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Gain enhanced security and performance with Windows Server 2025—now in preview
We are excited to announce that Windows Server 2025 is available in public preview and ready for you to download in the Evaluation Center.
By now, readers of this blog may have already heard of our presence at VMworld in San Francisco this week. As you can imagine, planning a “guerrilla” activity is never a trivial task, and making it happen requires a lot of hard work behind the scenes. Therefore, I was feeling pretty pleased with what our team had managed to organize as I boarded my flight for San Francisco early Monday morning. Add to this the fact that I was visiting the Bay Area, a place that I called home for seven memorable years – I was really looking forward to the trip.
It was only during the flight (when I finally had some time to myself) did the enormity, the audacity of what we were doing dawn on me. We were driving up to our competitor’s biggest event of the year, in its own backyard, and trying to promote a competing technology to a very committed and passionate community. We were committed to keep our conversation to the merits of our own solution, and not to disparage our competition in any way, but would VMworld attendees give us a chance? I would be lying if I said that I didn’t start to feel apprehensive about the week ahead.
Two days in, and I can tell you that the only thing I should have been worried about is eating way more frozen custard than is healthy (to be fair though, I have been standing in front of an ice cream truck for two days). So far, hundreds of VMworld attendees have lined up to sample some delicious dessert and talk to us about Hyper-V and System Center, the latest trends in storage and networking, and above all, the future of the datacenter. All in all, it’s been a blast.
Of course, we showed up unannounced at VMware’s biggest event of the year, so some interesting encounters were to be expected. As word of our presence spread, quite a few VMware employees stopped by our location. While one tried to interrogate us, and a few were clearly very nervous, many shared a good laugh with us, and some even tried the frozen custard!
Not surprisingly, the real highlight over the last two days has been the great conversations I’ve had with the IT professionals who have stopped by. Here are the trends that seemed to repeat themselves over and over again:
Of course, some of the people we spoke to were skeptical about how good Hyper-V really is. Many looked at Hyper-V a long time ago, and haven’t kept up with the progress our platform has made in recent years. If you count yourself among this group, we at Microsoft would love to show you how far we’ve come. However, you needn’t take my word for it – I encourage you to find out for yourself. We have created a website called Virtualization2 specifically for IT professionals familiar with VMware. The site has self-paced courses that go into Microsoft virtualization, our advanced management and automation tools, as well as the storage and network virtualization features of Windows Server 2012. There are also links to hands-on-labs, trial downloads of our software, as well as other useful tools.
Our ice-cream truck will be at VMworld on Wednesday as well – you can find us on the corner of 2nd and Howard between 12-4 pm. If you haven’t yet done so, please come by and talk to our experts! And whether or not you are at the conference, be sure to check out our Virtualization2 website, and give us your feedback on other content you’d like to see there.