I just discovered a cool new utility from Microsoft: Disk2vhd. It’s built by the Sysinternals team; Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell. It’ll capture any disk on your system as a VHD; meaning you can transfer a physical machine to a virtual environment in a snap. I’m going to try to use it to get away from Hyper-V on my laptop, so I can install Windows 7 and run just Virtual PC. I’m thinking I can use this to make a “running” backup of old computers as well. So when I’m ready to ditch a computer and get a replacement or pave it I can just capture the disk and store it on my Windows Home Server for later. Why would I do this? Because I always forget something; a document on my dekstop or some odd file in the temp folder… Or I can just boot it and see what that great litt utility I installed 2 years ago on the old Dell laptop was called, because I can’t remember anymore… 😉
October 8, 2009
September 28, 2008
bharry’s WebLog : Charting a course for TFS "Rosario
Perhaps the biggest call we made for Rosario was to drop support for SQLServer 2005. Rosario will only support SQLServer 2008 and later. That was a controversial decision but it is a final decision. The primary driving force behind it is that the Report Server feature in SQLServer 2008 is sooooo much improved over that in previous versions that we simply could not pass up taking advantage of it for Rosario.
Huge change in the next version of TFS! No support for Sql Server 2005 is huge! Hope everybody is getting the message!
If I were to deploy TFS now and be prepared for the future I’d order two boxes; one with Hyper-V installed and running a VM with Windows Server 2008 and the application layer installed. The other box would be a W2K8 with Sql Server 2008 on. On box number 1 I’d also add at least one more VM to use as a build server. depending on what kind of software you’re producing you might want a third VM for test installs of your software (ISV). Hyper-V is cheap, fast and simple. It lacks a bit compared to VMWare ESX, but that’ll come in v.Next. I believe the 80/20 rule is in effect here.
March 7, 2008
Singularity RDK – Home
Singularity, in code and binary! How cool is that? Holy cow! 🙂
I’ve been fascinated by Singularity from day #1 and this is another step towards my dream; Microsoft creates a super stable/secure/responsive OS, using the best tools and best practice we know now and implements a Super Powerful(tm) virtualization engine that enables us (users) to run every Windows version under the sun in a VM; thus enabling us to run every Window application ever written and then some! That sentence was ugly! I need to improve my writing skills… But the dream is there anyways. What would be even better is this; team up with one or more CPU manufacturers (Intel, IBM, AMD) and create an open and free architecture and build an open and free kernel on top of it. Then enable others to build great applications on top of that again. Microsoft could then sell their Windows Virtualization Engine to enable man+dog to run old Windows applications… Better yet; team up with Novel and make sure that the OS API is compatible with .Net/Mono so we can run most of our .Net application with out virtualization and we can develop applications in a managed 1 library, many languages world. How cool would that be?
December 20, 2007
Getting Started with TFS Build Virtualizer « notgartner
Oi! I did not see this one coming! This is just amazing! I wanna implement this now! Now I tell you! 🙂
Link to Getting Started with TFS Build Virtualizer « notgartner
Noocyte's Weblog 