The Sikh Geek

Last night was our Group meeting and we had Matt McSpirit of the Microsoft PTS Team come and present on Windows Server 2008 and Virtualisation. It was a really interesting session as no one in our Group has currently installed Server 2008, so to see Matt’s demos was great. The really interesting part for me and for many of the others was the Virtualisation aspect. The Hyper-V (as it’s now known) will be available in all versions of Server 2008 but the number of VMs that can be started will be different with Server Enterprise supporting 8 VMs. The other interesting point is that Hyper-V will be available as a separate thing which can be installed on a server and this will cost $28. Now you might think what’s the use of that? Well the scenario that I was playing around with in my head was installing future versions of SBS on Hyper-V, giving you the option of an install of System Centre Essentials (SCE) for monitoring/management on the same box. Why would you want to do this? How about Disaster Recovery through taking server snapshots or being able to migrate to new hardware. The other scenario might be for a Terminal Server.

The Terminal Services feature of Server 2008 looks like a killer feature as well with you being able to run an application from TS without opening a TS window to do this and being able to access TS using a secure http connection (sound like RWW?). Matt’s going to be sending me the presentations, so I’ll get those distributed to AMITPRO members.