Microsoft VHD Test Drive Program Overview
The VHD Test Drive Program provides customers with an enhanced Windows Server-based software evaluation experience that’s faster and less expensive, better supported and more flexible. The VHD Test Drive program is a first for Microsoft software and the more than 7,000 software vendors who can now deliver pre-configured mainstream applications within Windows Server-based virtual machines to their customers. Microsoft partners can now offer their prospective/current customers greater choice during the software evaluation process for mainstream applications and make it easier to evaluate complex solutions through the distribution of pre-configured virtual machines that can run on Virtual Server 2005 R2 or Hyper-V. You can also use System Center Virtual Machine Manager, to manage all the virtual machines in your environment.
The VHD Test Drive Program enables Microsoft and partners to distribute VHD images that contain Microsoft software and partner software. The VHDs are pre-built and pre-configured so that they can be downloaded or distributed for fast evaluation and testing of Microsoft software and partner applications.
The Microsoft Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) format is the common virtualization file format that provides a uniform product support system, and provides more seamless manageability, security, reliability and cost-efficiency for customers. The VHD format captures the entire virtual machine operating system and the application stack in a single file.
Virtual machine technology applies to both server and client hardware. Virtual machine technology enables multiple operating systems to run concurrently on a single machine. Virtual machine technology serves a variety of purposes. It enables hardware consolidation, because multiple operating systems can run on one computer. Another of the key applications of virtual machine technology is seen in test and development environments, where features such as faster provisioning, re-usability of the VHDs and ability to be hardware agonistic provide a more seamless environment.
Key Features and Benefits
The software distributed in a VHD provides you with convenience and simplicity, enables you to evaluate applications in an isolated environment and reduce costs and more as the table below describes.
| Benefits of using the VHD Test Drive Program |
| Benefit | Description |
Simplicity and convenience | Pre-configured VHDs significantly reduce the time and effort required for software evaluations. - Easy to install and evaluate pre-configured images of application + operating system.
- Provides flexibility to be able to evaluate the VHD within the organization but still be free of dedicated hardware requirements
- Helps abstract the complexities with configuration tasks from the end user of the application
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Isolation | Virtual machines provide an encapsulated computing environment to enable you to evaluate software without affecting the rest of your system. - VHDs: Encapsulates virtual machines in portable Virtual Hard Disks (VHDs), enabling flexible configuration, versioning, and deployment.
- Virtual networking: Enables flexible networking with guest-to-guest, guest-to-host, and guest-to-net connectivity.
- Guest to guest clustering: With iSCSI clustering for guest to guest across physical machines, you can now easily test high availability features of products in a isolated manner without the need for dedicated hardware
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Confidence | Comprehensive testing and support for Virtual Server and Hyper-V in conjunction with Windows Server operating systems and Microsoft server applications provides confidence in using VHDs with a consistent version of Windows Server 2003 R2 or Windows Server 2008 as the base operating system. - Windows–qualified drivers: Virtual machines utilize the Windows host operating systems WHQL driver set. This ensures robust and stable device support and broad device compatibility.
- Operating system support: Microsoft extensively tests Virtual Server and Hyper-V in conjunction with Windows Server 2003 and 2008.
- To help customers improve the utilization of hardware resources, the Microsoft Common Engineering Criteria requires all server products must be capable of running from within a virtual instance and will support Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 and Hyper-V.
- Active Directory integration: Enables delegated administration and authenticated guest access.
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Ecosystem Support | Independent software vendors (ISVs) and customers can integrate their offerings in VHDs for enhanced functionality and manageability. - VHD Test Drive Program: Partners now have the ability to provide you with a consistent evaluation experience in a virtualized Windows Server environment and leverage the common virtualization file format - VHDs.
- VHD OSP: The Microsoft VHD file format is freely available under the terms of the Open Specification Promise, enabling ISVs such as security and management vendors to natively interoperate with Virtual Server and hyper-V.
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The Drive to Self-Managing Dynamic Systems
Virtualization is one of the fundamental pillars of the Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI) commitment from Microsoft and its partners. The goal of DSI is to deliver self-managing dynamic systems to help IT teams capture and use knowledge to design more manageable systems and automate ongoing operations, resulting in reduced costs and more time to proactively focus on what is most important to the organization.
With VHD Test Drive Program you can now see how virtualization is helping organizations to simplify their IT operations, improve server hardware utilization and more flexibly provision their data center resources.
For more information, see the Dynamic Systems Initiative Web site.