Anything about IT

Often people think that App-V is is an Application Compatibility Solution, it’s not. Chris Jackson has written an excellent article where he explains this in detail. Read the entire article here

Learn how to configure App-V; create, publish, and update virtual applications; and create and manage policies for virtual applicationss. The videos can be downloaded from here

I’m just about to expand my knowledge a bit around App-V. I haven’t done any hands-on yet, because I usually first focus on gathering all the useful resources available on the net, and then start reading these. By doing so, I found these fantastic videos on The Blogcast Repository.

Deployment Scenarios with App-V 4.5
Planning Considerations before Implementing App-V 4.5
The App-V Client (part 1)
The App-V Client Part 2- Deep Dive

By the way, if you are not familiar with The Blogcast Repository but like video based trainings, have a look at the Repository, there is lots of other Microsoft related Technology training material there.

As I wrote in my earlier post this month, VMWare published a Release Candidate for VMWare Workstation 7. One of the most interesting new features (to me) is the Pause feature that is described as following:

The pause feature causes a virtual machine to cease operation temporarily, without powering off or suspending. Use the pause feature when a virtual machine is engaged in an lengthy, processor-intensive activity that prevents you from using your computer to do a more immediate task.

VMWare Guest in Pause Mode

For those of you that have been using VMWare before, you probably know that situation where nothing goes anymore on your system because your 1 or 2 or even more VM’s consume all of your system resources. Well that’s exactly where the Pause feature will be of great help.

Note The Pause Feature does only release CPU usage, not Memory. The graph below shows the Host system CPU utilization of a Windows 7 64 bit client, where a VM Guest, running on Windows 7.

To simulate CPU load within the Guest OS , i simply executed a dir c:\*.* /s command and I then “paused” and “re-enabled” the VM twice after a few seconds.

Windows Virtual PC requires that your hardware supports hardware-assisted virtualization. There are a number of third party utilities around already, but now Microsoft released one as well. It’s called the Hardware-Assisted Virtualization Detection Tool and can be downloaded from here

If you launch the tool manually it will tell you if your system meets the requirements for running Windows Virtual PC or not, quite similar as the Securable utility I wrote about in the Detect XP Mode Support article.

But since I usually work in enterprise environments, I’m more interested in command line automation than in visual user interfaces, so let’s see what we have here.

When downloading the tool you get the havdetectiontool.exe, which is a self extracting executable. So the next step is to extract the content which we do by running the havdetectiontool.exe /x command which will prompt you for a location where to store the content. Once extracted you will see a havtoollauncher.exe and a subdirectory called Sources that contains the havtool executables for both 32 and 64 bit clients.

I was not able to find any command line options for the havtoollauncher.exe itself, so i moved on the to the 32 bit version of the havtool.exe. And yes, indeed the tool does provide command line options, Hura!

Executing the following command will parse the output into a log file:

havtool /log havresult.txt /q

Content of havresult.txt

System CPU doesn’t support Hardware Assisted Virtualization.
BIOS Vendor : Hewlett-Packard
BIOS Version : F.22    
System Manufacturer : Hewlett-Packard
Final returnValue = 1

Executing the following commands will set the result into the Errorlevel variable and then create a new System Variable called HAV and sets its value with the Return code.

havtool /q
SETX /M HAV %ERRORLEVEL%

Setting a system variable is just one example, you could also write a custom registry key or log file. Once you have marked your system with the result, you can use your system management software such as SCCM 2007 to collect the data and create your custom reporting.

if you have watched the Windows XP Mode IT Pro Deployment Video, you might be interested in the scripts they’ve used to automatically install XP Mode and create virtual machines. You can download them from here

When talking about Hyper-V with customers or colleagues, I notice that there is quite some confusion around the definition of Hyper-V Server and Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V.

Hyper-V Server 2008 / 2008-R2
The Hyper-V Server is a stand-alone product, which contains only the Windows Hypervisor, Windows Server driver model and virtualization components.  What’s important to know, the Hyper-V Server comes for FREE!.

No, Hyper-V Server is not just Windows Server Core + Hyper-V, the only thing this server is designed for is virtualization and therefore does not contain any other server roles.

Windows Server 2008 / 2008-R2 with Hyper-V
Here Hyper-V is an enabled server role running on Windows Server 2008 (64 bit) or Windows Server 2008 R2 (note that Server 2008 R2 only comes in 64 bit).

The below table provides an overview of the Hyper-V Server and Windows Server products.

Source: Microsoft

Other Sources:

Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008

Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2

Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 Preview (Paul Thurrot)

Microsoft TechNet – Hyper-V

First Look: Hyper-V Server

Here’s another great article from Stephen Rose, explaining XP Mode vs. MED-V. Read the entire article here

Microsoft recently published the “Virtual Hard Disk Getting Started Guide”. This paper provides you with all the information you need around VHD.

Download the Guide here

In my earlier post “Detect XP Mode support” I wrote about a utility that checks the system for virtualization support. I have just found a similar one from VMWare that helps detecting if your CPU supports running virtual 64 bit guest operating systems.

The VMWare Guest Check utility can be downloaded from here

The following message appears when your system does not support running 64 bit guest operating systems:

The following message appears when your system does support running 64 bit guest operating systems:

Brian Madden has done an analysis on the Microsoft VDI Suite License bundles. Read the entire article here

Ruben Spruijt has released an update of the Application Virtualization Solutions Overview and Feature Compare matrix whitepaper. Read more

Just took a look on CodePlex to see if there’s any new interesting projects and came across the Windows4all.com project. Windows4all.com is a silverlight based website simulating an operating system inside your web browser.

By the way, if you’re interested in these type of solutions, there’s also Wiki-OS or continue reading the WEB OS article on Mashable.

The first out of four  screen casts about MED-V has been published today on TechnetEdge.

Talking to people about virtualization almost every day, I notice that many aren’t that familiar yet with all the terminologies. Ben Armstrong has written two good articles on his blog, describing all the terminologies used around Hyper-V.

Hyper-V Terminology

Hyper-V Terminology Update

One of the things that seems to confuse people a lot is understanding the difference between Hyper-V Server and Hyper-V on Server 2008. I take the freedom of copying Ben’s explanation (below).

Microsoft Hyper-V Server
When you see people talk about “Microsoft Hyper-V Server” they are talking about the stand alone version of Hyper-V.  The simple rule here is the “Microsoft” means that you are not talking about a full Windows installation.  From a Microsoft lexicon point of view software is either part of Windows – and gets the Windows naming (e.g. Windows Powershell) or is not part of Windows and gets the Microsoft naming (e.g. Microsoft Office).

Hyper-V on Windows Server 2008 / Windows Server 2008 with the Hyper-V role enabled
The part is a little clumsy.  While we have the “Windows Server 2008 without Hyper-V” SKU, its alternative is just “Windows Server 2008”.  But in order to avoid confusing people into thinking there is another SKU you will never see Microsoft say “Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V” as that sounds to close to the aforementioned SKU name.  As a result you will see the above terms used to refer to a Windows Server 2008 system that has Hyper-V enabled (as compared to a Windows Server 2008 system that does not have Hyper-V enabled).