The first part of a four-part article series titled Architecting a Microsoft Private Cloud, by myself and my colleague Adam Fazio (@adamfazio) has been published in TechNet Magazine here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/hh127072.aspx Microsoft Services has designed, built and implemented...

This week I had some folks ask me about the hardware and setup I use for customer meetings and demonstrations. Since I’m in the Consulting side of the business, usually my customer discussions are multi-product scenarios or solution-oriented, not just single product scenarios so I need to have a pretty...

In my continuing work on building a private cloud offering with Hyper-V and System Center, I started work on a scenario today where the “fabric” management infrastructure is in a different Active Directory forest than the fabric hosts. This would be something you could see in a multi-tenant hosting scenario...

Issue 24 of the Microsoft Architecture Journal focuses on virtualization. My paper, From Virtualization to Dynamic IT , has been published in this issue. My thesis: Virtualization is a critical infrastructure-architecture layer that is required for achieving higher IT-maturity levels, but several others...

With the release of Hyper-V R2 and Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2, many service organizations are seeing a business opportunity around providing design, planning, and implementation services around Hyper-V and the rest of the Microsoft virtualization and management platform. To encourage this trend...

The Virtual Hard Disk Getting Started Guide is 61 pages of great info outlining all the relevant scenarios, configurations, and options for using VHD files. This was release about 3 weeks ago but I missed it at the time due to training and TechReady9. The guide outlines basic scenarios like booting Windows...

Day 4 and 5 of TechReady were action packed, I didn’t even have time to post yesterday. I skipped the first session timeslot on Thurs to prepare for the double session I was presenting with Citrix. The double session format basically allocates two sessions (3 hours) to one topic letting you get into...

Day 3 kicked off with a keynote by Ray Ozzie and several very cool demos on UI futures, what’s coming across some of the Bing features, and some stuff MSR is working on. There was also a good discussion of how concepts move from MSR, to Labs, then into the product groups. Next up was a very entertaining...

There’s a good technical post over on Chris Adam’s blog about how to dynamically provision customized virtual machines by using System Center Virtual Machine Manager and unattend.xml. The unattend.xml file is used in combination with a sysprep’d image and applies customization (things like computer name...

Here’s an interesting and slightly amusing mock debate between Brandon Shell and Jason Conger on Citrix’s Workflow Studio vs PowerShell for automation . If you aren’t familiar with it, here is the description of what Workflow Studio is: “Citrix Workflow Studio™ is an infrastructure process automation...

The Hypervisor Functional Specification v2.0 for Windows Server 2008 R2 has been posted to the web and can be found here . The original v1.0 version for Windows Server 2008 RTM was described in this post . Here is the overview of the v2.0 version: This document is the top-level functional specification...

I was able to get a small commentary on desktop virtualization and VDI published in the Microsoft Architecture Journal . It’s based on the work I’ve been doing around creating a VDI offering to augment Microsoft’s server virtualization offerings. For a slightly expanded version of my thoughts on this...

The links below lead to a series of technical whitepapers on DirectAccess, BranchCache, and Remote Desktop Services in Windows Server 2008 R2. Networking Resources: DirectAccess and BranchCache Remote Desktop Resources: Kerberos, User Profiles, RemoteApp

The Exchange team has published a whitepaper on TechNet comparing the power utilization of a typical 8 server physical Exchange environment compared to a a virtualized environment using the same number of logical processors but on only two Hyper-V host servers. The result: a 50% reduction in power usage...

The Windows Server Division blog announced that Windows Server 2008 R2 is tracking with Windows 7 and both are planned to RTM in the second half of July with General Availability on Oct 22! That RTM date is earlier than I thought it would be, I was thinking late August. The more I dig into R2 the more...

When planning server consolidation initiatives, particularly if using a structured offering and tools like SVAM and MAP , underutilized database servers are a frequent consolidation candidate. Similarly, if you have already widely implemented virtualization, then virtualizing database servers for new...

Good news from the virtualization team. Over on their blog is a new post about the import/export functionality in Hyper-V. There are major enhancements that address several scenarios that were either not easy or not possible with Hyper-V RTM. Scenarios such as exporting a VM and importing it to a different...

Continuing the foray into social networking I started on a couple weeks ago, today’s topic is social bookmarking. For those who are even later to the game than I am, social bookmarking is basically a site or service that lets you tag and store your website bookmarks in a central location that is accessible...

Between MMS and TechEd there have been a lot of announcements on the virtualization and cloud computing front. First, over on the Virtualization Team Blog , Jeff provided the announcement and details around some new capabilities coming in Hyper-V with Windows Server 2008 R2: 64 logical processor support...

Brian Madden has an excellent post up today called The hidden costs of VDI . I’ve been working nearly full time the last two months helping to put together a Microsoft Services offering around desktop virtualization in general and VDI in particular so have spent a lot of time looking into both the technical...

The Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT) have been updated for the Windows 7 RC build. I’ve been using a combination of the RSAT and the Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 Beta console on my Windows 7 machine to manage my Hyper-V lab machines and its been working very well so far. The main download...

Robert has a good post up for folks wanting to run Windows Server 2008 R2 on their laptops. A lot of us do that so that we can run Hyper-V for demos or development purposes. If you enable the Desktop Experience feature along with Wireless LAN and a few other things, you effectively get a Windows 7-like...

Two new books on Hyper-V have been released or coming soon. These are written by some of the most active members of the virtualization team and extended community inside Microsoft. Some of the authors I know personally and some I know by reputation from the hundreds of questions they answer every month...

Announced today over on the Virtualization Team Blog, Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2, the “stand-alone” version of Hyper-V will include Live Migration and host clustering capabilities. It will continue to be a free download. With support for the advanced feature set, this will open up a lot more...