Planet Lowyat

Microsoft ISA Server 2006 Service Pack 1 have been released!

The new features focus on configuration change management and enhanced troubleshooting designed to help you identify and resolve ISA Server configuration issues within the ISA Server Management console.

The service pack includes the following new features and feature improvements:

• Configuration Change Tracking—Registers all configuration changes applied to ISA Server to help you assess issues that may occur as a result of these changes.
• Test Button—Tests the consistency of a Web publishing rule between the published server and ISA Server.
• Traffic Simulator—Simulates network traffic in accordance with specified request parameters, such as an internal user and the Web server, providing information about firewall policy rules evaluated for the request.
• Diagnostic Logging Viewer—Now integrated as a tab into the ISA Server Management console, this feature displays detailed events on packet progress and provides information about handling and rule matching.
Improvements for existing features, including:
• Support for integrated NLB mode in all three modes, including unicast, multicast, and multicast with Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP). Previously, ISA Server integrated NLB-supported unicast mode only.
• Support for use of server certificates containing multiple Subject Alternative Name (SAN) entries. Previously, ISA Server was able to use either only either the subject name (common name) of a server certificate, or the first entry in the SAN list.
• Support for Kerberos Constrained Delegation (KCD) cross-domain authentication. Credentials from users located in a different domain than the ISA Server, but in the same forest, can now be delegated to an internal published Web site by using KCD .
• Support for client certificate authentication in a workgroup deployment. This removes the requirement to map each client certificate to an Active Directory® directory user account.

For more information about this service pack, see Microsoft Article 943462.
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The interesting article “How to extend the Windows Server 2008 evaluation period” can be found on Microsoft Support and Help.

Many system administrator like me are testing Microsoft Windows 2008 and normally installing Windows Server 2008 without a key gives you a 60 day evaluation period.

Come on, let extend Windows Server 2008 evaluation period to 240 days.

INTRODUCTION
Evaluating Windows Server 2008 software does not require product activation. Any edition of Windows Server 2008 may be installed without activation, and it may be evaluated for 60 days. Additionally, the 60-day evaluation period may be reset (re-armed) three times. This action extends the original 60-day evaluation period by up to 180 days for a total possible evaluation time of 240 days.

Note In the Windows Server 2008 Evaluation DVD package, there is a 120-day initial evaluation period. You can extend the evaluation period to 240 days. To extend the initial evaluation and testing period, follow the steps in this Microsoft Knowledge Base article.
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VMware has just released a Beta 2 build of its very popular and free server virtualization software, VMware Server 2.0 (build 84186).

What’s New

New features and enhancements in the VMware Server 2.0 Beta 2 release:

• Updated VMware Infrastructure (VI) Web Access management interface: With the faster performance, improved stability and broader range of configuration options, the VI Web Access management interface provides a simple, flexible, intuitive and productive management experience. In addition, embedded help files are context sensitive based on the task being performed.
• Independent virtual machine console: With the new VMware Remote Console, you can access your virtual machine consoles independent of the VI Web Access management interface plus resize the virtual machine console windows as needed.
• Support for USB 2.0 devices: Transfer data at faster data rates from USB 2.0 devices.
• Multi-tiered permissions: Configure different levels of permissions to access virtual machines in different ways, including browsing, interacting, configuring and administering virtual machines.
• New hardware editors: Edit and add devices such as USB 2.0 devices and legacy devices such as floppy drives, serial and parallel ports.
• Automatically start your virtual machines: Select which virtual machines that you want to automatically start when VMware Server starts. In addition, there is also an option to boot the virtual machine directly into the BIOS Setup Screen.
• Link to Virtual Appliance Marketplace: Access thousands of pre-built, pre-configured, ready-to-run enterprise applications packaged with an operating system inside a virtual machine. This speeds up time to value and simplifies software development, distribution, and management.

Existing VMware Server 2.0 Beta features

• New operating system support: The broadest operating system support of any host-based virtualization platform currently available, including support for Windows Vista Business Edition and Ultimate Edition (guest only), Windows Server 2008, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and Ubuntu 7.10 in 32-bit and 64-bit versions.
• More scalable virtual machines:Support for up to 8 GB of RAM (up from 3.6 GB in Server 1.0) per virtual machine, 10 virtual network interface cards and up to two virtual SMP (vSMP) processors per virtual machine.
• 64-bit guest operating system support:Use 64-bit guest operating systems on 64-bit hardware to enable more scalable and higher performing computing solutions.
• Support for Virtual Machine Interface (VMI): This feature enables transparent paravirtualization, in which a single binary version of the operating system can run either on native hardware or in paravirtualized mode to improve performance in specific Linux environments.
• Support for VIX API 1.5: This feature provides a programming interface for automating virtual machine and guest operations.

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Look at my download speed - 375.2KB/sec.

I had a Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Datacenter, Enterprise and Standard edition download from MSDN today. The file size is about 1.7G and it took me about an hour for fully download.

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ESX Server 3i is the industry’s first hardware-integrated ultra thin hypervisor built on a next-generation thin architecture, giving your organization an efficient foundation for building a dynamic, secure, reliability, manageability & automated data center.

ESX Server 3i represents a significant advance in realizing the vision of virtualization as the standard computing platform for x86 servers, further simplifying IT operations through integration with server hardware.

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