Free-as-in-beer Codeplex help for Hyper-V admins.
PowerShell Management Library for Hyper-V
A project to provide a PowerShell management library for Hyper-V
Hyper-V Web Manager
Hyper-V Web Manager (HVWM) is a web-based management utility for Microsoft Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V role. The web manager will eventually give you most of the functionality that is available in the Microsoft Management Console for Hyper-V. The project is not an official Microsoft project and is not developed by Microsoft employees.
Hyper-V Server 2008 Local Management scripts / UI
Hyper-V Server 2008 is based on Server Core and has no local management possible. One must have a second machine (either Windows Vista SP1 or Windows Server 2008). This project intends to develop various scripts and put them together in to a small user interface for easier / local management of hyper-v server. Most of the functionality (except VM console access / Guest Install) achieved using Hyper-V Management MMC will be mimiced here.
Hyper-V Powershell Snap in
A Powershell snap-in to access and manager Hyper-V Servers (locally or remotely)
Hyper-V Machine Recovery Tool
Small tool to recover/import Hyper-V machines which were not exported. This will include snapshots related to the Hyper-V machine.
Meet the team behind codeplex in this C9 vid: http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Glucose/Hanselminutes-on-9-Inside-CodePlexcom/
10 modules to help supercharge your Windows PowerShell scripting. The PowerShellPack lets you write user interfaces in PowerShell script, manage RSS feeds, schedule operating system tasks, and much more.
Here’s what you get:
WPK Create rich user interfaces quick and easily from Windows PowerShell. Think HTA, but easy. Over 600 scripts to help you build quick user interfaces
TaskScheduler List scheduled tasks, create or delete tasks
FileSystem Monitor files and folders, check for duplicate files, and check disk space
IsePack Supercharge your scripting in the Integrated Scripting Environment with over 35 shortcuts
DotNet Explore loaded types, find commands that can work with a type, and explore how you can use PowerShell, DotNet and COM together
PSImageTools Convert, rotate, scale, and crop images and get image metadata
PSRSS Harness the FeedStore from PowerShell
PSSystemTools Get Operating System or Hardware Information
PSUserTools Get the users on a system, check for elevation, and start-processaadministrator
PSCodeGen Generates PowerShell scripts, C# code, and P/Invoke
I was a ha-yuge Laurie Anderson fan in the 80s. I’ve seen her perform live more than I’ve seen any other artist, United Sates a couple of times, and Mister Heartbreak twice. Think that defines me as a fan.
“Holy smokes, looks like some kind of guest/host relationship to me…”
“Let X = X, ya know?”
The way she chanted her lyrics opened up worlds of meaning for me. It wasn’t a Mondegreen, because I believe she knew I would hear:
“It
It aches
It takes one
It takes 1 2
It takes 1, to no-1”
Ironic I now work in I.T.
She’s a gifted artist, teacher, inspiration. Genius.
I thought of her tonight as I listened to an old recording I’d made of a conversation many years ago with Dialog Coach Andrew Jack. Among other things, he’s responsible for the dialect work in the Lord of the Rings.
Gifted artist, teacher, inspiration. Genius.
“language is a virus”
Books are a medium of transmission.
Increasingly, so are sound recordings. We are missing something really important in this whole podcasting/webcasting/zunecasting thing…
According to Text2Go:
The average worker in the US spends 46 minutes a day commuting. That's almost 200 hours or over 8 days a year wasted. Enough time to listen to
I am getting more and more enamored of listening to Narrator read text-to-speech in Win 7 for stuff that I do not need to focus on intently. For those studying dialects, the different accent voices, like those you can hear at http://www.text2go.com/voices.aspx is fantastic. You just load the screen reader with the appropriate accent with the actual dialog you have to say, then listen/repeat after the bot till fluent – instant electronic coach.
Well, at least it’ll get you started till you can arrange to get with Andrew.
Need to convert a running computer to a .VHD? Use Disk2Vhd, released yesterday.
Disk2vhd is a free-as-in-beer Sysinternals utility you can use to create VHD (Virtual Hard Disk - Microsoft’s Virtual Machine disk format) versions of physical disks. You can run Disk2vhd on a system that’s online.
“Disk2vhd uses Windows’ Volume Snapshot capability, introduced in Windows XP, to create consistent point-in-time snapshots of the volumes you want to include in a conversion. You can even have Disk2vhd create the VHDs on local volumes, even ones being converted (though performance is better when the VHD is on a disk different than ones being converted).”
Did I mention is was free-as-in-beer?
Download Disk2vhd (704 KB) at: http://download.sysinternals.com/Files/Disk2vhd.zip
Check out the newly released PowerShell cmdlet reference material at:
Next up:
Want more? Have feedback? Leave comments.
The perf team blog this morning has an excellent summation of What’s New in Remote Desktop Services
The free VHD program now includes Windows 7 free-as-in-beer VHD for your testing, hobby and POC pleasure.
The fine print:
The customer-focused information security team have released the free-as-in-beer Risk Tracker 1.0 on Codeplex.
This sample app (did I mention it was free?) helps the Microsoft Information Security Team track information security risk across the company. They provide you with the source code, for free. Risk Tracker serves as an example of how to build a custom security application using the Connected Information Security Framework. Download it today (for free!) and use it to:
Check out the Edge video on Risk Tracker.
Dunbar’s number is said to be about 150. The new book Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape our Lives, advocates, among other things, that human nature will correct Wikiality to more closely reflect reality.
Now, there are those who claim that Microsoft employees work in a Redmond Reality-Distortion Field, but in the spirit of truthiness, most of Microsoft works waaay outside Redmond. And we have anthropologists on staff. 2 of em. And our tribal groupings are usually well far fewer than 150 people.
In any case, what’s your thought about wikis in re: IT? Leave comments.
If 150 of us agree – maybe something will happen!
Microsoft IT General Manager Jim Dubois shares info about virtualization inside Microsoft in this short (4 minute) video.
According to my teenager, “twitter is creepy, its just stalking. I mean the button you push says follow”! Duh!.” Yet, some in the business press in the US say Microsoft should buy Twitter.
Hrmm… Microsoft advertises job listings there, Bing integrates tweets, and there are colleagues I respect happily building community there.
So what is UA for IT Pros to do? Conversations continue inside Windows Server UA about the best use of our time as far as engaging with community is concerned?
What are your thoughts? Leave feedback.
And then consider:
Try wait, you could consider those links first, THEN leave comments. Yeah…that’s probably better…
In the beginning, there was blogs.msdn.com. IT Pro bloggers posted there, because there was no place for IT Pros to blog. Then there was blogs.technet.com.
Looks like the devs are leading the way again with the recent update on mdsn.com of “community stuff”. For example, they’ve now got a very nice plateful of links called “Networkwide” (warning: they have ads, IT Pros tell us they don’t like ads – I always thought devs don’t like them either, but the folks at TN/MSDN say they’ve received no negative feedback since launching ads…)
Would you like to see “Networkwide” on TN? Leave feedback and I’ll forward.
Bing.com now searches twitter. Interesting way to keep tabs on the twitterverse chatter about *things you care what people are twittering about*.
For example:
This is not the image search for Tony Soper you were looking for…
Doing a Bing image search on yourself can be eye-opening. For instance, I once worked with this guy (great actor and human being BTW, check out his current TV show)
And I currently work with this guy – also a fine human being that is a pleasure to work with, check out his blog
I’ve used various obscure but meaningful-to-me images for Tony Soper as avatars across the interwebs, including
and and (my fav and current).
Just to clarify, I’m not the ornithologist, and I once looked like this…
And this blog post - aside from sweeping my pics folder clear of images of Tony Soper, is designed to see if I can modify those Bing image search results a bit…
Windows XP Mode is ready for download.
Read about Windows XP Mode modes of operation over on the VPC blog: http://blogs.technet.com/windows_vpc/archive/2009/08/27/three-modes-of-windows-xp-mode.aspx
Yesterday I blogged about the awesome new bing search for twitter. You don’t need to follow the tweetstorm to know by now that Windows 7 was released today.
I’m with James on this one: today is A uniquely good day to be at Microsoft.
Plus, last night my teenager turned me to on a fabu new pizza place near our home: Flying Squirrel Pizza – their music library looks like this:
People who bring in a mixtape (cassettes only) get 10 percent off their total order. If your tape is deemed good enough, it may even get played at the restaurant…
According to this article.
John shares how to hack your 12V drill to power you Zune speakers.
He also tells How to Detect The Virtualization Layer From Within A Guest.
There is a fascinating new time-waster at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/social/, including this gem for Firefly fans…
I’ll be in my bunk…
Scientists in Switzerland map the human brain on hallucinogens. Measured this way, all tripper’s brains look the same, yet internally, each drug-takers experience is different and personal…
Warning: clicking the link subjects you to a short commercial before vid plays. Can anyone tell me how to skip the commercial?
Ben’s blog post lays out all the background and details on import/export of VMs in Windows Server 2008 R2. Soumya’s blog post gives a couple of scripts showing how to do a config-only export,a nd a script for importing it.
There’s a new video showing How to Deploy Windows XP Mode. Requisite see alsos:
Others who downloaded Window XP Mode IT Pro Deployment Video also downloaded:
In Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V R2, when a running or a saved state virtual machine is migrated to another virtualization server (also called “host”), the destination server may have a processor with a different set of features. An operating system or application that attempts to execute CPU features discovered when the virtual machine was started on a "source" machine, but not present on the destination (called "destination") machine, will cause a virtual machine migration failure.
The Hyper-V R2 virtualization platform prevents the migration of a virtual machine that will fail in this way because the processors of the "source" and "destination" servers are not compatible. However, this check for compatibility only happens at the time of virtual machine migration, not when the server joins a cluster.
Windows Server 2008 R2 includes a capability called “Processor compatibility mode” so that you can avoid the situation where virtual machines cannot be migrated due to processor incompatibilities. However, if you do not want to turn this capability on for each of your virtual machines, you can use the free-as-in-beer Virtual Machine Migration Test Wizard to identify which machines in your environment are compatible.
You can use the wizard before you have clustered any hosts to show you pools of servers that are processor compatible. The wizard covers four use scenarios:
Want to read the doc before downloading the wizard? See http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/VMMTestWizard/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=3326.
Note: You’ll run this wizard on a server, pre-reqs include:
You can watch a video with Dinesh explaining/demonstrating the Virtual Machine Migration Test Wizard here.
Josh Barnard on the High Performance Computing team at Microsoft has a new video out explaining Job Templates in HPC. Click the image to watch the video on msn video.
You can read the white paper at Windows HPC Server 2008 Job Templates.
The Security Compliance Management Toolkit Series provides organizations with an end-to-end solution to help them plan, deploy, and monitor security baselines of Windows operating systems and 2007 Microsoft Office applications. Recent updates include new security baselines for Windows® 7, BitLocker Drive Encryption, and Windows Internet Explorer 8.
Did I mention, free-as-in-beer?
Includes:
The new TechNet Script Center Gallery has a useful RSS feed of most active submitted scripts. This help me find two useful ones:
There’s also a bunch I’ve uploaded for Hyper-V/Hyper-V Server and VPC/VS:
And don’t forget jamesone’s excellent PowerShell management Library for Hyper-V. Also free, as-in-beer.
You will also want to look at the Windows Management Framework: PS 2.0, WinRM 2.0 and BITS 4.0.