Plumbing & Wiring in a Microsoft World : Virtual Server

Planning and Design Guidance for Microsoft Virtualisation

infoz — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 03:01:00 GMT

The recently published Infrastructure Planning and Design Solution Accelerator is a great place to start when considering the practical implications of deploying Microsoft's broad range of virtualisation technologies. I've just worked through the 'Windows Server Virtualization' paper, and it looks like this offers the kind of guidance my partners and customers are frequently asking for....scoping the hardware resources to meet the needs of your virtual environment - right down to which perfmon counters are key for analysing disk, memory, CPU and network requirements. There's also a scattering of handy snippets on validating your technical decisions agaist the needs of the business - just in case you're getting carried away with the technology and forgettintg about the business reasons behind the push to a virtual world. No doubt I'll get round to working my way through the 'Application Virtualization' paper sometime over the festive period! [RH]

Virtual Server 2005 R2 - Service Pack 1 now available

infoz — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 13:36:00 GMT

Service Pack 1 is now available for download from the recently revamped Virtual Server site. The focus of SP1 is clearly to improve manageability of existing deployments of Virtual Server in the run up to Windows Server Virtualisation and the full release of System Center Virtual Machine Manager (currently in Beta 2). Important new functionality in this Service Pack includes:

Support for VSS snapshots (great for backup and an enabler for P2V and V2V conversions)
Support for hardware virtualisation (IVT and AMD-V)
Offline VHD mounting
Novell SLES 10 and Solaris 10 now supported as guests (taking non-MS guest support up to 11 OS variants)

(RH)

Viridian (Windows Server Virtualisation) and Virtual Server Timing Updates

infoz — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 07:21:00 GMT

The Windows Server team recently announced some updated timings for the forthcoming releases of Windows Server Virtualisation and Virtual Server 2005 R2 Service Pack 1 - get the details of what, where and when (RH)

System Center Virtual Machine Manager hits Beta 2

infoz — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 05:34:00 GMT

SCVMM Beta 2 has been released, offering IT administrators a fully featured and easy to use suite of management tools. Enhancements in Beta 2 package include: P2V and V2V conversions, 64-bit server support, remote installation options and a vastly improved UI.