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EMC and Microsoft both made a splash in the news this week with exciting new announcements for Hyper-V.   Microsoft’s announcement focused on a new set of programs to help customers implement a private cloud infrastructure based on Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V while EMC’s announcement highlighted new products and integration for EMC customers running Hyper-V. 

Microsoft’s new “Hyper-V Cloud” program includes four components to accelerate a customer’s deployment of a private cloud based on Hyper-V and Microsoft System Center.  These include:

• Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track – a reference architecture program\blueprint guide based on Hyper-V, System Center and HP servers.
• Hyper-V Cloud Service Provider Program – implementation services for up to 70 public and private service providers.
• Hyper-V Cloud Deployment Guides – tools and guidance for building private clouds on existing infrastructure.  These deployment guides are based on the experience of Microsoft Consulting Services (MCS).
• Hyper-V Cloud Accelerate – investments to fund assessments for customers and partners for POCs or customer engagements.

Microsoft also announced the System Center Virtual Machine Manager Self Service Portal 2.0 which is a toolkit for implementing a private cloud infrastructure using Microsoft technologies.  The Self Service Portal provides a foundation for a private cloud infrastructure to deliver IT as a service.  EMC has been working with Microsoft as a partner of the Self Service Portal program and will be providing provisioning services for EMC storage as part of the toolkit.

EMC’s announcement focused on how we are helping customers on their Journey to the Private Cloud based on Microsoft virtualization.  Included were some recent announcements that I’ve recently blogged about such as:

• EMC’s project to create a highly scalable Hyper-V cluster based on an EMC Symmetrix VMAX.  The environment consisted of a 16 node cluster with up to 1024 virtual machines and EMC Time Finder for local replication of virtual machines for improved deployment methods.  Be sure to check out the new ESG White Paper highlighting this solution! 
• Virtualizing Exchange 2010 with EMC and Hyper-V.  I blogged about the virtualized solution recently published along with Microsoft and Cisco and will soon be highlighting a second solution including Dell and Brocade that we recently published.  Both of these reference architecture guides virtualized Exchange 2010 with Hyper-V across multi-sites with replication for protecting data.
• Virtual Storage Integrator (VSI) for Hyper-V.   This free tool from EMC provides a mapping of Hyper-V based virtual machines to the physical infrastructure including servers, LUNs and EMC storage so you can easily see what servers are connected to which SAN and where the VMs physically reside on the SAN storage.

The release also highlighted our new integration of RSA SecureID two-factor authentication with Microsoft Forefront United Access Gateway (UAG) 2010 SP1 Direct Access to protect data when remotely accessing physical or virtual resources.

Be sure to visit EMC and Microsoft at Microsoft TechEd Europe or SQL PASS Summit to learn more about these exciting programs and tools and how together we can help you on your Journey to the Private Cloud based on Microsoft Virtualization!