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In the News


  • 2005-04-14:

    PKI in the News
    Diffie: Infrastructure a disaster in the making

    Part 2: Diffie, now chief security officer, vice president and a fellow at Sun Microsystems, explains why Windows' spread into critical infrastructure is dangerous and how use of elliptical curve cryptography will grow with the proliferation of smaller, integrated mobile devices.
    more...


    PKI in the News
    Hellman: Authentication at every access point

    Part 1: Hellman, now professor emeritus of electrical engineering at Stanford University, explains why phishing is one of the biggest threats we face, why strong authentication is needed at every access point and why security add-ons won't do much to ease the threats of cyberspace.
    more...


    2005-03-29:

    RMS in the News
    Patricia Seybold Group Identifies Liquid Machines as Leader in the Enterprise Rights Management Market

    "Liquid Machines' Solutions for Managing Digital Rights on Electronic Desktops: Tracking How Customers and Business Partners are Distributing Content across the Web" (Patricia Seybold Group - March 2005) discusses the suitability of Liquid Machines ERM products to the growing enterprise need for a rights-management solution that can protect their sensitive and high-value documents, prevent information leakage, and eliminate potential violation of compliance regulations. The report identifies many key differentiators of Liquid Machines ERM solutions' including its Policy Droplet? control, technology superiority in the area of policy enforcement and persistence, and strategic partnership with Microsoft® to extend Windows® Rights Management Services.
    more...


    2005-03-27:

    VS and VPC in the News
    Virtual-Server Face-Off

    The year 2004 might very well become known as the year of virtualization. Initially, IT pros recognized the value of virtualization technologies in test and demo environments. However, with the advent of ever more powerful systems coupled with continued improvements in virtual machine (VM) technologies, virtualization has since become a production-level technology that enables server consolidation.
    more...


    IdM in the News
    Microsoft Preps Move on ID Management

    Observers say Microsoft's intent is to centralize some identity services and make it easier to deploy its identity platform by reducing the amount of integration end users must do and giving developers one point where they can tie their applications to the identity platform.
    more...


    PKI in the News
    RSA Security Solutions Adopted for PSP (PlayStation®Portable)

    i-Newswire, 2005-03-25 - RSA Security Inc. ( Nasdaq: RSAS ) announced today that it has licensed RSA BSAFE® Secure Sockets Layer ( SSL ) and public key infrastructure ( PKI ) products to Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. ( SCEI ), to provide a secure interactive environment for software title developers and publishers creating game titles for its new PSPTM ( PlayStation®Portable ) handheld entertainment system.
    more...

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April 19, 2006

Want the Performance Improvements in Virtual Server 2005 R2 But Still Want to Use Virtual PC 2004?

In addition to some new features (host based clustering using iSCSI, x64 support, etc.) VS 2005 R2 also includes some fairly significant performance improvements. What if you're running, and want to keep on using VPC 2004 but you'd still like to have the performance improvements that VS 2005 R2 provides? Now that VS 2005 R2 is free, there is a simple solution to this problem. If you install VS 2005 R2 on a system that already has VPC 2004 installed, a number of components that are shared between the two products will be installed and will then be available to VPC 2004. These shared components contain most of the performance improvements in VS 2005 R2 and as such will be available to VPC 2004 after installing VS 2005 R2. Note that if you don't plan on using VS 2005 R2 you don't need to have IIS installed before installing VS 2005 R2. Also note that you won't get any of the new features as these are all VS specific, however, you will get the benefit of the performance improvements.
This will also allow you to take advantage of the latest version of the Virtual Machine Additions which ship with VS 2005 R2. To use the new Additions you can either manually mount the ISO from Program Files\Microsoft Virtual Server\Virtual Machine Additions in a VPC guest or, if you want to be able to install the updated Additions using the Action menu item in VPC, copy the VMAdditions.iso file from that folder to the Program Files\Microsoft Virtual PC\Virtual Machine Additions folder, replacing the existing Additions ISO.

Posted by Paul Adare at April 19, 2006 04:37 AM

Comments

Thanks! I assume this will give us the ability to install the virtual SCSI driver as an in-situ upgrade to speed up the VHD access?

On a related note, (I'm sure this is probably somewhere else but haven't been able to find it), why is Windows XP so slow while Windows 2003 is much faster (with either VPC or VS)?

Is there any other things that can be done to speed up XP?

We have one app that only works in XP - otherwise we use 2003 servers inside VMs even just for client apps because it runs so much faster.

Posted by: Robert E Spivack at April 20, 2006 03:39 PM

Hi Robert, I'm not sure that I understand your question. If you're asking if installing VS 2005 R2 will allow you to use SCSI devices in VPC, then the answer is no. Otherwise, I'm not sure what you're asking.
Personally, I don't find that XP is significantly slower than Windows Server in a virtual machine. One thing you can do to improve XP performance in a virtual machine is to disable all of the eye candy that XP gives you.

Posted by: Paul Adare [TypeKey Profile Page] at April 20, 2006 04:32 PM