I was passed on this Microsoft announcement today of the release of WSSRA Virtual Environment for Development and Test. This set of documents and prescriptive guidelines shows you how to build an accurate emulation of a corporate enterprise data center.
“By building with Microsoft Virtual Server and implementing only the IT services relevant for development and test, this instantiation is compact, requires far less hardware, and is easier to build and maintain.”
The WSSRA-VE package contains a fully integrated set of guidance, including an introduction document, an architectural blueprint, a planning guide, a build guide, and an operations guide.
The blueprint is a vendor-agnostic discussion of the business considerations and design choices available to address the development and test environment requirements, both for the virtual environments and for the laboratory environment needed to support the virtual and physical environments. It is designed to familiarize business decision makers with the issues around this type of scenario and gives insight into how this can benefit their businesses.
The planning guide consists of the fundamental design decisions based on technical constraints and business requirements. As an example it provides details of the exact design decisions and hardware choices that were made to create a WSSRA-VE environment based on the original WSSRA guidance. It discusses which design features were carried over from the production WSSRA environment into the emulated environment and how and why you would adapt these designs for your specific needs.
The build guide provides guidance for planning, executing, and verifying the deployment to physical host computers, network devices, and virtual machines. Example configurations are provided, including a list of the hardware and software necessary for deploying the example environment.
The operations guide provides guidance for operating a laboratory environment that can support many virtual environments simultaneously. The guidance is based on Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) and documents the differences between lab-related service management functions (SMFs) and operational roles and their generic equivalents used for production environments.
WSSRA-VE also includes several other documents and supporting files that can be valuable in your own deployment and configuration automation work. These files include all of the command files, VBScripts, and Windows script files used to deploy and configure WSSRA-VE in the WSSRA test lab, ISA server routing and firewall rule configuration files, Active Directory schema and policy files, and files used for building WinPE boot CDs that support XML file parsing, RAM drive creation, and command files to perform repetitious tasks when booted under WinPE.
Where to Find the Solution
WSSRA Virtual Environments for Development and Test is available at the following sites:
Please send your comments and feedback to cisfdbk@microsoft.com
Feel free to forward this mail to any others you think will be interested.
Microsoft Solutions for Infrastructure & Management, as part of the Core Infrastructure Solutions group, includes three components: MOF, WSSRA, and MSM.
Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) provides guidance that enables organizations to achieve mission-critical system reliability, availability, supportability, and manageability of Microsoft products and technologies. It addresses the people, process, technology, and management issues pertaining to complex, distributed, heterogeneous IT environments. For more information, see MOF.
Windows Server System Reference Architecture (WSSRA) provides enterprise-class architectural blueprints and implementation guidance that have been tested and proven in the lab with hardware and software partners. WSSRA explains the process to follow and decisions to make to ensure that the infrastructure an organization deploys matches its business needs, tolerance for risk, and technical design goals. For more information, see WSSRA.
Microsoft Solutions for Management (MSM) helps organizations achieve operational excellence. Through a combination of technologies, partner offerings, best practices, and training opportunities, organizations can improve service, reliability, availability, and security while lowering total cost of ownership. For more information, see MSM.