In another window I am listening to the desktop Virtualization hour which I blogged about yesterday. A couple of hours ahead of the broadcast we posted the press release on Press pass which contained the following detail of what we are announcing today. • New VDI promotions available for qualified customers...

About a month ago I mentioned that we have a “Desktop Virtualization Hour” planned for 4PM (GMT) tomorrow, March 18th. (That’s 9AM Seattle time, 5PM CET … you can work out the others I’m sure). More information and a downloadable meeting request are Here . I said then that I thought it might be “more...

Every now and then a news story comes up which reminds us that if people with bad intentions, even sensible people can fall into traps on-line. There was one such story last week where friends of the victim said she was “the sensible one” – if she wasn’t unusually gullible it could happen to anyone....

You may have seen that registration for UK TechDays events from 12 th to 16 th April is already open - but you probably won’t have seen this newly announced session, even if you are following   @uktechdays   on twitter After Hours @ UK Tech Days 2010 – Wednesday 14th April, 7pm – 9pm. Vue Cinema...

First rule of blogging. Don’t blog when angry. I’ve been through a time consuming process which could be called educational – in the sense of “Well ! That taught me a lesson”. My drug regime has been mentioned before in my posts, and this is one of those times when the drugs don’t seem to be working...

In a post a while back about Windows Image Acquisition (WIA) I wrote “I’ve got a bad track record choosing scanners” and described the most recent one I’ve bought as a  “piece of junk”. Because my experience has been bad I don’t scan much, and because I don’t scan much I won’t spend the money to...

On the MDOP blog there is an announcement   of new releases of both APP-V (which runs applications in a Virtualized “bubble” so they don’t clash with each other) and MED-V (which runs a centrally managed virtualized OS) App-V 4.6 can be accessed immediately via MDOP 2010 . Existing MDOP customers...

Over on the MSPress blog they have an announcement Mitch Tulloch has updated his free ebook of last year. You can now download Understanding Microsoft Virtualization R2 Solutions in XPS format here and in PDF format here . I’ve worked with Mitch on a couple of books, including the first release of this...

I had a mail earlier telling me about desktop virtualization hour , planned for 4PM (GMT) on March 18th. (That’s 9AM Seattle time, 5PM CET … you can work out the others I’m sure). More information and a downloadable meeting request are Here . Some effort seems to be going into this one, which makes me...

There’s running joke on my team – if I want to drive my blog statistics up all I need to do is talk tough about VMware. A few days ago I posted a response to some VMware FUD. and it’s had 3 times the readers of a typical post and more than the usual number re-tweets, inbound links and comments, including...

Information week published an article last week “ 9 Reasons why enterprises shouldn’t switch to hyper-v”. The Author is Elias Khnaser, this is his website and this is the company he works for .  A few people have taken him to task over it, including Aidan . I’ve covered all the points he made, most...

I spent this morning with a group of our partners and one of the comments which came back was “we know there is a lot of material out there for Hyper-V .. can you point us to some of the highlights”. So it was a nice surprise to find a mail from the product team telling me that they’ve now got a “best...

I had a mail about an update to the Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool , which I thought was worth passing on: in case you haven’t come across it before : The Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool 2.1 manages the workflow of updating large numbers of offline virtual machines according to their individual...

A couple of posts back I showed the video of deploying an operating system with Windows deployment services. But if you have an image in a Virtual hard disk , it is quicker to copy VHD file than it is to make an image of its contents and then expand the image back onto a new system. That’s one of the...

For a little while I have had a beta version of a project I call PSCONFIG on codeplex. I’ve changed a couple of things but from the people who have given it a try, it seems that it is working pretty well. It’s aimed at servers running either Hyper-V server R2 Or Core installations Windows Server 2008...

My colleagues from the other side of the Atlantic  Dan Stolts, Blain Barton, Yung Chou and John Baker have lined up a a set of on-line sessions on virtualization aimed at IT Professionals.   They will go from the desktop to the enterprise, Covering VHD native boot , Windows XP mode, Windows...

I’ve had plenty to say about the uses of VHD files on different occasions. They get used anywhere we need to have a file which contains an image of a disk. So from Vista onwards we have had complete image backup to VHD, we use VHD for holding the virtual disk to be used by a Virtual Machine (be it hyper...

There is a problem which comes up in several places in PowerShell – that is helping the user by being vague about parameter types. Consider these examples from my Hyper-V library for PowerShell 1. The user can specify a machine using a string which contains its name Save-VM London-DC or Save-VM *DC,...

Having begun my previous post with an explanation of “ I have a professional disregard for …” it bubbles up again… Quite near were I live is the headquarters of Sophos, as a local company I should be well disposed to them but I’ve had occasion before now to roll my eyes at what their spokespeople have...

There’s a phrase which has being go through my head recently: before coming to to Microsoft I ran my a small business; I thought our bank manager was OK, but one of my fellow directors – someone with greater experience in finance than I’ll ever have – sank the guy with 7 words “I have a professional...

Mary-Jo has a post about the release of our Hyper-V drivers for Linux entitled Pigs are flying low: Why Microsoft open-sourced its Linux drivers , it’s one of many out there but the title caught my eye: I thought I’d give a little of my perspective on this unusual release. News of it reached me through...

A few weeks back I posted about VMware’s conduct in posting a video which of some tests which appear to bring on a crash in Hyper-V. No company is all good or all bad, not Microsoft, not VMware. But I did say in response to one of the comments VMware shows all the signs of running scared. The thing is...

Last week I taught a PowerShell class – the first time in ages I’d gone back to my old role as a trainer, and of the first things we do explaining PowerShell is explain that (a) When PowerShell’s own commands are piped together they pass object with properties – not a text representation of the objects...

The last post I made talked about customizing windows image (.WIM) files, and the post before that talked about creating Virtual hard disk (.VHD) files. So the last step is to look at putting an image onto a VHD and making it bootable So the steps are Identify your WIM file and if it has multiple images...

In the initial release of Windows Server 2008 one of the the questions which always came up was “how do I add X” – the answer was we had tools named OCSETUP and OCLIST. These have been superseded in Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 with the new Deployment Image Servicing and Management tool (DISM.EXE). The...