Windows Virtualization Team Blog

For $50,000, I could pay someone to move my virtual machines for me

The subject line will make sense in a moment. It's a quote from a customer in Australia ... and pretty funny, too. But before that, a few items crossed my inbox that I thought I'd share: Software vendor AspenTech has a process engineering/manufacturing application called aspenONE. Today they announced that their customer BASF deployed aspenONE using Microsoft App-V. I found this interesting for a few reasons. One, I've participated in conversations about whether enterprise customers would deploy 3rd-party apps running on App-V/SoftGrid without some sort of application certification program/logo for App-V. Second, BASF runs large, complex chemical process simulations - and now they're doing so as a network service. I know these sorts of computer-aided engineering apps often times get computed on HPC clusters; but never did I think they'd then get streamed at sufficient speed to the desktop using application virtualization. Along the lines of App-V, J.C. over at the App-V blog noted some new downloads. Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.5 security configuration wizard. Download here. Microsoft Application Virtualization best practices anayzer. Download here. J.C. wrote last week that App-V 4.5 for Terminal Services license will be available Nov. 1. Read more here. Adam over at TechNet Edge just posted a video interview with the authors of "Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V Unleashed." I mentioned Rand's and Jeff's book a couple weeks ago. I had the opportunity to meet Rand/Jeff last week while they were up here in Redmond. Rand spoke to a bunch of us about Convergent's business, and set us straight that applications (Exchange, Sharepoint) and solutions such as disaster recovery and compliance are driving his customers' infrastructure purchases (e.g., Windows Server, Hyper-V, System Center) ... not the other way around. Here's a link to Jeff's blog. Read More...

by porourke | 3 Comments

Virtualization Feed for Your RSS Reader

With a "tip of the cap" to creators of Planet V12n blog, we've just launched a blog and Twitter aggregator for virtualization. It's called VirtualizationFeed. Like Planet V12n, this site aggregates virtualization blogs from lots of sources. In this case, 18 independent bloggers and 14 Microsoft bloggers on either TechNet or MSDN. I'm sure you'll recognize many of the names/blogs ... and maybe you'll discover new ones. For example: Tarry Singh (Netherlands) Andrew Dudgell (Australia) Kevin Fogarty (CIO.com) Allesandro Perilli (Italy) David Marshall (U.S.) Mark Bowker (ESG - analyst firm) Ben Armstrong (aka, Virtual PC Guy) Rakesh Malhotra (VM management blog) The App-V team blog Tony Soper's blog The blog aggregator will show a short (200-character) excerpt from the blog and point you to the blogger's site for the full post. In addition to blogs, you'll see a tab for Tweets. VirtualizationFeed.com is also a Twitter aggregator (in case you're not using Twitter's useful search tool) that pulls all virtualization-related tweets. Read More...

by porourke | 2 Comments

Virtualization wrap from TechEd IT Pro

I'm NOT in Orlando this week attending TechEd IT Pro conference. That means I get to enjoy Redmond's "wintery" spring weather and not Orlando's hot/humid thunderstorms. For those of you also NOT in Orlando, you can follow along with the happenings at a few spots: Scott Lowe's blog, focus on virtualization (and expect comparisons to VMware's tools) Margie Semilof from Techtarget will be publishing articles Go here for blog roll and a bunch of news sources from the conference I'll point out a few cool items from today's keynote: You can now get cooperative technical support from Microsoft and four (initial) vendors [Citrix, Novell, Sun, Virtual Iron] when running Windows Server 2008 (or 2003, or 2000). How so? Microsoft's Server Virtualization Validation Program is now operational and vendors have begun validating their configs. So you'll soon see additional vendor names added to KB article 944987. This program is only intended for the dozen or so vendors that make/sell their own Type 1 or Type 2 hypervisor, and want their customers to receive technical support from them and Microsoft. MS Application Virtualization (formerly SoftGrid) 4.5 Release Candidate will be available by the end of June. And interestingly enough it's been almost 2 years since the Softricity acquisition. Tim Mangan blogged about this over at BrianMadden.com. Double-Take, an ISV partner, announced that their GeoCluster technology will run on Hyper-V once the latter is released. GeoCluster works with Windows Server 2008 failover clustering, and offers somethign that VMware can't. Forefront Client Security is adding host and guest VM support for Hyper-V upon its release. See more here. Enjoy, Patrick Read More...

by porourke | 1 Comments

Application Virtualization and Streaming

I am Gavriella Schuster and I am responsible for the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) within the Windows team. This week I was fortunate enough to participate in a panel discussion at Interop with my peers at Symantec, Citrix, and VMWare discussing Read More...

by porourke | 0 Comments