Robert Larson has a good post on an issue that is cropping up quite a bit for folks upgrading to Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 who don't read the fine print of the release note :) The gist of it is make sure you shut down (not save state, actually shut down) your VMs before running the upgrade. The Save State functionality is not compatible between versions so you have to shut the VMs before you upgrade or they will not be able to start and you'll have to discard the saved state which could result in data loss.

http://blogs.technet.com/roblarson/archive/2007/08/23/upgrading-to-virtual-server-2005-sp1-why-can-t-i-start-my-vms.aspx

 

This is a very interesting article on a theory by Sun's CTO Greg Papadopoulos that over the intermediate term, computing and data centers are going to consolidate so much that eventually a very large percentage of all computing will be done in massive data centers owned by a very few large companies such as Google, IBM, Microsoft etc. I agree with quite a bit of this theory and though Microsoft isn't mentioned in the article, I think it is clear that we will be a major player in this space. Our current major services such as Hotmail, Live ID, SkyDrive, etc are only the very beginning. Sun as usual leaves out any mention of the client. I strongly believe that Microsoft has a much clearer overall vision that encompasses the massive back end consolidtion that is happening but also leverages the massive computing power at the edge which is comprised of the hundreds of millions of PCs in the world. To not address and utilize this power is a tremendous waste of resources and very short sighted. Unfortunately a lot of commentators gloss over our Software + Services message vision as an attempt to protect shrink-wrapped software sales. This also is very short sighted. The increasng power and decreasing cost of PCs and devices continues to be an amazing human achivement. The winners in the technology industry over the next 15 years will be those that provide the best combination of cloud-based services and rich client devices and applications. Microsoft is one of the few that is on this path. Interstingly and on a smaller scale, Apple is a great example of this as well.

I hadn't taken note of the market share numbers in a while but check out the results from the most recent Netcraft survey. They state the following:

 "Microsoft continues to increase its web server market share, adding 2.6 million sites this month as Apache loses 991K hostnames. As a result, Windows improves its market share by 1.4% to 34.2%, while Apache slips by 1.7% to 48.4%. Microsoft's recent gains raise the prospect that Windows may soon challenge Apache's leadership position." ... "But if Microsoft continues to gain share at its current pace, it could close the gap on Apache sometime in 2008."

That is a substantial change especially considering that the percentages remained essentially stable through all of 2004 and 2005 with Apache leading by 30-40 points. Getting the gap down to 14 points is a significant achievment. Remember also that IIS used to be a toxic term in the late '90s and earlier this decade.

With the major improvements coming in IIS7 on Windows 2008, IIS may well become the leading web server platform in the very near future. That's a turn around that I don't think the team gets enough credit for. 

It is very cool application virtualization technology. Check out this post for details:

http://blogs.technet.com/softgrid/archive/2007/08/02/inside-the-grid-part-1.aspx

This is the first in what will be a series of posts from the team so be sure to subscribe to their feed. There is a lot of development in this area that I heard about two weeks ago at TechReady like further improvements to the core technology, sorting out some overlapping functionality with other products, and further integrating it with System Center.