I have to admit, I'd never thought of this one. Yes, I've looked into using ADS (Automated Deployment Services) for deploying Windows Server 2003 and use it as part of the Virtual Server Migration Toolkit ( VSMT ) solution but never thought of using it to deploy Windows XP. Unsupported it may be, but...

...but only if you're US based. I know I get readers from all over the world, and know many of you are US based. I'm hoping to follow up with the powers that be to see if we can get some free subscriptions also in the UK too! The Technet Magazine , Microsofts magazine for IT Pro's is going to be beginning...

While on the subject of patching here is the home page for the newly released Windows Server Update Services (WSUS), the next generation of SUS. To find out more about patching, management and securing your networks, have a browse through Eileens or Steves blog. WSUS is a patch and update component...

Now this is worth a read having just found about it internally. Megans whitepaper which I blogged about recently is now available in its completed from on microsoft.com. The whitepaper discusses in detail the differences between Virtual PC 2004 and Virtual Server 2005. I know from my own experiences...

I blog about Virtual Server a lot (as you may have noticed), but I'm not alone. Megan Davis is a technical writer/author at Microsoft who especially focuses on Virtual Server & Virtual PC and is extremely active both internally within Microsoft answering employee questions on discussion groups and...

If you're interested in using VSMT (Virtual Server Migration Toolkit) for migrating a physical machine into a virtual machine, there was a new KB article posted up a few days ago which gives you some general guidelines. Note that there is one error in the article - it currently says it applies to Virtual...

It's rare you see something in a beta release which makes such a dramatic difference to performance. This is one such instance. If you want to save yourself over 5 hours when installing a Virtual Machine under Virtual Server 2005, read on.... Last week at home, I was installing a new Windows Server...

Sometimes the most blindingly obvious and simple utility become a weapon of choice in your toolbox arsenal. Here's one such example I stumbled across a few days ago and am now wondering how I ever coped before. Over on longhornblogs.com, Robert (who I remain indebted to) has put up the Remote Desktop...

Something which cropped up internally over the past couple of days has been a discussion about how many people at Microsoft must have moved on beyond using the standard HTML interface to their blog engine for posting. I kept quiet at this point once discussions got round to all sorts of software I'd...

Some of you may have noticed recent changes to the blogs.msdn.com site. In case some of you are subscribing to http://blogs.msdn.com/jhoward to read my blog, or are linking to the blogs.msdn.com/jhoward site, please can you update them to point to http://blogs.technet.com/jhoward instead. Thanks!

I just stumbled across Marts blog entry and thought this was such a cool way to use of the tabbed capability of Windows Messenger 5.1 to embed a view of your Exchange email. Had to share it! Nice one Mart & Stef- great tip.

While on the subject of Certificates/Encryption/IPSec/PKI in general yesterday, I was looking around for some good information on how PKI works to post up. One white paper which stuck-out from the pile was published in December last year (so it's reasonably up to date) by David B. Cross and Avi Ben-Menahem...

Kind of hard to miss the launch party. Well, as it happens I did :-) Even though I'd consciously seen Bill Gates plastered over the home page of both www.msn.com and www.msn.co.uk on-and-off all morning, it never dawned on me to read what the story might be about. You can find out more from Christopher...

This is fantastic. I love using the Virtual Machine Remote Console for accessing VMs running under Microsoft Virtual Server 2005, but it never dawned on me until I saw this blog entry by Peter Provost, that you could run up two instances of the VMRC client from two different machines to connect to one...

How cool is this - Robert Scoble just posted up on channel 9 about Blogcasting . My colleague Eileen has already recorded couple of blogcasts - for example here , and I've done a series of blogcasts to explain about VSMT - there's lots more in the pipeline especially from the UK IT Pro team, so stay...

As promised, here's the last blogcast installment walking through a VSMT migration of an NT4 server into a virtual machine running under Microsoft Virtual Server 2005. This blogcast walks through deploying the disk image into the blank VM and seeing the final result. It can be viewed by clicking here...

I'm "virtually" (no pun intended) at the end in the series of blog entries walking you through a VSMT migration of an NT4 server into a virtual machine running under Microsoft Virtual Server 2005. If you've missed out so far: Part one can be viewed here (links to 2 blogcasts) Part two can be viewed...

If you missed my two previous postings in this series of blogcasts walking you through a VSMT migration of an NT4 server into a virtual machine running under Microsoft Virtual Server 2005, part one can be viewed here , and part two can be viewed here . This blog provides links to the next two blogcasts...

I hope you enjoyed the first two blogcast demonstrations of VSMT I blogged about yesterday. Today, I'm publishing part two which contains the next two blogcasts in the series. The third VSMT blogcast walks through validating the XML file describing the hardware which the server being migrated...

Blogcast, podcast, mini-webcast.... What's in a name - well quite a lot judging by some of the reactions I've had. Leaving the name issue to one side, I've recorded a series of eight clips which walk through the process of migrating an NT4 server into Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 using the VSMT ...

Heaven knows where I found this link now, but at Lake Superior State University, the word Blog is on the 2005 list of banished words. I especially liked one of the reasons - "Maybe it’s something that would be stuck in my toilet". We're all in trouble now....

Eileen recently explained in her blog what 200, 300 and 400 meant as levels of experience needed to be able to make the most out of Microsoft sessions. However, after reading this comment , and as it's nearly christmas, here's an alternative version which hopefully everyone can relate to regardless of...

No, it's not a typo! A "blogcast" is probably a new term to you as it's been made up by the IT Pro Evangelism team in the UK (not quite true, but it's nice to think we got there first). A blogcast in this context is a webcast delivered through blogs. So what's new about that I hear you ask? The answer...

I'm co-presenting a free Technet evening event with Dave Sayers tomorrow night (Tue 23rd Nov) at the Microsoft office in Reading, UK discussing "NT4 and Windows Server 2003 interoperability". The session starts at 18:30 with registration opening at 18:00. Click here for the registration site. Remember...