Every system administrator uses remote desktop which is a great protocol by Microsoft. When you are having a lot of clients and virtual/physical servers you often face a problem with organizing and keeping track of all the connections. To add even more complexity you may need to go trough remote desktop gateway to connect to the endpoint. Using Microsoft Remote Desktop’s MMC (included in Windows Administration Kit) is often seen but the mmc snap-in lacks many functions and have it’s issues. I will have a look at two forgotten tools that should always be included in your system administrator toolkit and used daily.

Ubuntu 10.10 was today 2010-10-10 released which is great new for us working with Hyper-V R2. We now have access to all the new drivers that Microsoft donates to the Linux community. The earlier drivers available in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS lacked features such as integrated shutdown, heartbeat detection, problematic host and guest synchronization and unstable network drivers (network traffic died unexpectedly). With Ubuntu 10.10 we now have the sames features as the Linux Integration Components 2.1 from Microsoft which only enables us to use Red Hat, Cent OS or SuSE Enterprise where Cent OS is unsupported from Microsoft.

Microsoft today released the Linux Integration Service version 2.1 for Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V R2. This package will get you new and improved features. Some of the most appreciated will be integrated shutdown,support for up to 4 virtual processors and better timesync. Please don’t miss this package.