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Out of the blue, Microsoft has released beta 1 of their virtualization hypervisor Hyper-V (formerly known as Viridian). Microsoft seems to have got working on this much quicker than what was anticipated earlier.

It seems the annoucement went live on the 13th, but I didn't see any mention of it until just now. Interesting to see that Quick Migration, as opposed to Live Migration, is still on the table. All in all, the feature set still reads as Microsoft is still playing catch-up with VMware and that there probably won't be any big surprises for the final version scheduled for release 180 days after Server 2008 goes RTM.

For the full details and specific release information, check the Microsoft Press Release and the Hyper-V site.

Invirtus has published a press release announcing the availability of their new Enterprise VM Converter beta. The tool was formerly "known" as Humboldt and only available to selected beta testers has now been announced publicly and "IT professionals interested in becoming Beta testers can sign up on the following Web site".

I did get an invite to test the Humboldt software earlier this month, but never really got around to test it properly. Now that a new build is available I'll be sure to put it through the ropes in the next week or so.

The P2V tool is poised to be released in Q1 2007, alongside other virtualization tools still to be announced.

Get all the details from the Invirtus website.

Live View is a Java-based graphical forensics tool that creates a VMware virtual machine out of a raw (dd-style) disk image or physical disk.

LiveView, which is still in it's beta cycles, lets you boot an image or physical disk inside a virtualized VMware Server session, but without tampering with the image or disk. It writes changes to a scratch file, and to be 100% sure that changes are made it can even boot a write protected image.

Very interesting, and an extremely good idea and if used correctly it'll end up as an excellent P2V tool as well.

WSUS 3.0 looks like it's shaping up real nice, and the decision to move away from a web based management interface to a MMC based one looks like a really good idea.

I've been love with WSUS since it's first iteration, SUS, and currently employ WSUS to manage updates for my windows based clients at work.

The next generation of WSUS seems to bring this incredibly useful tool to new heights, and I highly anticipate it's final release some time next year. In the mean time, Jeff Centimano of windowsconnected.com fame has written an informative article highlighting some of the improvements WSUS 3.0 will offer, as well as a very nice screenshot gallery of the latest Beta 2 version.

After opening my inbox, I got a sweet little suprise from the people over at moka5

Apparently I'm one of the "the über virbu" and found worthy of an invite.

I did get a glimpse at what they are offering though. Moka5 looks to be offering something along the lines of the VMWare Appliances, but they have created a VMWare Player addon that lets you centrally manage and share what Moka5 call LivePC's. I haven't been able to test it properly yet since it requires VMWare Player and I only have VMWare Server installed.

So far the sites LivePC library consists of 7 setups, some made by the Moka5 administrator but some are also contributed by other beta testers.

Moka5 has created a service that turns standalone VMWare VMs into centrally manageable and updatable VMs through their web service and they also provide detailed instructions on how convert an exiting VMWare VM into a moka5 LivePC (this is the way they are created). I'm sure this will be a great service and that a lot of VMWare appliances and pre-configured desktop VMs will be converted and published on their site.