For those who may not have seen this on the Microsoft Virtualization blog, the Hyper-V Linux Integration Services for Linux Version 2.1 just went RTM! This is great news for customers using virtualization in a heterogeneous data center environment. Hyper-V has supported Linux as a guest OS for a long time, and this new release really enhances that support Read more
Wednesday (7/21) was an exciting day for customer Direct Edge. They’re a new stock exchange, and are expected to handle 10%-13% of the monthly U.S. stock trading volume, which comes to an average of 1.4 billion shares a day. You can see news article here and here. Microsoft, and other technology partners, joined them on Read more
The Microsoft Solution Accelerators Team is happy to announce that the Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit 5.0 is now available! This is one of the most useful and popular of Microsoft’s planning toolkits allowing customers and partners to automatically assess your current infrastructure and make recommendations for future capacity and compliance. The new version 5 Read more
Building on our commitment to provide customers with the right technologies to virtualize their IT environments, today we’re announcing that the public beta of Service Pack 1 for Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 will be released by the end of July. We’ve posted on the contents of SP1 before, but the beta release Read more
We in Windows Server are sorry to report a disturbing trend among IT professionals. Ever since Windows Server 2008 R2 was first released as a public beta, and Best Practices Analyzer for Windows Server roles was first available, we’ve been getting some alarming dispatches from the IT management front. An IT consultant from the Austin, Read more
I have been talking with a number of customers, CSOs, CIOs and industry professionals over the past few weeks and I realized that the availability and benefits of using the Server Core option of Windows Server 2008 or Windows Server 2008 R2 was not as widely known as I think it should be. Windows Server Read more
Hi everyone. Good news: Active Directory Federation Services 2.0(AD FS 2.0) has been finalized and is now available for download! AD FS 2.0 is a role in Windows Server that simplifies access and single sign-on to both on-premises and cloud-based applications. Using “claims-based” identity technology, it helps enable secure business collaboration and productivity within the Read more
IDC recently released a analysis of the x86 server market “Business-Critical Workloads: Supporting Business-Critical: Computing with an Integrated Server Platform.” If you don’t have time to read the whitepaper, check out the ComputerWorld webcast covering this material here. What does the white paper show? Clearly, IT managers have realized that large, proprietary UNIX systems cost Read more
Intel’s announcement yesterday of its new Xeon 7500 server CPU platform (previously known as the Nehalem EX) is generating a good deal of optimism, especially when its contrasted with new features in Windows Server 2008 R2 that take advantage of all that these new silicon marvels have to offer. The new platform’s potential in the Read more
I wanted to first introduce myself to the Windows Server community as an upcoming contributor in my new role as the Director of Program Management for Windows Server. Some of you may know me from my previous role as the Product Unit Manager for Forefront Threat Management Gateway 2010. I wanted to take a moment Read more
I’ve written previously about 64-bit and Windows Server and the long, steady adoption of 64-bit computing over the years. Having been involved in Windows Server support for Alpha processors in the past, and seeing many of the early chapters of 64-bit Windows Server written on Intel’s Itanium architecture, it’s with a sense of nostalgia that Read more
