating the virtual machines of different departments or customers can be a challenge on a shared network. When these departments or customers must isolate entire networks of virtual machines, the challenge becomes even greater. Traditionally, VLANs are used to isolate networks, but VLANs are complex to manage on a large scale. They have cumbersome reconfigurations, and production switches are required whenever the virtual machines or isolated boundaries must be moved. The required reconfiguration of a physical network to add or modify a VLAN increases the risk of unplanned loss of service. VLANs also have limited scalability, because most switches only support about a thousand VLAN IDs, with a maximum of 4,095. In addition, VLANs cannot span multiple subnets, which limits the number of nodes in a single VLAN. This also restricts the placement of virtual machines based on a physical location. In addition to these drawbacks of VLANs, virtual machine IP address assignment presents other key issues when organizations are moving to the cloud. When most IP addresses are moved to the cloud, they must be changed to accommodate the physical and topological restrictions of the data center. Renumbering the IP addresses is cumbersome because the associated policies that are based on the IP address must also be updated. For example, a server with a hardcoded IP address may host an application with that IP address; moving the server across a subnet or cloud can break that application. The typical result is that an administrator assigns IP addresses to the virtual machines and forces the virtual machine owners to adjust their policies based on the original IP addresses. The risk of renumbering is so high that many enterprises only choose to deploy new services in the cloud and leave legacy applications unchanged. Hyper-V network virtualization solves these problems. Server virtualization is a wellunderstood concept that allows multiple server instances to run on a single physical host concurrently, but isolates

them from each other, with each server instance acting as if it were running on its own physical machine. Hyper-V network virtualization extends the concept of server virtualization to allow multiple virtual networks with potentially overlapping IP addresses to be deployed on the same physical network. Therefore, with Hyper-V network virtualization you can set policies that isolate traffic in your dedicated and virtual network independently of your physical infrastructure. With this new feature, you can isolate traffic from different business units, or customers on a shared infrastructure, and not be required to use VLANs. Hyper-V network virtualization also lets you move virtual machines as needed in your virtual infrastructure while preserving the virtual network assignments. Finally, you can use Hyper-V network virtualization to transparently integrate these private networks into pre-existing infrastructure on another site. The diagram on the slide illustrates how Hyper-V network virtualization isolates network traffic belonging to two different customers. The blue and red virtual machines are hosted in a single physical network, or even on the same physical server. Because they belong to separate blue and red virtual networks, the virtual machines cannot communicate with each other even if the customers assign then IP addresses from the same address space. To summarize, on the same physical network you can run multiple virtual network infrastructures. You can have overlapping IP addresses. And each virtual network infrastructure acts as if it was only running on the shared physical network infrastructure. Hyper-V network virtualization solves problems such as removing the VLAN constraints, eliminating hierarchical IP address assignments for virtual machines, and providing IP portability when you are moving from onpremises data centers to a shared and hosted private cloud.

With the growing importance of virtualization in enterprises and at hosting providers, organizations need to ensure that system responsiveness can meet service level agreements and customer expectations. Windows Server 8 provides significant improvements in scalability and performance of virtualized platforms, allowing a fixed amount of resources to run more workloads faster with Hyper-V, and also by offloading specific processes to hardware. The result is a high-density, highly scalable environment that can be adapted to perform at optimum levels based on your needs. Windows Server 8 now supports up to 64 nodes in a Hyper-V cluster, and can run up to 4,000 concurrent virtual machines. It supports configurations of virtual machines up to 32 virtual processors and one terabyte (TB) of memory for the guests. Windows Server 8 does this through taking advantage of non-uniform memory access (NUMA) to speed up the performance of the virtual machines. Microsoft also has increased the technologies, such as Virtual Fibre Channel, and performance within the Hyper-V platform to focus on scalability. Now we can virtualize host bus adapters (HBAs). Instead of using the host system to communicate with the storage area network (SAN) device through Fibre Channel, you can now have the virtual HBAs as part of the guest. The guest virtual machines have direct access to the SAN, increasing performance and increasing the flexibly. For example, you can utilize guest clustering within the Hyper-V environment. Windows Server 8 now supports Offloaded Data Transfer (ODX) in Hyper-V, which is useful if you have ODX-compliant hardware such as a storage array. Copies between files and shares become almost instantaneous. For example, normally copying a VHD template uses server processing power as the server copies from one file to the other. With ODX, you offload this task to the hardware, and what might have taken minutes before, may now take seconds. Windows Server 8 also supports other hardware offloading such as SMB, remote direct memory access (RDMA), and SMB-direct, which provides the ability to offload key process to the hardware and increase the performance capabilities of Windows Server 8 and Hyper-V.

The table on the slide shows the new scale enhancements that Windows Server 8 Beta supports today, and the improvements over previous editions. From the host perspective, Windows Server 8 can support a larger density of Hyper-V guests on a single host, now up to 1,024. Microsoft has also increased the amount of logical processors to 160, and physical memory to two terabytes, to support greater hardware host platforms and be able to increase the density. From a guest perspective, there are substantial scalability enhancements. Windows Server 8 can now support up to 32 virtual processors in a virtual machine, which is an eight-times increase over the previous version. It also now supports up to a terabyte of memory within the guest machines, and supports up to 1,024 active virtual machines in the environment. From a cluster perspective, Windows Server 8 can now support up to 64 nodes and 4,000 virtual machines in a clustered environment. Windows Server 8 can also support up to a 64-terabyte virtual hard drive, which is a substantial increase over the previous 2terabyte limit in Windows Server 2008 R2. Microsoft provides the ultimate flexibility and scale for you; there is no workload that cannot be virtualized. By putting your mission-critical workloads on a Hyper-V platform, you can create density, ensure the workloads can scale, and support them in a clustered environment. And Hyper-V can support huge amounts of memory and processing power. This makes Hyper-V the platform for supporting the private cloud and the largest workloads that Microsoft customers are using.

Windows Server 8 Beta provides a reliable platform with enhanced security for connecting to cloud services. It does this by using a common identity and management framework for cross-premises connectivity, federating identities, and increasing data protection. The new and enhanced virtualization features in Windows Server 8 not only advance the possibilities of cloud computing for you, they provide ways for hosting providers to provide more value-add services to their customers. Identity federation with Microsoft Active Directory Federation Services provides a common identity framework between physical and cloud environments. Users can collaborate across organizational boundaries and easily access applications, whether those applications are on-premises or in the cloud. This includes the extension of the Active Directory infrastructure so that they can access cloud resources. It provides support for claims-aware identity solutions that involve Windows Server and Active Directory technology. It provides seamless high security and a single signon experience for users that are moving between on-premises and private and public cloud environments, and is easily integrated with other platforms. Cross-premises connectivity lets enterprises easily connect to private subnets in a hosted cloud environment, and also provides connectivity between geographically separate enterprise locations. The cross-premises connectivity support in Windows Server 8 includes virtual private network (VPN) or site-to-site functionality, and includes the Unified Remote Access server role that is divided into two components. Windows Server 8 now integrates Direct Access with VPN and Routing and Remote Access Services (RRAS). This provides a simple way to set up a remote access service between local infrastructure and hosted services, and by using a VPN site-to-site tunnel the infrastructure is invisible. Enterprises can also connect to private subnets in a hosted cloud network, and between geographically separate locations. Whether these servers are local, at a separate location, or hosted in the cloud, users can access resources as though they are on the same network. Cross-premises functionality is based on industry standard protocols, which enables organizations to use the network infrastructure they have today, such as an IPsec-enabled router, to create VPN site-to-site tunnels directly from their local sites to the host in a different geographic site. Cross-premises connectivity and the integration of the two roles of RRAS and VPN provide a simple way to lay the foundation between your site and a hosters site to ensure that easy, highly secure, and seamless access can occur. Hyper-V Replica is a new technology built in to Windows Server 8 that provides a synchronous replication for disaster recovery. This helps with the complete virtualization platform area. Hyper-V Replica effectively replicates a copy of your virtual machine to another site. This site can be anywhere from the same rack, to the same server room, or even in a different country. It can also be in a hosted environment. You can replicate your entire virtual machine infrastructure to a hoster.

Microsoft is seeing a lot of hosters and service providers getting excited about Hyper-V Replica technology as a means to provide business continuity and disaster recovery solutions for their customer in a hosted environment. If you have a site disaster recovery, you would fail over to the hosted environment fairly quickly and be up and running without much downtime. Because Hyper-V Replica is include in Windows Server 8, any organization can use this technology to provide this affordable business continuity solutions. It is asynchronous replication, so it replicates every five minutes. Hyper-V Replica provides some failover tools and management out of the box. It can also be completely orchestrated through the Windows PowerShell command-line interface and through System Center technologies to automate failover processes and components.

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As you have seen, Microsoft is building on the complete virtualization platform that Hyper-V provides, and new technologies such as extension in live migration and live storage migration, network virtualization, and NIC-teaming. Windows Server 8 has new features for enhanced scalability and performance, such as supporting up to 32 virtual processors in the guest and up to 160 logical processors in the host, to push the density of both single and clustered systems. And new technologies such as site-to-site connectivity and Hyper-V Replica help you create further capacity and functionality by integrating into a hosted or cloud environment.

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 2012 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Microsoft, Active Directory, Hyper-V, the Server logo, SQL Server, Windows, the Windows logo, Windows PowerShell, and Windows Server are or may be registered trademarks and/or trademarks in the U.S. and/or other countries. The information herein is for informational purposes only and represents the current view of Microsoft Corporation as of the date of this presentation. Because Microsoft must respond to changing market conditions, it should not be interpreted to be a commitment on the part of Microsoft, and Microsoft cannot guarantee the accuracy of any information provided after the date of this presentation. Some information relates to pre-released product which may be substantially modified before its commercially released. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY, AS TO THE INFORMATION IN THIS PRESENTATION.

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