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.

This entry was posted Tuesday, July 13th, 2010 at 3:48 pm and is filed under Core Infrastructure. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.