Have you ever attempted to access a folder that you didnt have permission to? Are you an administrator who is concerned about security principals without the proper permissions seeing the names of files and folders they dont have permissions to? SP1 and...

It's with The Scan in mind that I decided to piece together the following quilt of 64bit industry news from this week....

Hi. Patrick O’Rourke here – I am also a Product Manager over in the Windows Server Division. I’m writing because Cactus league isn’t in full bloom yet, and I’m still waiting for Gary and Bob to be fired so I can be interested in the NHL again. I was watching...

Managing the rollout of our x64 editions has been an amazing experience—not to mention juggling launch duties with becoming a father of three. I find myself working at the oddest times, and trying to squeeze as much as I can from every spare minute. Such...

As a follow-up to my last post regarding the official name of Windows Server code name "Longhorn", I thought it might be interesting for people to see some other names that have been touted during our brainstorming meetings, but that will never see the...

Today we announced Windows Essential Business Server as the official name for Windows Server codename "Centro," our upcoming IT solution designed for mid-sized organizations. We unveiled details about the product, available here , as well as an initial...

Every now and again we'll use this blog to correct errors in the public domain, mainly by journalists or analyst trying to do a good job but who come up short on fact checking due to time constraints (yes I'm being nice). Of course some of these errors are more obvious than others. The latest form of error pertains to Hyper-V. Somehow both Greg in Australia and Mario in New York believe that Hyper-V is built on Xen [cough]. Hyper-V, the new beta feature in Windows Server 2008 RC1, running on top of Xen [cough-cough]. Maybe they're confused over our July 2006 interop announcement with XenSource? Or maybe they take too serious the work MS Research did during the development of Xen 1.x by developing a port of Windows XP to Xen? Or maybe they're working with Oliver Stone, who is exposing another cover-up? Can you imagine GPL code running in the Windows kernal ... now that'd be something. Mario and Greg - a picture is worth a thousand words. I hope the following two diagrams help you. ...

Here we are at the RC milestone of Windows Server 2008 R2 , which usually indicates that we've hit the home stretch and we're marching straight ahead to RTM. Generally that's nothing new, but get set to smile, because this time we're not just marching...

I’m really pleased to say that the release candidate of Hyper-V is available for download today. You can read the announcement and Jeff’s more detailed post. This milestone is important to the hundreds of customers and partners in the early adopter programs, and those of you trialing Hyper-V on your own, because it’s feature complete, better performing than the beta, and you’ll have a better experience using it. Reports from the Hyper-V early adopter programs have matched some of the third-party reviews and first looks, with comments such as: · “External deployments have exceeded Beta coverage goals” · “External TAP deployments have increased significantly” Amongst the early adopter customers, the three most common Windows Server 2008 roles run within Hyper-V are IIS, application server and Terminal Services. The four most deployed Microsoft applications are SQL Server 2005 and 2008, Exchange Server and Forefront, while more than half of the customers are running an AV/security application, nearly 50% are running a backup appliance at this point, and around 75% of the customers are running Hyper-V with some attached storage. At the same time we’re starting to see more and more and more ISV partners announce plans to support Hyper-V. So overall we’re seeing good enterprise uptake of Hyper-V. I was in France and the Nordics two weeks ago attending launch events for Windows Server, SQL Server and Visual Studio. Lots of the attendees had already started testing the beta of Hyper-V. Several people remarked that they were impressed with early testing of the multi-site clustering capabilities for remote disaster recovery. Beyond the technical capabilities, total cost of ownership was another hot topic. Given that Hyper-V is a role within Windows Server 2008 – the beta of Hyper-V was included with Windows Server 2008 – customers attending the launch were looking forward to having these server consolidation and DR capabilities built into Windows Server 2008. I did have to remind several folks that Hyper-V will be available with three, x64 editions of Windows Server 2008 (the versions of Windows Server 2008 without Hyper-V are $28 less). And I often noted our work on cross-platform interoperability with Citrix/Xen, Novell and Sun, and that we’re opening up APIs to the community. ...

Announcing the Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT) for Windows Vista SP1! Do you remember ADMINPAK.MSI? This has been a staple for many IT Admins for many years. RSAT is an update to ADMINPAK.MSI for the WS08 administration tools to run on Windows...

Hi, Manlio Vecchiet here. I'm director of product management on the Windows Server marketing team, focused on Windows Server networking, terminal services and VDI. I'm in Barcelona right now attending Microsoft TechEd EMEA conference. Whether you are one of the many IT Pros that have successfully deployed Terminal Services over the past decade, or whether your company is considering virtualization technologies to implement a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), or even if you are new to the concept of a centralized, remote desktop - this will matter to you. Today we are introducing Windows Server 2008 Remote Desktop Services – the next generation of server tools and platform that allow you to accelerate and extend centralized desktop and application deployments to any device. So, what exactly is ‘Remote Desktop Services’? ...

For the first time in the two companies history, Microsoft and Cray have teamed up to offer a powerful mix of what each company does best - - the Cray CX1! What is the CX1, you ask? It’s a compact supercomputer running Windows HPC Server 2008 , that’s...

It might seem like a distant memory now, but when we launched Windows Server 2008 back in February, we made a big deal about the next-generation Web platform included with it: Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.0 . We spent a lot of time talking about...

If you visited the new Microsoft Web Platform site yesterday, you would have noticed that we’ve performed a radical overhaul of the site, with a fresh new look and articles and media content aggregated from popular external and Microsoft sites. This new...

As we ramp up for the largest enterprise launch in Microsoft history , Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008, this is a great time to share some additional big news. In August of 2007, when Microsoft and Cisco made an announcement...

In the course of talking to many Microsoft partners and customers, the Windows Small Business Server team has learned that there are sometimes misperceptions about the product, in many cases based on experiences with the earlier versions of SBS. In hopes...

Whenever I work with the Windows Server “8” storage, I get a huge smile as I think about what customers are going to be able to do and the excellent engineering that went into the features. Whether you’re using a block-based storage...

I've recently seen some articles that have been speculating that we will be including "Monad" in the upcoming release to Windows Server Longhorn, and that we have removed it from the Windows Vista beta 1. I just wanted to take a minute and comment on...

It's been a tough week for MySQL....

We have received overwhelming customer and partner feedback requesting that Virtual Server 2005 be part of MSDN. We have listened, and as such, effective today Virtual Server 2005 Standard Edition will be available as part of MSDN Enterprise, and Universal...

Guy Haycock here - SBS Product Manager. While many of you will be following the news and excitement around the release of Windows Server 2003 R2 today , we wanted to be sure that you saw the related news on Windows Small Business Server 2003 R2 (SBS 2003...

Today Microsoft released to the Web the final version of Virtual Server 2005 R2 service pack 1. Available at no charge, this service pack adds support for hardware-assisted virtualization and improved backup services and compatibility. A new feature to the service pack is Volume Shadow Services, which provides improved support for backup and disaster recovery. Instead of scheduling downtime for backing up each virtual machine individually, you can now take snapshot backups of physical machines, with no downtime. Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 also supports host clustering, which offers customers minimal downtime depending on the speed of storage and amount of memory assigned to a virtual machine. Host clustering is storage agnostic, comes with Windows Server 2003 Enterprise or Datacenter editions, and is a high-availability solution for both planned and unplanned downtime. And with System Center Virtual Machine Manager, downloadable today as a beta 2 version, customers will have tools for high availability migration. I'm told there's been more than 5,500 downloads of the product in the past 30 days. Virtual Server 2005 R2 service pack 1 adds support for Novell SLES 10 and Solaris 10 as a guest operating system; bringing the total to 11 non-Windows operating systems supported on Virtual Server 2005 R2. In less than one year, there have been more than 15,000 downloads of the Linux add-ins for Virtual Server 2005 R2. We're also seeing uptake amongst hosting service providers. I'm told there are over 5,000 companies delivering hosted services to their customers using Microsoft products today. These services range from web hosting to high-end IT applications. Even Microsoft IT is using Virtual Server to offer utility computing. Another example is RackForce, which spends at least 22% less time on support in March 2007 than it did in late 2005. Using Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1, RackForce mirrors a customer’s hosting environment on a backup server, and then, if a physical server fails, restore the customer’s site on another server in minutes. RackForce also uses virtual servers as “hot standby” backups that can boot instantly and take over for a physical server that experiences an outage. RackForce also is evaluating System Center Virtual Machine Manager to manage many physical and virtual servers, consolidate underused physical servers, and provision new virtual machines. If you're a hosting service prover, you should know that over five years ago Microsoft launched a subscription-based licensing program called the Service Provider License Agreement, which gives you a way to license MS products on a monthly basis. Patrick ...

Late on Wednesday, as part of our commitment to deliver regular updates of Windows Server "Longhorn" to our communities, we released the April 2007 Community Technology Preview of Windows Server "Longhorn". This marks the last CTP we will release before...

Interesting news today for large orgs with branch offices looking for cost effective implementation of the BOIS architecture . First announced by VP Andy Lees at World Wide Partner Conference in Boston , Branch Promo got its needed update to ISA...

We constantly strive to reduce the steps required for you to get your job done. One of the reasons Windows Server 2012 is a such great release is that we spent so much time listening to our customers and understanding their scenarios and concerns. When...