Microsoft is releasing a series of solution accelerators, and the first of the series is dedicated to helping an organization with leveraging virtualization in their infrastructure planning and design phase. Microsoft says that the Infrastructure Planning and Design guides (IPD) are the next version of Windows Server System Reference Architecture. The guides in this series help clarify and streamline design proc Microsoft is releasing a series of solution accelerators, and the first of the series is dedicated to helping an organization with leveraging virtualization in their infrastructure planning and design phase.Microsoft says that the Infrastructure Planning and Design guides (IPD) are the next version of Windows Server System Reference Architecture. The guides in this series help clarify and streamline design processes for Microsoft infrastructure technologies, with each guide addressing a unique infrastructure technology or scenario.Each guide leads the reader through critical infrastructure design decisions, in the appropriate order, evaluating the available options for each decision against its impact on critical characteristics of the infrastructure. The IPD Series highlights when service and infrastructure goals should be validated with the organization and provides additional questions that should be asked of service stakeholders and decision makers. IPD currently consists of the following downloadable packages: Infrastructure Planning and Design Series Introduction (11 Pages) Planning the next generation of technical infrastructure for corporations is a complex and daunting task. If done well, the Information Technology (IT) group’s capabilities are well aligned with the business and will be a strategic asset for the company. If done poorly, IT can be a barrier to the agility of the organization. The success of any infrastructure is measured in how well the infrastructure choices that are made match the objectives of the business. Although there are often hundreds or even thousands of pages of product documentation available, historically it has been very difficult to find guidance on how to appropriately plan the core infrastructure for an organization. The Infrastructure Planning and Design (IPD) series provides architectural guidance for Microsoft infrastructure products. The series is designed to present the reader with the most concise planning guidance for Microsoft technologies. It also provides a means to validate design decisions with the business to ensure that the solution meets the requirements of both business and infrastructure stakeholders. This paper describes the background for the guides as well as the format of each guide and defines characteristics common to all of the guides. Selecting the Right Virtualization Technology (16 Pages) The objective of this guide is to enable the reader to rapidly and accurately select which Microsoft virtualization technology or technologies to use for specific scenarios. The reader will then be able to proceed with the planning and design process for that virtualization technology by using the appropriate Infrastructure Planning and Design guide. SoftGrid Application Virtualization (54 Pages) Application coexistence continues to be a significant issue for business customers. The task of managing the portfolio of applications in a company has remained a very complex process with few tools available to help reduce this burden. Some of the challenges when managing applications include accommodating multiple versions of the same application as well as updating application packages. Microsoft SoftGrid enables organizations to respond to the challenge of managing applications by implementing application virtualization. The purpose of this guide is to present the infrastructure planning process for SoftGrid by providing a clear and concise workflow of the decisions and tasks required to plan for each method. This guide, when used in conjunction with product documentation, will enable companies to confidently plan the SoftGrid 4.2 infrastructure. Although additional options and guidance will be available in SoftGrid 4.5, none of the planning or sequencing work done today will be wasted effort. The appendix includes a sample job aid for recording the decisions made during the design process. Windows Server Virtualization (for Windows Server 2008 virtualization and Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1) (46 Pages) This guide leads the reader, step by step, through the process of planning the server virtualization environments. The first six steps in the guide focus on determining requirements for the guest operating systems, applications, and services; they enumerate the capacity and performance requirements that will be used in planning host systems. By addressing information such as resource requirements, backup approaches, and availability first, the user can determine the size of the load that the virtual applications will require from the host infrastructure. Steps 7 through 13 in the guide focus on the planning and design issues that affect the physical host infrastructure design. Specific guest workload requirements determine the server form factor, server placement, and the storage and network architecture. Specific steps and an overview of the entire decision process appear later in this document.You can download these documents, here. Software Development