• Hyper-V 2.0 Features – Windows Server 2008 R2 will include Hyper-V 2.0 As expected, it will support Live Migration.
• Using Hyper-V with Windows Small Business Server 2008 Documentation Released
• Windows 7 Preview Part 4: Apps, Internet and Devices – I linked to Part 1 – Part 4 yesterday.
• Review: System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 – Jonathan Hassell finds SCVMM 2008 a compelling solution. I agree.
• App-V Resource Kit Tools Available – 5 free useful tools for Microsoft Application Virtualization
• VMWare Server 2: Worse Than Failure – Good to know that I am not the only one who doesn’t like VMware Server 2.0.
• Core Configurator 1.1 available -  New:  Add/ Remove DNS Servers, Server Hardening plus bug fixes. My review Core Configurator
• Windows 7′s best secret feature – Discusses the new Libraries feature. Looks nice.
• Windows Server 2008 SP2 beta will be available for a small group next week – New: Hyper-V RTM and new power profile.
• Wireshark 1.0.4 released – Security related bugs have been fixed.
• AdvancedRemoteInfo update – No Vista support yet, but the author hopes to add this feature soon. My review of ARI

As expected, the number one topic in the Windows blogosphere is Windows 7. As I write this, about 30 or 40 Windows 7 articles have shown up in my RSS reader. In this post, I will just link to the best ones which will save you some time if you want to inform yourself about Microsoft’s new operating system.

Windows 7 Reviewer’s Guide – A First Look at Windows 7 (PDF) (not available at the moment)

This is the most comprehensive article about Windows 7. Microsoft explains all its new features on 119 pages.

Windows 7 At-A-Glance (PDF)

If you don’t have the time now to read about all the details, check out this short version, which has only 19 pages.

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The Microsoft Diagnostics and Recovery Toolset (MSDaRT or DaRT) is tool set to recover Windows which is only available for Volume license customers.

In my view, the Microsoft Diagnostics and Recovery Toolset (MSDaRT or DaRT) is one of the best tools when it comes to repairing a non-bootable Windows installation, or when you have to perform repair tasks which can’t be done on a running system. The toolset comes with an ISO file which contains the ERD Commander. You have to burn it on CD and then boot into Windows PE. You will have the following tools available:

• ERD Registry editor: edit Windows registry
• Locksmith: reset a password (without knowing the administrator’s password)
• Crash Analyzer: analyze crash dumps
• File Restore: Restore deleted files
• Disk Commander: Repair volumes, MBR, partitions
• Disk Wipe: Erase data from hard disk
• Computer Management: System Information, Autoruns (configure autostarting applications), Event Viewer, Disk Management (format, manage partitions, etc.), Services and Drivers (enable, disable, etc.)
• Explorer: Browse the hard drive

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Submitted by Josh Stephens – Blog: Thwack

SolarWinds free VM Monitor is an ingenious desktop tool that continuously monitors a VMware ESX Server and its virtual machines, delivering the real-time monitoring of ESX Servers that you’ve been missing. With VM Monitor at your fingertips, you’ll be able to track virtual server health at-a-glance and ensure your mission-critical apps never fail you… after all, VM Monitor ensures you are visually alerted in real time to any issues in your virtual reality. (more…)

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PDC2008 will start tomorrow and everybody is expecting that news about Windows 7 will surface there. It seems that news already leaked today because some bloggers have information about new Windows 7 features. In this post, I will summarize the interesting things I’ve read today. However, I will exclude the features that I already mentioned in earlier posts. By the way, I have been invited to take part in the Windows 7 Beta Program. Thus, I will be able to report firsthand information about Windows 7 soon.

Mary-Jo Foley lists a couple of features in her post about the pre-beta of Windows 7. The main points are:

Device Stage: It is a central location for managing devices of all kinds. To be honest, I didn’t get a clear picture of this new feature from the description I read. One thing is for sure though, it is not just a revamped Device Manager. It seems to be more like a place where you can interact with devices. I think such a management tool makes sense. We connect more and more different devices to our machines and a central place where we can control everything could really be helpful. People often forget that the most important task of any operating system is to manage devices and this is Windows’ real forte. It is the main reason why cloud computing is no real threat to Windows. I doubt somehow that Google will be able to add a Device Stage to Chrome in the near future.

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• Specops Gpupdate 2.0 is out now – I blogged about the beta of this free Group Policy tool some days ago.
• Mike Nash about Windows Vista Service Pack 2 Beta
• Download and install Windows Vista SP2 now
• German speaking readers might be interested in my review about Symantec’s application virtualization solution Altiris SVS.
• Core Configuration Console (CCC), the Server Core configuration I blogged about some days ago has been updated.
• Clues hint at Windows 7 debut in 2009 – I doubt that there is anybody at Microsoft who can predict when Windows 7 is ready.
• New Microsoft blog: The Windows 7 Blog for Developers – I think this blog could also interesting for admins.
• Microsoft Volume Licensing Reference Guide – This paper has 79 pages. Why is licensing so complicated?
• Network Policy Server (NPS) Technical Reference – 237 pages about the most important new security feature of Server 2008.

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FREEping is a ping utility that can be used as a simple monitoring tool. There are many free network scanners that are much more sophisticated, but FREEping has a feature that allows you to monitor the availability of an unstable server without much hassle.

FREEping constantly pings a server, but it won’t immediately mark it as unavailable if no echo response is received within the configurable ping timeout period. This is useful because sometimes packets are lost or a server is just too busy to respond in time.

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It was hard to miss the fact that Microsoft released Virtual Machine Manager 2008, the successor to VMM 2007. In this post I will summarize the new features, add a few thoughts about the VMware-Microsoft showdown, and share my experiences when I updated the beta version.

Let’s start with the new key features:

Hyper-V support: VMM 2007 only supported Virtual Server. Of course you still can manage Virtual Server 2005 R2 with VMM 2007.

VMware ESX support: Actually, you can manage VMware Infrastructure 3 with VMM 2008. There is no doubt about it: This is the best way to convince VMware customers to move slowly to Hyper-V.

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Some days ago, I blogged about the free tool AvancedRemoteInfo. LanHelper from Hainsoft is a similar tool, but it is not free. However, US$ 69.95 is not much considering that it is much more powerful than ARI.

The focus of LanHelper, however, is not on gathering information about computers, but on basic remote management tasks such as Wake-On-LAN, Remote Shutdown, user and user group management, remote execution, shares and open files management, services control, and user notifications.

LanHelper supports several ways to find computers. You can scan the LAN, scan IP ranges, and scan in domains and workgroups. The tool only finds computers that are currently online. But you can save the list of found computers. It would be nice if LanHelper were able to access Active Directory to gather the computer list.

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As expected, many Windows admins dislike the idea of configuring a server on the command prompt. Server Core Configurator is the third tool I am discussing that helps configure Windows Server 2008 Server Core. CoreConfigurator (without space between Core and Configurator) is a GUI tool and Core Configuration Console (CCC) is a batch script. Server Core Configurator is something in between.

The tool consists of several VBS scripts with one central script providing the main menu. Similar to a batch script you have to enter numbers to open a submenu, but the menu and the input fields are presented in a graphical window.

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• Your favorite tools and utilities always available everywhere Interesting post that explains how to deploy admin tools.
• FREE Solarwinds VM Monitor » Get X-Ray Insight into Your ESX Servers
• Ballmer: You can skip Vista Hard to comment on this.
• Washington DC drops Microsoft for Google Reminds me of the Linux hype in public institutions some years ago. I guess most of them regret it by now.
• Network Policy Server (NPS) Technical Reference Documentation (237 pages) about Windows Server 2008 Network Access Protection (NAP)
• System Center Essentials 2007 Operations Guide (29 pages)
• Windows Small Business Server 2008 Best Practices Analyzer Presents a list of information and errors.
• Silverlight 2.0 has been released
• Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 Configuration Guide (15 pages). Looks quite easy.
• Native .VHD Support confirmed for Windows 7 – Server version
• Syinternals Updates Autoruns v9.35, Process Monitor v2.01, DebugView v4.76, AccessChk v4.21
• The Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit 3.2 Beta is now released Find the right Microsoft technologies for your IT needs.
• Windows Is Preferred Cloud Operating System States GoGrid Interesting prospects for Windows admins.

AdvancedRemoteInfo (ARI) lets you access all kinds of information remotely from a Windows machine. You can do similar things with Windows’ Computer Management tool, but ARI represents everything in a clearly arranged table which allows you to get an overview of a Windows machine quickly. Furthermore, ARI has some additional features like the batch mode or the remote screenshot feature.

ARI has eight panes: Overview, Process, Services, Drivers, Software, Shares, User and Groups. The Overview displays information such as the DNS name, MAC-Address, UP-time, registered owner, logon server, logged on user, and many more. You can also send messages to the user who is logged on. Please check out the screenshot for more.

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NirCmd is one of those tools that belongs in every admin’s tool box. It was released in 2003 and the number of features has been growing ever since. It is hard to describe in a few words what you can actually do with this nifty tool because its functionality is so versatile. There is no special field of application; thus you could say it is a Swiss army knife for system administrators.

While the future of command line administration and scripting certainly belongs to PowerShell, I know that many admins still prefer simple batch scripts when it comes to scripting in a Windows environment. PowerShell is powerful, but it also requires a powerful memory if you only use it every now and then. What I like most about NirCmd is that its structure is so simple that one can easily memorize its commands.

Another advantage of simple batch scripts is that you can run them on every Windows box without installing .NET and PowerShell. Because NirCmd is only about 30KB, you can load it from a network share when you have to run a script on remote machines. In addition, it is possible to execute NirCmd commands on remote computers. You can explicitly add the computer names in your script or specify a text file with a list of the computers on which you want to run a specific NirCmd command.

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Paul Thurrott has updated his Windows 7 FAQ. Some of the information has already been available for some time, but he discusses quite a few features I hadn’t heard about before. In this post I will summarize the new features that are specifically of interest to Windows administrators. I will also add a few comments and wishes. Not that I believe that someone in Redmond will listen to me, but my therapist always recommends expressing one’s wishes because it frees the soul.

Release date

Windows 7 is slated for early 2010. That means that chances are it will be available for Xmas 2010. I wonder whether those who decided to skip Vista will be happy with their decision, considering that that Windows XP will be almost 10 years old by then? Yes, I know XP works just fine, but so did NT.

Kernel

It is unclear if MinWin (the micro kernel) will be included in Windows 7. I somehow doubt it, because this might provoke more compatibility issues. The worst thing that can happen for Microsoft is that Windows 7 is not 100% compatible with Vista. It is more likely that Windows 7 will have better support for parallel processing capabilities.

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Microsoft’s Windows 7 blog has an interesting post about UAC (User Account Control). Ben Fathi, vice president for core OS development, reveals some data from Vista’s Customer Experience Improvement Program about UAC and describes how Microsoft intends to change Windows 7 UAC. This is the essential information Microsoft gathered in one year (May 07 – May 08, Aug 07 – Aug 08):

• The number of applications and tasks generating a prompt has declined from 775,312 to 168,149
• The number of sessions with one or more UAC prompts has declined from 50% to 33% of sessions with Vista SP1
• Windows itself accounts for about 40% of all UAC prompts
• Windows components accounted for 17 of the top 50 UAC prompts in Vista and 29 of the top 50 in Vista SP1
• In one lab study we conducted, only 13% of participants could provide specific details about why they were seeing a UAC dialog in Vista

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