Microsoft Corporation India Pvt. Ltd. announced the availability of a set of tools designed to facilitate the adoption of virtualization technology for its customers and partners. As a part of this initiative, the company launched the Microsoft Integrated Virtualization ROI Tool that is designed to help customers quantify the cost advantage from deploying Microsoft’s virtualization offerings versus competitive solutions. It also announced the availability of a solution accelerator – the Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool to help customers automate the process of updating virtual machines, thereby allowing them to manage the updation of a large numbers of offline virtual machines according to individual needs.

The Microsoft Integrated Virtualization ROI Tool gives customers direct access to a software solution that produces a detailed representation of the total cost advantage that Microsoft’s virtualization solutions deliver in comparison with other options in the market. This tool was developed independently by ex-Gartner TCO/ROI experts at Alinean, Inc. The tool 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 Return on Investment from implementing Microsoft’s integrated virtualization solutions.

The Virtualization ROI Tool collects specific information about current infrastructure costs and opportunities for improvement, then uses research by Alinean to project potential costs and benefits for various optimization strategies using the Microsoft Integrated Virtualization solutions. All research was collected from the Alinean ValueBase of IT spending metrics, and Microsoft product and pricing experts to reflect typical costs and savings for similar company type and size.

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.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.

With a holistic approach towards virtualization, Microsoft offers a comprehensive set of virtualization products, from the data center to desktop assets – both virtual and physical – that are managed from a single platform. Microsoft has a number of virtualization technology infrastructures that provide a range of options for organizations to choose from and a number of architectural layers that they can consider when applying virtualization, including machine, application, presentation and the management of the various layers. Microsoft recently announced the global launch of Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, its hypervisor-based virtualization offering that will play a key role in delivering next generation virtualization solutions to customers. Later this year, Microsoft will also be announcing the availability of the next version of its virtualization management platform - Virtual Machine Manager.

Shalini Ale/ITvoir Network