Every now and again, we like to use this forum to provide commentary and context on happenings in the industry. from Waltham, Mass. and Palo Alto, Calif. is a good example. On the one hand, there’s a . On the other hand, there’s a ). And if there’s such a thing as a third hand, there are So what’s our take? First, the Microsoft and Novell alliance.. more »

Wow, 11,000 attendees, press, analysts and speakers here at TechEd. That’s a testimony to the passion, and excitement that this generates amongst our customers and partners. Day 1 got off to a flying start with Bob Muglia and his inimitable style. For those who did not get a chance to view the keynote you can catch the recording at . Some really co.. more »

One of the fun parts of being in a team that develops Hyper-V is seeing it in action. Here at TechEd 2010 in New Orleans, Hyper-V and the are running the Hands-On-Lab infrastructure. Powering the labs for the 11,000 people here at TechEd are 25 x HP380G6’s. The detailed specs of each server is Intel Xeon E5504, 2 Ghz The attendees are accessing la.. more »

For those of you who think about desktop management strategies, and how virtualization might fit, I'd recommend reading Edwin Yuen's . Some of you may know Edwin as he's contributed to this blog, now blogs at , and has done lots of demos during keynotes. Edwin's latest post describes our approach to desktop virtualization, the partners we work with .. more »

Most people I know who have spent a lot of time with Hyper-V have had the experience of accidentally taking too much memory away from the parent partition. This happens when they start too many virtual machines – and all of a sudden the performance and responsiveness of the parent partition goes down significantly. The response from people who hi.. more »

Back in February we started working with partners and TAP customers on a toolkit to create private cloud environment. about the Dynamic Infrastructure Toolkit for System Center. First, the tool has a new name: System Center Virtual Machine Manager Self-Service Portal 2.0 . Second, we reached the release candidate milestone. You can download it A .. more »

In the past few blogs we’ve covered Page Sharing and Second Level Paging. Today, let’s dig into what we’re delivering with Hyper-V Dynamic Memory in SP1 as well as our free hypervisor Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 SP1. So what is Dynamic Memory? is an enhancement to Hyper-V R2 which pools all the memory available on a physical host and dynami.. more »

over on the virtualization team blog, but as a general rule of thumb we believe that it is much better to have paging occur inside the guest operating system rather than at the virtualization layer (if paging is needed). The simple reason for this is that the guest operating system has far better understanding of which are the best sections of .. more »

Back in 2008, Microsoft acquired a company called Kidaro. Kidaro is a virtualization management software. After the acquisition, Microsoft rolled/renamed Kidaro into a product called MED-V (Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization). Now, some details are surfacing on what is coming out in the 2.0 release of MED-V. Virtualzation.info has some .. more »

Hi, as I type this post while flying over the country, it just amazes me how far we have come from the days of original computing machines. There is something surreal in being able to blog from an aircraft at 37,000 feet. I will be at TechEd in New Orleans starting this Monday Jun 7, 2010. We are really excited with the content that we have .. more »

Hi - by now you might have read there's 17,000 of us attending VMworld in San Francisco. Huge crowds, just as . Lots of energy and excitement as you can imagine. This post is designed to bring some of the show to you, assuming you're not attending and queuing up to a session 45 mins before the start. The expo hall started Monday. The attendees who .. more »

With Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 we have added a number of new performance counters for dynamic memory. These counters allow you to get some extra insight into what is actually happening with memory on your Hyper-V server. The counters are grouped in two categories. First is “Hyper-V Dynamic Memory VM”: These counters allow you to access spec.. more »

VMworld 2010 starts August 30, 2010. There is a lot of speculation of what will be announced there. Two authors that have posted predictions are Jake Sorofman and Brian Madden. Jake predicts: More focus on OpEx Virtualization is a cap ex boon and an op ex bust-as compute capacity is made available by the hypervisor, it's quickly filled in with new .. more »

Citrix recently announced the coming availability of XenVault - a data protection mechanism for securing offline access to data needed for XenDesktop and XenApp. There are 3 main features/benefits to XenClient. Encrypted data safe zone Citrix XenVault Plug-in uses 256 bit AES encryption to protect Citrix XenApp and Microsoft App-V application data .. more »

Hi, Max Herrmann here again from the Remote Desktop Services team at Microsoft. Lots of news and activity this week at VMworld in San Francisco, including Microsoft’s open letter to VMware customers . Today, I wanted to discuss a question that is important to our large base of session virtualization customers: How do you decide between virtual de.. more »

When you use dynamic memory with Hyper-V one of the obvious changes to the user interface is the addition of the “Memory Availability” column: This is actually a really useful figure to have handy. What memory available represents is the ratio of how much memory a virtual machine has – compared to how much memory the virtual machine needs. For ex.. more »

I am a bit late in getting this post up (due to being on the road at TechEd Australia & TechEd New Zealand); but last week we released a hotfix rollup package. This package includes the fixes for three of the five issues that . The specific issues that are addressed are: . Some of you reported that this did not solve the problem for you. The hotfix .. more »

Microsoft Hyper-V has started to make inroads into dominate VMware shops, but how prevalent is Hyper-V in these types of shops? A recent article from CIO attempts to answer this question. Small companies or those with simple IT requirements aren't the only ones looking at Hyper-V more intently. more..... more »

Back in the days when we delivered applications remotely using Terminal Server based solutions, roaming profiles were mostly sufficient for personalization options. Now that VDI solutions are becoming more prevalent, roaming profiles are usually not sufficient to conquer the personalization needs for an end user. Ron Oglesby started a new blog .. more »

, Oliver says the beta is . Oliver focuses on Windows Server 2008 R2 sp1, but Windows 7 sp1 beta is also available. All of this was announced today at our Here's an excerpt from Oliver's post: The two most important developments in SP1 for Windows Server 2008 R2 are: lets Hyper-V administrators pool available memory on a physical host and d.. more »