leedesmond’s blog

Earlier this week, the Windows Server Division Weblog announced the availability of SP1 for Virtual Server 2005 Enterprise Edition. The Virtual PC Guy also blogged about it here. Some notable features of the service pack:

- hardware assisted virtualization
- volume shadow copy (VSS) for online backup and restore
- storage agnostic host clustering on a per VM basis
- vhdmount.exe (off-line VHD mounting)
- guest OS support for Novell SLES 10 and Solaris 10

Pay attention to the pre-requisites to install Virtual Server 2005 SP1. More information and link to download here.

While on the subject of VM, centralized administration and management should be of interest to any IT Pro in an enterprise. Check out System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007 now available as Beta 2 either as a download for installation on a physical machine or take advantage of the pre-configured VHD here.

Finally, take a look at Microsoft’s licensing strategy captured in this article regarding the deployment of Windows operating system on virtual machines hosted on virtualization platforms other than Microsoft’s.

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Pre-built virtual machine images that come in the RAR format to allow for jump-start evaluation of SCVMM Beta 2. It comes in 2 x RAR files and a self extract EXE coming just under 2GB in size. Requires Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 with the Administration Website installed. More information and download here.

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System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) Beta 2 and Longhorn Server Beta 3 are the latest beta programs available for download at connect.microsoft.com. For the latter, more information and public beta download are available at www.microsoft.com/windowsserver/longhorn/default.mspx.

Both are part of a growing list of core, strategic Microsoft products that integrate my favorite administrative tool of choice for IT Professionals - PowerShell (first is Exchange Server 2007). Watch this space for more!

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