Microsoft eyes the virtual data center

IDG News Service - Microsoft Corp. hopes to play alongside Sun Microsystems Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co. and others in developing "virtual data center" software that will make it easier to manage applications running across groups of servers, a company executive said yesterday.
"It's a problem that we're pretty excited about solving, and there are lots of things we're doing to tackle it across the company," Bill Veghte, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Windows server group, said in a presentation at the company's Silicon Valley campus.
"Think of it not only in the context of what Windows Server can do on the deployment and operation and policy side, but think about how applications are written and how server applications such as Exchange and SQL Server can take advantage of [virtualization]," Veghte said.
He made the comments at the end of a presentation about Microsoft's upcoming Windows Server 2003 software, which is due for release April 24.
Without providing a time frame or much detail about the data center software under development, Veghte said the company will provide a system-definition model that will reduce the time it takes to develop applications for the data center. It will also provide resource virtualization and partitioning software that will help businesses make more efficient use of their hardware.
Sun and HP already have outlined plans to offer software and hardware for building a virtual data center and have rolled out some initial components. The idea is to let administrators manage a large group of servers and other hardware as if it were a single large machine, make better use of hardware resources and make it easier to deploy and manage applications on those systems.
Veghte said more work can be done during the software development stage to provide capabilities that make it easier to manage applications in such an environment.
"Instead of management being an afterthought ... where you've got vendors providing solutions that aren't really bolted into the platform, we have to invert that," he said. "We have to bolt it into the platform so that we can consume this schema, or this definition from applications, and then expose it for innovative third-party tools. If we can do that, then you have the operational automation that is necessary to get away from the complexity in a data center today."
Veghte declined to elaborate on his remarks later, saying Microsoft isn't ready to discuss its plans in detail.
Some of Veghte's remarks echoed goals already expressed by HP, Sun and others. Customers have more hardware capacity than they need to