Dugie’s Pensieve

…and on my way to geek it up at Microsoft!! . Actually it’s more like ~36 hours, but who’s counting?  Ummm, that would be me!

I’m off to Seattle for the MVP Summit. I’m really looking forward to this.
I reckon I’ll be run off my feet, and blogging will more than likely come to a standstill, but I’ll try and drop a post or two and say hello  :)

See you all in a few days from the other side of the world !

Here’s two new utilities I’ve been shown in the past few days.  They are so good I’m starting to wonder how I survived without them:

• vXCopy- multi threaded Files & Folders Copy Tool with Resume support
• MuRD - Multiple Remote Desktops and soooo much more

These two are going straight to my USB key.

Ok so you’ve seen the Movie, “Windows Server Virtualization” over at Soapbox.

Well Clive has just posted another gem.  The Virtualization forum over at TechNet.  Check it out: Windows Server Virtualization.  You’ll even find Mike Neil, (General Manager of Virtualization Strategy) there answering questions!  A snippet of the top 5 posts is below:

• Re: VS/VPC Additions for Longhorn…
  We’re working on getting the additions available to the beta testers of Longhorn. Mike   
   
• Re: Hypervisor - will it be in…
   Thomas Lee wrote:As the subject says - will the hypervisor be built into Longhorn Server?I’ve seen    
   
• Re: Virtual server vs Hypervis…
  With Windows Server “Longhorn”, the Windows Server virtualization technology will be avail   
   
• Re: Virtualization support on …
    We do not currently plan to make Virtual Server or the Windows hypervisor available for Itanium.    
   
• Re: Hypervisor - will it be in…
  The hypervisor is being built for Longhorn server.  We plan to release it within 180 days of Longhor  

Ugh, what a week, definitely time for another speedlink post.  Here is a list of posts I thought were interesting this week:

• The Orcas March CTP VPC is available for download at 6 Gb
• New Exchange rebasing tool in a VM — It’s great to see ready to run VHDs getting some traction
• Interesting security posts for Virtual Server:  Virtual Server security; Improving security with virtual machine log file monitoring and Examining the compromised Virtual Server 2005 host
• Ben Armstrong has post an update to the HP ProLiant Server Sizer for Virtual Server 2005 R2
• Tony Soper has done a nice roundup of resources for the  Microsoft Virtualization Strategy — The items are platform, management, applications, interoperability and licensing  from Mike Neil’s post
• Virtual switch security- VMware, Virtual Server and XenExpress – Now this was very interesting from Chris Wolf.  Armed with Wireshark and some curiosity checks out the default network isolation of VMware Server, Virtual Server and XEN
• Lastly, a thought provoking discussion,  Does-virtualization-makes-monitoring-obsolete — No commentary for this one, just read the article :)

The last two post are recommend reading, and I’ll mostly likely post back on these two with more info.

Coherence is more than phwaaar.  It’s sexy!  Sexy as in the classic Audrey Hepburn, elegant, simple but purposeful type of way.

Anyway, if you haven’t heard of “Coherence”, I’m not even going to try and explain it, when you can see it in action in this 90 second youtube clip:

Dave Northey has written a great 3 part article on Virtualization:

• Virtualisation (1 of 3) - What is it- What’s all the fuss?
• Virtualisation (2 of 3) - Why should you care?
• Virtualisation (3 of 3) - What’s Microsoft got to offer?

Actually it’s not just virtualization but covers all aspects of virtualization, from different technologies and vendors int the virtualization space; to monitoring, licensing, other vendors; and additional benefits, even if you choose a vendor other than Microsoft as your virtualization platform.  Check it out.

Many thanks to Arlindo Alves (Microsoft Belgium) has just posted the Jeff Woolsey’s Hypervisor demo on soapbox.  How cool is that?!

Check it out, it’s 5:47 long, and jump to 5:00 to see Jeff hot-add another NIC to a VM whilst it’s running!

Longhorn - Windows Server Virtualization

In this demo you will see:

• Windows Server Virtualization running on Server Core managed from another Windows Server Longhorn box
• 64-bit hosts and 32-bit hosts and a Linux running on the same server core box
• An 8-core virtual machine
• System Center Virtual Machine Manager
• System Center Operations Manager
• Monitoring the VMs on the Server Core box
• Fire off a PowerShell script to hot-add another NIC to a SQL VHD Image

The boys from vmToolkit are back!  The VHD Expander is now VHD Resizer.  More info in their post “VHD Expander is now VHD Resizer“, a snippet is below:

We have made some changes to the VHDExpander. First off it is now called the VDHResizer and it will do some of the things the new name implies.

The tool will now check the partitions within the VHD and provide you with sizing options (displayed as a slider) which start at the end of your partition and go up to 127 GB. This means you can technically shrink your VHD if you do some preparation work. The preparation needed is to shrink your partition, the tool will not shrink your partition for you, we want to leave that up to you (look for David to post some steps on this). However if you previously expanded your VHD and determined later that the size was too large you can now shrink that size back down if you have not already extended your partition.

Everything else from the expander remains the same. VhdResize will resize Microsoft’s VHD files and will also convert between Fixed and Dynamic file types. This is a sector by sector copy operation from one size/type to the other and the source file remains unaltered. The .NET 2.0 framework is still required.

Download it here:  VHD Resizer