What Happens in Vegas.... Gets Blogged About!
I'm sitting on an airplane as I type this. An airplane bound for Vegas. We're headed out for a team meeting. Imagine that many geeks all in one place. Then, imagine the place is Las Vegas. :) It really is nice to get together with all my co-workers, since I rarely see more than a handful of them the rest of the year. We've got a pretty full agenda, too, so if my blog looks a little light this week, that's the reason. I'm going to do my best to maintain my post-a-day goal, but they may not be the meaty posts you're used to sinking your teeth into. Instead, they may be fluff pieces about a team meeting, for instance. (See what I did there?) :)
There is some big news coming this week. I'm eagerly awaiting an announcement from the Microsoft Hardware team tomorrow. They've been teasing us for awhile now about something new coming. (You can see the tease here.)
I wrote a post earlier in the week about the change in our support for virtualization scenarios. What I haven't written about yet is the change we made in our licensing regarding virtualization. It's good stuff. I'm looking forward to the confusion. :)
I didn't even let you know about the release of Hyper-V Server. I realized that when I was having lunch with a friend of mine on Friday and he mentioned the competition's now giving away their flagship product. I hadn't heard that. I asked him what their model is, then, to make money. He said he was wondering the same thing. So, I need to check in on that. But, the reason I brought that up is that the decision to give that product away may have something to do with our launch of Hyper-V Server, which is a stand-alone virtualization product. It's a hypervisor that runs sans Windows. All you need to do is install Hyper-V Server on a machine and you can begin virtualizing machines on it. If you are like me, thinking, "Why am I running this host machine with Windows Server 2008 when all it is doing is hosting virtual machines?" then this is the product for you. Hyper-V Server allows you to run a low-overhead Hyper-V instance with no "real" operating system. It is just a virtualization tool. Once that is installed, you can begin virtualizing your servers on top of it. I am looking forward to getting home from Vegas and getting one of those up and running, so that I can tell you all about it.
I also want to tell you about BPOS, which is the Business Productivity Online Suite. This is part of Microsoft's new S + S initiative, which stands for Software Plus Services. The idea behind this is that using software AND services together is really the way to get the most bang for your buck. The BPOS offering contains such goodies as Exchange and SharePoint. Imagine getting all the functionality of these programs in your organization without the hardware (and associated costs such as power, cooling, and physical space), maintenance, etc. Imagine having a solution that "just works" and that someone else takes care of for you. You don't have to imagine it anymore, because the future is here with BPOS. Sounds good, right? That's because it is!
So, if my blog does, despite my best efforts, come up a little light in content this week, don't give up on me! I clearly have lots of good stuff coming soon! :)
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