Robert Larson, co-author of the Virtual Server 2005 R2 Resource Kit, has joined the blogosphere. Gate posts look promising, for example:

Virtual Server COM API - VMTask usage and error handling in VBscript

How do you route between Virtual Networks? 4 options

Bloggy goodness for us.

New in the download center, enjoy:

SQL Server 2005 Best Practices Analyzer (July 2007) The SQL Server 2005 Best Practices Analyzer gathers data from Microsoft Windows and SQL Server configuration settings. The Best Practice Analyzer uses a predefined list of SQL Server 2005 recommendations and best practices to determine if there are potential issues in the database environment.

Virtual Machine Remote Control Client Plus This tool enables management of Virtual Server 2005 by combining configuration management and remote control of Virtual Server and virtual machines from a single Windows application.

Microsoft Web Sites and Services Management Pack for MOM 2005

The Free Malware Removal Starter Kit, the newest Solution Accelerator from Microsoft, provides free, tested guidance to help you combat malware attacks and restore infected systems—so users can safely get back to work. The kit shows you how to use the Windows Preinstallation Environment (Windows PE) to discover malware by performing a thorough offline scan of your computers, uncovering malware that may be hiding in the operating system. And once malware is located and identified, it can be quickly removed from infected PCs with a number of free anti-malware tools, like the Malicious Software Removal Tool from Microsoft.

Related Resources

Do you have the right versions of VM Additions on all your VMs? Here's a handy script to check and report:

 

Set oVS = WScript.CreateObject("VirtualServer.Application")

Set oVmCollection = oVS.VirtualMachines

 

For each oVm in oVmCollection

If oVm.State = 5 then

                wscript.echo oVm.Name & ", " & oVm.GuestOS.AdditionsVersion

else

                wscript.echo oVm.Name & ", n/a"

End If

 

Next

Netflix stock took a downturn, and the website has been offline for the last 12 hours...hrm...

Before the boat sinks, I grabbed my queue and history to learn the new Office bells and whistles for data mining. Here's what I learned in about my family entertainment choices in about 10 minutes:

25% Drama
16% Foreign
13% Thrillers
10% Television
10% Documentary
6% Music & Musicals
6% Sci-Fi & Fantasy
6% Independent
4% Horror
3% Special Interest

In 12 months we watched 212 DVDs, at $20 a month that's less than a $1 per DVD. Seems like we got a good deal.

Oh, and if you are used to using the sorting and charting tools in Excel 2003, expect to spend some time figuring out where all those features are in the new Excel 2007. Perhaps it is much easier for the first-time charter, but I found it annoying that my habitual right-click options had moved around.

What's in your queue?

The Homeserver blog announces that Q has reached RTM - I was one of the 1K internal early adopters who kept Microsoft's best kept secret, and wish the Homeserver team all the best for launch.

Kudos.

Microsoft IT's Devin Murray is interviewed here on the use of VMM inside Microsoft during the beta. Microsoft IT runs the compute utliity on more than 17,000 servers that provide computing power to 550 buildings across 98 countries from the data center. They use the SPEC benchmark as the raw computing metric in the business conversation. For example, you want to buy a platform with 200 compute units, but you're replacing a system with 40 units that you're not really using fully. You're using 20% of your existing system, but you want to upgrade by 400%. Microsoft IT is changing the conversation to why you want to replace the system and what you're trying to do.

Microsoft IT has ~ 1K production and 500 development applications running on around 70 hosts. The average consolidation ratio is 8 VMs to 1 physical server in the production, and about 16 to 1 in test/dev environments. Their goal..."all new applications to go into the virtual environment..."

 

Waiting for a class to begin, cleaning out my favorites (why don't they archive themselves if they haven't been used in N days? Seems like they should be self-grooming) and forgot that I never blogged this ultra-cool site from the british library that allows you to play with books on the interweb, like the codex arundel - check it out. Work Safe but a resource hog - try from a high-speed connection with good graphics, CPU and memory :-)

A colleague compiled this list of wiki resources for those of you wondering where to start, enjoy:

·         Wikia.com – (free) www.wikia.com/wiki/Start_a_new_Wikia

·         Blogtronix – www.blogtronix.com

·         Stikipad (Rails) – http://stikipad.com/

·         PBWiki (PHP) – http://pbwiki.com/

·         SocialText (Perl, Fee-based) – http://socialtext.com/

·         Confluence (Java) - http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/hosted.jsp

·         Wikispaces - http://www.wikispaces.com/

·         Wetpaint - http://www.wetpaint.com/

 See also:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wiki_farms

Open Source at Microsoft has a new weblaunch today. IT Pros will want to watch this site for Microsoft's next steps in building bridges that help them do their jobs.

See also:

Microsoft Research (MSR) and the Open Source Software Lab at Microsoft have partnered with Penn State University to study usability design in open source projects. This summer, the lab is hosting a PhD intern looking at human computer interaction and computer usability at Microsoft and in open source. Read the PDF (258 KB)

·         Port 25 – Open Source Software Lab at Microsoft (Will also host a blog from Bill Hilf in the morning)

·         Codeplex – Microsoft’s open source project hosting site

·         Shared Source – Microsoft’s set of programs for sharing source code with customers, partners, governments, researchers, etc.

·         John Lam’s Blog – MS Developer, good blogs on IronRuby, Dynamic Language Runtime, Silverlight, etc.

·         Microsoft Open Source ISV Forum – offer for OSS ISVs through Microsoft Partner Program

I have been asked to participate in working group that is looking into several areas of interest around the future of content publishing at Microsoft in a crowdsourcing world. You can read one take about that world in the Wired magazine article The Rise of Crowdsourcing.

Any feedback on the MSDN Wiki? Should TechNet follow what MSDN has done here?

One interesting comment on Soma's blog announcement to kick-start the discussion:

Check out new MSD division head Brad Anderson's blog post on the Windows blog.

Leave comments here about the next division head you'd like to see start bloggging.