As I write this, more than 1500 have taken part in my poll about Vista deployment. It is no secret that Vista isn’t really a success among corporate customers. However, I must admit, I am a bit surprised by the results of this poll.

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Regedit, the Registry editor that comes with Windows is a rather simple tool. It makes sense to use a third-party tool, even if you only have to edit the Windows Registry every once in a while. RegAlyzer is a free Registry editor with useful features.

My favorite feature is its search functionality. RegAlyzer supports different search criteria such as wildcards, Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) and even regular expressions. You can also limit your search by date (newer than, older than, between and outside of). However, the latter didn’t work properly when I tested it.

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Zone-h published a new statistics report about registered attacks. In 2007, Apache websites were defaced 319,439 times whereas IIS sites (IIS 6.0 + IIS 5.0) were attacked only 137,599 times. Of course, one has to take into account that there are (still) more Apache sites out there. So, I used the latest Netcraft data to calculate what I call the Apache/IIS website security ratio.

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The articles I wrote here on 4sysops about the Adminpak-Vista issue were accessed about 150,000 times. Obviously, Microsoft has managed to frustrate quite a few admins this way. It took them more than a year to finally solve this problem. And the solution is the Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT).

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It seems as if Service Pack SP1 for Windows Vista won’t be able to accelerate Vista adoption. My article about Vista SP1 troubles is meanwhile among the top 10 here on 4sysops. Most of the readers are coming from Google searching for help. Guess they didn’t read my warning. The fact that Microsoft offers now a toll-free hotline for customers having problems with Vista SP1 is another hint that this service pack is a bit problematic. This post gives some tips of how to deal with SP1 problems.

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Microsoft published a couple of new step-by-step guides for Windows Server 2008. At least it seems so if you take the publishing date on the download page seriously (3/18/2008). However, many of them were already published in 2007 when Server 2008 was still in beta. This wouldn’t be a problem if the contents of the papers are still valid. This seems not always to be the case, though.

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I wonder how many different names this tool kit already had. Just some months ago, Microsoft renamed Business Desktop Deployment (BDD) 2007 into Microsoft Deployment 4. The name of the new version, which was released today, is Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) 2008. I guess many got confused by the former name because they thought it would be another deployment tool which is not the case. MDT is indeed just a tool kit, but one that is delivered without the tools. That means you have to download the tools you need for your work. The new version has quite a few new features.

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I am kinda surprised that Microsoft already released the Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V Release Candidate. It seems they are still ahead of their original schedule. Virtualization.info speculates that the release date of Hyper-V might be much earlier than August. Since Microsoft’s new hypervisor is now feature complete a quick look at it could be worthwhile. The new features are interesting. If you already played with the Hyper-V beta and want to upgrade to Hyper-V RC, I recommend reading ahead.

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So ordinary people can now download Vista SP1, too. It is hard to find an IT site today that doesn’t have the news. Yesterday, the blogosphere and IT sites were in fever to uncover Microsoft’s most protected secret. Will Vista SP1 hit Windows Update today or not? And what about the retailers? Nobody really knew, everyone was speculating. All this tension that was building-up over the last months is finally over. Now, we can sleep soundly again. So, is this brilliant marketing or not?

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Ruben Spruijt wrote a comprehensive overview of Hyper-V over at Brian Madden’s site. In my view, Hyper-V is the most important component of Windows Server 2008. Although Microsoft’s new virtualization solution is still in beta, it can’t be wrong to get started with learning about it now. Even though, its user interface is fairly simple, Hyper-V is quite a sophisticated piece of software. This means that many different things can go wrong and you will only be able solve those problems if you understand the architecture of Hyper-V. Although parts of this overview are probably only for those who already have experience with virtualization solutions, it is also a good introduction into Hyper-V.

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