Windows Server User Group UK on LinkedIn

Posted on By Mark Wilson

LinkedIn logoLast year, Scotty McLeod set up the Windows Server User Group UK with the intention of creating a lively discussion area (backed up with regular meetings) for UK-based IT Professionals who are interested in the development of the Windows Server platform. Unfortunately, Scotty was involved in a serious accident at the start of the year and, whilst he is making a fantastic recovery, it’s going to take a while longer yet.

With no administrative access to the user group website, we have no way of finding out who our members are and no way to contact each other should we do what we talked about at the community day in April (was that really 3 months back?) – namely to start to organise some events. So, I’ve created a LinkedIn group to supplement the user group website. If you’re interested in Windows Server and would like to take part in future user group events, please join the Windows Server User Group UK on LinkedIn.

Once we have a quorum, then I’ll be in touch to try and get the ball rolling for some meetings.

Comparison between Hyper-V and the Xen hypervisor in RHEL

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Even though choosing a hypervisor is only a small part of implementing a virtualisation strategy, much has been written about how Microsoft Hyper-V compares to VMware ESX – and there are some fundamental differences between those two products. Architecturally, Hyper-V has a lot more in common with the Xen hypervisor (although they are not identical) and indeed XenSource worked with Microsoft to provide Linux support for Hyper-V and I’ve recently been alerted to the presence of a short white paper which compares Hyper-V and the Xen technology implemented in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (the leading Linux distribution, which is not currently on the list of supported guest operating systems for Hyper-V). Despite being published by Microsoft, it seems to me to give a balanced view between the two products, although it should also be noted that Red Hat has announced it will be switching from Xen to KVM for future virtualisation support.