Hi, my name is Max Herrmann, and I am part of the Windows Server Remote Desktop Services marketing team at Microsoft. Two years ago, Microsoft acquired Calista Technologies where I came from – a startup that set out to create technology that allows remote workers to enjoy the same rich user experience over a network as with a locally executing desktop. This experience includes full-fidelity video with 100% coverage for all media types and highly-synchronized audio, rich media support including Silverlight and 3D graphics, and of course Windows Aero. Today, Microsoft announced during its Desktop Virtualization Hour that Microsoft RemoteFX, a platform feature being developed for Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 will bring a rich, connected user experience to the virtual desktop market. So what is RemoteFX, and how are Calista and RemoteFX related? Just to be clear, RemoteFX is not a new standalone product from Microsoft. Rather, it describes a set of RDP technologies - most prominently graphics virtualization and the use of advanced codes - that are being added to Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1; these technologies are based on the IP that Microsoft acquired and continued to develop since acquiring Calista Technologies. So think of Microsoft RemoteFX as the ‘special sauce’ in Remote Desktop Services that users will be able to enjoy when they connect to their virtual and session-based desktops and applications over the network. With Microsoft RemoteFX, users will be able to work remotely in a Windows Aero desktop environment, watch full-motion video, enjoy Silverlight animations, and run 3D applications – all with the fidelity of a local-like performance when connecting over the LAN. Their desktops are actually hosted in the data center as part of a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) or a session virtualization environment (formerly known as Terminal Services). With RemoteFX, these users will be able to access their workspace via a standard RDP connection from a broad range of client devices – rich PCs, thin clients and very simple, low-cost devices. ...

This blog entry describes the support in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 for creating and managing Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) files as a native format, and booting a physical machine from a VHD file. Native VHD support helps our enterprise customers...

Last week we announced the Hyper-V Release Candidate and a week later, we're back again. This week, we're happy to provide the Hyper-V Manager MMC (RC release as well) for Vista SP1 (x86 & x64). What this allows you to do is install the Hyper-V Manager...

Virtualization Nation, I’ve had the pleasure of talking with customers in the last few months and the Hyper-V R2 reception has been nothing but unequivocally positive. Whether it’s been folks in small, medium or the enterprise, they appreciate the...

Hi, I’m Mike Neil, general manager of virtualization at Microsoft. It’s been a while since I’ve blogged here, but today’s post is worth a read. Ever since we released Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and Terminal Services, System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 and Microsoft App-V 4.5 last year, customers and partners have been getting huge value from server consolidation projects, have been able to increase business continuity at much lower costs than with VMware, and have decreased the time and cost required to deliver applications to end users. And while doing this, they’ve been able to use a familiar set of system management tools for both their virtualized and non-virtualized systems and applications across the datacenter and desktops. In fact, Chris from Kroll Factual Data wrote about his DR project on this blog last year. So in many ways I’m pleased that we’ve been able to help so many customers and partners break down the barriers to enterprise-wide virtualization. But until today there’s been one barrier, not product related, that we haven’t been able to overcome to meet customer and partner demand: the ability to run and support Red Hat Enterprise Linux within a guest VM on WS08 Hyper-V and Hyper-V Server 2008. For all of those who have emailed me, my colleagues and your Microsoft account teams and partners, I’m pleased to say that today is the first big step to delivering that support. Microsoft and Red Hat recently signed agreements to test and validate our server operating systems running on each other’s hypervisors. Customers with valid support agreements will be able to run these validated configurations and receive joint technical support for running Windows Server on Red Hat Enterprise virtualization, and for running Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V or Hyper-V Server 2008. You can see Red Hat’s news release here, and watch a public webcast [live and archived] discussing this news. ...

Today’s post is from Kathy Davies one of the excellent Hyper-V technical writers.  Enjoy!   Here is some preliminary documentation on planning for backing up Hyper-V VMs. It will eventually be made part of our Planning and Deployment guide on...

Virtualization Nation, Today is a really big day at Microsoft and more importantly for our customers . Both Windows Server 2008 R2 and Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 (our FREE standalone Hyper-V Server) have both been Released To Manufacturing (RTM...

Hi, my name is Manlio Vecchiet, and I am a director of product management on the Windows Server marketing team. I'm in New Orleans right now attending the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) , and wanted to update you on new licenses we’ll offer...

Apologies for a lack of a new post on the WMI scripts, look for a new double part post Wednesday morning. I was a bit busy with Hyper-V RC1! As of 2AM PST I am very happy to be the first (I think) to announce Hyper-V RC1 is now available for public...

Virtualization Nation, It's been a very good busy since the Windows Server 2008 R2 & Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 RTM announcements. We're pleased that these releases have been warmly met by our early adopter customers and industry analysts alike...

Virtualization Nation, It's been very busy in the world of Windows Server. With the launch of Windows Server 2008 R2 Release Candidate, Tech Ed and the announcement of several new Hyper-V R2 capabilities such as 64 logical processor support and processor...

Virtualization Nation, One common refrain we hear from you is that you appreciate the fact we’re driving down the costs of virtualization and adding more and more capabilities in the box such as Live Migration (LM) and High Availability (HA)...

Virtualization Nation, The Virtualization team is pleased to announce the availability of the Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 Release Candidate for download. Hyper-V Server 2008 R2, our free standalone hypervisor, represents our continued commitment...

Hi—I am Rob Emanuel from the Microsoft.com Operations team. For those of you who may not know what we do, our group designs, deploys, manages and sustains highly available, highly scalable Web and SQL systems for Microsoft for some of the largest corporate...

Hi everyone. I’m Fritz DeBrine, senior group manager for Server Technology & Enterprise Storage with Target Corporation. Here with me is Keith Narr, technical architect consultant in our Infrastructure Strategy & Architecture team. It’s...

Hi, I'm Edwin Yuen, a Senior Technical Product Manager at Microsoft's Integrated Virtualization team. In today's blog, I'd like to discuss another type of migration being added to System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2, Quick Storage Migration...

My name is Ronald Beekelaar. I'm a Microsoft MVP of Virtual Machine Technology, based in Amsterdam. I have my own consultancy firm, and since 2002 I focus on virtualization. At first, this was strictly VMware-oriented, but a few years later this included Microsoft's virtualization products as well. Since the first public beta of Hyper-V more than a year ago, I have done many presentations about Hyper-V at various events, and talked to a lot of customers about transitioning to Hyper-V. The people I talk to can be divided into two groups: they either have experience with Microsoft Virtual PC and Virtual Server, or they only know the VMware products and are just now looking into Hyper-V. However, for both groups, and despite very different opinions, there are five topics that always come up in discussions. Below is my list of the top-5 things you should know and understand about Hyper-V. ...

Virtualization Nation, In my last blog, Beware the VMware Memory Tax; Plus Good News for Hyper-V… , I responded to the flood of emails we’ve received about the VMware Memory Tax introduced in vSphere 5. We discussed the changes in the...

Daniel asked about the Linux integration components for Hyper-V. They've now reached RC2 status according to Mike Sterling, and are available from http://connect.microsoft.com/ Hang on – did you say RC2? Due to customer feedback from the beta version, we added a couple of additional features. · Mouse Support: Support for the synthetic mouse device has been added in beta. This new mouse support allows the mouse to move in and out of the window without having to use the CTRL-ALT-LEFTARROW key command to break out. · Fastpath Boot Support: Support for faster single disk configurations has been added to the RC2 release. Boot devices now take advantage of the storage VSC to provide enhanced performance. We’ve reached RTM on the hypercall adapter, Linux implementation of VMBus, and the network and storage VSC. Patrick...

We are really excited to announce the availability of the Hyper-V Linux Integration Services for Linux Version 2.1. This release marks yet another milestone in providing a comprehensive virtualization platform to our customers. Customers who have a heterogeneous...

====================================================== Preamble: The point of this series, and the spirit in which it is written, is to take a holistic approach at the issues facing our customers, discuss the complexities with regard to memory management...

Windows Server 2012 is generally available for evaluation and purchase by all customers around the world. Additionally, there is great news for organizations that are looking for a way to migrate virtual machines hosted on VMware vSphere to the Hyper...

Virtualization Nation, Generally speaking, I like to focus my blogs on what we’re doing at Microsoft regarding Hyper-V virtualization and pretend the rest of the Internet doesn't exist. However, there’s some buzz on the web about a topic that I feel...

It’s Christmas in July… As you may have heard, Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V was released today, and is now available to download . July 8 th will mark Hyper-V’s Release to Windows Update . You may remember when we released the first Hyper-V beta , it...

  With the release of Beta of Service Pack 1 for Windows Server 2008 R2 a number of you have asked about Service Pack 1 for the standalone Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 , and whether the new capabilities of Dynamic Memory and RemoteFX will be...