Good news this morning.... The virtualization team is pleased to announce the public beta release of the Hyper-V WMI interfaces . Hyper-V WMI APIs . Hyper-V uses WMI APIs (similar to the Virtual Server COM API) to create, manage, monitor, configure virtual...

As you should be aware SCVMM like Exchange 2007 is based on PowerShell (previously known as "Monad"). This enables you to perform every action that the GUI does from the command line and in some cases more. PowerShell is a pre-requisite for SCVMM and...

Two blogs I noticed today from the Windows Server team were, some more details on Windows Server 2003 SP2 (also applies to XP x64 edition) and that CCS (Compute Cluster Server) is now on our Volume Price list, i.e. Generally available.

Getting back to how to use SCVMM, I'll now walk you through one of the ways to create a Virtual Machine (VM) on a host - I'll use one the simplest ways, there are lots of other options. BTW, Are those of you not on the SCVMM beta finding this series...

In a prior post I promised more details on the template feature in SCVMM so here we go. The Template which in my mind is linked with two other options in SCVMM which are known as profiles, the two profile types are: Hardware Guest OS Going...

If you know a bit about PowerShell this post wont enlighten you further, so you might stop reading here. However if you're new to PowerShell or specifically PowerShell with System Centre Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) then the command GET-COMMAND will...

Some of you may remember a free tool that you could use to configure Windows Server 2008 core (basically a simple GUI that allowed you to setup the system), unfortunately this tool was removed from the web . This *new* tool is uncomplied code (Script...

Summary To date we have covered the following: Part 1: Initial Setup Part 2: Creation of a host group Part 3: Possible host and VM status Part 4: Adding a host into SCVMM Part 5: More state information and filtering lists Part...

Dugie and others have posted about this in the past, now Conrad has added some great detail, especially leveraging native Microsoft tools (some still in beta). Basically you have a choice of: Method 1 . Using WAIK (Windows Automated Installation Kit)...

If you go to https://connect.microsoft.com the update that allows SCVMM to work with Hyper-V RC1 is now available Update for SCVMM 2008 Beta - (You can access this from the downloads page). Install this update to enable Virtual Machine Manager 2008 Beta...

Mark speaks about new kernel constructs in Windows 7 and the dismantling of the Dispatcher Spin Lock and redesign and implementation of its functionality into separate components. Resulting in Windows 7 being able to scale to 256 processors, along with...

As promised in the last post here is how you remotely manage the Virtual Machine you've just created. For those familiar with Virtual Server this is very similar. VMRC.exe (Virtual Machine Remote Control) utility has always been in Virtual Server,...

The following screen grab shows a single running Virtual Server host machine in the “Infrastructure Hosts” group. I've circled the state information which shows "responding", meaning that the server that's running Virtual Server 2005 R2 is available,...

Steven recently asked me about the password for the VHD Testdrive program, he wrote: "I found your details on the Microsoft MVP site. I hope you can help in this instance. I have installed Virtual Server 2005 R2 and downloaded the VHD for Windows 2003...

UPDATE: Changed post title from "Day1" to "Part1"... System Center Virtual Machine Manager (Beta1) was made avialble on http://connect.microsoft.com site. For more information (assuming you haven't downloaded it yourself) can be found here and here...

John has kindly demonstrated that DFS-R is a replication technology, and that shadow copies can be enabled as a method of providing backups, I must say I’ve done a similar thing to John whilst prepping for a demo; fortunately the files were small and...

If you're a Virtual Server user in the UK , and if you're a TDM (Technical Decision Maker), Architect or even a CTO (with the proliferation of job titles these days I'll let you make up your own mind as to whe ther your title is equivalent to these suggestions...

I've heard of an issue twice now so I thought it was worth pointing out what may be the cause. The message received is "<server name> could not be started because one of its virtual hard disks is already in use by another running virtual machine...

One of the great SCVMM features is the ability to simply, create a "Host Group" under the "Managed Computers" object. In this example I have created two sub groups, the one I'll detail here is UK, I could also create child groups under these parents....

Thanks to Tony for SCVMM Self service information from the beta 1 FAQ. Lots of good information to read... Have a good weekend!

Check out the PressPass site for information on Virtual Server licensing changes that have been just announced. In summary the changes are: • New virtualization use rights for Windows Server™ 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition and Windows Server “Longhorn...

This is a recent post I missed (thanks for the pointer Julius ) from the Remote Desktop Services Team (formally known as Terminal Services). Basically with Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V “ We conducted our testing using both non-SLAT and SLAT hardware...

In the course of a working week with customers and partners the term ' Paravirtualization ' comes up frequently. I've linked to what wikipedia has to say about it and also show a snippet from Ben Armstrong where he answered a question on Paravirtualization...

The following blog will show the state information and context filtering that is achievable in SCVMM. In parts 2-4 I have shown how SCVMM displays the hosts and Virtual Machines that have been added to the console for management. This posts concentrates...

Ok...so in the last 3 weeks I've been asked this numerous times (and to save emailing it again!), the article you need is http://support.microsoft.com/kb/888794/en-us .  I guess just recently we've seen a step up in the workloads being virtualized...