Age of Virtualization | Hyper-V, App-V, Virtual PC…

 These days it is hard to find useful information, especially if you want to find a lot materials in one place. That’s why I spent some time searching through the web to find interesting and useful information regarding virtualization. So I hope you will find useful my list of free virtualization related books.

To summarize, in my list there are 8 free books (with download links included):

1. Understanding Microsoft Virtualization Solutions, Second Edition
2. Introducing Windows Server 2008 R2
3. Virtualization for Dummies – HP special edition
4. The Definitive Guide to Virtual Platform Management  
5. The Essentials Series: Virtualization and Disaster Recovery
6. The Shortcut Guide to Virtualization and Service Automation
7. The Shortcut Guide to Selecting the Right Virtualization Solution
8. Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V: Insider’s Guide to Microsoft’s Hypervisor (this book was free for few weeks and now you can read it on Google)

Ok, so let’s see brief introduction to all books:

Understanding Microsoft Virtualization Solutions, Second Edition

This is the book for IT professionals who want to learn more about the latest Microsoft virtualization technologies, including Hyper-V and Remote Desktop Services in Windows Server 2008 R2, Microsoft Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.5, Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization, Windows Virtual PC and Windows XP Mode, System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008, and Microsoft’s private and public cloud computing platforms including Windows Azure.

Introducing Windows Server 2008 R2

This book is targeted primarily at Windows server administrators who are responsible for hands-on deployment and day-to-day management of Windows-based servers for large organizations. Windows server administrators manage file and print servers, network infrastructure servers, Web servers, and IT application servers. Book contains Chapter about Hyper-V, RDS and VDI.

Virtualization for Dummies – HP special edition

The purpose of this book is to provide you with an introduction to the subject so that you can understand its promise and perils — and create an action plan to decide whether virtualization is right for you, as well as how to move forward with implementing it should you decide it is right for you. This book will help you sort out the hope from the hype and give you tools to feel confident in making your virtualization decisions.

Note** – following 4 books are available to download from same site nexus.realtimepublishers.com on which you can find a lot of free books. You just need to register with them and that’s it (Everything is free)

The Definitive Guide to Virtual Platform Management  

The Definitive Guide to Virtual Platform Management is designed to help IT staff better manage the complexity of virtualization. This guide begins with a discussion of the business value of virtualization and how organizations can benefit from this technology. Next, details related to virtualization approaches and challenges related to managing heterogeneous environments will be discussed. Based on these issues, the focus will turn to ways in which IT organizations can address all of these issues. Details include monitoring and optimizing virtualization performance, developing policies and processes, and automating data center operations. Finally, a list of important features is developed that IT organizations should look for in a virtualization management solution.

The Essentials Series: Virtualization and Disaster Recovery

The Essentials Series: Virtualization and Disaster Recovery discusses the benefit of virtualization in providing for business continuity though data replication and protection, allowing a more cost-effective solution for high availability and disaster recovery.

The Shortcut Guide to Virtualization and Service Automation

The intent of this guide is to assist the smart enterprise with understanding virtualization’s fit into the rest of the IT environment. A major part of that fit is in aligning the promise of virtualization technology with the automation benefits associated with virtualization management. What you’ll find in reading this guide is that notwithstanding what technologies and technological improvements virtualization brings to the table, there are a set of management enhancements that also arrive. Those enhancements are a function of the levels of automation that naturally bundles with the move to virtualization.

The Shortcut Guide to Selecting the Right Virtualization Solution

The intent of this guide is to assist the smart enterprise with understanding virtualization’s fit into the rest of the IT environment. A major part of that fit is in aligning the promise of virtualization technology with the automation benefits associated with virtualization management. What you’ll find in reading this guide is that notwithstanding what technologies and technological improvements virtualization brings to the table, there are a set of management enhancements that also arrive. Those enhancements are a function of the levels of automation that naturally bundles with the move to virtualization.

Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V: Insider’s Guide to Microsoft’s Hypervisor

Hyper-V is one of the top virtualization products, and this practical guide focuses on the essentials of Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V. Written by the Microsoft team behind the Hyper-V product, this book shows you how to perform key virtualization scenarios, such as server consolidation, software and development, and a dynamic data center and demonstrates how Hyper-V can be used to reduce cost and eliminate the complexity of a server infrastructure by consolidating workloads to a small number of machines. In addition, the material addresses using DPM, and SCOM with VMM in order to maintain and manage Hyper-V environments.

I hope you’ll find some interesting stuff in those books, and of course, feel free to comment if you know maybe more free virtualization books.

New VHD available from Microsoft – Exchange Server 2010. Download VHD here. As you all probably know new version of Exchange 2010 has a lot of useful and cool features:

• Exchange 2010 is faster because Microsoft reduced I/O load. Hence you can use slower and cheaper disks to get great performance.
• OWA now works great in non-Microsoft browsers and on non-Microsoft platforms
• SMS – users can now send and receive SMS text messages from Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Web App
• Support for IRM in Outlook Web App - IRM-protected messages in Outlook Web App can be accessed through Windows Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari (no plug-ins required)
• Voice mail transcription -  Exchange 2010 uses a speech recognition engine to automatically transcribe voice mail messages
• Much much more…

Really, there are a lot exciting features of Exchange 2010, and if you would like to try them go on and download pre-configured virtual machine (13365.4 MB).

If you are developer and would like to try out library that provides a set of functions for emulating a file system and a system registry for an application, ckeck out BoxedApp SDK. It is a great way for creating virtual files, fake registry entries, keys and values.

With BoxedApp SDK you have following features:

If you are wondering when to use this SDK see some examples below:

 -  When an application must run properly even if it doesn’t have the right to write to the system registry and to the file system

 -  When an application uses DLL and files, which are to be kept secure, and because of that you can’t save them to disk

 -  When an application needs ActiveX but doesn’t have an installer because it must run instantly, without the installation (for example, when it’s a portable application that runs from a flash card)

Of course a lot more use cases are available, and if you would like to try it for yourself download the demo here (19 MB)

New VHD available from Microsoft – Forefront Identity Manager 2010 Rc1. This VHD is really useful to get you going with FIM, because clean FIM installation and configuration can take pretty much time. You need to install all FIM components (and believe me, there are a lot of components), configure provisioning etc, etc.   Anyway, now with FIM 2010 VHD available for download, you can try all features:

• Provisioning of users and groups to AD
• Creating new dynamical groups
• Self service password reset
• Integration with office
• And much more…

If you are interested in identity management, grab your VHD here , create Hyper-V Virtual Machine and manage your identities.

Hello again. I am happy to announce that Microsoft published free Windows Server 2008 R2 E-Book (with two virtualization chapters), and you can download it from here (PDF file, 11.1 MB). Book has 200 pages and following chapters :

Introduction    xvii
Chapter 1    What’s New in Windows Server R2    1
Chapter 2    Installation and Configuration: Adding R2 to Your World    9
Chapter 3    Hyper-V: Scaling and Migrating Virtual Machines    25
Chapter 4    Remote Desktop Services and VDI: Centralizing Desktop and Application Management    47
Chapter 5    Active Directory: Improving and Automating Identity and Access    65
Chapter 6    The File Services Role    91
Chapter 7    IIS 7.5: Improving the Web Application Platform    109
Chapter 8    DirectAccess and Network Policy Server    129
Chapter 9    Other Features and Enhancements    147
Index    163

Download and enjoy reading.

Bing.com just released new great, fun and useful feature called Visual Search. Visual Search is new type of search organized by categories and then when clicked on category, sorted by criteria. For example; open Bing.com/VisualSearch (before clicking on that link make sure your country/region is set to United States), click on Digital Cameras,  and then on left menu click on criteria Highest Megapixel. You will see how Bing quickly shows all types of digital cameras and then sort them by highest megapixel. Also, going with mouse pointer over image, information about the digital camera is nicely displayed in upper left corner. Same rule applies to all other categories.

Try it out for your self – go to www.bing.com/visualsearch , but as I said earlier change your country/region to United States.

Finally I must say, great job Bing team.

Howdy… Herby I would like to mention great post written by my collegue Ilija Brajkovic on brajkovic.info. Found out why is Ilija prefering Windows, rather than other operating systems. Get some intersting facts, and conclusions about Linux, Mac and others… Read the rest of this entry here.

Yeah I know. You are probably wondering what does DPM or Exchange have to do with virtualization. Well it doesn’t, except that with DPM you can backup Virtual Server or Hyper-V virtual images, and Exchange is officially supported in virtual environment. Be that as it may, this post has really nothing to do with virtualization. Anyway, my latest project includes working with Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager and Exchange 2007 CCR.  So I would like to share some known problems, and errors that may happen when you try to recover Exchange Storage group, or Mailbox Database to Original Exchange location. So after recovery process completes successfully, you are not completely done, because DPM replica becomes inconsistent. So why is that? Well, because DPM automatically recovers to Active node of Exchange CCR,  few steps must be done on Passive Node after recovery. Steps are:

Suspend replication for the storage group by running the following command:

Suspend-StorageGroupCopy -Identity:<Server\StorageGroupName>

Reeseed the copy of database  using following command:

Update-StorageGroupCopy -Identity:<Server\StorageGroupName>

Resume replication :

Resume-StorageGroupCopy -Identity:<Server>\<StorageGroupName>

After all that, go back to DPM and do a Consistency Check  on your DPM replica and you will see nice green status color.

Office SP2 is published and it is available for download here. Among many other improvements I would like to mention here realy great improvement in Outlook performance:

• Startup
  Removes lengthy operations from initial startup.
• Shutdown
  Makes Outlook exit predictably despite pending activities.
• Folder View and Switch
  Improves view rendering and folder switching.

Try it and feel it.

by Domagoj Pernar