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With Service Pack 1 now released for Hyper-V R2 it is about time to start deploying it and updating your VMs. As with anything there is a process to follow to ensure that everything goes smoothly and that the virtual machines can take advantage of all the features available in SP1. We’ve already covered these new features in articles on Dynamic Memory and RemoteFX so lets look at what you’ll need to do to get SP1 installed on your hosts and what needs to be done at the guest level to enable those features. Standalone Hyper-V Server This is the most straightforward of installations but it will also incur the most downtime. The following process will allow you to get SP1 installed with the least downtime possible. - Save state of all running VMs
- Install SP1 on the host server
- Reboot
- Resume state of all running VMs
Clustered Hyper-V Servers This is still a straight forward process and thanks to clustering and Live Migration you shouldn’t experience any downtime. The following process will allow you to get SP1 installed on all nodes in the cluster. - Live Migrate all VMs from Node 1 to the other nodes in the cluster
- Apply SP1 to Node 1
- Reboot Node 1
- Live Migrate previous VMs from other nodes back to Node 1
- Repeat on all nodes in the cluster
Hyper-V R2 SP1 Virtual Machines Continue reading at Thelazyadmin.com….. 
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Almost all workloads are now supported on one virtual platform or another. There is a knowledge base article from Microsoft that outlines the support policy of it’s products that will help you determine what level of host OS, guest OS and application version you need to be at to obtain support but how do you determine if a machine should be virtualized or if it should stay a physical machine? It isn’t as hard as it sounds as there are some great guidance out there as well as some tools to help make the decisions easier. The first thing you need to determine is the limitations of your virtualization platform. With this information it will be easy to eliminate physical machines that cannot be virtualized. These will include any that aren’t supported (see the KB article or application vendor) as well as those with physical attributes that are not supported in a virtual environment. This might be specialized hardware but most likely it will be machines with CPU and/or memory requirements that are beyond the support of virtualization platforms. These limitations include: Hyper-V R2: - Maximum 4 virtual CPUs per VM
- Maximum 64GB RAM per VM
- Maximum 12 NICs per VM (4 synthetic, 8 emulated)
- Maximum 260 virtual hard disks (4 IDE, 256 SCSI)
VMware ESX 4.1: - Maximum 4 virtual CPUs per VM (8 in Enterprise Plus edition)
- Maximum 255GB RAM per VM
- Maximum 10 NICs per VM
- Maximum 64 virtual hard disks (4 IDE, 60 SCSI)
Now if you have a reliable and up to date hardware inventory it should be easy to cut out the physical machines that can’t be virtualized. But even still there is a determination to be made, just because something can be virtualized doesn’t mean it should be virtualized. There are two ways to help make this decision and both will also help you if you don’t have a reliable and up to date hardware inventory. One is the Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit, which is free, and the other is System Center Operations Manager with a few select management packs. Continue reading at Thelazyadmin.com….. 
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Some time this week the last of the public IPv4 addresses will be distributed. You read that right, no more public IPv4 addresses. If you’ve been following along this might not be a surprise but if you’ve been buried under a pile of projects the last year or two you might have missed this. Regardless now more than ever IPv6 is going to make inroads and soon you’ll be asked about it. Don’t worry there are some great resources. Over on Thelazyadmin.com I wrote a 4 part primer on IPv6 and there will be more coming soon. Of course Microsoft has a great technical library over on TechNet that includes an in depth section on IPv6. And there are more resources coming along everyday. Regardless of which resource you decide on IPv6 just parked its car in your driveway and is making its way to your front door. Are you ready for it? 
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There are a lot of webcasts, videocasts and resources available for those planning, piloting, deploying or managing Windows 7 at the Microsoft Springboard site. There are case studies and stories of deployment success and while still relevant they are typically based around US customers and scenarios. But we’ve got something totally Canadian coming your way! On May 27th 2010 we are inviting you to hear Fountain Tire’s IT Manager, Tobias Staley, speak with Travis Wizniuk, Compugen Senior Consultant, about the company’s experiences in tackling, and successfully resolving, their real-world Windows 7 deployment challenges. Join this one-hour panel discussion and get your questions answered about executing a successful Windows 7 pilot, building and managing a deployment project in your organization. Fountain Tire is a nationally recognized tire dealer in Canada, Fountain Tire offers a wide range of car, truck, and trailer tires, as well as complete automotive services, for any make and model of vehicle. Today, it has over 150 stores spanning as far west as Victoria, British Columbia and as far east as Thunder Bay, Ontario. - Event Title: Windows 7 Live Talk Webcast: Deployment Tips from Early Adopters - Fountain Tire
- Event Date: May 27, 2010
- Event Start Time: 9:00 am Pacific
- Event End Time: 10:00 am Pacific
PRESENTERS Customer: Tobias Staley, IT Manager, Fountain Tire: Mr. Staley has been with Fountain Tire for 6 years and led the team that successfully piloted and deployed Windows 7 over 50 seats and have standardized the OS for all future deployments (650 seats) across their organization. Consultant: Travis Wizniuk, Senior Consultant, Compugen: Travis Wizniuk is a highly skilled and progressively educated Senior Network Consultant with over 10 years of experience. Travis has acquired advanced specialized skills in systems management, which include extensive experience with the Microsoft System Center line of products as well as Microsoft’s previous generation of management products. Host: Raymond Phillips, Deployment Lead, Windows Client, Canadian Business and Marketing Organization, Microsoft: As the Canadian Windows Deployment lead, Mr. Phillips is responsible for Windows Client deployment and adoption for the Canadian Mid-Market and Enterprise accounts. Mr. Phillips leads the business strategies and directs elements of the marketing and relevant programs to drive Windows Client adoption and evidence through and to partners and customers. Registration is now open for this event. For more information, please visit our registration page at:
http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9727431 
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During the recent Deployment Deep Dive on Windows 7 Community Tour there were a few questions on how best to tackle an application compatibility problem. There are a number of ways you can go about it from new apps, to shims to virtualization. The other day Microsoft and ChangeBASE announced a partnership that will allow you to asses and remediate application compatibility issues with Windows 7 automatically. You can read the announcement here but I urge you to take a look the following: Microsoft and ChangeBASE are working together to offer you a simple online solution that assesses and automatically remediates applications for Windows 7 compatibility at the press of a button. This solution uses a subset of the full AOK tool from ChangeBASE, a market leader in automated application compatibility and remediation software. AOK4SMB is an application compatibility tool developed to help small and midsize businesses to get their applications ready for Windows 7. Whether you are about to upgrade your PCs to Windows 7 Professional or already running Windows 7, this solution can help your business continue to run smoothly. You can try the tool for free until the end of July 2010 so head over to http://aok4smb.com and check it out. 
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During the course of EnergizeIT I got a few questions about how to maintain your library of offline VMs that you have built for your test/lab environment or you have stored for various reasons. I had mentioned the Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Toolkit and saw today that they kicked off the beta for v3. VMST 3.0 helps customers more effectively—and safely—manage the workflow of updating their offline virtualization environment. Using VMST 3.0, customers can now service: - Offline virtual machines in a SCVMM library.
- Stopped and saved state virtual machines on a host.
- Virtual machine templates.
- Offline virtual hard disks in a SCVMM library by injecting update packages.
- Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V host clusters.
You can register for the beta here or download the current RTM of v2 here! And for more information on the tool you can read up on it in the TechNet Library! 
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He’s back! On April 29th, join Microsoft Technical Fellow, Mark Russinovich, as he will be leading a discussion around the process of planning, testing, assessing and rolling out Windows 7 in an enterprise organization. Having just finished up the Windows 7 Deployment Deep Dive Community Tour I know there are a lot of plans to deploy Windows 7 and with every plan there are a lot of questions. This is your chance to get those questions answered by some of the brightest minds at Microsoft and learn from the experience of others who have already gone down the Windows 7 path. Mark will be joined by a panel of IT professionals who are currently in the piloting and deployment process, along with Microsoft subject matter experts who can speak in depth about the technologies. The event will be broadcast live over the web at 9:00 am PDT, and will be available for on-demand viewing following the broadcast. The discussion will be open and candid, with the panel sharing insights, dispelling myths and getting down to the real story around technical adoption of Windows technologies. Specific topics will include the role of the pilot and the critical information it provides, best practices and tips & tricks for ensuring a successful effort, tools and technologies that will help automate the pilot and deployment processes, and conducting a frank post-pilot assessment. During the event, Mark will field questions coming in via the web from viewers across the globe. Missed a previous Springboard Series Virtual Roundtable? Gain insight, tips, and tricks from Microsoft Technical Fellow Mark Russinovich, industry experts, and IT professionals from around the world from these recordings: http://technet.microsoft.com/windows/dd421882.aspx Access the VRT live at: http://ms.istreamplanet.com/springboard/ 
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Webcast, video cast, white papers, resource links, there are plenty of all of these scattered throughout the web. Finding them and having them available when and where you need them can be a challenge. Searching, missing plugins, and a requirement to be online all pose challenges to access the information we want when we want it. There is help via a beta tool called the Microsoft Desktop Player. 
The Microsoft Desktop Player is all about giving you the resources you need, when you need them. There is information for both IT professionals and developers covering .NET, Exchange Server, Windows 7, Visual Studio, Server 2008 and more. The information is easily searchable and split into four categories, webcast, podcast, whitepaper, resources, and combines all the information allowing you to download it for offline viewing and storing content in your own local library. You also have the ability to localize the player to give you updates on local events happening in your area. I downloaded this the other day and have been using it to get caught up on Office, SharePoint and Visual Studio. Grab it here and let me know what you think! 
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As part of EnergizeIT 2010 we have partnered with RunAs Radio to produce some podcasts on Office 2010. In this episode Richard and Greg talk to Nick Simons about the upcoming Microsoft office Web Apps. Web Apps are lightweight versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote available through Sharepoint 2010 or soon via Windows Live SkyDrive. The conversation digs into how users can interoperate between regular Office 2010 and Web Apps as well as the ability to collaborate (simultaneously edit) a document with multiple users using both Office 2010 and Web Apps.
 
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It’s obvious by the number of comments to Rick’s post, and my last post on Azure, that there are a lot of questions still on your mind in regards to cloud computing. IT Pro Technical Evangelist Joey Snow and Senior Architect Evangelist Brian Prince are back at it again! This time Brian gives the white board a workout as he describes the Windows Azure architecture and answers questions about the IT Pro’s role. With Windows Azure, IT Pros have to deploy applications and manage their health, predict and manage demand for applications, and make sure data is backed up and secure. Brian describes the Windows Azure Platform Application Fabric and touches on SQL Azure, storage elements, blobs, queues and tables. 
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Yesterday the Windows team disclosed some information on what you can expect for Service Pack 1 for Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2. While there are no new features set for Windows 7 SP1 there is a change to XP Mode available for Windows 7 Professional and up. Until now your computer needed to support hardware assisted virtualization for XP Mode to run but that has changed. XP Mode will now run on all CPUs! This is great for those people with 2+ year old computers that have the horsepower to run Windows 7 but don’t have the CPU extensions, or the BIOS support to enable hardware assisted virtualization. You can get the bits here.. The more exciting news (to me anyway) were the announcements around Server 2008 R2 SP1. There are two big new features that will be released with this service pack… RemoteFX is a technology (from the Calista acquisition in 2008) that give remote workers using Remote Desktop Services (aka Terminal Services) the full Windows Aero desktop environment, support for full motion video, Silverlight apps and 3D applications. You’ll be able to extend the same experience to users with thin clients accessing a VM on Hyper-V R2 as they would get on a full featured PC. Dynamic Memory is a technology that will allow you to dynamically allocate memory to VMs running on a Hyper-V R2 host. Now those of you with experience with ESX might think this is like memory overcommit but it is different. In a nutshell both technologies allow you to assign more memory to your VMs than the host has. For example I can start 5 VMs each with 4GB of RAM eventhough the host only has 16GB of RAM. Memory Overcommit is different in that it uses paging files for that extra address space. As you are aware paging has a negative impact on performance. I am simplifying but that’s basically it. Today, on a Hyper-V host when you assign a VM 4GB of memory and start it, it locks out the 4GB of address space on the host for that VM. Now that VM might only be utilizing 1GB meaning that the other 3GB is essentially idle until the VM requires it. With Dynamic Memory we will still assign the VM 4GB of RAM however it will only lock the address space the VM is utilizing leaving the rest available for other VMs. When a VMs memory utilization increases, it will draw from that pool and when memory utilization decreases it will release it back into the pool. Again I am simplifying things but that is how it works in a nutshell. What this means is that you’ll be able to use the physical memory in your Hyper-V hosts more efficiently without impacting performance in your production environments. You can see a demo of RemoteFX and find out more about these changes at http://www.desktopvirtualizationhour.com 
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With the recent Windows 7 Deployment Deep Dive tour wrapping up tomorrow night in Saskatoon one of the most common question topics was desktop virtualization. From XP Mode to MED-V, App-V to VDI there are plenty of choice to fit the needs of the particular situation. What is the best migration path to Windows 7? What’s the best desktop management strategy for my company? Which virtualization solutions can save us time and money? On March 18th at 9am Pacific (noon Eastern) a virtual event is being hosted where you can how Microsoft can help you discover choices, preserve & extend your existing investments and learn how Microsoft’s virtualization vision and technologies can help you: · Build a desktop virtualization management strategy that helps you manage your applications, data, mobile workers and multiple physical and virtual form factors · Reduce desktop costs · Enable flexible and agile IT through virtualization · Increase desktop security and compliance · Improve business continuity and end user productivity · Increase end user productivity and streamline your IT management with Windows 7 I’ll be listening in and I hope you can join us for Desktop Virtualization Hour! 
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As part of EnergizeIT 2010 we have partnered with RunAs Radio to produce some podcasts on Office 2010. The first podcast of this 4 part series was posted yesterday. If you don’t already subscribe to RunAs Radio I encourage you to do so. It is a great podcast aimed directly at IT professionals. ------------------------- In this episode Richard and Greg talk to Robert Crane from the Computer Information Agency in Sydney Australia about SharePoint 2010. The show digs into the issues that companies face when using SharePoint without careful governance to manage their data well. Check out Microsoft's Sharepoint Governance Resource Center for more information.
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As we announced in 2008, support for Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) will end on July 13, 2010. Support for Windows 2000 will end on the same date. Support for Windows Vista Release to Manufacturing (RTM) will end on April 13, 2010. NOTE: There is no Service Pack 3 for the 64-bit version of Windows XP. If you are running the 64-bit version of Windows XP with Service Pack 2, you are on the latest service pack and will continue to be eligible for support and receive updates until April 8, 2014. To find out if you are running the 64-bit version of Windows XP, right-click My Computer, then click Properties. If you do not see "64-bit" listed, then you are running the 32-bit version and you need to install Service Pack 3 . If "64-bit" is listed under System, then you are running the 64-bit version. If you are running Windows Vista RTM then you need to download and install at least Service Pack 1 but I would recommend installing Service Pack 2. If you already have either of those installed you will continues to be eligible for support. If you are running Windows 2000 you will need to upgrade to XP SP3, Vista SP1 (or SP2) or Windows 7 to continue to receive support. You can find out more about what is supported and until when on the enterprise products support lifecycle page. 
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