I plan to live forever. So far, so good.

Yup, Network Monitor 3.4 is out – more details on the official blog post.

I’ve been using it for quite some time now, and it’s one of the best tools of its kind.

Yesterday, David Mills, Senior Product Manager on System Center announced that the System Center Essentials 2010 Release Candidate is available. This is from the Nexus SC blog:

Microsoft® System Center Essentials 2010 provides a unified IT management solution that enables you to simply and efficiently perform complex management tasks across virtual and physical servers, PCs, hardware, software and IT services from a single console.

Essentials 2010 -

• Delivers single console monitoring and management with summary information, common tasks, alerts and reports, allowing you to quickly see and manage your IT environment.
• Provides rapid provisioning, importation, management and live migration of virtual servers.
• Simplifies complex management tasks like packaging and deploying software, and configuring Microsoft and third-party updates.
• Helps quickly solve problems using integrated alerting, expert knowledge and troubleshooting for servers, PCs and IT services running in your IT environment.

Here is the SCE 2010 Release Candidate download link.

A very useful free eBook is available on Microsoft Downloads: Deploying Windows® 7 Essential Guidance

Overview:

Microsoft’s eBook Deploying Windows® 7 Essential Guidance from the Windows 7 Resource Kit and TechNet Magazine combine selected chapters written by industry experts Mitch Tulloch, Tony Northrup, Jerry Honeycutt, Ed Wilson, and the Windows 7 Team with select Windows 7 articles from TechNet Magazine. Sample topics include: Deployment Platform, Planning Deployment, Testing Application Compatability, and 8 Common Issues in Windows 7 Migrations.

As I was announcing last week, System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 has been released. A SCVMM 2008 R2 evaluation version is available here.

Building on the new and (much) improved Hyper-V that comes with Windows Server 2008 R2, SCVMM 2008 R2 also comes with a few significant feature improvements, such as:

• Live migration between Windows Server 2008 R2 clustered hosts. With live migration, you can migrate a virtual machine from one node of a Windows Server 2008 R2 failover cluster to another node in the same cluster without any downtime and with a barely noticeable impact on application performance. Because the virtual machine does not experience any downtime, the move is completely transparent to the users that are connected to the virtual machine.
• Network optimization detection during virtual machine placement. VMM 2008 R2 supports both Virtual Machine Queue (VMQ) and TCP Chimney, which are Windows Server 2008 R2 features that improve network performance for virtual machines.
• Network adapters that support the VMQ feature are able to create a unique network queue for each virtual network adapter and then connect that queue directly to the virtual machine’s memory. This connection routes packets directly from the hypervisor to the virtual machine, bypassing much of the processing in the virtualization stack.
• Hot addition and removal of virtual hard disks (VHDs). In Windows Server 2008 R2, Hyper-V allows users to add and remove VHDs from a virtual machine while it is running. Microsoft also added storage enhancements to SCVMM to accommodate changes in the way that VMs can now use CSV (clustered shared volumes) and for provisioning changes to speed up VM deployments.
• Network adapters that support the TCP Chimney feature are able to offload the processing of network traffic from the networking stack. Both of these features increase network performance and reduce CPU utilization.

Also, it’s worth noting that since the first version of SCVMM 2008 was launched, VMware released the current virtualization platform, vSphere 4. Testing brings another great piece of news about SCVMM 2008 R2, in that it is able to work just fine with vSphere 4, although Microsoft officially supports only VMware Infrastructure 3 environments at this time.

All in all, I find SCVMM 2008 R2 to be one of the best Virtualization Platform Managers out there, especially due to it’s ability to manage multiple virtualization environments (Hyper-V, MSVS and VMWare for now, with Citrix/Xen support announced to be implemented later as well), and – of course – due to it’s other particularly useful features.