The official Microsoft Windows 8 Engineering Blog

[EduTech]

I personally view the whole change/feature are not as bad as some people make out, okay sometimes they are delayed in introducing things that have been around for a while but maybe that is a view they take because they introuduce it at a point IT REALLY NEEDS TO BE THERE as oppose to throwing everything in and then having very limited new editions.. I dunno.

The developers are not stupid, they all know what is around and what is available so they are quite known to the fact linux has dual desktops how many years ago etc. I think they just plan to implement it at a later date maybe when it is more common?

I dunno..


James.

[CyberNerd]

Its OT but I think I may just have to build a Mint VM for a gander, never played with that distro yet. RedHat expensive for schools? never seen pricing at all thb.

I think the server is about £175 p/a and the desktop around £30- but you are paying for the support rather than the product. MS charge extra for support. I've not used the RHEL desktop, but our file servers and webservers are RHEL (in an AD domain). There is a bunch more things that you can do on Samba for file sharing that windows servers can't cope with. Hopefully the'll fix these in server8 The redhat clustering suite also looks fantastic (free if you use centos) for high availability datacentre type stuff.

[ZeroHour]

I think the server is about £175 p/a and the desktop around £30- but you are paying for the support rather than the product. MS charge extra for support. I've not used the RHEL desktop, but our file servers and webservers are RHEL (in an AD domain). There is a bunch more things that you can do on Samba for file sharing that windows servers can't cope with. Hopefully the'll fix these in server8 The redhat clustering suite also looks fantastic (free if you use centos) for high availability datacentre type stuff.

I thought there was a base license cost for the OS and support was part? You cant get redhat without support can you?

[CyberNerd]

I thought there was a base license cost for the OS and support was part? You cant get redhat without support can you?

no, essentially the base cost includes support. There are other options - Centos, Scientific Linux and Oracle are just re-builds of redhat. I'm not sure of Oracles pricing, probably more as it's aimed at really high end database stuff.

[ZeroHour]

no, essentially the base cost includes support. There are other options - Centos, Scientific Linux and Oracle are just re-builds of redhat. I'm not sure of Oracles pricing, probably more as it's aimed at really high end database stuff.

How does it work with renewals? if you dont renew do you have to stop using redhat or do you just get to keep that version but unsupported?

Thanks for info, really am curious

[CyberNerd]

How does it work with renewals? if you dont renew do you have to stop using redhat or do you just get to keep that version but unsupported?

Thanks for info, really am curious

When you sign in to RHN ( http://rhn.redhat.com ) you get a list of your machines, and their patch level - you can opt to patch them from there or log into each server and patch them (or do it automatically, but I prefer not to). If your entitlements run out then you don't get any updates, or access to their knowledge base - so yes you can keep using it, it's open source - you OWN it.

[apearce]

I wish I was going to Build as I think we'll be seeing a lot of Windows 8 and Windows 8 Server.
Home - BUILD | September 13 - 16, 2011 | Anaheim Convention Center

Anyone want to pay me to go? ;-)

[Arthur]

Bringing Hyper-V to "Windows 8"

Hyper-V, Microsoft’s answer to VMware’s popular hypervisor, will continue to require 64-bit processors, as it always has, while adding new hardware virtualization requirements.

“Hyper-V requires a 64-bit system that has Second Level Address Translation (SLAT),” explains Hyper-V program manager Mathew John in Microsoft’s Windows 8 blog. “SLAT is a feature present in the current generation of 64-bit processors by Intel & AMD. You’ll also need a 64-bit version of Windows 8, and at least 4GB of RAM.”

SLAT is a form of hardware virtualization that is included in newer versions of Intel and AMD processors, such as Intel’s Core i3, i5 and i7 processors and AMD’s Barcelona processors. Hyper-V always required some form of hardware virtualization, but this is more restrictive than the current specs.

If the same requirement applies to the forthcoming Windows Server 8, then some machines capable of running Hyper-V today would not be able to run Hyper-V after upgrading. For example, Intel Core 2 machines meet Hyper-V’s current requirements, but do not contain the SLAT feature. (Source)