Source: Internal As you might know I was not able to fly to MMS 2010 in Las Vegas due to the recent eruption of the Eyjafjallajokull volcano in Iceland :-( So I’ve time for other things and today I stumbled on the next screencast, which might be handy for implementing OpsMgr Crossplatform monitoring. Check out this screencast on Screencast.com.  

Maybe you missed this news being busy at Tech Ed Berlin ;-) But Microsoft and Novell announced a set of broad business and technical collaboration agreements to build, market and support a series of new solutions to make Novell and Microsoft products work better together. The two companies also announced an agreement to provide each other’s customers with patent coverage for their respective products. These agreements will be in place until at least 2012. Under this new model, customers will realize unprecedented choice and flexibility through improved interoperability and manageability between Windows and Linux. The two companies will create a joint research facility at which Microsoft and Novell technical experts will architect and test new software solutions and work with customers and the community to build and support these technologies. The agreement between Microsoft and Novell focuses on three technical areas that provide important value and choice to the market: Virtualization. Virtualization is one of the most important trends in the industry. Customers tell Microsoft that virtualization is one way they can consolidate and more easily manage rapidly growing server workloads and their large set of server applications. Microsoft and Novell will jointly develop a compelling virtualization offering for Linux and Windows. Web services for managing physical and virtual servers. Web services and service-oriented architectures continue to be one of the defining ways software companies can deliver greater value to customers. Microsoft and Novell will undertake work to make it easier for customers to manage mixed Windows and SUSE Linux Enterprise environments and to make it easier for customers to federate Microsoft Active Directory with Novell eDirectory. Document format compatibility. Microsoft and Novell have been focusing on ways to improve interoperability between office productivity applications. The two companies will now work together on ways for OpenOffice and Microsoft Office system users to best share documents, and both will take steps to make translators available to improve interoperability between Open XML and OpenDocument formats. “As a result of this collaboration, customers will now be able to run virtualized Linux on Windows or virtualized Windows on Linux,” You can read the full story here.

Source: Matthijs’s blog The Integration Components for Hyper-V made it to the Linux Kernel tree. This means any Linux distribution can compile these and leverage the components for optimal performance running on Hyper-V! Read more on source.

Source: Matthijs’s blog The Integration Components for Hyper-V made it to the Linux Kernel tree. This means any Linux distribution can compile these and leverage the components for optimal performance running on Hyper-V! Read more on source.

Source: Mindre.net Tore has listened to my request :-) Thanks Tore!     Go and download this great Sidebar Gadget!

Source: Mindre.net Tore Lervik has create a very cool Hyper-V Monitor Gadget for Windows Sidebar. The gadget can list multiple servers at once and also support vmconnect when double clicking on a VM. PS: The gadget uses WMI to connect to the server so the user need remote WMI access (Step 5) on the Hyper-V server I’ve installed it and it’s really cool! One feature request though ;-) Resizable Gadget so I can read the whole names of the guests.

Source: John Baker’s BritBlog I’m currently building a new demo environment on Hyper-V for the next Public Beta of OpsMgr 2007 R2 and was looking for a fast way to install some new Windows Server 2008 machines. And today I stumbled upon this article from John Baker. “Are you working with Hyper-V?  Want to save some time creating virtual machines?   Then take a look at the Virtual Machine download site, there are two virtual machines available:  Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Server CORE installation and Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Server FULL installation. These VHD's are only available in English only and is only for evaluation and testing purposes. Evaluating Windows Server2008 software does not require product activation or entering a product key. Any edition of Windows Server 2008 may be installed without activation and evaluated for an initial 60 days.” More info on source.

Go to Microsoft Connect and download.