Microsoft Windows

Windows 7 Beta 1 Seems Virtualization-Ready

January 2, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Although the official release of Beta 1 of Windows 7 isn’t expected until early January, a leaked copy of what looks like Beta 1’s been making the rounds on the Internet for a few days. ZDNet’s Ed Bott has spent some “quality time” with the build, and reports some interesting tidbits from the EULA:

The revision ID at the end of the EULA is: Win7_B.1_PRO_NRL_en-US – so it sure sounds like Beta 1 is on the loose.
There’s no limit on the number of installs you can perform, but they stop working on August 1.
Redmond says you can’t use Beta 1 in a production environment.
You can install Beta 1 in a virtual machine instead of a normal installation, but only one VM per hardware device.
Potential privacy concerns (such as Customer Experience Improvement Program and automatic error reporting) are turned on by default, but you can turn them off if you prefer.
Beta 1 must be activated.
Releasing benchmark test results to third parties without Microsoft’s prior written agreement is not permitted.

Amazon EC2 Now With Beta Support for Windows

October 27, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Beta level support for Microsoft Windows is now available on Amazon EC2, in the form of 32 and 64 bit AMIs, with pricing starting at $0.125 per hour. Microsoft SQL Server is also available in 64 bit form.

With over two years of operation and many highly-requested features added, Amazon EC2 is today exiting its beta into general availability and offering customers a Service Legal Agreement (SLA). The Amazon EC2 SLA guarantees 99.95% availability of the service within a Region over a trailing 365 day period, or customers are eligible to receive service credits back. The new Amazon EC2 SLA is designed to give customers additional confidence that even the most demanding applications will run dependably in the AWS cloud.

Microsoft Releases Integrated Virtualization ROI Tool

September 4, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Microsoft Corporation India Pvt. Ltd. today announced the availability of a set of tools designed to facilitate the adoption of virtualization technology for its customers and partners. As a part of this initiative, the company launched the (free) Microsoft Integrated Virtualization ROI Tool that is designed to help customers quantify the cost advantage from deploying Microsoft’s virtualization offerings versus competitive solutions. It also announced the availability of a solution accelerator – the Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool to help customers automate the process of updating virtual machines, thereby allowing them to manage the updation of a large numbers of offline virtual machines according to individual needs.

The Microsoft Integrated Virtualization ROI Tool gives customers direct access to a software solution that produces a detailed representation of the total cost advantage that Microsoft’s virtualization solutions deliver in comparison with other options in the market. This tool was developed independently by ex-Gartner TCO/ROI experts at Alinean, Inc. The tool allows partners and customers to examine current production server, development/QA lab, desktop and application virtualization opportunities – thereby enumerating the potential savings, service level, agility benefits and overall Return on Investment (ROI) from implementing Microsoft’s integrated virtualization solutions. The Virtualization ROI Tool collects specific information about current infrastructure costs and opportunities for improvement, then uses research by Alinean to project potential costs and benefits for various optimization strategies using the Microsoft Integrated Virtualization solutions. All research was collected from the Alinean ValueBase™ of IT spending metrics, and Microsoft product and pricing experts to reflect typical costs and savings for similar company type and size.

The Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool is built on Windows Workflow Foundation and the Windows PowerShell interface to manage the workflow of updating large numbers of offline virtual machines according to their individual needs. To do this, the tool works with Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007 and with software update management systems (at present, either Microsoft Windows Server® Update Services 3.0 or Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007. The tool uses “servicing jobs” to manage the update operations based on lists of existing virtual machines stored in VMM. Using Windows Workflow Foundation technology, a servicing job runs snippets of PowerShell scripts to work with virtual machines.