April, 2007

UPDATE: This article used to explain how to configure BitLocker inside of a virtual machine. However - as I have been informed that this configuration is in violation of the Windows Vista EULA - I have removed this information. Sorry for the inconvenience...

Anyone who has spent time troubleshooting networking problems will be more than familiar with the tool - Ping . However - there are two problems with using ping with shared networking under Virtual PC: 192.168.131.254 does not respond to a ping. One of...

System Center Virtual Machine Manager Beta 2 is available for download here . Some of the new features of this release include: New UI (similar to System Center Operations Manager 2007, Service Desk and System Center Essentials) Physical-to...

For a while these drivers were missing - but now if you need Windows 3.11, OS/2 or CAD drivers for running under Virtual PC - you can get them from http://www.s3graphics.com/en/resources/drivers/legacy/software_archive.jsp#id_765drv Cheers, Ben

Here is another interesting virtual machine. The Visual Studio team have made Beta 1 of the next release of Visual Studio (codenamed 'Orcas') available as a virtual machine . It is quite a large download - but it provides a relatively easy way to checkout...

I have oftened been asked "what do the people who read your blog use virtualization for"? So - I thought it was due time to ask you: I look forward to seeing the responses. Cheers, Ben

Per the title of this post, the Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 RC build can now be downloaded here (note - if you have not signed up for the beta program - you will need to go here instead - and sign up first). There are no significant new features from the...

rPath ( www.rpath.com ) is a company that provides a toolkit for building virtual appliances. These are virtual machines with an operating system and application set preconfigured, and designed so that user can download them and run the application with...

This is very cool. To help web developers who have IE 6.0 or 7.0 installed on their computers, and need to test the alternate version, the IE team have provided virtual machines with Windows XP and IE 6.0, and Windows XP and IE 7.0. You can find out more...

Hah - almost missed this one . 10 years ago (yesterday) - Virtual PC 1.0 for Macintosh was released. So here's to you Virtual PC - may you have many more happy years :-) Cheers, Ben

Some of you have reported that if you have VMware & Virtual PC installed on the same system - you see crashes on your system. Now, it used to be possible to do this with no problems, but that has changed recently. The cause of this compatibility issue...

A couple of people I know have hit this problem - so I thought I would let you all know about it. If you have Virtual PC / Virtual Server installed on a computer, and realize that you have not enabled hardware virtualization in the computers BIOS - make...

Time for me to unveil a personal secret - I have written a big honkin' book about Virtual Server. For more details - check out this write up that I have made which details everything that you can find inside. Cheers, Ben

If you regularly build virtual machines for testing - and delete them within 30-days of creation - then there is something you should know about installing Vista. You can skip the option of entering a serial number - and you will just get a 30 day trial...

I have decided to start a personal blog at http://mumblingtomyself.spaces.live.com/ Cheers, Ben

This is a fun little puzzle game. On each level you are given a laser gun (in a fixed position), a target and many obstacles. You then need to place angled mirrors in order to try and hit the target, and any bonus objects that you can. It is a simple...

Okay - so this week I have a little VBScript to create and connect a virtual network under Virtual Server. This script asks for the name of the new virtual network, then asks the user to select a physical network adapter to connect the virtual network...

Virtual PC supports a relatively unknown feature called a 'split virtual hard disk'. The problem here, is that if a virtual hard disk is created on a FAT32 partition on the host operating system, it cannot grow larger than 4GB in size because that is...

I do not know how I missed this one, but this is a very cool tool. The Windows Server Virtualization Calculator allows you to specify how many virtual machines you will be running, on a given set of hardware, and it will show you all of your licensing...

I have posted about this in the past, but HP provides a useful tool for giving guidance on hardware to purchase for virtualization projects, depending on the work load that you intend to run. They have just recently updated this tool to include information...

Well, Andrew Dugdell beat me to posting about this , but an updated version of the Virtual Machine Additions for Linux is now available for download. With this version the following distributions of Linux are supported: Red Hat Enterprise Linux...

Richard Macdonald posted a nice list of Microsoft virtualization resources the other day, it is well worth checking out . Cheers, Ben

One thing that we have seen growing interest in recently is the concept of 'centralized desktops' with virtualization. The idea here is that enterprises are able to create server farms that host virtual machines, which in turn run the desktop environment...