• 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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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.

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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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