Yesterday I wrote about end-of-life planning for OSes and so it makes sense to talk about the end of a service pack, as retirement – it is after all the word that is used on the product lifecycle pages . Of course we don’t mean retirement in go and live by the seaside sense… Special police squads...

No. I’m not talking about sorting out the music for one’s funeral* … I think every manager I have had in my 10 years at Microsoft has grumbled that I’m not great with planning – it’s a fair criticism and I try to work on it. When the subject comes up a quote from a book by William Gibson comes into my...

Arthur : “You mean you can see into my mind ?” Marvin: “Yes.” Arthur: “And … ?” Marvin: “It amazes me how you manage to live in anything that small” Looking back down the recent posts you might notice that this is the 8th in a row about my new phone (so it’s obviously made something of an impression...

My photography posts appear to be a bit like busses. I don’t make one for a while then two together … Some while back I wrote a tale of two Codecs bemoaning the patchy support for RAW files. Basically we (Microsoft) don’t provide codecs for anything other JPG, TIF, PNG and our Windows Media formats...

It’s official. Windows 7 has released to manufacturing. http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/press/2009/jul09/07-22Windows7RTMPR.mspx   It’s official. Windows Server 2008 R2 has released to Manufacturing http://blogs.technet.com/windowsserver/archive/2009/07/22/windows-server-2008-r2-rtm.aspx It’s...

I have been working on some PowerShell recently to handle the initial setup of a new machine, and I wanted to add the activation. If you do this from a command line it usually using the Software Licence manager script ( slMgr.vbs ) but this is just a wrapper around a couple of WMI objects which are documented...

One of the first books I read on PowerShell  had a comment about using AD from the PowerShell V1 which amounted to “It’s too hard, don’t bother use VB Script instead”. I’d taken against the book in question (no names no pack drill) – in fact it reminded me of something Dorothy Parker is supposed...

I mentioned recently that I’m writing a PowerShell configuration tool for the R2 edition of Hyper-V server and Windows server core. One of the key parts of that is managing the firewall settings…. Now… I don’t want to plug my book too much (especially as I only wrote the PowerShell part) but I had a...

A short post by my standards On the server core blog, Chuck has posted Top Issues for Microsoft Support for Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V , which makes an interesting read. If you do a lot of hyper-v you’ll probably stumble over one of these at some point. On the Main Microsoft site we have Windows Server...

One of the questions which comes up on our internal distribution lists for Hyper-V is “when will such and such and OS be supported on Hyper-V” and the somewhat frustrating response is usually in the form “We’re talking to OS vendors, but we can’t talk about contract negotiations while they are going...

Somewhere in the queue of things to post is the remainder of my PowerShell configurator for Windows Server 2008 R2 Core and Hyper-VS Server R2. If you’re building a cluster the PowerShell CMDlets for clustering make that a breeze. Of course a cluster often calls for iSCSI and setting that up from the...

Earlier in the week we took the virtualization tour over the Irish Sea. Tuesday was Belfast – and with the snow, getting there was quite a challenge. I felt ill all day and didn’t think I’d delivered the content as well as I should have, but the feedback forms were really positive, better than I thought...

A couple of posts back I mentioned that I was working on a configuration library for Server 2008 R2 Core and Hyper-V Server R2 and this includes checking and setting the configuration for remote desktop. It turns out that this is controlled from just 2 registry entries – hence it is controlled by the...

I mentioned I was doing some PowerShell work to manage configuration on the R2 versions of Windows Server 2008 Core and Hyper-V server (which now support PowerShell), and somebody in Redmond asked me if I knew  there were tools out there to do this job. … I was thinking about how we find stuff,...

Some naked statistics 1942 – the number of lines of code in HyperV.PS1 499 – the number of lines of formatting XML 14,381 – the number of words in the documentation file 2443 - the number of downloads of the last version 929 – the number of downloads for the versions before that 1.00...

With all the betas out at the moment I’ve been trying to get up to speed on both Windows 7 (by using it) and Windows Server 2008 R2 , and Hyper-V server R2 as well. If you’re a regular reader you won’t be surprised to know that I’m excited by what’s coming in PowerShell. PowerShell V2 is better in...

One of the new features for both Windows Server 2008 R2 and the Windows 7 client is support for Virtual Hard Disk files built into the OS. You can create fixed or dynamic disks and “attach” the tools for Hyper-V call this “mounting” a VHD and early stuff on 7 seems to  have called it surfacing a...

From time to time people ask me who I write for, and I always say I write for myself in the hope that there are enough people out there like me to make a reasonable size audience. It always surprises me how many people inside Microsoft read this blog, not to mention the number of competitors who come...

Details of the next Microsoft Virtualisation* User Group meeting now up on www.mvug.co.uk ! Where:     Microsoft London (Cardinal Place) When: Date & Time 29th January 2009 18:00 – 21:30 Who & What: Simon Cleland (Unisys) & Colin Power (Slough Borough Council) Hyper-V RDP deployment...

I’ve had a couple of requests for the slides and related information from the”Unplugged” tour My Keynote slides My Hyper-v Cluster setup and Jose Barreto's blog post on getting Storage server for iSCSI   Matt’s slides on Management and SCVMM (these are in a Password protected zip, the Password is...

I'm going to spend the next two or three Posts explaining what I did in this session for those who weren't there but, for those who were I promised the slides and scripts would be downloadable You can get the zip from my skydrive

I mentioned I was presenting on Virtualization a week or so ago, and Matt was presenting another of the sessions. Without wanting to make a big deal of it, but since I’ve got to know Matt, I’ve come to value his opinion and he used my library from codeplex. to  demo building VMs from a script, he...

I haven’t really said much about Windows HPC server 2008, which we launched recently as the successor to Compute Cluster Server. But there are some useful webcasts lined up , they’re early in the morning Redmond time, which puts them at then end of working day for those of us in Europe. HPC Webcast Series...

I had a mail from Alessandro, asking about scheduling operations on Hyper-V; specifically he wanted to schedule the snapshotting of a virtual machine. The logic was already in my codeplex library , but it only needs a couple of the functions ( new-vmsnapshot and get-vm) , but the easiest thing seemed...

There’s Billy Connolly sample which I’ve had on my PC for ages. To use it recently at Virtualization events Steve Lamb had to edit 3 rude works out of 12 seconds. We want this, and that, We demand a share in that and most of that . Some of this and **** all of that Less of that and more of this and ...