Dugie’s Pensieve

Damn, where did this year go?  Wherever it went, it went quickly!  Today’s my birthday, and although it has only just started and it feels good to be me.  Being a December baby I’m close enough to Christmas for it to be cool, but not that close so that you get the ’single syndrome’ - Other Decemeber babies will understand :)

I woke up this morning to a cup of (my favourite) freshly made coffee in bed and a couple of presents to open.  I got some really good stuff - but I have to wait until this afternoon for everything else.  And tomorrow I’m having a Birthday BBQ lunch with fiends, and  ‘roadtest’ the arcade machine. 

But now on to the SCOTCH!  Mmmm. 

Last weekend I went over to a friends place for our quarterly scotch night.  It usually once a quarter because that’s the only time when we’re all in town.  It’s a great night to enjoy some great conversation, and some great scotch. 

I bought two new scotches for the occasion.  Both bottles I have never tried before.  Being new, I paid a reasonable amount, but not too much.  It would be such a waste to have to drink them with dry.

One of the bottles was Glenwood Malt Scotch 8 years - strangely enough its a scotch from Spain!?   I was particularly impressed.  A very pleasant aroma and taste.  So much so, that today, I’m going to stop on the way home and buy another bottle!! 

Cheers for now :)

Windows Server 2008 RC1 is available for download.

The 64 bit Enterprise edition isn’t available just yet, once it’s up I’ll download it and confirm that Hyper-V is in the public release and give everyone an update.

Until then, grab a copy of the Step-by-Step Guide to Getting Started with Windows Server Virtualization and check and see if your hardware is on the list.

UPDATE:  If you are using SUN hardware you will need to read the Sun Windows 2008 BluePrint.  Hyper-V does not run on the Sunfire as of yet.  I’m chatting with Sun about this at the moment.

Post back soon when I know more.

KB 867572 (Supported operating systems in Virtual Server 2005 R2) was updated yesterday from v7.0 to 7.1

For VMware or XEN users, KB 897615, Support policy for Microsoft software running in non-Microsoft hardware virtualization software appears to have been updated to version 3.0 on Nov 10 *.

And lastly, speaking of support James O’Neill has posted some answers to all the questions’s we’ve wanted to ask =)

There will not be a no new releases of Virtual Server; (no new server side 32-bit Virtualization).  But Virtual Server will be supported to the end of 2014. It became available in 2004, so mainstream support lasts until the end of 2009, and extended support ends in 2014, when the product is 10 years old.

There is a general expectation that there will be a new version of the desktop Virtual PC, at the moment there isn’t any concrete information to share. 

As well as server 2008, we also have service packs in the pipeline for both Windows XP and Vista in the works.  There may be [updates] for Virtual PC and Virtual Server to fully support the new OSes, but for general guidance, all three will be supported as guest OSes under both Virtual Server 2005 R2 , Virtual PC (32 bit only).

Phwaaar!, fellow MVP and all round really good guy, Ronald Beekelaar has created a lab walkthrough for Server and Domain Isolation in a VHD.  Nice work Ron!

The walktrough is a 22 page paper, supplied with VMs, scripts and a very sleek HTA interface.  You get to choose between two different demonstration scenarios, Basic and Advanced.

The Basic demo shows just Domain Isolation and Server Isolation — and the Advanced demo includes No Fallback Group Isolation, Boundary Group Isolation and Encryption Group Isolation.

Anyway download the Server and Domain Isolation Demo and check it out.

If you’re trying to install Windows 2008 (or in my case 2008 w/ Hyper-V) you are probably going to get the following error:

*** STOP:  0×0000005C (0×000000000000010B, 0×0000000000000003, 0×0000000000000000, 0×0000000000000000)

The solution is to go into the BIOS (F2 at boot) and go to:  Advanced | ACPI Configuration | Advanced ACPI Configuration | IRQ0 Legacy Routing for HPET = [enabled]

Thanks to Chris Midgley for the heads up!