MS Virtual PC and Server

Ben Armstrong Program manager for the Microsoft Windows virtualization team finishes writing Professional Microsoft Virtual Server 2005

Charles Aunger / www.eknowlogy.com — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 07:32:00 GMT

The books aims to provide an in-depth resource on Virtual Server, so the book covers the basics of Virtual Server as well as the configuration; management and programming aspects of using Virtual Server. All in all this book is just shy of 600 pages long

To give you an idea of where this book goes - here is a summary of the chapters and their contents:

Why Virtualize?
This chapter provides information on the various reasons why you might want to look at server virtualization, as well as making recommendations about configurations that might not be suitable for server virtualization.
Getting Started with Microsoft Virtual Server 2005
Here the details of how to install Virtual Server and get everything up and running are provided, as well as using the advanced installation options.
Virtual Server Basic Concepts
The basic concepts of virtual machines, virtual hard disks, virtual networking and emulated hardware are covered in this chapter.
Installing Guest Operating Systems
This chapter provides detailed instructions for installing Windows Server 2003 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 inside of virtual machines, including installing Virtual Machine Additions.
Creating a Virtual Machine Library
Having a good virtual machine library strategy is critical to efficiently using Virtual Server. Here I outline different strategies and discuss how to create template virtual machines for Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista and Linux.
Understanding Virtual Machine Performance
I love this chapter, it provides details of processor, memory, networking and storage performance; as well as how to optimize each for best performance.
Monitoring and Managing Virtual Machines
This chapter outlines the basic tools and methods for management of virtual machines.
Keeping Virtual Machines Up to Date
This chapter discusses different strategies for keeping virtual machines up to date with the latest patches. It also details how to configure a Windows Server Update Server and a YUM server inside of virtual machines.
Keeping Virtual Machines Secure
Here I talk about all of the necessary steps to take to ensure that virtual machines are secure, and remain secure.
Securing Virtual Server
Next I move on to talking about what is required to secure the physical installation of Virtual Server itself.
Backing Up Virtual Machines
This chapter discusses a number of different approaches that can be used in order to back up virtual machines, as well as highlighting the pros and cons of each approach.
Physical to Virtual Migration of Servers
This chapter is all about how to use Microsoft's Virtual Server Migration Toolkit (VSMT).
Manual Physical to Virtual Migrations
This is another of my favorite chapters, as it provides all the information necessary for you to perform a manual physical to virtual migration - including information on driver and configuration changes that need to be made.
Clustering Virtual Machines
This chapter discusses how to cluster virtual machines using emulated SCSI or iSCSI, and the reasons why you would want to use either configuration.
Clustering Virtual Server
Here I provide detailed information about clustering Virtual Server using the HAVM.VBS script and Windows Server clustering.
Using the Virtual Server COM Interface
This is the first chapter on developing against the Virtual Server COM interface, and it discusses the basics needed to connect to the COM interface under various development environments.
Scripting Virtual Server
Another favorite chapter of mine, Scripting Virtual Server provides sample VBScripts that demonstrate how to use pretty much every method and property of the Virtual Server COM interface. As well as providing some interesting general use sample scripts.
Using PowerShell to Control Virtual Server
Next I drill into scripting Virtual Server with PowerShell. On top of covering the basics, I demonstrate how to use PowerShell pipelining and function capabilities effectively with Virtual Server.
Developing Managed Applications for Virtual Server
This chapter steps you through the process of creating a simple managed application that allows you to control the state of virtual machines, view statistical information about virtual machines, and interact with them through an embedded VMRC control. Code samples are provided in both VB.NET and C#.
Developing ASP.NET Applications with Virtual Server
Here I show you how to build your own 'self service' website, where users can create and destroy virtual machines using preconfigured virtual machine templates, all without needing to have administrative access to the actual Virtual Server installation (or any virtual machine knowledge at all).
Application Debugging with Virtual Server
Finally I discuss how to use Virtual Server to help with the development and debugging of other applications.

click for source

Charles Aunger
charles aunger eknowlogy / eviglio / frameworkx / charles.aunger homepage

Microsoft Enables New Ways to Deploy Windows Vista

Charles Aunger / www.eknowlogy.com — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 13:20:00 GMT

Microsoft Enables New Ways to Deploy Windows Vista
Q&A: New options to license desktop virtualization and diskless PCs give Windows Vista Enterprise customers more choices, says the director of Microsoft's Windows Business Group.

For many IT professionals within large organizations, maintaining control over their desktop environments is becoming an increasingly tall order. The cost of deploying and administering PCs – sometimes tens of thousands of PCs – across an enterprise can be significant, especially without the proper infrastructure in place to aid in the automation of these tasks. Add to that the growing complexity created by more mobile and temporary workers as well as new data security and compliance requirements – such as Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA in the United States – in regulated industries, and it is little wonder that some large enterprises are exploring alternative approaches to traditional desktop management.

With the combination of Window Vista Enterprise Edition and the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack, customers can secure PCs, centralize applications and increase productivity while decreasing deployment costs. In addition, the advent of fast networking and virtualization has opened the door for large enterprises examining new architectures that centralize Windows. Last week, at the Microsoft Management Summit 2007 (MMS 2007), Microsoft detailed the upcoming availability of licensing for two new centralized architectures based on Windows Vista Enterprise Edition. For details on the new offerings and what they mean to customers, PressPass spoke with Microsoft’s Scott Woodgate, director in the Windows Business Group.

Scott Woodgate, Director, Microsoft Windows Business Group

PressPass: At MMS 2007, you disclosed additional deployment options for Windows Vista. What are these changes designed to address?

Woodgate: Some of our larger, more highly managed and heavily regulated customers have been asking us for more new Windows Vista deployment models and licensing so they can see how well nascent architectures based on virtualization and fast networking function within their environments. We are responding by adding two more options to the numerous ways customers can deploy and manage Windows Vista Enterprise. These two new options will enable our customers to begin testing centralized desktops and diskless PCs in their production environments alongside their existing deployment model and determine which combination provides the right mix of centralized IT control and end-user flexibility for their respective businesses.

PressPass: What exactly are the changes you announced?

Woodgate: For Software Assurance customers using Windows Vista Enterprise, we’re adding two new ways to license and deploy the operating system. They are:

1) The license right to use Windows Vista on diskless PCs

2) The availability of a subscription license called Windows Vista Enterprise Centralized Desktops (VECD) which allows customers to use Windows in virtual machines centralized on server hardware.

PressPass: What are diskless PCs? How do customers benefit from running Windows on a diskless PC, and how does it work?

Woodgate: We think of a diskless PC as simply a PC that runs Windows but does not store Windows or data locally because it does not have a hard drive. The customers that have been requesting diskless PCs tell us they want the ability to move their Windows data and applications to centralized storage hardware such as a Storage Area Network (SAN), while still maintaining the local computing characteristics and experience of a PC.

We are working with our partners so they can provide the software to enable diskless PCs and they will likely enable two different scenarios for customers. In the first scenario, each employee’s hard drive is stored individually on centralized storage hardware. In the second scenario, shared images are used by a group of users. Our licensing enables both of these scenarios so that customers can work with our partners to determine if these are valuable architectures within their desktop environment.

click here for source and the rest of the release

Charles Aunger
charles aunger eknowlogy / eviglio / frameworkx / charles.aunger homepage

Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 and Next-Generation AMD Opteron™ Processors Increase the Business Value of Virtualization - Whitepaper

Charles Aunger / www.eknowlogy.com — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 17:34:00 GMT

Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 and Next-Generation AMD Opteron™ Processors Increase the Business Value of Virtualization - Whitepaper
from Microsoft.

click for to download the whitepaper from source

Extract

The Next-Generation AMD Opteron processors offer even more virtualization-specific features including energy-efficient DDR2 memory, which offers greater memory bandwidth, improved memory RAS, and cost savings.

Plus, Next-Generation AMD Opteron processors provide a seamless upgrade path to quad-core, using the same socket set, which provides even greater scalability for Virtual Server implementations and protects hardware investments by doubling processing power through a simple chip replacement in existing servers. The seamless hardware upgrade also dovetails with the forward compatibility of VHDs to Windows Server Virtualization, which together provide a seamless upgrade path for virtual machines in the software layer.

Virtual Server and Next Generation AMD Opteron Processors: Increasing Business Value

To meet the increasing demands of their businesses while simultaneously controlling costs, organizations continually strive for ways to increase efficiencies through streamlined deployment processes, comprehensive consolidation strategies and optimized manageability. Virtualization has emerged as a leading technology enabling exactly those sorts of efficiencies.

Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 running on Windows Server 2003 R2, powered by AMD-V enabled Next Generation AMD Opteron processors provides a compelling virtualization platform for use in click for to download the whitepaper from source

Server Consolidation

Disaster Planning and Recovery

IT Infrastructure Management

How to get around Virtual Floppy hell in a Virtual Platform

Charles Aunger / www.eknowlogy.com — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 12:17:00 GMT

A common source of pain among those who work with VMware, Virtual PC or Virtual Server is the need to copy data to a virtual floppy disk. If you're migrating from one VM platform to another and need a Ghost boot floppy, for example, then you may need to set up the virtual floppy disk twice (once for each VM format). Of course, if you have a physical floppy drive in a system, then this is not necessary since any VM can bind to the physical floppy drive.

If you need a virtual floppy drive that can be used by both Microsoft and VMware platforms, then take a look at Virtual Floppy Drive 2.1. VFD allows you to create and save virtual floppy drives on any 32-bit Windows system.

What's nice is that when you mount it, you can use this as a floppy drive on your Windows host system. Then, any VM can access the drive by connecting to the "Physical Drive" on the host. Even though VFD is a virtual drive, its emulation makes it appear as a physical drive to the host OS and both VMware and the Virtual PC/Server applications. So if you need to make a boot floppy for a VM, you can mount the VFD on your host system, create the floppy and then link it to a virtual machine.

Here's all you need to do to use VFD:

Download VFD 2.1 here.
Extract the downloaded .ZIP file to a folder on your system.
Open the folder and then double-click on the vfdwin.exe file.
You should now see the VFD Control Panel window. From here, click the Driver tab and then click the Install button.
Next, click Start.
Now click the Drive0 tab. Next to Drive Letter, click the Change button. In the Drive Letter dialog box, click the Drive Letter drop-down menu and select A if no floppy drive is installed on the system, or select B if a floppy drive already exists.
At this point, your system will show that it has a floppy drive; however, it currently does not have a disk. To add a virtual disk, under the Drive0 tab, click Open.
In the Open Virtual Floppy Image dialog box, you have two choices: have the virtual floppy live in RAM or link the virtual floppy to a file. If you need a temporary floppy disk, you can leave RAM selected as the disk type and then click Create. If you want to maintain a permanent virtual floppy disk, click Browse and enter the name of the new file. Note that it can have the .FLP or .VHD extension (among others). Next, click Create and your virtual floppy is ready to go.

At this point, any VM can access the virtual floppy by connecting to it as a physical drive on the host system. While leaving the VFD Control Panel open, you can now use Windows Explorer to navigate to the floppy drive, format it and save files to it. If you see the drive appear as a 5.25-inch drive in the Windows Explorer GUI, don't go running for your old copy of Oregon Trail. This is just a glitch and the drive will still be treated as a 1.44MB disk.

In addition to its usefulness with VMware and Virtual Server/PC, the virtual floppy can also be helpful in testing or training environments where a floppy drive is needed, but no physical drive is installed in a system. While it may not resurrect floppy disk classics like Oregon Trail, VFD can at least ease the management of virtual machine floppy disks.

Read or comment on the original, here.

Charles Aunger
charles aunger eknowlogy / eviglio / frameworkx

Microsoft releases Virtual PC 2007

Charles Aunger / www.eknowlogy.com — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 19:46:00 GMT

Microsoft® Virtual PC 2007 allows users to conveniently run multiple operating systems on a single computer. Users can switch operating systems as easily as they switch applications—instantly, with a mouse click. As a migration tool, Virtual PC provides a cost-effective safety net for certain employees to run critical legacy applications on an interim basis while you continue migrating to a new operating system. Virtual PC also helps companies more rapidly develop, test, support, and deploy applications. This document presents a technical overview of Virtual PC and how it can benefit your company.

Host Machine: An x86-based or an x64-based computer with a 400 MHz or faster (1 GHz recommended) processor with L2 cache. Virtual PC supports the use of AMD Athlon/Duron, Intel Celeron, Intel Pentium II, Intel Pentium III, Intel Pentium 4, Intel Core Duo, and Intel Core2 Duo processors. You can run Virtual PC on a multi-processor computer, but it utilizes one processor only.

Host operating system: Windows Vista Business, Windows Vista Enterprise, Windows Vista Ultimate, Windows XP Professional, or Windows XP Tablet PC Edition

Guest operating system: Microsoft fully supports the following operating systems running in a virtual machine on Virtual PC: Windows Vista Enterprise, Windows Vista Business, Windows Vista Ultimate, Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows 2000 Professional, Windows XP Home and Pro, OS/2. Users can also install Windows Server operating systems and numerous third-party operating systems, including Red Hat Linux, Novell NetWare, and others.

click to download

or click for more information on Virtual PC 2007

Charles Aunger
charles.aunger@eknowlogy.com

charles aunger eknowlogy / eviglio / frameworkx

Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 Release Candidate is available

www.eknowlogy.com / Charles Aunger — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 15:37:00 GMT

You can download it from:

https://connect.microsoft.com/Downloads/Downloads.aspx?SiteID=288

Some key changes from previous builds include:

PXE Boot Support
Keyboard / performance issues on laptops addressed (yay!)
Virtual Networing on wireless adapters re-enabled
Fixes for installing Vista off of physical DVDs
And more...

Virtual PC 2007 blue screen at standby or Hibernate

www.eknowlogy.com / Charles Aunger — Sun, 19 Nov 2006 17:49:00 GMT

There seems to be an issue in the current BETA if you hibernate or standby by your Vista machine and then restart,
plus start up Virtual PC 2007 it seems to blue screen you. Tried this on a few machines and get the same issue,
I also believe a few people at Microsoft have seen the issue also.

Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 now available on Microsoft Connect

www.eknowlogy.com / Charles Aunger — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 18:18:00 GMT

The Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 beta 1 is now available on Microsoft Connect in x32 and x64

What’s new in Virtual PC 2007 Beta

Hardware-assisted virtualization

Virtual PC 2007 includes support for virtualization technology from Intel and AMD. By default, hardware-assisted virtualization is enabled if the feature is enabled on the physical computer. You can turn this assistance on or off for each virtual machine by modifying the virtual machine settings.

Support for Windows Vista as a host operating system

This beta release of Virtual PC 2007 introduces support for Windows Vista as a host operating system. The following versions of Windows Vista are supported: Windows Vista Business, Windows Vista Enterprise, Windows Vista Ultimate.

Support for Windows Vista as a guest operating system

This beta release of Virtual PC 2007 introduces support for Windows Vista as a guest operating system. The following versions of Windows Vista are supported: Windows Vista Business, Windows Vista Enterprise, Windows Vista Ultimate.

Support for 64-bit host operating system

This beta release of Virtual PC 2007 supports 64-bit host operating systems. However, there is no support for 64-bit guest operating systems

click here for further information