WinHEC Redux

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Well - this has been a pretty cool week from a virtualization point of view. We demonstrated the Windows hypervisor for the first time ever, and announced our intended release dates. We also demonstrated System Center Virtual Machine Manager - and announced release dates for it.

We have had a lot of positive press about this - with many observing that Microsoft is clearly making a strong commitment to virtualization. Well this is definitely the case if you measure commitment in 'banner size' :-)

The WinHEC dining hall had two large banners over it, a Windows Vista banner and a Windows Server virtualization banner:

WinHEC Banners   WinHEC Banners   WinHEC Banners

The virtualization banner was at least 25% larger than the Vista banner - so I claim technical victory.

Personally my favorite press coverage was the almost positive article posted on The Register - see - miracles can happen.

We also spent a lot of time this week presenting at WinHEC talking in great detail about the architecture and APIs used and exposed by Windows virtualization. I personally hope to be providing a lot of this information on my blog over the next couple of months.

One final comment I would like to make - is that in cruising around the Net, I have noticed a number of people questioning Jeff Woolsey's claim about Windows virtualization being the first virtualization solution to support hot add of network, memory, processors, etc. They have usually been pointing to existing mainframe technology - however they missed the key part that Jeff stated that we were the first to do this for Windows operating systems.

Any way - it has been a great week. If you still haven't seen the WinHEC keynotes you can see them here:

Cheers,
Ben