If so the Technet Script Center has plenty of resources, view them here Some scripts I’d like to highlight: Virtual Machine Management Configure Guest OS for VDI (PowerShell) Configure Guest OS for VDI (VB Script)   Virtual machine assignment management Bulk assign virtual machines to users or pools List VM assignment information   Infrastructure setup: RD Connection Broker cluster creation and management Manage RD Connection Broker cluster (create, add nodes) Update RD Connection Broker

My colleague Martin McClean recently sat down with me to record a video with some information about his recently released Windows Server 2008 R2 Feature Components Poster for IT Pros. You can see a bit it of it behind his head… Click on the image to play the vid .

John Kelbley’s blog has a recent series of posts (including helpful screenies) explaining everything you need to do a Hyper-V backup is included in Windows Server. Highly recommended. Best Part of Hyper-V Backup and Recovery Is Windows! The Wonder of Volume Shadow Copy and Hyper-V   DiskShadow / Xcopy BACKUP of Hyper-V DiskShadow / Xcopy RESTORE of Hyper-V Backup and Recovery of Non-Windows VMs on Hyper-V – IT JUST WORKS!  

System Center Essentials 2010 isn’t even out of beta yet, and already it’s starting to grow in popularity. I’m currently sitting through an installation of it inside a Hyper-V R2 VM as we speak, but whilst it’s working away, I thought I’d give you a couple of useful resources to mull over… Firstly, what is System Center Essentials? Well, you can get all that info from my previous blog post, along with an overview video . For those of you’ve who’ve already climbed that rung of the ladder, the next

Selecting the Right Virtualization Technology Windows Server 2008 R2 Remote Desktop Services The Infrastructure Planning and Design team has released two updated guides, Selecting the Right Virtualization Technology and Windows Server 2008 R2 Remote Desktop Services. Download the IPD Guide for Selecting the Right Virtualization Technology at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=160981 Download the IPD Guide for Windows Server 2008 R2 Remote Desktop Services at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=177881

…in that case you’ll need http://www.codeplex.com/CoreConfig   It is completely open source so it can be ammended and changed to fit your requirements, this version has been a year in the making and has been written in powershell with a reference to Winforms so that a GUI format is displayed.   Core Configuration tasks include: Product Licencing Networking Features DCPromo Tool ISCSI Settings Server Roles and Features User and Group Permissions Share Creation and Deletion Dynamic Firewall

For those of you not familiar with the IPD Guides, they aim to provide a couple of key benefits: Help to define the technical decision flow through the planning process. List the decisions to be made and the commonly available options to be considered. Relate the decisions and options to the business in terms of cost, complexity, and other characteristics. Frame decisions in terms of additional questions to the business to ensure a comprehensive alignment with the appropriate business landscape The

There’s been a lot of talk recently about Cloud Computing ; what it is, how it works, who’s going to provide what and so on, and personally, I think things are starting to make more sense now.  Microsoft’s recently shown it’s hand (or I guess, some of it!) with Azure at the Pro Developers Conference 2009, and explained that it won’t just be a platform for developers, but will also provide IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) – I think for a lot of people, the IaaS bit came as a bit of a surprise,

Here’s a question for you…what’s the link between tuna, and Hyper-V? Before anyone jumps in with a fishy-joke, the connection is MWBrands, who own, among other things, the John West tuna brand.  MWBrands is an organisation of 5000+ employees, and, as you would expect from a retail company of that size, keeping track of their sales and financial transactions isn’t easy, hence the reason for adopting Dynamics NAV as their business management software.  What they didn’t have however, was a

Customers often ask “Given a hardware load-out X, how many Ys can I get/run/host?” The frustrating answer always starts with “…it depends…”. We caveat this way not because we want to frustrate, but because it is true. Many teams will go on to say “We have tested the following in our labs and gotten the displayed results…” 1 X = thingy 2 X = more thingies 3X = many more thingies While accurate, not super-helpful. The truth is that to do good perf planning for Hyper-V you have to run some tests. Run

Times are tough, and belts are tight. Many companies have looked to server virtualization to reduce costs through hardware consolidation. Cutting costs by combining server instances onto fewer physical systems can reduce costs, but could you do more? Are you squeezing the right cost without putting your organization at risk? Could you actually save more with less? I speak with lots of customers about cost cutting and virtualization. I’m always interested in how they manage their virtual environment,

plein de formats différents pour chaque e-démo : Windows Media Video (WMV), Windows Media Audio (WMA), iPod Video (MP4), MP3 Audio, High Quality WMV (2.5 Mbps), Zune Video (WMV) et Smooth Streaming (ISM) Hyper-V v2 et System Center : la virtualisation en action Installation et configuration basique d'Hyper-V sur Windows Server 2008 R2 Windows Server 2008 R2 - Hyper-V, failover clustering et live migration Partie 1 Windows Server 2008 R2 - Hyper-V, failover clustering et live migration Partie 2 Mise

Following on from yesterday’s post on the Appliance Test Drive, for those of you interested in learning more, there’s a webcast scheduled that should give you all the information you need.  Here are the details: MGT49PAL: VHD Test Drive Program allows Partners to Distribute Virtual Appliances for Evaluation, Training and Demo Purposes Presented by:  Vipul Shah and Volker Will Thursday, 3rd December 2009 – 17:00-18:00 GMT Attend this Academy Live session to learn about the VHD Test Drive

Following on from yesterday’s post on App-V , I thought I’d take the chance to provide you with some quick overview videos on some of the other technologies that make up the Microsoft Desktop Optimisation Pack, or for the acronym-fans, MDOP. For those of you not familiar, MDOP is a suite of technologies available as a Software Assurance benefit for Windows Client, and it’s sole aim is to help optimise the desktop estate, through 6 key tools, one of which being App-V.  So, what’s in there? Microsoft

One thing that you can’t take away from VMware, is their ecosystem of Virtual Appliances that people can download.  Not quite up to the level of the iPhone/iPod just yet, where ‘there’s an app for that’, but still, a quick scout around on the Virtual Appliance Marketplace, and you’ll find lots of different appliances, many of which are free, that can provide solutions to different problems within an infrastructure, but can also allow organisations to quickly test a certain piece of technology

There’s an interesting experiment in community just started over at TechNet/MSDN called the Community Machine Translation Pilot . The first member of the community is the machine translation (MT) service (thanks Microsoft research!). The MT service (not HAL 9000, I just like the image as a referent to a non_human team member)  takes an article, for example Hyper-V: Using Live Migration with Cluster Shared Volumes in Windows Server 2008 R2 , runs MT on the text, and then displays it side-by-side

Upgrading a desktop OS isn’t always easy(!).  Typically, users have the OS, intertwined with lots of applications, favourites, files, folders and other profile-related goodness.  With all this interlinked deeply, it makes replacing one part of it that bit more difficult.  With that in mind, separation is a good thing!  Separating the OS from the apps, which technologies like App-V, or XenApp can help with one part of it, and by combining this with capabilities like Roaming Profiles,

Patrick, from the MVUG blog , has fired across a couple of other useful titbits of information that the guys at HP have been working on around both Hyper-V, and Exchange 2010, from both a server, and storage perspective. From blog post #1 : HP has released "HP recommended configuration for Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 - StorageWorks EVA8400 using CA-EVA and CLX-EVA". With the release of Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 (Exchange 2010) there are many new design features and configuration

Performance & Resource Optimization (PRO) permet en couplant System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) avec System Center Operation Manager (SCOM) de créer des règles de gestion et de répartitions des ressources (les machines virtuelles) en fonction de la charge (CPU et/ou mémoire) des serveurs physiques de virtualisation et/ou des machines virtuelles elles-mêmes. Suivez dans cette e-démo l'installation des différents composants relatifs à la mise en oeuvre de PRO dans votre infrastructure

[mise à jour du 19 novembre 2008] Depuis plusieurs mois, nous préparons et enregistrons avec Fabrice Meillon, de nombreuses vidéos de type tutoriel dans une série baptisée “Premiers pas avec Windows Server 2008 R2 et Windows 7”. L’objectif est de vous permettre de découvrir et reproduire sur une plateforme de test les nouveautés fonctionnelles de Windows 7 et Windows 2008 R2 . Aujourd’hui, cela représente une trentaines de vidéos (d’autres sont planifiées) et c’est