Review of the “Implementing Virtualization Solutions with Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V” Workshop

For the past couple of days I attended the workshop organized by the Microsoft Partner Academy; the workshop lasted for two days from 09:00 AM to 05:00 PM. The instructor was Mr. Riaan Woest who joined us in the Microsoft Innovation Center in Riyadh where the course was held. The below is a review about the workshop. Overall the course was very beneficial for me because it introduced the concept of server’s virtualization; this introduction can represent a strong base towards virtualization awareness. However, 4 more virtualization aspects should be covered so that anyone will be able to complete the Microsoft 360 Virtualization approach.

The workshop covered topics like System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008; it demonstrated the strength of this very powerful product that can be administered using MMC 3.0 console. One of the very interesting topics which were covered during the course is how to enable the high availability features when planning a virtual environment of servers. We saw how Microsoft Windows 2008 cluster services can be used to make certain virtual machines in a high availability state 24/7, this actually demonstrate the redundancy idea that’s commonly used with critical applications. This practice was very interesting because we installed a third party software to simulate the iSCSI devices needed to have a cluster in the lab.

Nevertheless I do have some constructive - hopefully - criticism. This can be summarized in the below points: The lab could have been prepared better based using Virtual Machines not physical machines. I mean for instance, we spent more than 60 minutes with my lab Partner Mr. Albert trying to configure the Windows Cluster using the third party software that simulates the iSCSI. My point is, creating two virtual machines with a previous connectivity between them and a ready built cluster would have saved much time and enabled us to focus on the Hyper-V rather than Windows Clustering. Personally I wanted to see more discussion about the architecture of the virtualization concept. I mean more information about the hypervisor layer in Windows 2008. This wasn’t all the attendees’ specific point of view, but maybe because I come from a consultancy background where I like to see such details. Aside from the above points the workshop was good, and I enjoyed the topic keeping in mind that this is somehow an introduction that enables you to read more and have deep dives about virtualization with a better pre understating of the topic.