VIRTUALBOY BLOG
For those of you want to learn a little bit more about some of the nitty gritty details around Hyper-V, like what actually happens when the Hyper-V role is enabled in Windows Server 2008 R2, or what happens when a snapshot is deleted, this Hyper-V R2 component architecture poster could be of use to you. If you’re lucky enough to have a whopping printer, and some massive paper, you could print it out, and view it in all it’s glory, and heck, even put it on your wall if the mood takes you, but for the rest of us, we’ll have to stick with the PDF on the screen. There are a total of 8 sections on the poster, covering the following aspects
People usually get caught out with networking, so that’s a useful section to pay attention to, especially as it goes into detail on the differences types of virtual networking and also the differences with and without VMQ and the benefits this brings. The configuration of storage is also covered in some detail. All in all, a pretty useful reference!
You can get hold of the poster here.
If you’re a Microsoft Partner, and you currently sell/deploy, or are thinking about selling/deploying either System Center Essentials 2010, or Data Protection Manager 2010 into mid-size businesses, then Redmond Channel Partner Magazine have published a very useful 8-page document that may just be up your street. It’s got a wide range of information, along with a number of interviews with key stakeholders in the technology, such as David Mills, Senior Product Manager, Jason Buffington, Senior Technical Product Manager, and Dave Sobel, CEO of Evolve Technologies to name but a few. There’s also a 2 page interview with Zane Adam, a General Manager for Virtualisation at Microsoft, who shares his thoughts on virtualisation and management in the mid-market, and how Microsoft can deliver the integrated IT solution to address the challenges seen by businesses in this segment.
If you’re interested in getting hold of the article, simply head on over to Redmond Channel Partner Online, register, and you’ll then have access to the article for free.
If you’re interested in more information around the combination of SCE and DPM, there’s a useful blog post over on the System Center blog, here and also, more specifically here.
I admit, it’s been a while. 28th April to be precise, which, in my book, is far too long. For those of you who showed concern, it was much appreciated, but I’d like to reassure you, I hadn’t moved role, left Microsoft, or been struck down with illness. On the contrary, I’d just been very busy indeed, as we roll up to our end of year. That said, you have to go back to December 2007 when I last failed to post at least one article within a month, so it’s a good job I’m here today!
May has been an absolute whirlwind. A series of events, meetings and other Partner-related activities has meant blog-time has been at an all time low, but that doesn’t stop my ‘to-blog’ folder mounting up and mounting up…
53 items, excluding this one, to talk about! It’s going to be a while before I get through that lot, and by the time I do, some of it will no doubt be out of date, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.
The eagle-eyed among you will no doubt have noticed that the blogs hosted through MSDN and TechNet have recently undergone a bit of a facelift as we upgraded our blogging platform to a newer version. At first, I thought this was going to be painful, but I was reassured all content would be brought across to the new platform without any loss. They were right. Well, apart from the fact that the CSS overrides I’d successfully used on the old virtualboy blog, didn’t really have the same effect on the new virtualboy blog, so I had to start again on that one, but, and I hope you agree, it’s looking better than ever, with more flexibility from my side to boot.
Firstly, I can happily create my own widgets, and drag modules around the page to style them how I like, which makes simple customisations much easier. I have more control over what exists in these modules too. Sure, I had control over my right-hand-column before, but the new platform makes it much easier to enable me to have control, and set the styling how I see fit. I’m no web guru (or should that be, master?) so anything that makes my life easier is a good thing.
One of the first things you may notice is the inclusion of a small, well, advertisement I guess, for the sister site, virtualboy tv:
Hopefully, it’s inclusion will make it easier for anyone to make their way over there, should they want to investigate some of the video content that’s available around Microsoft virtualisation. Again, I’m sure I could have done this before, on the old platform, but the new platform just makes it easier.
You’ll also notice that you’re now in control of how you view the content on the homepage:
If you take a look at the screengrab above, you’ll see right at the top left, you have 2 controls. the first, is list view, and shrinks down the content on the homepage into bitesize chunks, so the page loads a bit quicker, and if you’re interested in a post, as usual, you can click the link and read it in it’s entirety. This is the default setting on my blog. Alternatively, if you prefer, you can expand this out by using the button next to it, in order to see all the posts in their entirety on the home page. You also have the option to sort the content in a couple of different ways.
One of the biggest things I’ve noticed with this new platform however, is the integration with Windows Live ID’s, which opens up a whole new content-sharing opportunity, by unifying the authentication process of the blogs. So, if you’ve got a Live ID, make sure you sign in when accessing the blogs, as you’ll be able to start to build up a repository of content that you’re interested in. If you check out mine:
You’ll see that I have a number of tabs, ranging from profile, which includes posts that I’ve marked as ‘favourites’ across any of the TechNet and MSDN blogs. For me, that’s very cool, as I can see something that I’m interested in on say, the Virtualisation team blog, mark is as a favourite, and in the future, I can just go to my profile and find it. I guess it’s an alternative to favourites in your internet browser, but hey, it’s a nice feature!
You can also start to make friends with fellow bloggers, which then starts to contribute towards your activity tab.
All in all, I really like the new platform. I expect there to be a few niggling bugs as we go through the next few weeks. The fact that the search bar at the top of my blog currently searches across the whole of TechNet rather than just my blog is one they already know about, so hopefully there won’t be too many more!