Jonathan Cusson dot Com

Windows 7 beta is now available and I could not wait to test it. I already have 3 installations of Windows 7 for intensive testing. I have decided to put Windows 7 trough a really good test.

When Vista came out people complained that it took too much resources and that you needed a powerful computer to run it. Well, I just tested Windows 7 with a 6 years old computer and believe me the performance are surprisingly good even on old PCs. Here is the hardware setup of that machine:

As you can see the system global score is 3.0 but keep in mind this is a 6 years old computer with slower CPU, memory and video card. What is also amazing is that all the hardware was detected and Windows Update to care of installing latest drivers. I have installed Office 2007, Norton 360 version 3(beta), Photoshop CS and Nero 9. Well the performance are good enough to work on it. I am used to very good performance on my main computer (Dual Core T9300, 4GB RAM & Quadro FX 1600 512MB) and I can say that Windows 7 performs well even with older configurations. I even went to a slower configuration with a Pentium 4 2Ghz, 1GB of RAM and a very old ATI R92LE 32MB video card. (don’t ask me how I got this card, I can’t remember) With that, the system got slower but would still be enough to use for Internet navigation, Word and Excel.

The most amazing is that so far I did not get any errors or crashes on that old PC. All of those waiting for a new Windows that offers stability, compatibility and performances are served!

This post was written with Live Writer on Windows 7.

Jonathan

Here is the direct link to download Windows 7 and get a CD Key. You must register with your Live Profile to access the downloads.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/beta-download.aspx

Windows 7 beta is here for TechNet and MSND members. For those of you that don’t have access to these, here is a link for public download. No CD Key but you don’t need it……30 days trial!

http://snipurl.com/9psn8

Jonathan

For those of you already using Hyper-V, you know it’s a great product. Since Hyper-V is stable and offers very good performance – I recently had the opportunity to do a migration of our production and development environment, from Windows 2003 with Virtual Server to Windows 2008 Enterprise with Hyper-V. (Note that this migration was done without SCVMM or other migration and management tools. At the time of migration I did not have access to SCVMM which would have allowed me to migrate VMs in less steps.

Let me give some details on our environment. In the production and the development environments we have servers with dual Intel quad core processors and 16GB of memory. We also have a production server with two dual core and 8GB of memory. Storage for the servers is direct attached storage configured as a RAID 5 on each server.

The first thing I needed to do was to move the VM’s from Virtual Server to the Hyper-V environment. If done correctly, you shouldn’t have any issues. The best way to do this is:

Uninstall the Virtual Server Addition Tools before moving to the Hyper-V host
Move the VHD to the new host server
Create the VM in Hyper-V using the VHD you just moved
Once you boot the VM, you will need to install the Hyper-V tools. You will have to reconfigure your virtual NIC since Hyper-V uses a different driver but this should not create problems. Just make sure you have the configuration(IP, Gateway, DNS) written down before removing Virtual Server Additions tools.

In the production environment we have 8 VM’s per server with space remaining for more VM’s. Some of you might question the performance of the VM’s but as surprising as it might sound everything is running smooth. We have SQL 2005 & 2008, SharePoint 2007, OCS, Dynamics CRM, Operations Manager 2007 and other applications running on the VM’s. Some of the servers are Windows 2003, other Windows 2008 and both in 32 bits and 64bits.

However the most impressive is the development environment. The hosts have the same specifications but we are running up to 12 VM’s per server and the performance are up to the needs of the development teams. Hyper-V offers surprising performance and really allows you to optimize the use of physical machines.

Now that the migration is complete – I’ve had time to install and configure System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008. In a world where virtual servers are spreading at high speed and with Hyper-V adaption growing rapidly, the new System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 is more than welcome.

I’ve recently installed it to centralize the management of all our Hyper-V and VS 2005 servers. Installation and configuration is simple and Microsoft did a great job putting useful tools and options to make managing VMs and hosts easier and faster.

Our development teams frequently requires new VMs for testing and preparing solutions for clients and that required me to do manual deployment very often. Microsoft SCVMM 2008 now makes it easy to deploy VMs using templates, hardware and OS profiles saving me valuable time.

In the coming months I will be installing some new servers and maybe a SAN. Here’s to more room to grow our environment!