Virtualization on tour, SCVMM Released and a peek at WSV

I remember the first time I saw the comedian Eddie Izzard perform live, he walked onto the stage in Oxford, and looked around the audience. There wasn't a single empty seat. He said "I've sold out! People always say 'Stay true to yourself and never sell out' but I say NO!!! "  Somehow I managed not to blog that we're on road when the news first came out. George announced it and Eileen blogged it, and in no time flat most of the venues were fully booked. Anyhow Steve and I are going to be doing "Creating and Managing a Virtual environment on the Microsoft Platform"   On 20th September in Manchester ,  on  21st September in Reading (TVP), on 25th September in Newcastle, 27th September in Falkirk,  3rd October in London.  George is working on have more places next time to improve the coverage - having got involved in this a little it's a far more complex business than I thought We might keep on Selling out.

We're showing Windows Server Virtualization on the tour, and in preparation Steve and I have both been trying out a Microsoft internal build.  I've used my second internal hard disk (£28 from Scan, or over £100 from Dell with a small piece of plastic attached). Of course that means the disk with everyday work on is out of the machine when I'm doing Virtualization. Outlook web access is very useful at times like that. 

What I can say about WSV is limited right now. It's not my baby, and it's for its parents (the product group in Redmond) to talk dates and features. But, from the first build we had, they've been happy for us to demo it. Stuff posted to the Internet can take on a life of its own, I don't want to describe something which is the correct today and have it quoted in 6 months when it's no longer the case.  Steve and I both used WSV yesterday for a presentation of some other stuff to an audience of 30-40 people. It worked well. Actually a minor networking issue I had with a VM on virtual server went away in the move process.

On the road-show, we're also going to show System Centre Virtual Machine manager, which has just been released after a fairly long beta. We want to talk about managing a virtualized environment so we're going to show this technology working with Virtual Server 2005. You can read what the product manager for it has to say about the launch and the future - the SCVMM team are looking to the next release syncing up with the release of Windows Server Virtualization (which is due within 180 days of Windows Server 2008), and it will also manage VMWare and Xen virtualization. The Xen product uses the same virtual hard disk (VHD) format as we do and we have tools to migrate physical machines to virtual ones.What worries me at the moment is that with SP2 Windows Server 2003 seems to be fussier about changes of hardware needing re-activation, so moving platforms may have an extra step for some cases.

 

Technorati tags: Microsoft, Virtualization, Windows server Virtualization, SCVMM, Carmine, Viridian