Dwayne's Blog : Virtualization

Windows 7 & XPM

dwaynef — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 15:16:00 GMT

Despite running Windows 7 for almost a year now, and the OS going to RTM sometime ago, Windows 7 only goes GA (general availability, i.e. on the shelf) on Thursday 22nd this week. Hopefully everyone has taken a look at this point, really good improvement, and especially if you are looking at low end PCs like netbooks (my S10 & NC10's are doing well at this point).

There has been a lot of talk about Windows 7 XP mode and the ability to run an underlying XP/Vista VM so you can run applications (like IE 6) that won't run under 7. It does require a 64bit OS and hardware that supports virtualization. More info here

One interesting piece that no one I've seen mentioned is Sysinternals (Sysinternals is now owned by Microsoft) has a P2V Tool for free that would allow you to P2V your previous desktop (or Server), you then could do a fresh install of Windows 7, and load your previous OS under XPMode and either access previous apps or the entire desktop as required.

P2V Tool here

Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 & Hyper-V R2 RTM'ed !!!

dwaynef — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 00:12:00 GMT

So big news today, 3 major products went RTM all at the same time, there will be lots of news and more authorative blogs out there, so I'll just throw in a few pointers.

Windows 7, the next desktop OS (replaces Vista), if you haven't downloaded the beta or RC yet, I strongly encourage you to pull down one of the trial copies when they become available. Very fast, very responsive, actually runs on less resources/hardware than it's predecessor. I'm presently running my Samsung S10 Netbook (1.6 Atom Proc, comes with 1Gb Ram) with Windows 7 and Office 2010 Technical Preview (another blog post) and it's great.

Windows Server 2008 R2 (note this is what people thought would be called Win 7 Server, it's not, it's called R2). Big change here is the great new functionality in Hyper-V (Live Migration, Clustered Shared Volumes) as well as support for some great better together functionality with Win 7 (Direct Access, Branch Cache, Bitlocker to go)

Hyper-V R2, Free Hypervisor with High Availability and Live Migration capability!!!

Really good blog from the Virtualization Team detailing all the Hypervisor improvements as well as regularly updating and answering questions/statements about Microsoft Virtualization, good read here

Windows Server Team announcement here

Windows 7 Team announcement here

Release Candidates everywhere!

dwaynef — Wed, 06 May 2009 18:18:00 GMT

So the last week has had a lot of news about the public availability of release candidates for Hyper-V R2 Server, Windows 2008 R2 Server and the Windows 7 Client operating systems. They were initially available for Technet and MSDN subscribers, but now are public, see links below.

Hyper-V Server R2 RC

Windows Server 2008 R2 RC

Windows 7 RC

Hyper-V Server is a standalone free product, details here .The highlight features for the R2 release will be the inclusion of High Availability and Live Migration features (while still remaining a free product).

20-Part Webcast Series on Microsoft Virtualization Solutions

dwaynef — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 16:40:00 GMT

Yung Chou has put up a great blog with a link to 20 Technet Webcasts starting on January 14th around Microsoft Virtualization.

His blog here Also some great free Elearning content here

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 Launched!

dwaynef — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 17:10:00 GMT

SCVMM 2008 has been released, for those not familiar SCVMM is Microsoft's Virtual Machine Manager, it is how you would manage your virtualization environments in enterprise scenarios, includes the ability to manage physical, virtual and applications, see the official release statement below

Microsoft is pleased to announce the release to manufacturing (RTM) of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 – the next generation of Microsoft’s solution for managing the virtualized infrastructure. A key member of System Center – a centralized, enterprise-class suite of data center management products -- Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) 2008 enables customers to configure and deploy new virtual machines and centrally manage physical and virtual infrastructure from one console. New to this version of VMM is multi-vendor virtualization platform support, Performance and Resource Optimization (PRO) and enhanced support of “high availability” host clusters, among other new features

SCVMM site Evaluation download Virtualization Team Blog Datasheet download

More Hyper-V stuff

dwaynef — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 22:22:00 GMT

More updates around Microsoft's Hypervisor based virtualization offerings, bit of a duplicate post (to the CI team blog), and I have previously mentioned the Hyper-V updates earlier, just adding in the new Hyper-V Server info ...

Hyper-V Server has been released, it is a seperate product from the Hyper-V included in Windows Server 2008. It is available for download now (for free), link here. Table below illustrates the differences

Virtualization Needs	Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008	Windows Server 2008 Standard	Windows Server 2008 Enterprise	Windows Server 2008 Datacenter
Server Consolidation
Test and Development
Mixed OS Virtualization (Linux and Windows)
Local Graphical User Interface
High Availability—Clustering
Quick Migration
Large Memory Support (Host OS) > 32 GB RAM
Support for > 4 Processors (Host OS)
Ability to Add Additional Server Roles
Virtualization Rights per Server License	Each VM Guest requires a server license	1 Physical + 1 VM	1 Physical + 4 VMs	1 Physical + Unlimited VMs

So, if you don't want to scroll down to the early piece, info here -> There has also been an update to the Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 to allow for 192 supported guest VMs on a single host as well as support for upcoming 6 core CPUs among other things. KB Article and download package

Free Online Microsoft Courses

dwaynef — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 16:39:00 GMT

Microsoft's learning normally has a couple of free courses, especially with some of the newer products. List available right now includes a lot of stuff on Virtualization (Hyper-V, App-V, SCVMM), SQL, Windows 2008

Training for free, how can you go wrong?

List of free courses here note you can subscribe to RSS for more course release information

Hyper-V update

dwaynef — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 01:53:00 GMT

A new (good type) of update is available for Microsoft's Hyper-V on Windows Server 2008.

Update includes support for more logical processors and larger number of VM's per physical host.

KB Article here

Remote Desktop Client (RDC) 6.1 now avialable for XP SP2 users

dwaynef — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 20:12:00 GMT

RDC 6.1 was originally going to be only available for Windows XP SP3 (as part of SP3). Seems a bit of customer feedback has changed that ... always good to listen to the customer :)

You can download RDC6.1 for Windows XP SP2 from the Microsoft Download Center (KB 952155) for the following languages:

Arabic, Chinese - Simplified, Chinese – Traditional, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese – Portugal, Portuguese – Brazil, Russian, Spanish – Spain, Swedish, Turkish.

We have also released the MUI package for RDC6.1 on Windows XP SP2 from the Microsoft Download Center (KB 952230).

These are some of the supported features of Remote Desktop Client 6.1 for Windows XP SP2:

Windows Server 2008 & Windows Vista feature support
TS Web Access support
TS Easy Print support
TS Remote Programs support
TS Gateway support

Please review the complete list of features and details about RDC6.1 for Windows XP SP2 in this Knowledge Base article.

Hyper-V RTM Release !!!

dwaynef — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 19:29:00 GMT

Guess it will be on a lot of blogs today, but here goes anyway.

Hyper-V, Microsoft's hypervisor based virtualization product that is part of Windows Server 2008 went RTM today. In terms of public availability, it sould be available for download later today (12pm PST), with availability via Windows Update scheduled for July 8th.

Hyper-V Home Page here

Server & Tools blog

Virtualization Team blog

Understanding Hyper-V networking

dwaynef — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 20:34:00 GMT

Those of us who came from the Virtual PC/Server world will have quickly realized that setting up your NICs and the host's setup is a bit different under Hyper-V, nice quick explaination of hyper-v netowrking (with pictures!) from the Virtual PC Guy's blog

Linux under Virtual PC

dwaynef — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 03:56:00 GMT

Getting Linux to work under Virtual PC usually is a bit of a challenge, but got some good links to walk you throught the process

Virtual PC 2007 SP1 download (free) here

Sean's blog showing how to install Fedora/Ubuntu/Suse under Virtual PC here