{"id":10921,"date":"2010-10-29T12:20:34","date_gmt":"2010-10-29T12:20:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/?p=10921"},"modified":"2010-10-29T12:20:34","modified_gmt":"2010-10-29T12:20:34","slug":"virtualisation-has-changed-microsoft-announces-azure-vm-role","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/?p=10921","title":{"rendered":"Virtualisation Has Changed: Microsoft Announces Azure VM Role"},"content":{"rendered":"

I attended the PDC party that was held by Microsoft Ireland.\u00a0 During his keynote, Bob Muglia talked about the soon-to-be-beta Azure VM Role.\u00a0 This is a new feature of MS\u2019s cloud service.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Azure that you know now is Platfor-as-a-Service (PaaS).\u00a0 PaaS provides a framework that a developer can develop an application on, store data in, etc.\u00a0 It\u2019s a lock-in, i.e. if you decide that Azure isn\u2019t for you then you can\u2019t move your application.\u00a0 You will have to redevelop it.<\/p>\n

VM Role gives Azure customers Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) which you may know as VPS hosting, similar to what Amazon EC2 does.\u00a0 You get a virtual machine with a Windows Server 2008 R2 OS, the roles, features, etc.\u00a0 You can RDP into it, etc.\u00a0 You can develop your application and the good news is that anything you do here will be possible to do on other hosting platforms, i.e. your application is portable.<\/p>\n

But this is much more than VPS.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s start at the management portal.\u00a0 It looks just like System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) v.Next.\u00a0 That\u2019s the tool that Hyper-V administrators will use to manage many Hyper-V hosts.\u00a0 There\u2019s a good reason for this which I\u2019ll come back to later.\u00a0 An Azure customer can quickly deploy new VMs from a template.\u00a0 The VM is provisioned and you log into it.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t hear all of this but it looked like that the RDP login might<\/em> have used your Live ID.\u00a0 That would be cool if it did.<\/p>\n

Services such as SQL (database) and IIS (web) will be virtualised using Server App-V.\u00a0 That means SQL is running in a sandbox or virtual machine within the virtual machine.\u00a0 This means these services can be quickly deployed without doing the usual setup.exe-next-next-configuration routine.\u00a0 It also means that MS can patch their OS templates, and your provisioned VM\u2019s can be swapped out from underneath the virtual services.\u00a0 That SQL server will magically stay running while MS patches the OS!\u00a0 That is sweet!\u00a0 It\u2019s also a feature of VMM v.Next.<\/p>\n

A nice thing that I did not expect was cross-premises integration.\u00a0 Your Azure VMs can be members of your internal Active Directory domain(s).\u00a0 Now you have a single sign-on infrastructure.\u00a0 You could use Azure as a DR site.\u00a0 You could use it for automated elastic computing services.\u00a0 You could use it as an alternative virtualisation platform.<\/p>\n

And that brings us to Hyper-V.\u00a0 We have been told that a future version of VMM (maybe v.Next) will allow us to move VMs from our private cloud (essentially an internal Hyper-V infrastructure) to the public cloud as needed.\u00a0 For example, a developer could produce an application on cheap internal resources that are conveniently located.\u00a0 When it\u2019s ready, it could be put into production with a VM move onto Azure.\u00a0 There\u2019s no redeployment of all the resources.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The messy bit with cross-premises VM migrations will be the licensing, i.e. volume licensing versus SPLA.\u00a0 The price of per CPU licensing in SPLA will scare a lot of people.\u00a0 And if it isn\u2019t SPLA then MS can expect class action and\/or anti-monopoly court cases.<\/p>\n

If you are a System Center house then there\u2019s great news.\u00a0 The cumulative update 3 release of OpsMgr 2007 along with a new Azure management pack (RC release but supported in production) will mean you can monitor internal and Azure infrastructure\/platform applications with one management system.\u00a0 You can even build distributed application and\/or SLA monitoring for off-premises\/on-premises\/cross-premises applications\/systems.<\/p>\n

Azure VM Role will go into CTP\/beta sometime by the end of 2010.\u00a0 My guess is that RTM will be between MMS and PDC 2011.\u00a0 I would bet that VMM v.Next (2011) will need to be RTM at the same time or before Azure VM Role.<\/p>\n

These are very exciting times to be in the virtualisation or cloud world.\u00a0 On the other hand, it is not going to be a great time to be working for a small or medium sized hosting company.\u00a0 Microsoft and Amazon are effectively stepping on the necks of these competitors and twisting.\u00a0 It\u2019s very difficult to compete with what they do and the prices (which are impossible to understand\/budget for) that they offer.\u00a0 Anyone who is a MS hosting \u201cpartner\u201d will have to realise that they compete with MS and find a unique selling point (USP).\u00a0 There are two things I see:<\/p>\n