Day: Wednesday 19 March 2008
One more announcement that crept out this week… Microsoft has released Windows Vista SP1 to Windows Update. Although the service pack was RTMed a few weeks back, it has only been available for download to a subset of customers until now – the release to Microsoft Update (and a standalone installer for SP1 on the Microsoft website) means that SP1 is now generally available.
Sadly, I’ve been underwhelmed by the approach by certain ISVs (CheckPoint ZoneAlarm, to name one) to the provision of SP1-compliant products but in general SP1 is a major step forward which brings Windows Vista onto the same codebase as Windows Server 2008 as well as providing a number of incremental improvements. Paul Thurrott has a Windows Vista SP1 FAQ on his SuperSite for Windows.
For a couple of days now, I’ve been itching to write something about the Microsoft Hyper-V release candidate (RC), which was made available to beta testers earlier this week. Well, the wait is over as the (feature-complete) product was officially announced earlier today.
According to Microsoft:
The RC forms an important milestone in the development of Hyper-V and being feature complete, customers can now start to evaluate the final implementation scenarios with the knowledge that the upgrade path to the RTM of Hyper-V will be largely non-disruptive in terms of VM settings, VHDs, etc. In this release candidate of Hyper-V, there are 3 new areas of improvement including:
- An expanded list of tested and qualified guest operating systems including: Windows Server 2003 SP2, Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP1, Windows Vista SP1, and Windows XP SP3.
- Host server and language support has been expanded to include the 64-bit (x64) versions of Windows Server 2008 Standard, Enterprise, and Datacenter – with English, partial German, and partial Japanese language options now available and the ability to enable the English version of Hyper-V on other locales.
- Improved performance & stability for scalability and throughput workloads.
I’ll be upgrading my Hyper-V installations over the coming weeks but even running the beta has been a remarkably good experience, although so far I’ve failed to get the Linux integration components working (on SUSE or RHEL, 32 or 64-bit). I’m also pleased that Microsoft has released Hyper-V management tools for Windows Vista SP1, removing the requirement for another Hyper-V server in order to manage Hyper-V on a Windows Server 2008 server core installation.
There’s more information on the Hyper-V RC at the Windows Virtualization team blog and in the official press release.
I’ve just got home from the UK “Heroes Happen Here” customer launch event for Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 
and SQL Server 2008 in Birmingham. It’s been a long time since I was this closely involved with a launch event and I’m pretty exhausted! I did manage to get some time off from the stand to attend some of the sessions so, after I manage to catch up with the inevitable mountain of e-mail that will greet me after a couple of days out of the office, I’ll try and blog something from the sessions I attended. In the meantime, most of the key messages were covered in the post I wrote after the press launch last month.