* The Virtual Hard Drive program
Microsoft has always claimed to be an innovative company. And they are. Certainly their marketing is innovative if their software is sometimes derivative or even imitative. Network World’s John Fontana brought a new marketing program to light a couple of weeks ago and its fascinating.
The Virtual Hard Drive (VHD) program allows you to try out new software, to test it in a controlled environment, without having to set up a multiple server testing laboratory. As long as you have one of the Windows Server 2003 packages installed on a box with a minimum 550 MHz CPU, 256 meg of RAM (for each VHD) and 2 gigabytes of disk space for each, you can run as many as you want, all interacting with each other as well as with your production network (or a test network if you have one) to see just what these products will do in your environment. And when you’re through testing, just remove the VHD – no messy cleanup, no lurking DLLs to come back and bite you. This is how software testing should be done. All the details are available at the VHD Web site.
The VHDs come with a 30-day license, but Microsoft Technet subscribers get a 500-day license, and Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) members get an unlimited license as long as their membership is active.
Currently available as VHDs are Windows Server 2003 R2, Exchange Server 2007, SQLServer 2005 and Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server 2006. The company is also committing to providing future products via the VHD technology but is also opening up the program to other software vendors to provide their products as VHDs. VHD technology is covered by Microsoft’s Open Specification Promise (OSP) which allows other vendors to freely use the technology without the threat of legal problems. Already 20 vendors (including, Altiris, BEA, Check Point, Citrix, CommVault, Dell, FullArmor, HP, Network Appliance, PlateSpin, Portlock, Quest Software, SourceCode Technology Holdings, Symantec and UGS) have signed on to the program and are developing VHDs of their own products.
This is a major benefit to you, the managers of networking technology. No longer will you need to be satisfied by slideware or demo programs. No longer will you have to dedicate equipment to install evaluation software which never, it seems, can be removed cleanly. This is great stuff!
