Dugie’s Pensieve

Here are a few snippets of posts in recent weeks I thought were interesting enough to share:

• MS07-049 - Vulnerability in Virtual PC and Virtual Server - does not affect Virtual PC 2007 or Virtual Server SP1
• Windows Virtualization Team Blog  Virtual Server Maximums - Upper limits to current VHD Virtual Machine limits
•  VolkerW’s WebLog  An OS is an OS is an OS - made me smile, I hear you Volker!
• VMRCplus  Unattended setup of VMRCplus 
• How to tell it’s Patch Tuesday - istartedsomething - Made me giggle like a school girl.  Even Apple (virtualization) users can share in the joys of patching Tuesday :)
• Warning! Virtualization Is Addictive To Management - Article from ToutVirtual, made me smile. Been there and my head is still spinning.
• VMware working on a new community portal - I’m expecting big things from this guys; don’t let me down  :)
• P2V blues: Physical-to-virtual migration mishaps - Keeps popping up, therefore I can only assume lots of people keep having problems
• PowerGUI: Graphical User Interface for PowerShell - allows you to use the PowerShell in a familiar and intuitive GUI front end
• Useful Registry Changes During Build Creation/Image Deployment - Like it says, usefull reg hacks for [VM] Images
• Virtual Server with PowerShell - create an ISO file comprising of a given set of files
• VIDEO: Mr T does Hitachi Virtualization Disk Arrays - Mr. T says he’s the “T” in IT, and we have Hitachi to thank for this one?

It’s been a longer than I would have liked, but here is a rollup of links I thought interesting, but didn’t blog at the time:

• MS WINCAT-  Virtualization IT Administration Model - Allen Stewart is after your experiences; An Administration model that will win out and your thoughts on the topic because this should drive flexible administration models in virtualization products *Recommended Reading*
• Moving a virtualized data center « Documenting a virtualization project - Field notes on relocating 150 servers (30 physical servers) to a new data centre 60 km away
• VDI: Operational and stable - real life from the field notes on their production VDI implimentation
• VMRCplus on Microsoft Downloads
• Cache and memory with many-cores - Virtualization consumes more cores and more simultaneous threads — this means more contention for shared resources, specifically cache space and memory bandwidth. Good article covering this
• Tracing with VHDMount - functionality to see when something goes wrong when trying to mount a VHD file
• Upgrading Windows Server 2003 R2 to SP2 with WDS - If you upgrade Windows Server without belonging to a domain, WDS will NOT work when you try and configure it
• How do you route between Virtual Networks?  - Various ways from RRAS to Dedicate Routing VM
• Windows Server Platform Directions (Sean McGrane)  - improved hardware error handling, and server consolidation to improve server usage by using technologies like
• Windows Server Virtualization Scenarios and Features (Jeff Woolsey and Chris Corio)  - It looks in depth at the server consolidation, business continuity, development and test, and dynamic datacenter scenarios
• How to disable F12 keypress in WDS and RIS  - ’nuff said
• Blog P2V and all that - P2V alternatives to VSMT
• Backup!, Here Comes Protection - DPM and Virtual Server from the DPM blog

Lots has been happening lately, but all that is for another post.  Here are some recent Virtualization snippets of interest:

• Hardware Virtualization Check Utility - Volker posts about two tools to check if your machine supports Hardware Virtualization.
• Windows Server 2008 hits the bookshelf - Mitch Tulloch [MVP] has written a Windows Server 2008 book that is getting some good reviews.  Hoping to get a portion soon so I can post a review
• SoftGrid 4.2 Tech Preview on Connect - nuff said.
• Viridian at TechEd 2007 USA - If your lucky enough to be there [I wont] you might get the opportunity to see Viridian in action and use it in the labs.
• Scott Hanselman gets jiggy with it on VM Performance Checklist - Before you Complain that your Virtual Machine is Slow;  Virtual Machine CPU Performance and The Duh Files - The file is too large for the destination file system..
• The domain transfer for www.windowsvirtualization.com has finally gone through.  Still some hard work to do before the blog and wiki go live.
• My good mate Luke, shares his experiences with P2V of IBM servers using SCVMM - good read

Well, System Centre Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) aka Carmine hit Beta 2 this week, so here are a couple of posts definitely worth checking out

• Windows Server Blog - Download SCVMM Beta 2 and you could win an Xbox 360 ?!  As always US only I’m afraid.
• DABCC Über Console - MVP Douglas Brown does a great writeup of SCVMM features and screenies
• VMM Beta 2 V2V - Tony Soper gives a run down on VMware to Microsoft VM conversion with the command line
• VMM Beta 2 What Are You Talking About - and again with a comprehensive glossary of all the SCVMM buzzwords
• VMM Beta 2 Reporting - and again with the A - Z of Ops Manager reporting (this rocks!)
• MM Beta 2 Built on Windows PowerShell - and again with Powershell.  Face it Powershell rocks, and SCVMM console is just a front end to powershell, why not cut out the middle man :)
• VMM Beta 2 How to P2V - and again with the command line P2V, very useful if you want to multi-batch many conversions

…on a side note there is over 11,000 registered users for SCVMM beta 2!  Lastly on almost relevant links, Hitachi have the 1Tb desktop drives to store all those VMs you are about to work with.  Ok so it’s only 930 Gb usuable by Windows, but what’s a few gig between friends. 

Here is a list of assorted links I thought were interesting.  I’ve been distracted and haven’t blogged in a while, so I imagine you have already seen these from other sources :)

• VMware strikes back against Microsoft Virtualization - Paul Thurott article, not a bad read.
• Microsoft is about to release a IE7 VPC for download, and refresh the current IE6 VPC
• Pete also has a really good article on manually compacting xp vpc images - I might even blog this again?
• A good mate of mine Luke Notley has blogged his experiences with WDS and Virtual Server.  A good read
• It’s already done the round, but Intel spills beans on Core 2 faster virtualization is good primer on Virtualization with Intel VT
• If your using Virtual Machine for TFS, you should read Richard’s Rant - TFS, Virtualisation, and Newsid - Hmmm I can feel a cloning VM blog post coming on
• If you have 4Gb ram read Dude, Where’s My 4 Gigabytes of RAM and I’ll never have to explain -3GB again…   :)
• I should have blogged this weeks ago Ben Christian’s great SCVMM and powershell collection.
• Dell plans virtualization oriented server - A sign of things to come?
• Common Engineering Criteria 2008 - Looks like Microsoft official support for 64 Bit Virtualization is starting to ramp up?

That’s it for now.

This post is mainly for all the guys I met today at the MVP summit, but I thought everyone else might be interested in these links as well:

• Linux Sound in Virtual PC 2007 — also some great info and experiences with installing Fedora Core 6 (Zod) and OpenSuse 10.2 in a VPC
• Richard has a pretty good collection of resources in his post Everything You Need to Know About Microsoft Virtualisation Technologies
• The IE6 VPC update is on it’s way.  More in Peter’s post IE6 VPC (An Update)
• System time is too fast under Linux
• Auto power-off after shutdown for a NT4 VM
• Power Management and weird repeated keystrokes in Virtual Machine Guests
• Powershell for Virtual Server and Virtual Machine Manager
• How to Create a MOSS 2007 VPC Image
• VMware to Microsoft Virtual Machine Conversions with VMDK2VHD
• Resizing VHDs with ghost imaging or resize VHDs without imaging
• Compacting VHDs - notes from the field
• Although its a little dated, here is the Quicklist of VPCs and VHDs from Microsoft Downloads

I think that’s everything?  If I missed your question drop me an e-mail and I’ll dig it up for you

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.

Some more (and pretty exciting) Virtualization goodness from recent days gone by:

• SWsoft’s virtualization./partitioning software (aka Virtuozzo ) is now supported by Microsoft - It’s been 12 months since I checked out Virtuozzo, time to revisit this
• Chris Wolf, covers how to disable time synchronization under Virtual Server — it not as graceful as under VMware, but it can still be a life saver
• Longhorn February CTP is out, and yes Longhorn runs under VirtualPC
• SQL 2005 allows unlimited virtual instances on servers fully licensed for SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition
• Yes you can install Virtual PC 2007 fully unattended,  Eric has more info — just remember your NIC will go offline for a few seconds during the install
• MCPMag has a good primer on scripting Virtual Server

Here’s a few more item that have caught my attention recently:

• Bill Gates talks about the importantance the Virtualization stack within Longhorn at Microsoft Tech Ready - I haven’t found a transcript yet
• The Microsoft Virtualization blog has posted a case study of Leuime card  -  They are now running 220 virtual servers hosted on 22 physical servers.
• Clive posted about the Clusprep tool - I’m keen to check this out the next time I build a cluster in a VM
• If you building Vista Templates in Virtual Machines please read “Windows Welcome May Not Prompt for End User to Input Product Key” - On a side note there seems be a huge awareness gap for the need to sysprep VMs?
• Security Glitch with Virtual Server - Interesting post, using solitaire to expose a security glitch

Speedlinking #702 - SCVMM, Powershell, and the VHD program

Here are some general Virtualization news items that interested me but haven’t blogged in detail:

• Bink reports Virtual Machine Manager will RTM Q3 2007 - I’m so hoping for a Beta 2 refresh reeeeal soon
• Jaybaz has part II of Controlling Virtual Server through PowerShell - Ben has Part I
• You can download
• Tony Soper blogs a nice thought provoking post “Why 1TB disks will force you to embrace virtualization” - worth a read
• Virtual Machine MVP Ronald Beekelaar, presented recently for TechNet Ireland can download his presnetation from Microsoft Downloads
• rPath has 12 Virtual Machines in VHD format you can download
• On a side note Reflect Systems have announced support for the VHD program as well and will ship their signage software in a VHD.

• Rodney Buike posted the podcast “Virtualization, The Road Towards Dynamic IT Systems” check the post out for more info

That will do for now, I’ve got a few other blog posts I want to sink my teeth into.