Dugie’s Pensieve

Virtualization and Windows licensing has been a pain point for a long time.  There has been hints that it’s going to get better.  With Data Centre available through Volume License at $2,999 USD per processor it’s just got a little easier.

But I saw this post from Patrick on the Windows Server Division WebLog, although (I think) the industry has made some good ground, there is still a long way to go.  A snippet is below:

Every now and again we use this blog to correct inaccuracies in the public domain. Mostly innocent errors at media outlets. And usually I wouldn’t comment on opinion pieces at Linux-Watch because the rhetorical debate would be fruitless. You know, “taste great” versus “less filling” sort of thing. But one of our pals at Linux-Watch botched some facts while he was predicting doom and gloom for Windows Server, and the article was picked up by reputable media site eWeek. I’m not asking reporters (with editors) to spare the rod. Your critical eye helps us identify areas of improvement. But how about getting the facts right?

In this case, we’re talking about virtualization licensing. It’s not a simple topic, and virtualization is certainly causing Microsoft and the industry as a whole to review its current licensing policies. When you combine the onset of virtualization with the introduction of multi-core processors and mainstream x64 computing, there’s a tremendous amount of new capabilities available to you. But also new licensing models to understand that aren’t uniform across the industry.

So if eWeek editors want to get the facts straight on the timing and details of Microsoft’s virtualization licensing policies, they should start with Ward’s posting last October. Then they can read the announcement. And if there’s more column inches left in the revised balanced article, then you can give a shout out to IDC’s reports, the updated licensing for Datacenter Edition - in addition to Peter Galli’s article.

With quad core CPUs and beyond, the next 12 months will be interesting se see how each of the vendors change licensing.

Oooooh, I just got this in my e-mail, a sign of good things to come:

System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) Beta 1 has now been out almost two months and the SCVMM team has been busy adding new cool features and making sure that you get a great SCVMM Beta 2!

As a product team we want to thank you for all your hard work and help so far, we fixed many bugs thanks to your help, we can only make SCVMM better with your feedbacks, please keep them coming.

For those of you that haven’t had a chance to test the product, we recommend you take a moment and download Beta 1, install it in your test environment and provide feedback through the Feedback mechanism in Microsoft Connect.
 

Howwww, Yeaahhh there were dancing, And singing, And moving to the grooving…..   Ummm never mind.

At work I have dual monitors, and I must say makes me more effective in my work — combined with a piece of software call UltaMon is is a winning combination.  So much so that when I am at customer sites, or at home I find my effectiveness in front of a computer suffers.

I do a lot of my blogs, email, research and reading at home.  I have an uber comfy chair, a great view out my window and have spent a great deal of effort getting the study “just right”.

But put bluntly, 1280×1024 sucks — but 1024 x 1280 doesn’t.

Yeah who would have thought?  Turning my monitor sideways had made a big difference.  A little tweaking with the layout of a few apps and viola!  I’m finding I can power through RSS feeds and e-mail in about a third to half the time it used to.

Now that everything is in one long visible list, I can skim over more information with less scrolling.

Anyway here’s what it looks like:

PS:  If you are a laptop multi monitor user try this;  Start | Run | %windir%\system32\desk.cpl ,3

Shameless plug:  

The Brisbane Infrastructure Group meet tomorrow night at Microsoft.  Come along and get your fix of Pizza, coke, MIIS and MOM.

At this point most people ask me, “What on earth is MIIS?  Isn’t that part of Exchange now?“

Well no, MIIS is a different product, and it’s way more fun to see it in action.  So check out Kleefy’s blogcast Automatically Provisioning AD accounts using MIIS

If your interested and want to show up let me know and I’ll save you a seat and some pizza.

I’ve been testing Invirtus VM Optimizer with Virtual PC and Virtual Server.  It’s pretty much the same as previous versions — The hard cold factsare in the last paragraph.

Not much has changed with this version VM Optimizer.  You download it, install it, run it — and it makes your VMs smaller.  Things I noticed different in this version:

• The new installer is much cleaner than the old 2.0 version; there is much less “noise” during and after the install
• Usability of version 2.5 is very similar to 2.0.
• Again, usability inside the VM is much cleaner with less “noise” and prompts during the optimization
• At least 10 minutes faster
• Took about 20 minutes total to run both the Invirtus wizard and then run the Virtual PC Virtual Disk wizard on a 3.5 Gb VHD.

So with my Control VM, which is a default install of XP SP2, Office 2003, assorted tools, patches and all updates comes in with a VHD at 3,511 Mb — this was reduced to 1,885 Mb (almost 50%).  The resulting VHD zipped down to 970 Meg.

Now the odd thing is the previous version could shave it and make it an extra 10 Meg smaller.  (I took an identical copy of the original control VM and compacted it to 1,845 Mb)  notably it took twice as long.  I imagine you can tweak this out, but I can live with that 10 Meg.

If you want to know more, download a copy from the Invirtus website, use an e-mail alias as you will get lots of lovely e-mail reminders :)

This post is coming to you live from within a Virtual Machine — the only difference is the host does not have “Internet Protocol (TCP/IP)” bound to the NIC:

Yes that’s right,  the host does not have TCPIP bound to the network adapter, but it does need the Virtual Machine Network Services Driver. Which makes sense really when you think about it

Anyway, just some fun that you can try at home with your own copy of Virtual PC.

There’s a long story, why I’m doing this - but that blog post is coming in a few days.