Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 reached RTM

If you are keen Microsoft blog follower then you will have noted an amazing milestone for customers and partners. The news is Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 has reach RTM code status milestone. You can read more in these blog posts :

https://blogs.technet.com/windowsserver/archive/2009/07/22/windows-server-2008-r2-rtm.aspx

As you will note in the Hyper-V blog https://blogs.technet.com/virtualization/ Hyper-V has some awesome new features in Windows 2008 R2.

I’ve been using these now for 9months. I updated all my machines to Win7 at the RC and must note it is truly a great OS. Now what does this mean for the demo VMs. As I’ve noted a few times in my blog we’ll start to transition towards Hyper-V for our images.

Why move to Hyper-V ? Well the reason is simple it the the only virtualization technology that is supported to run the server operating systems and because we build our demo environments under the server OS then it is the way to go.

The other important factor is 64bit support. Hyper-V has support for 64bit. I know a lot of our field and partners have already having been using Hyper-V for a while and keep asking for the images as Hyper-V images. Once we rebuild on Windows 2008 R2 these will be 64bit images and so only run under Hyper-V.

So the plan is simple. When we release the Windows 2008 images we’ll start the communication to move to Hyper-V. We know that not everyone will have hardware or the capabilities to move to Hyper-V immediately. So for those that can’t move immediately we’ll keep the current Windows 2003 based image alive till the release of AX6.0 and we’ll continue to update these each 6 months as we have been doing.

The coming year is really an amazing year for software with new release of Windows, Office, SharePoint, Visual Studio, SQL all in the pipeline. Combine that with advances and cost reduction in hardware, I noted previously about what sort of machine I use for demos and the costs of it. It is only going to continue to get better, more power and cheaper. Intel this week just cut the price of quad core processes.

Combine that with technology advances in Terminal Services and RDP in Windows Server and Live Mesh you can easily setup a great demo environment that doesn’t mean you have to lug around a log of external hard disks when you travel. 

All this means that you can do more with less and hence the move the Hyper-V will give you a lot more capabilities, performance and flexibility in managing your demo environments.

More news to come.

Cheers

Lachlan

Original post at https://blogs.msdn.com/lcash