August, 2008

Microsoft Virtualization Launch

On September 8th, 2008 Microsoft will launch its new virtualization products.
Attend this free summit on Microsoft® Virtualization Products and Practices and INCREASE your productivity!

Find out how Windows Server 2008® with Hyper-V™, Microsoft System Center - including Virtual Machine Manager 2008 - and Microsoft Desktop and Application Virtualization allow you to deploy, manage and get VIRTUAL now like never before.

Cisco, VMware sign the Microsoft Virtualization Validation Program

In June 2008 Microsoft formally launched its Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP) to extend the support on its products when they run as virtual machines on 3rd party virtualization platforms. Microsoft has announced that two new vendors are participating this program: VMware and Cisco.

” …Under SVVP, customers running Windows and Microsoft applications on the VMware ESX hypervisor will receive the support they need from Microsoft, in addition to the support they have enjoyed from VMware. VMware customers can continue to leverage the full flexibility and benefits of using Virtual Infrastructure.  VMware is working with Microsoft to certify ESX in the near future..” , said Carl Eschenbach, Executive Vice President of Worldwide Field Operations.

Public blog “Windows 7”

The public blog “Windows 7” team has started - http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2008/08/14/welcome.aspx. It looks like the team will be blogging using this as one of the channels to talk to general public about the progress of Windows 7.

SBS 2008 Released to Manufacturing

Windows Small Business Server 2008 software has been finalized! 3 Days ago both SBS Standard and Premium are being released to manufacturing, so it will be widely available by November 12 launch. 

Cheap (FREE) and Good SAN / iSCSI Storage - OpenFiler SAN Server

If you want to work / test / learn many of the VMware ESX Server advanced features, like VMotion, VMware High Availability (VMHA), and VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), you should have SAN (Storage Area Network).

For my Home Lab I’m using OpenFiler. You can find a very good Step-By-Step tutorial about OpenFiler at well know Petri.co.il web site. Article by David Davis - “Use OpenFiler as your Free VMware ESX SAN Server“

I just want to add one small part to this tutorial. I think it’s not the best idea to use IP address from DHCP on Server, a specially on SAN :). So, I’ve configured my SAN to use static IP. Here is how to do that:

Full story at source: http://app-v.ca/

Running ESX 3.5 and 3i Under VMWare Workstation 6.5

As result of battle between Microsoft and VMWare (for place on Virtualization market), VMWare announced that a new VMWARE ESXi server became FREE.
This news generated a lot of interest and many people started to try install VMWARE ESXi on VMWARE Workstation, just to see it and learn.

By little Googling you will find a lot of sites, where explained how to run ESX 3.0 server on VMWARE Workstation 6.x, but you will see that this tricks is not working for ESX 3.5. Equally they are working, but you unable to start virtual machine inside ESX.

To make ESX 3.5 fully working on VMWare Workstation we need to do the following steps….

Full story at source: http://app-v.ca/

Microsoft Virtualization and Licensing Announcements

Few days ago Microsoft announced some significant changes to its licensing and support policies for applications in hardware virtualization environments. There are two key parts of the announcement worth highlighting for Exchange customers:

1. Microsoft now supports Exchange Server 2007 SP1 running Hyper-V or hypervisors validated under the Microsoft Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP).
2. Microsoft is waiving its 90-day license reassignment policy to enable customers who virtualize Exchange to move their licenses between servers within a data farm as often as necessary.

As part of the updated support policies, we have published an article called Microsoft Support Policies and Recommendations for Exchange Servers in Hardware Virtualization Environments. This article includes Microsoft’s support policy and recommendations for running Exchange Server 2003 in a Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 environment. It replaces Microsoft Knowledge Base article 320220, which previously detailed the policy and recommendations for this environment. In addition, this article includes Microsoft’s support policy and Microsoft’s recommendations for running Exchange Server 2007 SP1 in a hardware virtualization environment.

Microsoft Support Policies and Recommendations for Exchange Servers in Hardware Virtualization Environments is a must-read for anyone considering a virtualized Exchange environment.

Diskeeper Helps Customers Get Virtual with Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V Virtualization

Diskeeper announced that its flagship Diskeeper 2008 automatic defragmenter achieved Certified for Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V status from Microsoft. Diskeeper 2008 is one of the first three applications, out of 175 applications currently certified for Windows Server 2008, to earn the Hyper V designation.

The Virtualization team is now on facebook

The Virtualization team will be utilizing Facebook to discuss their product and strategy with the broader community, and are inviting MVPs to participate in the conversation.

Ask to be our friend on Facebook :

http://www.new.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1341172571
http://www.new.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1346782204

SecTor Conference is looking for speakers.

SecTor 2008 is currently open to speaking proposals.  Visit http://www.sector.ca/ to learn more about the event. SecTor is all about the meat — The content that matters to Canadian IT Security Professionals today.  The key to SecTor’s success, and thus the primary objective of the Management Committee and Advisory Committee, is quality content and presentation for attendees.