December 2008 Archives

Jonathan Cusson from AlphaMosaik, a company that specializes in Microsoft products, shared his experience doing a Hyper-V migration with the Canadian IT Professionals blog at TechNet.

Here's the situation: Jonathan migrated the company's production and development environment from Windows 2003 with Virtual Server to Windows 2008 Enterprise with Hyper-V. And he did it without the help of System Center Virtual Machine Manager or any other migration or management tools (which would have made life easier).

Here are Jonathan's three easy steps for moving the virtual machines from Virtual Server to Hyper-V:

1. Uninstall the Virtual Server Addition Tools before moving to the Hyper-V host
2. Move the VHD to the new host server
3. Create the VM in Hyper-V using the VHD you just moved

Last month at the Connections conference Adam Bomb of TechNet's Edge site taped a brief interview with Francois Ajenstat about moving toward a more sustainable environment. He talks about the business and tech side of making sure your operations efficient.

When asked about low-hanging fruit, Ajenstat mentions power management in Windows. On the infrastructure level, he mentions management software like System Center.

You can watch it below.

Evironmental Sustainability at Microsoft with Francois Ajenstat

On the server side, the Windows Server Performance Team's Matthew Robben recently wrote a blog post on Configuring Windows Server 2008 Power Parameters for Increased Power Efficiency.

It doesn't appear to be in the plans, but Jason Perlow makes a pretty convincing case over at Datamation why Microsoft should look at doing something like this. As a serious IT user, he likes the clean, simple approach that the server OS takes as opposed to Vista.

Call me an ascetic, but when I'm doing work, I want to get work done. All the bells and whistles in Vista are simply an obstruction to doing that. Yes, I know you can turn them off with policies and componentized installs and such, but why go through all that aggravation just to strip something down when you can just ship a CD that already does this in the first place?

This isn't the first time a workstation version has been suggested. Heck, it's not even the first time Jason has suggested it.

But this time, they may want to give it a second thought – with the move toward greener computing and netbooks in the consumer space, and the desire to move toward thin clients and virtualized desktops in the enterprise, a leaner, meaner OS such as Workstation 2008 may fit the bill.