Microsoft announced the release of its Windows 7 SP1 public beta today at their Worldwide Partner Conference.  There are no feature enhancements in this service pack; instead it is just a roll up of previous released updates for the OS.

Although most firms usually wait for the first service pack to be release before deploying a new Operating System, there has been a significant effort by Microsoft to push companies to deploy Windows 7 before the final service pack released (which is scheduled to be released in the first half of 2011).  Various industry experts have recommended that customers not wait for SP1 as well.

Simplegrid’s Desktop Engineering Practice concurs with these recommendations.  We’ve designed and implemented a few Windows 7 environments ranging from 50 to 3,000 seats, and have not experienced any instability or performance issues that would require customers to wait for Microsoft to address in a service pack.  With that said, customers must still partake in significant planning to deploy a new desktop environment, and must also do their due diligence in ensuring that their applications are compatible with Windows 7 before deploying the OS.   

You can download the SP1 public beta here.

More information on features and updates being released in this service pack can be found on Microsoft’s SP1 beta overview page.

Microsoft announced the release of the Windows 2008 SP1 public beta today at their Worldwide Partner Conference.    There are a couple of features being released in this service pack that are of particular interest, especially since they are geared toward enhancing the virtual desktop experience:

Dynamic Memory lets Hyper-V administrators pool available memory on a physical host and dynamically distribute it to any virtual machine(s) running on that host. So as the workloads on that physical workload change, requiring more or less memory, Dynamic Memory will let administrators change the memory allocation to their VMs without service interruption.

Microsoft has taken a shot at VMware’s hypervisor with the release of the Dynamic Memory feature.  VMware’s advantage in the hypervisor war has been its ability to over allocate memory, and Microsoft’s release of this feature can narrow the competitive gap between the two hypervisors.

RemoteFX – enhances Microsoft desktop virtualization. RemoteFX lets Windows Server 2008 R2 administrators provide an even richer and user-transparent desktop virtualization experience. RemoteFX delivers rich content, independent of any graphics stack, to server-hosted virtual and session-based desktops, allowing them to support any screen content, including full-motion video, portable graphics stacks such as Silverlight, and 3D applications. Because it can use virtualized graphics on the server and advanced codecs, RemoteFX can deliver those experiences to a much wider array of target devices, including standard desktops and laptops but also an emerging slew of thin clients. You’ll also be able to forward the USB ports of the local client to the virtual machine being accessed on the device – just like you can forward the local printer over RDP today.    

Just to be clear, RemoteFX is not a new application that Microsoft is releasing; instead it is an enhancement to Remote Desktop Services aimed at improving the graphics virtualization and advanced codes usage.  On top of that, RemoteFX isn’t as big of a hit to Citrix’s technology, since Citrix had signed an agreement with Microsoft to integrate RemoteFX into its XenDesktop suite.  RemoteFX has been designed to integrate into 3^rd party solutions, and we’ll probably see other virtualization vendors integrating this technology into their products to enhance the end user experience.

It’s pretty easy to get excited over these features, however let’s remember that these features are still in beta.  The final version of SP1 won’t be released until sometime in the first half of 2011.  In the meantime, Simplegrid’s Core Infrastructure practice  will be extensively testing the new service pack, along with these two new features to determine whether they will make Microsoft’s Hyper-V a much more formidable hypervisor. 

You can download the SP1 public beta here.

More information on features and updates being released in this service pack can be found on Microsoft’s SP1 beta overview page.

Microsoft will cease issuing security updates for Windows XP SP2 machines on July 13th, 2010.  Microsoft will continue providing security updates for XP SP3 machines until April, 2014.  

Most enterprise PC’s are still on service pack 2 of Windows XP; these machines will become vulnerable to new attacks after July.  It is likely that attacks against unpatched exploits will begin by the end of this year.

Simplegrid recommends that all clients running Windows XP SP2 make plans to upgrade their machines to SP3 by the end of July.

You can download the Windows XP SP3 redistributable here, or via the Windows Update Service on your PC.

Microsoft announced at TechEd 2010 this week that a public beta of Windows 7 / Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 can be expected near the end of July. Although service packs rarely introduce new features, Microsoft has included two new items for Windows Server 2008 R2, as we previously discussed here, that are intended to enhance virtual desktop infrastructure and remote computing.

Microsoft RemoteFX: New improvements that are designed to enhance the desktop experience for remote users.  It will be interesting to see how these improvements compare to the current HDX features of Citrix XenDesktop that offer rich remote computing experiences.

Dynamic Memory: The ability for Windows Hyper-V to be able to dynamically add and release memory to virtual machines as required.  A concept not foreign to VMware users who are familiar with oversubscription and memory ballooning features.

For Windows 7, the service pack includes hotfixes, however does not introduce any new features.

As a result of the recent events in Nashville, the International Legal Technology Association recently announced that they wil be holding the 33rd annual technology conference at the ARIA Resort in Las Vegas this year instead of the Gayload Opryland Resort. Read more about the conference below and we’ll see you in Vegas!

http://conference.iltanet.org/default.aspx

http://www.iltanet.org/MainMenuCategory/Vendors/Sponsor/Basic-Sponsors/SimplegridTechnologyInc-00033350.aspx