Virtualizing Internet Explorer: Microsoft Takes The Ball and Goes Home

There is great outrage to Microsoft’s reluctance to play ball and support virtualization of IE. Without an alternative, the solutions offered by Microsoft are expensive, cumbersome and difficult to maintain. Virtualising the application may well allow different browser versions to co-exist – but the user-experience can be cumbersome with links to other applications not always launching the correct browser and users having to know which browser to choose. Unibrows offers an interesting alternative utilising isolation to support the deployment of different controls and centralisation to allow management and control and importantly wrapped up in what sounds like a very appealing cost.

OpenStack on Hyper-V – Microsoft does Public Cloud Interoperability

On October 22nd, Microsoft announced that it has partnered with Cloud.com to provide integration and support of Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V to the OpenStack project. The announcement caused a great deal of interest here at the Virtualization Practice, as it signals an unexpected willingness on Microsoft’s part to pursue interoperability at the IaaS layer, allowing users to break out of the Hyper-v stack, whilst still retaining Hyper-v at the bottom. The fact this announcement came from Microsoft (not Cloud.com, Rackspace or OpenStack) seems to signal the seriousness of the intent.

Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization – MED-V: Just a Band-Aid Solution?

Is Med-V only a ‘point solution’ to ease migration or can you use that functionality to a wider audience to solve other problems? When considering Med-v as part of MDOP, is it a useful client hypervisor tool for reducing desktop management costs.