Windows 7 Professional and Ultimate is stated to having an XP mode where applications that only run in XP can be installed in a virtualized XP environment and linked to the Windows 7 desktop. Microsoft is including this feature to hopefully ease businesses into upgrading with the assurance that the critical business apps will still run. This is one of the big reason Vista still hasn’t been adopted by businesses. This feature should be in the upcoming April 30th Release Candidate.

Source: The Register

VMware announced it’s newest product dubbed vSphere 4. What does vSphere do you ask well, it allows a small business to tap seamlessly into much more processing power via commercial cloud computing service such as Amazon’s EC2. Or it allows large business with multiple data centers to consolidate resources together seamlessly. vSphere is a collection of some of VMware previous tools such as ESX and HA and some new ones like vStorage VMFS a clustered file system and vNetwork Distributed Switch for virutalized networks. These and other products make up the vSphere suite and available in different versions with more or less features depending on the business’ needs.

Sources:

eWeek

VMware vSphere

According to The Register the conficker worm will have a signature that admins will be able to use to find which machines might have the worm. Up til now the only way was to monitor traffic and with Conficker C that was impossible as it didn’t send any traffic on the network but was waiting for instructions on a certain day.

IE 8 is set to be released today, it can be downloaded from here. Here are some of the new features of IE 8.

• Smart Address Bar.
• Tab Groups.
• Redesigned “New Tab” Page.
• Reopen Last Browsing Session.
• Enhanced Find On Page.

InfoWorld has an interesting article about a new upcoming trend in datacenters; using DC power instead of AC. The whole idea behind this being is that as much as 50% of the energy consumed in datacenters is wasted in the AC to DC conversion. The typical path of electricity is AC from power company to racks, then converted to DC then back to AC by a UPS, then in the server power supply converted back to DC for the internal electronics. Each conversion loses a little energy but multiply that by the amount of servers and the loss starts to add up.

The solution is to forget AC all together and run DC directly to the servers. HP, IBM, and Sun are all starting to make their servers with optional DC power supplies and trying to get a standard wiring, voltage, and connector ratified. This move will help companies with limited space expand their datacenter. This is because the energy lost in the conversion from AC to DC and back is released as heat, so the fewer conversion the less cooling needed the more servers you can pack into a datacenter.