Today I had the pleasure of participating in the very first Thrive webcast. Lilyn Chang kicked it off with a good overview of what the Thrive program and website are all about (http://www.microsoft.com/thrivemicrosoft.com/thrive), Karen Forster (Director of Platform Vision at Advaiya, Inc.) discussed how you should avoid the costly mistakes that so many businesses make in how they miss huge business value opportunities, and then I gave a quick 360 degree overview of Microsoft’s Virtualization solutions.
(If you want to watch this webcast recording, you can go here. It should be available roughly 24 hours after the time of this blog post.)
At the end of the webcast we had some time for Q&A. All of the questions were right up my alley, so I answered them verbally, but also promised to post them here along with a summary of my answer.
So.. here they are…
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“For small business with 5 – 10 users with a SBS2008 server installed would it cost more to deploy Office 2007 to the 10 employees as local desktop installs, Terminal Server deployment, or Virtualized Application deployment? If there is a difference in cost is it significant or very minor?”
As I said in the webcast, I’m not personally a licensing or cost expert (yet). You should work with your partner or contact (whoever you got SBS from) and see if they can help you with that calculation.
The MDOP product page does have a good ROI calculator that might help you with some of this:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/enterprise/products/mdop-roi-tools.aspx
(If someone else reading this has a good resource or idea, please enter it in a comment!)
“Isn’t RDS RemoteApp also application virtualization, as the application is isolated from the user’s operating system even though it doesn’t appear to be?”
Sure, you could look at it that way, I suppose. But I’m thinking the reason we call it “presentation virtualization” is that it is not actually running at all on the local machine. It’s just a presentation of what is running on the server or remote desktop. True Application Virtualization using something like App-V is running the application (albeit in its own sandbox) on the local machine.
“Where can I find out more about Med-V, costs, etc?”
“How can I get the MDOP if I have software w/ SA?”
Here is the MDOP Product Overview: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/enterprise/products/mdop.aspx
…and the “How to buy” page:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/enterprise/how-to-buy.aspx
The MDOP team has a blog, too: http://blogs.technet.com/mdop/. That will be a good one to watch for announcements. Trust me.
“Is PowerShell integrated in all MDOP?”
No. I’m pretty sure it’s not. A search on “PowerShell” on the MDOP blog turned up “No Results”, so I’m guessing not.
However, as I said in the webcast – there are foundational benefits in PowerShell that can be applied to configuration and management around the MDOP tools. If there is anything that can be driven through WMI, you can use PowerShell. If it can be run from the command-line, you can do it in PowerShell. So, don’t count out PowerShell if you’re looking for ways to automate MDOP management.
“Eta of both HV R2 and Server R2”
Not announced yet. Sorry. I’m still hearing that it could happen this calendar year.
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If you have any more comments or questions about the Thrive program and website resources, or have any suggestions for it, please send them to Lilyn Chang: lilync@microsoft.com
Absolutely Full of I.T. 
Here are some resources relating to webcast I delivered on March 20, 2009, entitled " TechNet Webcast:
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Here are some resources relating to webcast I delivered on March 20, 2009, entitled " TechNet Webcast:
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