vSphere Update 1 is out!
Apparently as I lay in bed in dreamland last night VMWare released vSphere update 1 - took long enough!
Update 1 brings several notable improvements:
• vSphere client works in Windows 7 - without a hack!
• You can run Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 as guest operating systems.
• View 4.0 support.
• Improved MSCS support.
• PVSCSI for 2003 and 2008.
• Improved dvswitch performance.
• 25 vCPU's per core!
• Support for Intel Xeon 3400 Series.
• And a whole lot of bug fixes.
No USB pass-through fix, and it seems like there are more known issues than fixed. To be fair, one of my VMWare colleagues mentioned that there were more known issues when 4 released than now, and most of these have existed since then.
For those of you with ESXi free, it's not available yet. No word on when it will be released - sorry!
Reports are already coming in of successful deployments, and I will probably update myself during next week’s rather large maintenance window (read: Thanksgiving).
Windows 7 is not bad.
Windows 7 - what a breath of fresh air!
I've been using Windows 7 since the beta was released on Technet and like a lot of people I believe it's everything Vista should have been. My only real problem with it is it's a couple years late.
Whoever Microsoft has in charge of usability did a really good job. The interface improvements have increased my efficiency, and more importantly (and very much unlike Vista) the improvements are far beyond cosmetic. For example, being able to effectively split screen applications by dragging them to right/left sides and the stacked taskbar with thumbnails.
For my home environment, I have found that homegroups are a great way to share media, such as music, between rooms and my HTPC. Remote desktop and various other applications that remember the last connection or documents you have opened in the past.
At my job, there are even more improvements. I chose to skip Vista, we will not be skipping Windows 7. Bitlocker - good bye PGP whole disk encryption? That alone will save us $150 per FTE. DirectAccess could potentially replace our Cisco ASA firewalls. The search feature may actually mean that I don't have to deal with employees installing Google Search and the associated privacy issues.
Oh, and it's faster too.
I guess it goes without saying that if Windows 7's launch went as bad as Vista's Microsoft would have been in a heap of trouble. I think that Microsoft not only dodged a bullet, but managed to create a great product.
Well done!