These are historic times and history was made yesterday.  Barak Obama proclaimed in a pre-inaugural address that “Anything is possible”.  Those words rang so true as hour before the Arizona Cardinals won their first NFC Championship and they are on their way to Superbowl.  The Cardinals are in the Superbowl?!

This is for those of you that are trying to install Windows 7 and/or Windows Server 2008 R2 on a XenServer 5 Host?  Chances are you didn't get very far as the virtual machine hangs when trying to boot from the installation CD.

At the moment, there is not a fix but there is a workaround.   I found the following searching through the Citrix Forums and it works.

In case you haven't heard,  the Beta for Windows 7 is now available on TechNet and MSDN for download.  It will be made available for everyone else on January 9th.

So far, the Beta has been working great under VMware Fusion with 1 gig Ram.  Microsoft even fixed my worst pet-peeve with Vista.  That is, when you open up Explorer,  the folder's pane no longer ping pongs around. (Sure the UAC was very annoying, but at least you could turn it off!)

Also,  I have been choosen as a moderator of the Microsoft Win7Beta forums so you'll find me hiding over there.

One interesting note for the virualization junkies out there.  Windows 7 supports boot from .VHD file WITHOUT the need for a hypervisor.  This is huge step in client side virtualization and management.  Eventually,  You'll be able to use a tool like Citrix's Provision Server to PXE boot your workstation(this part you can do now) and provide an offline version for laptops.  This one .VHD image could be used to run Windows 7 on:

• Raw Hardware on the Client
  
• Type 1 Hypervisor on the Client
• Type 2 Hypervisor on the Client
• Streamed to the Raw Hardware/Hypervisor on the client
• Raw Hardware delivered Remotely
  
• Type 1 Hypervisor delivered Remotely
• Type 2 Hypervisor delivered Remotely
• Streamed to the Raw Hardware/Hypervisor delivered Remotely
  

Lots of possibilities!

Joe

I just finished watching the season 7 DVDs of CSI and while the identity of the “miniature killer” was revealed in the last episode, the fate of one of cast members hangs in the balance as the season concludes in a typical cliffhanger.