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 [...]

With the new architectural changes in the Exchange Client Access Role, we need to give careful consideration to load balancing for Exchange 2010 deployments. We are often asked if NLB is adequate or if it is worth the money to invest in a hardware load balancer? Although there are a number of functions that benefit from [...]

On April 1st, VMware released a set of patches for ESX/ESXi as they do every month.  Included with this patch is an important fix to their software iSCSI initiator described as follows: In a software iSCSI environment, the iSCSI connection might go offline when multiple VMkernel NICs in the same subnet are used to access [...]

Transparent page sharing and memory over commitment has always been a key differentiator between VMware and other industry leading hypervisors, including Microsoft’s Hyper-V.  Despite downplayng the significance of this feature, a number of sources have reported that Microsoft will finally introduce a “Dynamic Memory” feature for Hyper-V guests that may bring this feature set closer for [...]