Speaking of Virtualization - Service Pack 1 Beta opened on Friday April 28th

This slipped past my RSS reader until the weekend (I had a busy Friday).  Service Pack 1 for Virtual Server 2005 R2 is in Beta right now. Why should you care? The big thing for me is Intel Virtualization support with a single checkbox…

A friend of mine from the UK who now works in Redmond as a Program Manager for Virtualization posted some good details on his blog.

At first, Beta 1 will include Intel Support for virtualization as well as Host Clustering scripts and whitepaper. Beta 2 will include support for AMD hardware virtualization as well as VSS support to simplify backup and disaster recovery.

If you are a Microsoft Operations Manager shop and you also use virtualization, you should seriously check out the Management Pack for Virtual Server (Updated for R2)… Eileen Brown posted up a note on it last week.  You can do some seriously cool stuff with the Management Pack that enable auto failover, self provisioning – all sorts of stuff along the Dynamic Systems Initiative.