• Total Network Monitor, a new tool from Softinventive Lab. Supported probes: ICMP, TCP,  HTTP, FTP, SMTP, POP3, IMAP, Event Log, Service State, Registry State, File Existence, File Size,  File Compare, File Count, Disk Space.
• Paul Thurrott predicts Windows 7 will be made broadly available in June 2009 – Ed Bott agrees
• Download Vista/Server 2008 SP2 Beta: ISO -  x86 – x64 -  ia64
• Licensing Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services – Short Microsoft paper
• Microsoft Online Subscription Program Licensing and Policy Guide for Customers – 13 pages
• System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 Configuration Analyzer – VMMCA is a diagnostic tool for computers with VMM
• Expanded Control with Group Policy Preferences – This Technet article gives a good overview.
• Gartner: By 2012, the majority of x86 server workloads will be running in virtual machines. That’s in 3 years! I doubt it.
• Windows worm swells new mega-botnet – 500,000 machines. Scary!
• A plea to the Windows team: Don’t make Windows 7 too Mac-like – I can’t agree more!

If you’ve read your RSS feeds yesterday, you probably noticed that Vista SP2 Beta is now available for Technet Plus and MSN subscribers. Quite a few news sites mentioned that Hyper-V is included in Service Pack 2 for Vista. Some sites corrected this mistake today. Of course, Hyper-V RTM is only included in SP2 for Windows Server 2008. There are two things I find remarkable about this incident.

When I first read that SP2 includes Hyper-V for Vista I was quite perplexed. I have been testing SP2, and there was no Hyper-V. So could it be possible that Microsoft really waited for the Beta for such an important change? Even more puzzling was that all of sites I’ve read just mentioned it in passing. Thus, my first thought was that it has been generally known already for some time that SP2 would include Hyper-V for Vista and I somehow missed this important information.

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I am in the beta program of Windows Vista SP2 and Windows Server 2008 SP2. The download has already been available for a couple of days, but I found time just now to try Service Pack 2. I think the most interesting thing about SP2 is that there is nothing interesting about it.

I had to install a new patch (SP Servicing Stack Update, KB955430) before SP2 showed up in Windows Update. The download size of Service Pack 2 was 297.5MB for each OS. I wonder if there will only be one setup file for both operating systems. I started both downloads at the same time on the same physical host, but the one for Server 2008 required only half the time. My guess is that Server updates have priority. I didn’t experience any problems after the installation. However, I only played a little with my test machines. I wouldn’t dare install a pre-beta on a productive system.

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I just stumbled across this new KB article KB article about SP2 for Windows Vista and Server 2008. The article starts out looking quite promising:

This article discusses a beta release of a Microsoft product. The information in this article is provided as-is and is subject to change without notice.

The following introduction is a bit disappointing, though:

This Microsoft Knowledge Base article will be updated with more information about Windows Server 2008 Service Pack 2 (SP2) and Windows Vista Service Pack 2 (SP2) when the information becomes available. Currently, the product release notes and related information about Windows Server 2008 SP2 and Windows Vista SP2 are not available.

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