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

With the help of an amazing team, we’ve recently launched a new Romanian entry/mid-level ITPro community, called ITSpark. Under the tagline “Your IT adventure!“, the community wants to become one of the top resources for the IT professionals in the country (both beginners and experts alike).

Even if the community is still at the beginning, I can assure you that the people behind it aren’t. It did take us a little while, but with the help we got from our partners, we’ve managed to get to where we are now.

So, what next? Well, for one, we’ll be hosting our first offline community event on November 27th, in Cluj-Napoca. And until then, I’m going to hold a security awareness / White Hat Hacking course starting this Saturday.

Beyond that, we’ll also be expanding the content on the website via webcasts, podcasts, screencasts, articles and the like. So stay tuned, good things are coming!

Even if it’s been done a couple of months back and only privately shared with some 3rd parties until today, I’m now making this screencast (in Romanian) on hosting Linux under Hyper-V R2 public. The screencast itself comes as a result of me being in close contact with some of the larger players in the Romanian hosting industry during the past year (while working with Todi and the rest of the great people in the local Microsoft subsidiary), so I did this as a way to provide some localized content on the topic at hand, as Linux clearly plays a major role in the local hosting market.

While some most of the companies I’ve talked with were only moderately interested in taking the next step and hosting their virtualized environments on top of Hyper-V, this was largely due to their lack in information on the subject. And I do know for a fact that the content covered in this screencast has changed many of these views.

I’m sorry for the quality of the audio, I’ll try and see if I can make it better for next time. Without further ado, you can find the screencast below (the HD version is available on Vimeo):

If you want, you can also download the slides here.

Part of the content was covered in Brent Shoemaker & John Kelbley’s WSV305 session at this year’s TechEd North America. I’ve also got some demos showing how to install the Linux Integration Services v2.1 (RTM) inside Linux VMs, and in the end I talk about some more tools that make your life easier when dealing with Linux and Hyper-V. Also, here are some useful links extending or better describing the topics addressed in the screencast:

• Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V
• Hyper-V 2008 R2 Server free
• Linux Integration Services 2.1 RTM
• The Microsoft Virtualization Team Blog

Hope you enjoy it!

The Microsoft Virtualization Team blog has recently announced that version 2.1 of the Linux Integration Services has been released. Quoting from their website, the following features are included in the 2.1 release:

• Driver support for synthetic devices: Linux Integration Services supports the synthetic network controller and the synthetic storage controller that were developed specifically for Hyper-V.
• Fastpath Boot Support for Hyper-V: Boot devices take advantage of the block Virtualization Service Client (VSC) to provide enhanced performance.
• Timesync: The clock inside the virtual machine will remain synchronized with the clock on the host.
• Integrated Shutdown: Virtual machines running Linux can be gracefully shut down from either Hyper-V Manager or System Center Virtual Machine Manager.
• Symmetric Multi-Processing (SMP) Support: Supported Linux distributions can use up to 4 virtual processors (VP) per virtual machine.
• Heartbeat: Allows the host to detect whether the guest is running and responsive.
• Pluggable Time Source: A pluggable clock source module is included to provide a more accurate time source to the guest.

This version of the integration services for Hyper-V supports Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP3, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 / 5.3 / 5.4 / 5.5. You can obtain the Linux IS’s via the Microsoft Download Center.

I’ve been told that this realease also fixes some major time drifting issues on Linux guests running with the SMP (multiprocessor) option activated that were present in the RC version. On this note, I’ll also be releasing a screencast (in Romanian) on running Linux under Hyper-V soon, along with some best practices.

Microsoft has recently announced the end of support for Windows XP SP2 (which means it won’t be receiving any more updates).

Vista RTM is also scheduled to enter end-of-support in April 2010. More details on the Microsoft website.