New Private Cloud Capabilities Available in Updates Today

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It's an exciting day with the availability of some significant updates from Microsoft which deliver new capabilities to our customers, especially for those of you working on private cloud projects. The Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 update, which includes Hyper-V virtualization, and the System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) 2008 R2 update are both available today. These latest releases give businesses new features they can quickly benefit from, some of which include:

  • - Dynamic Memory which provides improved optimization of hardware resources with increased virtual machine density, allowing you to maximize your hardware investment, while also minimizing service interruptions with the automatic allocation of new memory to virtual machines.
  • - RemoteFX enables new Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) capabilities providing a higher fidelity end user experience along with enabling IT to take advantage of low cost ultra-thin client devices.
  • - Live Migration and hot-add and removal of storage in VMM 2008 R2 to improve the dynamic, automatic nature of the private cloud environment and minimize downtime, enabling your IT staff to focus on more strategic initiatives.

There are many additional features available to you in these releases to help reduce your costs by maximizing your hardware and reducing the hands-on tasks that your IT administrators need to complete. While virtualization technology alone does not deliver all that's needed to deploy a private cloud, if you choose to use the combination of these new releases together you'll have access to capabilities improving the self-service, scalability and elasticity of your IT infrastructure to further unlock the benefits of private cloud computing. 

You can find the full details on the Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 and VMM 2008 R2 releases at these links and for customers running Windows Server 2008 R2 already the update is available starting today at Windows Update.

If you have further questions about Microsoft's cloud computing offerings be sure to check out our Cloud Power site here as a starting point.

Thanks for your time and let me know if you have any comments - Oliver