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2008 R2 announced 8 months after 2008 ships?  I hope there is a free upgrade.  If not I bet most places will wait unless they got to have Hyper V.

"I hope there is a free upgrade."

It's included in Software Assurance.  

Um....you did buy that didn't you?

Lol, my employer has an Enterprise agreement.  

We are not deploying 2008 yet anyhow, probably next year and late in that year at that.  So we probably will deploy R2 if its out then.

I just finished my 2008 training, its a great OS that is for sure.  Hyper V is huge improvement over VS and very close to VMware but doubtful my employer will be moving off of VMware anytime soon as we have thousands of Windows servers on VMware now.

"We are not deploying 2008 yet anyhow, probably next year and late in that year at that.  So we probably will deploy R2 if its out then."

Most "R2" customers are new customers, or SA customers that get it for free, and can afford the deployment support costs.  Many customers don't pay the extra money for R2 version upgrades if they have to pay full upgrade price, knowing that the next major version upgrade will be less than 2 years after that.

"doubtful my employer will be moving off of VMware anytime soon as we have thousands of Windows servers on VMware now"

It's usually more economical to look at the competition when your support agreements are due to expire, or when you're buying new hardware.

Don't forget that SCVMM will allow you to manage both VMware and Hyper-V VM's though - it even offers some integration with VMware Infrastructure management consoles.  The cost is pretty low on it too.  If you already use SCCM, you can use it for the actual OS deployment, and then deploy and manage VM's from SCVMM.

Azure Services Platform! www.microsoft.com/.../register.mspx

Waethron,

Yes received your message. Will reply later today. Thanks!!

Well, huge chunks of the computing world just changed.

I look at this, and the one thing that bugs me is this:

All the previous talk about virtualization platforms, and today it just got a big kick in nads.

Wae

Not really. The key point is the seamless range from  local to virtualized to global and the ability to mix and match as makes sense.

"The key point is the seamless range from  local to virtualized to global and the ability to mix and match as makes sense."

....and people say Windows client is bloated and offers too much choice.

I think the same people that work in IT would say the same about Microsoft's business offerings now.

This might be alright for enterprises, but a lot of the cloud computing stuff faces a big challenge:  SMB's.

Small businesses in particular, have been one of less likely customer segments to allow data to be hosted online.  As far as Paul is concerned, SBS should be hosted now.  Unfortunately Paul, that's just not possible now, as SBS is designed to run local DHCP and DNS services, as well as offering Active Directory domain authentication.  That's well beyond the capability of the currently-shipping SBS products.

Managed services for SBS are the key marketing message from Microsoft, and none of that has any mention of hosted SBS servers.  SBS also doesn't play nice in a pre-existing AD system, so the kind of company that would need to host SBS would be one that has a) a hard line into every customer's business, and b) would have dedicated internet connections for each SBS server that they host.  That's a bit much.

You can host SharePoint and Exchange online, but it doesn't address the issue of workstation security that's managed by a local SBS platform.

It's interesting to note that the BlueHoo mobile app that was demoed at the Keynote runs on (from their site) Nokia, Blackberry, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, Samsung, LG, HTC, Palm Treo, Windows Mobile, Java Phones, Symbian but not on iPhone. The company that makes it is asking people to help them lobby Apple.

Last year I set through a MS hosting presentation from MS at a MS office (St. Louis) that was presented to SMB implementers.  There was about 100 people the from various groups that sold and supported SMB solutions.

Almost all of them walked away thinking that hosted solutions from MS was going to cut into their business and none where really happy with it.

FYI: registration for the Azure SDK is now live. So is the beta for Bluehoo.

"Almost all of them walked away thinking that hosted solutions from MS was going to cut into their business and none where really happy with it."

Really?  Geez, they don't pay attention to Microsoft Partner marketing then.  Hosted services have always been a big part of it.  They've been lobbying partners to offer hosted SharePoint, Exchange, and SQL services for years now.  

Likewise, they've always talked about offering managed services for the SMB market because many SMB's won't have their own on-site IT staff.  That's a value-add.  If you, as a partner, can offer a customer an added managed service contract that's based off a product like SBS, it's a recurring revenue stream for you.  SBS makes it easy to set up a server, and configure monitoring via email logs and remote access for not only users, but for the IT team offering the managed services to manage their IT setup from a single, central console.

Most of the stuff mentioned today doesn't exactly apply to the SMB market anyway.  Local SBS and EBS servers do, at least for the foreseeable future.  They are bridging that to cloud-computing somewhat with the Office Live tie-in in SBS 2008.  This is just an internet extension to the already-present SharePoint intranet system already offered in SBS.  It's not a big deal though.  Microsoft still allows partners and IT developers to customize the SharePoint experience on SBS anyway, so having both an intranet SharePoint (customized or not), and an internet-based document workspace means that the customer ends up with a lot of overlap, *and it will cost them extra*.  The key is that documents online don't need a conventional backup system, since that's managed by the host.  

Many SMB's won't care anyway - many won't want to host data online due to privacy issues.  This might fly against what Paul would have happen, but it's the truth, and many companies won't trust online services to host critical documents.  DRWAM:  would you trust someone like Google to host your patients' medical records?  How about your own?

@bettie:

If they think Microsoft is going to cut into their business, they should look at customizing their service to offer better value to the customer.  Office Live Workspace is a good example of how to customize SharePoint, and it's a kick in the *** for partners to get on to customizing web services and applications instead of just offering a generic out-of-box hosted service.

Waethorn,

It does seem like a lot of Value Added Resellers really want to avoid adding value.

Paul,

It does seem like today's announcements and briefings were done so that people could have a day to wrap their heads around the framework before dealing with tomorrow.

Interesting times...