When designing your virtualization ho st framework for your Private Cloud, it's important to select platforms that use widely supported standards and provide cost-effective solutions for elastically scaling a resilient compute foundation. With this criteria in check, you'll be able to grow your compute...

Windows Server 2012 and our completely FREE Hyper-V Server 2012 certainly have some really cost effective new storage options, with Storage Spaces and Hyper-V over SMB 3.0 . However, many IT Pros have already invested in iSCSI shared storage and, as a result, many Hyper-V deployments also need to be...

Overheard at a recent IT Camp event … I’ve been virtualizing more and more VMs on my Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V hosts lately and I’ve got lots of virtual hard disks ( VHDs ) across all my VMs. It’s been working great, but … Is there an easy way to list all VHDs...

NEW HOURS! Based on popular demand, we've updated the hours for "Early Experts" Virtual Study Hall assistance - Fridays each week from 11AM to 1PM Eastern Time . - - - - - - - - - - There’s so many cool features to explore in the latest Windows infrastructure offerings that it’s hard...

Yesterday's Cloud Summit 2012 event in DFW provided exciting details about the new capabilities around Windows Azure Virtual Machines, Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V and System Center 2012 to deliver cost-effective, elastic cloud-oriented infrastructure architecture on-your-terms: In your own datacenter...

Mitch Garvis , a veteran trainer, consultant, Microsoft MVP and VMware VCP, has published a thorough independent analysis of his thoughts concerning Hyper-V 3.0 in Windows Server 2012 vs VMware ESXi 5.1. If you are currently evaluating Datacenter Virtualization and Private Cloud solutions for your IT...

Backup strategy options: quick backups, easy restores or lotsa $$$ - choose only ONE. That's the rules we've lived by all these years as IT Pros. We can either choose a path using incremental backup that gives us quick backup times, or a path using full backups that gives us easy restores. We can never...

Convert-WindowsImage is the new version of WIM2VHD for Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012! Rapid provisioning of new VHD/VHDX "gold" images for lab, development, test, and production use! Designed specifically for Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012, and completely rewritten in PowerShell by Mike...