WPC: Windows Server Beta, Azure Cloud Appliances
Happy Bastille Day to everyone! C'est le quatorze juillet, jour de la fête nationale en France. Here's one quick hint for your next trip to Paris: Don't ask where the Bastille is. There is a neighborhood called Bastille -- a really fun one, actually -- but the building itself has been gone for a couple of centuries now. You probably knew that, but we're always here to help.
Now, back in the 1780s, the fledgling US was pretty friendly with la France, so that leads us perfectly into...the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in Washington, D.C.! OK, so maybe that wasn't perfect (Washington DC wasn't founded until 1790...), but we weren't really sure how else to jump into another round of announcements from WPC '10. Anyway, here they are:
Microsoft released at the show the beta of Service Pack 1 for Windows Server 2008 R2. The beta adds dynamic memory and Remote FX for testing purposes; both are virtualization features. There's some other stuff in the beta as well, but you'll have to jump to the link to find out the rest. Hey, we've got Web sites to run here.
Also this week in D.C., Microsoft continued pursuing its cloud revolution (see, that Bastille Day meme is really working out now) by releasing its Azure platform as an appliance. That means that customers and partners will be able to run Azure on their premises. There's more, as always, in the excellent RCPmag.com story by Jeff Schwartz.
OK, so it's not revolutionary news, but it's useful. And installing the Windows Server beta will hopefully be a lot less messy than storming the Bastille -- which, again, isn't there anymore.
Posted by Lee Pender on July 14, 2010