The RC (final test) builds of Win7 and W2008 R2 are officially available via MSDN and TechNet as of this morning (a day earlier than expected).  They’ll be available to the general public next week (probably).

I said “the” release candidates.  Looks like there won’t be a second RC release.  If an RC lasts for around 2 months then when would MS RTM?  There’s a big conference in July in New Orleans: WPC 2009.  After that you have TechEd EMEA in Berlin in November.

SP2 for Office 2007 was released a few days ago – I missed the news because I’m snowed under with work.  You can read about the improvements.  That page also has some pre-installation reading that you should go through.

The Irish Windows User Group will be running two events over the next 2 months.  The details are below.  Note that anyone outside of Ireland or not near these venues can still attend online using Live Meeting.  We’re also planning to host the recordings on a new Microsoft TechNet Ireland portal.

Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V Deep Dive (This Thursday)

At TechDays for IT Pro’s 2009 there will be some sessions on Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. This will include some information and demonstrations on the new version of Hyper-V. However, due to time constraints, we won’t have time to get into the deep details of how and why things work.

Aidan Finn (C Infinity) will be talking about the new technologies that will be included as part of Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2 and Hyper-V Server 2008 R2. This includes new functionality and improvements in performance thanks to cooperation between Microsoft and their hardware partners.

Dave Northey (Microsoft Ireland) will be doing some demonstrations of the technology in action, including the much anticipated Live Migration.

Who's Speaking?

- Aidan Finn - C Infinity

- Dave Northey: Microsoft Ireland

When and Where?

07:30 until 10:00 on April 30th.

Swift Suite 2, Radisson SAS Royal Hotel, Golden Lane, Dublin 8, Ireland (Near St. Patricks Cathedral)

Registration

You can register for the event here: http://www.clicktoattend.com/invitation.aspx?code=137699. 

Anyone who registered for the event using the old event system does not need to re-register.

Online

The Dublin event on April 30th at 07:30 GMT will be web cast using Live Meeting.  You will need to install Live Meeting to watch.  The entry details are:

Attendee URL: https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/mvp/join?id=H73KPG&role=attend
Meeting ID:  H73KPG

Windows Server 2008 R2 Remote Desktop Services (aka Terminal Services)

Windows Server 2008 R2 sees Terminal Services being expanded and rebranded as Remote Desktop Services.  MVP Alex Yushchenko will be once again presenting for the Windows User Group and sharing his wealth of expertise and experience.  And be sure to check out his own event that is running in Dublin, PubForum.
This presentation will cover the following:

-       New features of Remote Desktop Services (previously known as Terminal Services) in Windows 2008 R2
-       Migration from W2003 or W2008 to R2
-       VDI – Virtual Desktop Architecture built-in
-       Application Delivery, TS Web Access, Session Broker & Load Balancing and Licensing
-       Powershell in Remote Desktop Services
-       Virtualization of Terminal Server?!
-       How to get the most of Remote Desktop Services and maybe even replace your Citrix farm and save costs

About Alex Yushchenko
Alex Yushchenko a.k.a Dr.Conti is a worldwide recognized Virtualization and Server Based Computing expert. He is a Microsoft Terminal Services MVP and Citrix CTP of which there are only about 25, worldwide. With over 10 years of experience in the application virtualization field he often attends Microsoft events as part of “Ask the Experts” team across the globe and is regularly presenting on application virtualization related topics. He is also founder and organizer of European Wide Virtualization and Application delivery Event called PubForum.net in Dublin in June this year. Alex holds a M.Sc. Degree in Information Technology.

Where and When?

May 20th Wednesday
Galway - 9.30 - 12.30: Days Inn Hotel
Cork - 18.30 - 21.30: Rochestown Park Hotel
May 21st Thursday
Dublin - 9.30 - 12.30: Microsoft Atruim Building Block B
Belfast - 18.30 - 21.30: Wellington Park Hotel 

Location details on the event registration pages.

Registrations
There is no fee for attending the event.  You can register for each individual event:

May 20th Wednesday
Galway - 9.30 - 12.30
Cork - 18.30 - 21.30

May 21st Thursday
Dublin - 9.30 - 12.30
Belfast - 18.30 - 21.30

Online

The Dublin event on May 21st at 09:30 GMT will be web cast using Live Meeting.  You will need to install Live Meeting to watch.  The entry details are:

Attendee URL:  https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/usergroups/join?id=6PC9BQ&role=attend
Meeting ID:  6PC9BQ

I’m back in Ireland but I won’t be posting too much this week.  While I was away in Virginia, sales built up a good load of business for me to get cracking on.  I’ve also got a Hyper-V presentation to prepare, 2 photography presentations to give and some writing with a deadline to do.

Work comes first so I’ll get back to the blog ASAP.

I just read about a very new application compatibility slash desktop virtualisation solution that will be available as a free download addition for Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise and Ultimate.  The solution is called Windows XP Mode.  It will be a version of XP Service Pack 3 that runs in a virtualisation solution similar to Virtual PC.  This means that you have a way to run XP applications on Windows 7 just in case they won’t run on Windows 7 natively, even with the shims available from the application compatibility toolkit.

We all know how annoying it is that important configuration items are being hidden behind layers of GUI in Windows, e.g. how long did it take you to first find TCP properties in Vista?  I’ve been using “NCPA.CPL” to get there quickly for the last couple of months.  Here’s a list of them that was posted after I had networking issues on Win7 Beta during a presentation at Minasi Forum 2009 yesterday – Explorer crashed, I had to reboot and the wifi network I had been on wasn’t appearing in the available list.

You have to be quite careful about choosing what metrics to monitor when checking out the performance of Hyper-V.  Not is all as it first appears.  This article explains how to and what to monitor.  Of course, if you have OpsMgr 2007 SP1 this becomes a whole lot easier.

Ben Armstrong has posted an article explaining why a virtual machine might go into a “Paused-Critical” state.  Quickly, it’s because Hyper-V is protecting a VM with a dynamic expanding or a differencing VHD (virtual hard disk) runs out of space to expand on the physical storage.  Importantly, Ben also says:

“Due to a bug in the current version of Hyper-V – it will file warning messages and place the virtual machine into paused-critical even if the virtual machine is using fixed size virtual hard disks, and the drive that is storing the disk runs out of space for some other reason”.

The annual MinasiForum conference has wrapped up and the last stragglers have just returned to the hotel from dinner.  Today we had Joe McGlynn talking about SBS 2008 and James Summerlin talking about SQL Reporting Services.  I had the last (rescheduled) session on Windows 7 for digital photographers.  Yesterday we had (Dynamics MVP) Curt Spanburgh talking about cloud computing/SaaS, (deployment MVP) Rhonda Layfield talking about the latest NetMon and Mark Minasi talking about W2008 Active Directory.  We also tried something new: 3 mini sessions with new speakers which included DR/business continuity, a home lab and how to install MacOS onto a non-Apple computer.

I got some more photography done :-)  I’m leaving tomorrow afternoon and making my way back to wet Ireland.  We’re already planning next year’s conference and I can’t wait to return.

I’ve seen some misleading information about Hyper-V logical processor or CPU numbers support.  Some people are taking the operating system edition, e.g. Enterprise or Data Center numbers and applying them to Hyper-V.  DO NOT DO THIS.  The actual support is 32 Logical Processors or Cores, e.g. 16 Dual Core or 4 * 6 Core CPU’s.  Here are the limitations for Hyper-V R2.

Credit: WChomak

One of the Microsoft guys has posted about how Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 will continue to be free but it will also include CSV and Live Migration (aka VMotion) included.  Hyper-V Server 2008 does not have cluster functionality so you must use Windows Server 2008 Enterprise/Data Center Edition to get this functionality.

Cluster Shared Volume overcomes the shared nothing principle of shared cluster disks by delegating read/write access to individual files to Hyper-V hosts (physical cluster members).  This means you can have many virtual machines on a single disk and they can run on many hosts in the cluster.  It’s not required for Live Migration but it is strongly recommended.  I'm looking forward to it to simplify my disk management.  The current version of Hyper-V doesn’t require (it does with VMM 2008) but should have 1 VM per 1 LUN – this allows VM’s to run on any host; the disk ties a VM to the host.

Live Migration finally gives Hyper-V a VMotion style of VM failover where a VM is “offline” for 10 milliseconds (not noticeable) when it is migrated from host 1 to host 2.  I’ve recently posted a PowerPoint slide deck that explains this.  I’ll be doing a presentation on this online on April 30th.

I’m having a blast in Virginia Beach.  The conference and the photography is good.  The presentations this year have been excellent.  Eric B. Rux (Windows Home Server MVP) did a great job on a company merger (AD and Exchange) session.  Nathan Winters (Exchange MVP) did a cool session on Exchange (history and 2010) and I was his secret demo monkey in the following Unified Communications session.  We all then had dinner out at a cool restaurant out in the sticks.  I’m about to head out again to do some more photography:

Was the Fox News website compromised with a virus?  Is their site dangerous to browse?  Are Rupert Murdoch and Dick Cheney the servants of Satan?  Will these question marks that I’m using the same way Fox News does ever end?

The mini geek conference based on MS technology that is hosted by Mark Minasi (MVP, author, journalist, trainer, speaker and consultant) in Virginia Beach has kicked off.  Saturday saw us all meeting up and a number of us went out to Mark’s house for beers and pizza.  Mark and Rhonda were great hosts as always.

The conference started yesterday.  Mark went through each of the attendees to ask who they are and what they do.  We found what people wanted to learn about or were having trouble with. The big ones were:

• Virtualisation (almost everyone)
• Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity
• Windows 7 and migration from XP
• Cloud Computing
• Certificate Services – because everything will require it in some way, shape or form

Mark then did his first Windows 7 feature list presentation.

I followed up with the last session of the day.  My subject was Hyper-V.  I spoke about:

• The need for machine virtualisation
• Hyper-V architecture and components
• Failover Clustering
• Licensing
• ManagementW2008 R2: Cluster Shared Volume and Live Migration
• The possible future

My slides are available here.

I don’t know much about the Business Intelligence stuff and I know less about BizTalk so I don’t know much about this new document from MS:

“The purpose of this guide is to provide guidance for using Microsoft BizTalk Server 2009 with Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V. The emphasis is on BizTalk Server, but the performance evaluation methods and performance testing scenarios are useful for analyzing the performance of virtualized server applications in general. This guidance will be of interest to both the IT Pro and Developer communities”.

The Windows Core team posted a blog about how to add a pass through disk to a Hyper-V VM or child partition.  Pass through disks are the fastest storage option for VM’s.  Instead of using a VHD file, they are presented with a raw and unformatted volume.  This is dedicated to the VM.  The VM will then format the volume.  You’ll use this option when you need VM’s running things like Exchange or SQL that need the very best in disk performance.  Note that Fixed VHD’s get within 6% of the underlying disk speed.

The update I referred to a little while ago for Virtual Machine Manager 2008 has been released as part of a rollup package.  This update is said to deal with the unsupported cluster configuration alert.  It also fixes a number of other issues.

“List of issues that are fixed:

Issue 1

When you migrate VMware virtual machines, the resource pools that are associated with the virtual machines are changed.

Issue 2

Hyper-V virtual machines have a status of "unsupported cluster configuration" if a node in a Windows Server 2008 Failover Cluster does not respond or has been restarted.

Issue 3

Differencing disks are lost when the following conditions are true:

• You migrate a virtual machine from a Virtual Server host.
• Multiple virtual machines share the same parent virtual hard disk file.

Issue 4

The agent status is not updated for Windows Server 2008 Failover Cluster nodes.

Issue 5

Hyper-V virtual machines in a Windows Server 2008 Failover Cluster have a status of "unsupported cluster configuration" if the cluster has a resource that has an MSCluster_Property_Resource_Cluster_Extension_XP_Type type. This resource type is typically used by storage replication software.

Issue 6

If you add a Virtual Center server by using an account that is a member of the Enterprise Admins group, you receive the following error message when the refresh host job runs:

Error (2951) Virtual Machine Manager cannot complete the VirtualCenter action on server servername.domainname.com because of the following error: Login failed due to a bad username or password. (InvalidLogin).”

EDIT #1:

Normally you'll get this update via Microsoft Update or WSUS.  However you can manually download it.  Don't just double click on the MSP otherwise you'll get a baffling message: "Launch setup.exe for installing virtual machine manager server".  It turns out I'm not the only person to get that one.  I did some digging and found you need to run this command to install the update: "msiexec /p vmmServer64update.msp BOOTSTRAPPED=1”.

EDIT #2:

Part of this update was a request from myself through IT Pro Momentum.  When you patched VMM 2008 managed Hyper-V nodes, 1 at a time, the state of VM's in that cluster would change to "unsupported cluster configuration".  I've installed the rollup update.  On day 1 to test I downloaded security updates onto our redundant host in the cluster.  There were no issues with VM's.  I forced a VM refresh using the refresh-vm cmdlet in the Powershell interface.  On day 2 I installed Windows Server 2008 SP2.  VMM saw that the agent was offline but the VM states remained managable.

Excellent.  This seems to have fixed an anoying issue.

Dell has released a guidance document for those planning to use Hyper-V on Dell servers.  I’ve scanned through it quickly and there is no mention of NIC teaming that I can see.

Microsoft has made the beta for Exchange 2010 available to the general public.  RAM requirements: 4GB plus 5MB per mailbox.  Imagine what the requirements for the next release of SBS will be like?

EDIT #1:

Here’s an early review by pcmag.com.

Microsoft has issued a beta release of a management pack for monitoring Windows Server 2008 R2 using Operations Manager 2007 SP1.  There’s a set of instructions to get the management pack and to configure your systems.  Note that this management pack and W2008 R2 are beta products and are not mean for production.