In a white paper called "Licensing Microsoft Windows Server 2003 R2 to Run with Virtualization Technologies," Microsoft outlines clearly how to license the current version of Windows Server -- Windows Server 2003 R2 -- for specific third-party virtualization technology, including VMware ESX, VMware Vmotion and SWsoft Virtuozzo. It also explains licensing for Microsoft's own System Center Virtual Machine Manager.

Virtualization has complicated server OS pricing because it allows more than one instance of server software to run on a single server, while traditional OS pricing has been per server, assuming that only one version of an OS can run on one piece of hardware. Virtualization allows software to be emulated via a virtual machine, and so run without having to be physically installed.

But even if Microsoft has done enough to clarify how its current version of Windows Server should be licensed for virtualization scenarios, customers could find themselves needing new guidelines once Windows Server 2008 is released, something Microsoft expects to do by the end of the year. Formerly code-named Longhorn, the next version of Windows Server will have virtualization technology built in, which could preclude the need for third-party virtualization software.

Pricing for Windows Server 2008 has not yet been announced.

According to the Microsoft white paper, current virtualization pricing for Windows Server 2003 R2 is as follows: Windows Server 2003 R2 Standard Edition (SE) allows a customer to run only one instance of the software in either a physical or virtual way on a server. Users need to assign an SE license for each running instance of Windows Server on a system.

Customers have more flexibility with the enterprise and datacenter editions of Windows Server 2003, however. They can run one physical instance of Windows Server and up to four simultaneous virtual instances with one Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition license, and can run unlimited physical or virtual versions of the software when Windows Server 2003 R2 Datacenter Edition is licensed for every physical processor in a server

Under terms of the deal, CDW shareholders will receive $87.75 in cash for each share of common stock.

http://www.thestreet.com/_tscrss/newsanalysis/techhardware/10359465.html 

I’ve been gathering some news about Exchange Server and messaging in general that I was planning to blog about. For one reason or another, I’ve been postponing the writing of some lines around those subjects.

So, without further delays, here they are;

• Exchange Server Wins CRN Award - The gap between Microsoft and its rivals in the e-mail and collaboration software space is widening.
  Microsoft beat its competitors on every single criterion and sailed past the runners-up with a 77.8 overall rating, more than 10 points higher than IBM’s 67.6 score and Novell’s 64.3 finish.
• The Exchange Dev Product Team is Blogging!! - Here is some exciting news…The Exchange SDK team is blogging now at http://blogs.msdn.com/exchangedev/! This a great opportunity to get some direct access to the members of the product team who are responsible for API development and SDK documentation…
• Windows Mobile 6 Localized Emulator Images - This package includes localized Windows Mobile 6 emulator images that can be used with Visual Studio to test applications on different localizations or simply as standalone emulators without Visual Studio.

Microsoft release version 2.0 of Exchange Server 2007 SP1 Release Notes. The document contains the following sections:

• Features that are available in SP1 Beta 1
• Installing SP1 Beta 1
• Known issues
• Workarounds for selected known issues
• Legal notice

Remember that SP1 will ship at the same time that Longhorn (or should I say Windows Server 2008?), so you can expect it by the end of this year.

I have just read in the Rui Silva's blog, called subject: exchange  an entry about Unified Communications and Collaboration Event presentations, that were presented in Singapore on last May 27.

Download of the documents: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=a10931b2-dceb-4ddc-8c5a-25c4b2c5804c&displaylang=en&tm

Read more at source: http://blogs.msexchange.org/silva/2007/05/21/unified-communications-and-collaboration-event-presentation-downloads/

Every Exchange Administrator knows what ESEUTIL does. It can be used to defragment the Exchange databases and recover free space or to repair them (knock on wood).

What probably you didn't know (I know I didn't) is that, according to the Microsoft Performance Team, ESEUTIL is the best utility to copy large files over the network. The syntax for ESEUTIL is very simple: eseutil /y <srcfile> /d <destfile>.

We usually see in the MS presentation the guys using a lot of cmdlets and they show the information in the browser directly from the PowerShell.. If you have already seen it, I think you might tried before in your lab without success, right? It occurs because the "out-html" and "out-IE" scripts aren't found in the default installation. These scripts belong to the Exchange Server 2007 Powershell Scriptacular pack  that were developed by (Vivek Sharma and Mihai Jalobeanu).

But why I'm talking about it? Because we are going to use those scripts to generate a report  :)

1. First of all, download the Scriptacular from this site: http://www.viveksharma.com/techlog/2006/12/21/announcing-the-exchange-2007-powershell-scriptacular-demo-pack/
2. Extract all the files in the Scripts folders that are located under Exchange installation drive (the defaul path is c:\program files\microsoft\Exchange Server\Scripts)
3. Run the following cmdlet:
   Get-MailboxStatistics | select DisplayName,TotalDeletedItemSize,TotalItemSize,StorageLimitStatus | out-html | out-ie
4. Now we can see a html report with all mailboxes, TotalDeletedItemSize, TotalItemSize and the status of the Storage Limit settings, as shown in figure below:

Quest (www.quest.com) has released a free tool called ActiveRoles Management Shell for Active Directory that is a set of PowerShell commands (CMDLETs). Inside of this tool we have got some cmdlets to manage the Active Directory environment, here are the list of cmdlets available in the free tool:

• CONNECT-QADSERVICE
• DISCONNECT-QADSERVICE
• GET-QADUSER
• SET-QADUSER
• NEW-QADUSER
• GET-QADGROUP
• NEW-QADGROUP
• GET-QADGROUPMEMBER
• ADD-QADGROUPMEMBER
• REMOVE-QADGROUPMEMBER
• GET-QADCOMPUTER
• GET-QADOBJECT
• SET-QADOBJECT
• NEW-QADOBJECT
• REMOVE-QADOBJECT
• CONVERT-QADATTRIBUTEVALUE

You can get it here: http://www.quest.com/activeroles-server/arms.aspx
Ps.: Registration will be required

Credit to: Anderson Patricio

Wondering if there are illnesses running in your area?

A threat of Flu/Common Cold etc...

How cool is this... Finally a server for the home. Not that most of us don’t have some form of one already... :)

It really is a step in the right direction though... This could be a Hugh success pending that they do it right!

There are more similarities than differences in Microsoft’s and Google’s approaches to building out their partner ecosystems for their respective hosted productivity suites.

Google Apps and Office Live are not head-to-head competitors. Google Apps includes hosted mail, calendar, document and spreadsheets. Office Live includes hosted mail, small-business accounting, workspace and (with two of the versions) business-contact management. (Office Live isn’t a hosted version of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.)

In spite of these distinctions, Google and Microsoft both realize that there’s money to be made in convincing software vendors, systems integrators, consultants and other partners to build on top of their respective offerings. The adversaries also both realize the business potential of getting others to sell hosted versions of their wares.

On May 18, Google quietly unveiled its “Google Apps Partner Edition” offering that it’s targeting at “ISPs, portals and other service providers.”

“All you have to do is point and click in the easy admin control panel and figure out what branding you’d like to layer on top of the products in order to create a customized look and feel. You can quit spending your resources and time on applications like webmail — and leave the work to our busy bees at the Googleplex,” according to Product Manager Hunter Middleton, in a posting to the official Google Blog.

Microsoft, meanwhile, is slowly but surely working to build up a partner community around its Office Live set of hosted Office add-ons. At the recent Microsoft Mix ‘07 conference, Microsoft officials showed attendees how to customize the Office Live public site and applications, as well as how to build mash-ups using Office Live elements.

Microsoft is showcasing third-party-customized Office Live apps on the Office Live Marketplace. And it is centralizing resources for partners interested in building on top of Office Live on the “Office Live Innovate On” portal.

Microsoft’s biggest potential stumbling block here, in my opinion, is that it is expected to field its own hosted Exchange, hosted SoftGrid and hosted SharePoint offerings, thus competing with some of the very partners that it has been courting.

Will partners gravitate toward Google or Microsoft in this customize-on-hosted-platforms space? Will it simply be a case of whoever has the best application programming interfaces (APIs) winning? ISVs and integrators: Are you more inclined to build on top of Google’s or Microsoft’s hosted solutions? (Or neither?)