Microsoft Hyper-V and the cloud

Well it has been a while since I have posted. I have been meaning to, but I have a master plan I am working on that this blog is just a part of. There will soon be an AtomicSuperGeek website also. But in the meantime I did want to blog a little about some stuff that I saw at a Microsoft conference I was recently at.

********* GEEK ALERT **********
This is a really geeky post this time. High end stuff more for the people that work in computers. So, unless you are suffering from serious insomnia or work in computers, you might want to wait for the next post.

There were three things at the conference that I found really interesting. The first one is the cloud computing strategy of the company. If you have read the computer trade rags at all you know that cloud computing is the new wave. If you are unfamiliar with the term then cloud computing is where a company like Microsoft or Google creates a huge server farm (you don't plant and grow servers you house them... so it really should be a server ranch) and then offers you a way to put your app on top of the farm and it just runs somewhere. So if a computer or two, or a whole data center goes down then your app will automagically switch to another server or data center. Your users will never ever know that there is a problem.

This is like the golden end point for computer data centers, fault tolerance, and disaster recovery. The thing is that to get enough computers into enough data centers with enough bandwidth to work you need to spend a whole ton of money. In the meantime none of the computers are really working very hard. So, unless you have a whole lot of different apps to run on your cloud, it is just not cost effective. In steps Microsoft. They are building a cloud with an abstration layer for you to build on. It is still in the early stages, but looks really good. I am thinking that all small and medium businesses that need a lot of uptime will find this very interesting. Not sure if the cost savings will be there for large companies at this time. Time will tell.

OK, second is the Hyper-V offering. This is Microsoft's answer to VMWare ESX Server. If you have not used virtual computing yet then just wait. I will be putting some really cool stuff together on virtualization for the main website soon. In the meantime, ESX server in the large corporate environment is way cool. You can have one physical computer host like 6 or 8 or more virtual servers. The users never know that it is virtual. If you have multiple ESX servers and they are all linked to a SAN then you can move a virtual computer from one host to another with the click of a button.

But this is suppose to be about Hyper-V from Microsoft. The Hyper-V virtualzation is really pretty cool. It all comes out of the VirtualPC product Microsoft bought several years ago. The thing that Microsoft is working on right now is management of the virtual environment. This was really cool. What was exceptionally cool is that you can manage both Hyper-V and VMWare environments from the same management console. The other cool thing is that you can actually manage down into the box to the application level. This was something very impressive.

There were two things that kind of surprised me though. First, if you do a P2V (physical to virtual) move of a server it clones the MAC address along with everything else. I have never seen a need to do this in any of the P2V clones I have ever done before. Also, this means you will have a problem if/when you reuse that hardware on the same network segment again. NOT a good idea. Second, if you clone an existing computer then it destroys the source computer. The clone of course has computer name and SID etc all stripped out, but it blows away the computer in the process. That seems totally unneeded. I would like to know what they were thinking.

Finally, they showed the software for creating apps for Windows Mobile so you could make an application for a cell phone. There were a number of asides about iPhones during the presentation, but you could see that they have seen the light that cell phones as a computer platform is a very large growing market. I am only a minor programmer. I do scripting but never thought of doing an app for a cell phone. I don't think I still could do it, but it does look interesting. If you are a programmer you might just be able to become financially independent with a cell phone program. BTW there was a guy I read about that made $700,000 this last year for a simple tank program for the iPhone.