A bit of this, a bit of that

Small Business Server and Essential Business Server

Now that I have picked up responsibility for SBS and EBS as well as Windows Server in the UK, I thought I would let you know that all my SBS/EBS stuff will be posted to the UK SBSC blog, hosted by Emily. Click here for news :)

And more photography things

Further to my post about AutoCollage 2008 below, I have also been playing with Photosynth. Genius. Flying along with that chap on the hangglider is really cool. I need to start doing some of my own - I did some ages ago on an internal release of the tool before it went all shiny Web 2.0 but views of my home office bored even me :) www.photosynth.net is the place to go

How amazing is photography these days?

I am taking a break from having my head stuck in SBS/EBS launch materials and I saw this AMAZING tool from MS Research called AutoCollage 2008. You point it at a folder of photos and it it merges them into the cleverest collage I have ever seen. Watching what the guys in MS Research are doing is amazing. Get the trial here....

I am about to buy a shiny new DSLR so I am going to be like a geek with new toys for a while...

Been caught NAPing?

Always nice to have a feature that lets you write bad headlines incorporating its name :). Network Access Protection (NAP) is one of the areas that customers, partners, journalists and analysts ask me about a lot. I regularly read the NAP blog written by the product group, and I would suggest you do the same...

Click here to read it

Wanna know more? Free webcasts to learn more in January

Hi ya all

Roll on over to here to have a look at the 6 new webcasts for January (focusing on clustering and virtualisation Hyper-V)

G

Its like being a teenager again

Its just so exciting. When I was a teenager, me and my mates spent many nights playing Sensible World of Soccer on my Amiga. You can't imagine how excited I was to hear that it was coming to XBox Live (trust me - you really can't imagine - I was like a kid at Christmas). When it finally came out, just before Christmas, I paid for some Microsoft Points and downloaded as fast as I could. ITS BRILLLLLLLLIANT.

Anyone want a game? My gamertag is paddlergareth - drop me a line and lets play.

Gareth

PHP is FAAAST on Windows

Yup - you read that right.... I saw this on Steve Lamb's blog, and its a great demo of cgi and Fastcgi on 2008. Massive performance improvements for PHP apps on Windows. Hosters... here we come :)

Hyper-V is go :)

I know you have been waiting for this.... but its here. the beta of Hyper-V is now available. Want it?

I told you it was fast :)

I often talk to customers and press about the speed improvements you get across the WAN with Server 2008. Ward in the US just posted this pretty serious metric :) 45 times faster than 2003 on a large file transfer test than Windows 2003

http://blogs.technet.com/windowsserver/comments/2540130.aspx

RC0 is here. Anyone want to play with Viridian ? :)

Hi all

Its a good day in the world of Windows Server. We have released Release Candidate 0 of Windows Server 2008 for you to download. The really cool thing (apart from it being RC0 of course) is you also get the CTP of Windows Server virtualisation (or Viridian as its known to its friends...)

You can get it here

There is also quite a cool video up on channel 9 that talks you through the release.

G

Its great that we can finally share this :)

Lots of people have been asking me how they can get hold of Viridian (Windows Server Virtualisation). We announced last week that you will get it with the RC0 release of Windows Server 2008. See http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2007/sep07/09-11virtualization.mspx for more details

Hurrah!

G

Internal Microsoft use of Virtualisation

My customers always used to ask me about Microsoft's own use of our technology when I was in an account team. There is a great article just published that shows how we use virtualisation internally - 1000 virtual machines running on 70 physical hosts, in production, not test/dev!

See here for the full article

WWW.MICROSOFT.COM is live on Windows Server 2008 Beta 3

Great news and a pretty serious proof point about the quality of beta 3 of Windows Server 2008. The whole of Microsoft.com is now running on Windows Server 2008 Beta 3 and IIS 7.

Have a look here for more details

Just playing with Technorati

Virtualisation

Hi all. Well, at last I am famous (in a very small way...). Virtualisation is certainly a hot topic at the moment, and I thought it would be useful to point out some of the resources that help customers answer the questions they often ask me.

Windows Server Virtualization Calculator - click here - helps you work out the costs of physical and virtual environments on Windows.

The other question I get asked a lot is "how do I license this stuff?" Have a read here to find out (links to a 2007 version Word doc)

Gareth