Windows Server Team

The Windows Server Team was the creation of Scotty McLeod - and Scotty continues to be our group leader. Unfortunately though, Scotty had a serious accident several months back and, although he continues to make a steady recovery , no-one else knows how...

Even though choosing a hypervisor is only a small part of implementing a virtualisation strategy, much has been written about how Microsoft Hyper-V compares to VMware ESX - and there are some fundamental differences between those two products . Architecturally...

One of the problems associated with virtualisation is "virtual sprawl" - the proliferation of virtual machines (which can totally negate the idea of "server consolidation" if not carefully controlled. Management becomes critical -...

At long last (and not before time), my corporate mail account has just been moved across to an Exchange Server 2007 system with Outlook Anywhere enabled. Unfortunately, I sold my Apple iPhone (which now has Exchange ActiveSync support) last week but I...

I was at a VMware event yesterday where they proudly played this video... ...it's a bit of fun (and the music is really catchy - even if the lip sync is a bit out!) and was apparently first shown at VMworld a few months back. It's not just VMware...

For the last few months, I've been running Windows Server 2008 as my desktop operating system . It's been rock solid, despite not being designed for laptop hardware and even if I can't hibernate (because I have Hyper-V enabled). Earlier today...

In the week or so since Hyper-V RTMed there has been a huge amount of coverage on various websites. Here's a roundup of some of the more useful articles that I've come across recently: Sean Earp has taken a look at running various Linux distributions...

A few months back, I wrote about using the Microsoft Remote Desktop protocol to access USB devices from within a Hyper-V virtual machine . At the time, I mentioned that this approach will also work for other local resources and James O'Neill recently...

I've posted quite a bit of information about Hyper-V on this blog - including the Hyper-V presentation I gave at Microsoft UK in April 2008 but TechNet Edge has some videos from the Windows Server Virtualization product team that go into a lot of...

Virtualisation is great but it's not a "one size fits all" solution - some workloads just don't make sense for virtualisation. For many organisations, Exchange Server is one such workload but there are scenarios when it might be appropriate...

So, after a 2 year transition, today is the day that Bill Gates steps down from his full-time job at Microsoft (although he will remain Microsoft’s chairman and will be involved in select projects based on direction from CEO Steve Ballmer and the rest...

I just wanted to say "thank you" to everyone who came along to one of our sessions at today's Community Day at the Microsoft Campus in Reading. I hope you enjoyed it - and please leave feedback on the UK User Groups website (the feedback...

Last night, I rebuilt my Windows Server 2008 machine at home to use the RTM build (it was running on an escrow build from a few days before it was finally released) and Hyper-V RC0. It was non-trivial because the virtual machines I had running on the...

Earlier today I needed to administer a Windows Server remotely, using a Microsoft Management Console (MMC) snap-in. Unfortunately, the computer I was using was in one domain and the remote server was in a workgroup, meaning that many of the MMC operations...

A few months back, I wrote a post with a few commands to get started with server core on Windows Server 2008. Since then, I've had some fun tweaking server core installations (including some cheekiness installing third party web servers and browsers...