Maria's blog

Application Compatibility Round Table on demand

Last week the Springboard team did one of their Virtual Roundtables with Mark Russinovich, this time about Application Compatibility. You can download it here.

All questions and answers will be posted on the Springboard Blog. There is also a new video on Application Compatibility posted on Talking About Windows and a new Windows 7 Application Compatibility section on Springboard

On the Springboard site you can also find the previous Virtual Roundtables around topics like security, deployment and performance.

Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2 turned out as the most cost effective solution for Amila

Amila is a Senior Support Engineer working for Ridgecrest Asia Pvt Ltd in Colombo, Sri Lanka. He is responsible for the entire network system and directly report to the CEO. Ridgecrest is a software development company for the  financial sector and they are currently running one major project for optimization of stock exchange systems on one of the Fortune 500 banks in USA.

When he joined the company they were running Windows Server 2003 and Exchange Server 2003 but also Ubuntu clients and other open source products. Amilas’s experience was mostly on the Windows platform and since they were running some .net applications he managed to setup a few virtual machines and used Sharepoint for the intranet.

Because of the nature of the business and the many tight deadlines Amila cannot afford any downtime in the system so he decided virtualization is a good solution. He heard about the IT Pro Momentum program and decided to do an evaluation of virtualization solutions. He tried out both VMware and Hyper-V to compare features, performance and price. Because he liked the Live Migration feature in Windows Server 2008 R2 he decided to use that for his evaluation.

After he had done the testing he, in his own words: “had a painful discussion with my CEO for moving from open source to windows. Finally I won.”

They are now planning to have 5 Windows Server 2008 R2 running 17 virtual machines. The main benefits he sees are migration of virtualized guests from one physical host to another with no downtime, easing servicing, planning and reorganization while significantly limiting detrimental effects on production services. He also like the new disk quorum features in Windows Server 2008 which allows you to have clusters in multiple locations.

“I can say confidently to any interested parties, with properly equipped hardware you can enjoy a number of benefits that weren't possible before. The single largest benefit to any company making use of Hyper-V virtual dedicated servers is the cost efficiency factor. It is far more cost effective to build multiple virtual dedicated servers than it is to build physical dedicated servers. IT departments in any business are able to maintain the same performance levels, security and reliability at a far reduced cost.”

If you are interested in piloting any of our latest technologies like Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows 7, Exchange 2010 and soon Office 14 with support from us, please send me an email and I will give you more details about the IT Pro Momentum program. Here you can read another IT Pro Momentum story in Sri Lanka.

For more information on Microsoft Virtualization technologies, visit the Virtualization web. If you want to play around with the Release Candidate of Windows Server 2008 R2, you can download that here

Free Windows 7 Learning resources

MS Learning has come up with a lot of free Learning assets for Windows 7. First you have Learning Snacks; short, interactive presentations with animations and demos.

For more deeper understanding I recommend eLearning and there are three free courses available now for IT Pros, Developers and Consumers.

You will also be able to download sample chapters from coming books on Windows 7. All this can be accessed from the MS Learning Windows 7 site

Windows 7 Beta will expire on July 1st, move to RC now!

Are you still on Windows 7 Beta? Then it’s time to move to the Release candidate since the Beta will expire on August 1st. But already next week on July 1st you will experience issues since the OS will start rebooting every 2 hours.

You can download Windows 7 RC here and give us your feedback via input.microsoft.com

Project Natal

Some news for all gamers out there, or maybe I should say for all NON-gamers :-) Project Natal is our new project for xBox where you will use your body instead of a traditional controller! Use your arms and legs to kick a ball and move your avatar any way you like! Check out this video from the media event or visit the Project Natal site where you can find more videos and an interview with Steven Spielberg saying:

“It’s not about reinventing the wheel, it’s about no wheel at all”

Windows 7 will be released on October 22nd

Now it’s official, the date when you will be able to buy Windows 7 in stores. Mark your calendar with October 22nd, that’s when it all begins :-) Read the full announcement on the Windows Blog. Windows Server 2008 R2 will also be available on this day, that announcement was made on the Windows Server Blog

Don’t forget that you can already now download the Release Candidate of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.

Have you tried Bing?

Bing! That’s our new search engine that we announced earlier this week. I’ve used it since Monday and like the look and feel of it and I recommend you to check it out and get your own opinion. For a review and to understand some changed that we implemented you can read this article in the Wall Street Journal: “Microsoft Effort to Best Google Yields Results”. Here you find a review from cnet.

Let’s Bing!