Chefs hat's at the ready: Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 cookbooks' going live!

I couldn't resist :-)

Thanks to Tony for sending this through.  In Tony's own words "These are the first of several cookbooks to help SI partner consultants get up to speed to deploy virtualisation solutions in record time.  These are step-by-step, one-stop documents with all the details, tips/tricks to build a working solution".  To me, this already sounds great, but what are the documents specifically about?

Hosted Backup and Recovery Solutions for Service Providers using DPM and VS

This cookbook will provide procedural, step-by-step guidance to an IT Generalist audience providing data backup and recovery to customers as a hosted solution using Virtual Server and System Center Data Protection Manager v2.

Simple Offsite Backup and Recovery of virtual machines using Data Protection Manager and Virtual Server

This cookbook will provide procedural, step-by-step guidance to an IT Generalist audience for backing up and restoring virtual machines running in an offsite location using Virtual Server and System Center Data Protection Manager v2.

Simple Onsite Backup and Recovery of virtual machines using Data Protection Manager and Virtual Server

This cookbook will provide procedural, step-by-step guidance to an IT Generalist audience for backing up and restoring running virtual machines using Virtual Server and System Center Data Protection Manager v2.

High Availability with Virtual Server and Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise Server Clustering

This cookbook will provide procedural, step-by-step guidance to an IT Generalist audience for implementing high availability of server workloads using Windows Server 2003 Server Clustering and Virtual Server using Intel-based hardware.

Application Isolation and Operation in Branch Office Using Virtual Server

This cookbook will provide procedural, step-by-step guidance to an IT Generalist audience for isolating and operating applications on separate virtual machines in branch offices using Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1, in an Intel-based hardware environment for regulatory compliance and improved legacy workload performance.

What's nice for me to see is, that we've worked closely with Intel to produce these documents, and Intel are firmly behind Virtual Server as a technology.  So much so, that they too will be promoting these cookbooks on their website.  You're also getting an early look at these documents - they won't go live on Microsoft.com for another 1-3 weeks, so why not feel like a VIP for a while, and download now :-)

These cookbooks are a great way to learn about a product - it's a shame we don't do this kind of thing for more of our products, but I guess it's pretty time consuming to write, create the demo's etc, but still, we can but hope.  You can however, expect some more Virtual Server related cookbooks in the works, very soon, along with System Center and Terminal Services cookbooks respectively.

Another interesting note is that I've stored the documents online using Windows Live SkyDrive.  This service gives you 500mb of online storage, and all you need to upload stuff is a Windows Live ID.  Pure and Simple.  You can create personal folders, folders that are just accessible to your Live ID friends, or, like I've done in this case, public folders, accessible to all.  Cool hey?

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