TechEd-IT Forum: The Keynote and Announcements

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I told you that I will keep you posted. We had some pretty exciting announcement at the keynote at IT Forum.

For me, the whole area of virtualization is probably the biggest step forward. We announced that we name the official product/feature "Hyper-V", which will be integrated in some of the Windows Server 2008 SKUs. There are some cool things to see:

  • We will releasing integration components to make Linux run on our virtualization platform (Hyper-V)
  • We are supporting 64bit, large memory, and up to four cores.
  • We are able to run Hyper-V as a core role, meaning with a thin layer of the OS just to support Hyper-V
  • We can take snapshots of a VM and are able to roll back to any snapshot without rebooting the VM!
  • In order to be able to manage the VMs, we are announcing the System Center Virtual Machine Manager. We can control the VMs directly, independent whether they are running on Virtual Server, Hyper-V or VMWare! Not only that, you can do more with System Center
    • You can move VMs from one host to another within a few seconds
    • You can access the content (say application) in a VM (e.g. managing a SQL Server within a VM)

There are a few other things that were pretty cool:

  • Data Protection Manager to do backup and restore of your servers (really, really, cool)
  • System Center Configuration Manager with which you can define base configuration and deploy them across your infrastrcutrue
  • The Read-Only-Domain-Controller
  • SQL Server 2008: In the meantime we ship more database server than Oracle and IBM together!! SQL Server 2008 has some cool features as well like support for file streams, policy-enabling the database, helping to build applications faster, better performance management through the resource governor. The next CTP will be available soon.
  • An offering for the IT Pro in your house (e.g. you): Windows Home Server

There is a great bunch of interesting things going on here in Barcelona. If you want to look into some of the videos, there you go:

Looking at the launch wave for 2008, there are exciting times coming up and I actually looking forward to it.

"Live" from the IT Forum keynote – running to the first press interviews J

Roger