I’m usually embroiled in ERP updates and installations, and don’t want to take the chance of destabilizing our DGG infrastructure long enough to install the newest and bestest version of Windows and other Microsoft products. Since I have to wait for official acknowledgement of compatibility with the new stuff, it’s usually the middle of the year (9 months or so later) when I install the newest stuff from Microsoft.

This year has been no different. I recently installed Windows 8 on my desktop. I actually like it. There’s one feature I found by accident that I really like. There is an option to have the taskbar appear on multiple monitors. Since I have two monitors, this means that I can have a task bar on the left hand and the right hand monitor. It reduces the length of many mouse movements, and can be quite handy.

We’ve now upgraded all but one of our physical servers to Windows 2012. Since we’re virtualized, this means that the physical servers are running the latest and greatest, while our virtual servers run whatever version of Windows we choose to run (or is compatible with the software we have on them).

So far (1 new install and 3 upgrades), the Windows Server 2012 migration has gone without a hitch. We added another virtual server and are balancing the loads between the servers.

And that brings me to the reason I’ve moved all of our servers to Windows 2012: Live Migration. VMWare has had it for a while. Now Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V supports a live move of a virtual box from one server to another. It can be done (for the technical out there) without a cluster, and without shared storage (SAN). With a little security tweaking, you can migrate virtual servers right out of the box.

From a non-technical standpoint, this means that if my CRM server is on an old virtual server, I can move it to another newer virtual server WHILE I’M USING it. Cool, No?

More later.