SCVMM 2007 is Microsoft's outstanding product for managing multiple Virtual Server instances across your enterprise. Frankly, I loved it. It made dealing with VS so much easier, and allowed me to build a library of solutions that I could quickly and easily deploy on any server in my environment. It was a huge time saver, and really easy to work with. All in all, one of the best Microsoft "version 1" products I've worked with. But then I moved my environment to Hyper-V, since I had to be able to support 64-bit guests. (Actually "child partitions" in Hyper-V terms.) Both Cougar and Centro (more properly known as "Windows Small Business Server 2008" and "Windows Essential Business Server 2008" or simply SBS2k8 and EBS) are based on Windows Server 2008 x64, so I clearly needed to move to Hyper-V.
Unfortunately, SCVMM 2007 doesn't support Hyper-V, at all. So I've been impatiently waiting for a version of SCVMM that did. And now, finally, there is a public beta for SCVMM 2008. The link here is to a self-nomination page for the beta, but if you have trouble with the link, just go to Connect, log in, and find the link for SCVMM 2008.
Charlie.
One of the changes in Hyper-V RC0 is that you can no longer use a mouse in a remote RDP session until you have the Integration Components installed into the VM. Well, that's a royal pain if you don't happen to be sitting at the console of your server. However, there is a workaround - run the VMConnect application locally on you Vista 64 desktop (or laptop), but use it to connect to the remote session.
When you install the Hyper-V Remote Management components on your Vista box, it installs both virtmgmt.msc, the Hyper-V Manager console, and VMConnect.exe. Both are installed in %ProgramFiles%\Hyper-V, which is not on your path by default. So, I use a couple of little PowerShell aliases to get around the problem. In my $profile, I've added the following two lines:
set-alias hyperv -value "C:\Program Files\Hyper-V\virtmgmt.msc"
set-alias vm -value "C:\Program Files\Hyper-V\vmconnect.exe"
now, to connect to a VM, I simply type:
PSH> vm <hostname> <vmname>
and I'm in business.
Charlie.
I ran across a perfect commentary on how the life of a Microsoft MVP works, in this comic on the xkcd site. Of course, it was sent to me originally by my wife. Wonder what she was trying to tell me...
Adobe has finally announced that PhotoShop CS4 will have a 64-bit version. Gee, took them long enough. The C-Net article on this is here.
Charlie.