Windows 7 - Resources from the Microsoft Q & A

Today Edwin Yuen, Senior Product Manager for System Center Virtual Machine Manager, will be taking your questions and feedback on Microsoft Hyper-V and other virtualization platforms as well as discussing industrial advances in Virtualization.

Joining him from the UK Microsoft team are Product Manager Neil Sanderson, IT Professional Audience Manager Phil Cross and Technology Specialist James O’Niell and Matt McSpirit.

We’re looking forward to an insightful afternoon and hope you’ll find it useful and enjoyable. To that end, we’ve gathered up your questions to date and have divided them into 3 main topic areas, this is to keep conversations clear and on topic.

1) Server R2 and live migration
2) Deployment and Management of Virtualization
3) Desktop Virtualization

If your question/comment doesn’t relate to these topic areas, please add it to the original Post your questions to the MSFT Virtualization team submissions thread and Edwin and the team will try to answer you there.

Please note, no one on today’s Q & A team is a member of Microsoft Support/Customer Services, therefore any query of this type will be referred and Microsoft will only be able offer a contact or reply at a later date.

Edwin will stop by later between 4-7pm (UK) (10am-1PM US Central) and announce himself as he arrives, please feel free to continue adding questions and talking points to the Post your questions to the MSFT Virtualization team thread or to say hello below.


Thanks!

Hi, I'm Edwin Yuen, one of the senior product managers at Microsoft. I'm monitoring the thread now so please go ahead and ask your questions.

Hi all,

I'm Matt McSpirit (a.k.a Virtualboy) and I'm also monitoring the thread, so feel free to fire your questions over!

Hi I am Neil Sanderson the Microsoft UK product manager for virtualisation - looking forward to your questions!

I'm James O'Neill, Microsoft UK evangelist covering virtualization - looking forward to the questions.

Thanks for your time and engaging with us today. We were learning as well and once we started answering questions, receiving new ones and making sure 2 of us were not answering the same ones (unless we had different opinions J) we all found it very interesting so thanks for all input.

We have a host of resources for you so I thought I would highlight some of them here
http://www.microsoft.com/virtualization, http://www.microsoft.com/uk/virtualisation and of course the UK would not be complete without something on the Register http://www.theregister.co.uk/software/virtualisation_lab/

Most of us have blogs or twitter accounts so follow us here
Edwin - http://blogs.technet.com/virtplanet and http://twitter.com/edwinyuen
James - http://blogs.technet.com/JamesOne and http://twitter.com/jamesoneill
Matt - http://blogs.technet.com/mattmcspirit/ and http://twitter.com/mattmcspirit
Neil - Neil Sanderson (neilsand) on Twitter
Phil – http://twitter.com/philcr and http://twitter.com/asktechnetuk - whilst I am not that technical I am readily available to help on anything Microsoft or IT related.

We do use these vehicles to update people with annouoncements and answer queries so feel free to talk to us. Thanks again and we will check the forums occasionally in the coming weeks.

Edwin, Matt, James, Neil and Phil from Microsoft

It may be useful to have a win9x mode as well as xp mode just in case theres even older software that requires it.

Other desirable options would include floppy drive support with ability to read img/ima formats, and also the possibility to set 24-bit color mode.

I'm studying SQL 2005 in the hopes of passing the certification test.
I recently built a new computer (first I've ever personally built), and I installed Windows 7. I had previously used Virtual PC 2007, and had a vhd that had Server 2003 along with the SQL 2005 trial app on it. I discovered, after having installed the new Virtual PC on my new Windows 7 computer, and pasting the old vhd into the Virtual Windows Folder, that the new version doesn't support Server 2003. Hence, the old vhd is worthless on this computer. Are there any Virtual formats that do support Server 2003? Can I install them in Windows 7? Can I somehow change the old vhd to a new format so I could use it in Windows 7?

I have an Epson scanner whose software doesn't work in 64-bit mode. I installed the XP virtual machine and was able to install and use the software in the virtual machine. If I start the virtual machine and manually attach the USB port for an 'unknown device', everything is fine. If I go to the start menu and select the software as a virtual XP application, the software starts in its own window, but won't function. It complains that there is no scanner connected.

How do I automatically attach the scanner when the VM application starts?

Thanks in advance for your response.