I'll just add that Patch Tuesday isn't only for convenience.

Often times security holes are fixed for exploits that aren't even in the wild, but have been discovered by the internal teams. Any time a security patch is released, the exploit becomes known since it's then trivial to compare the fix to the original and reverse-engineer the exploit. Releasing security fixes as they are ready would be akin to releasing exploits several times per month.

Patch Tuesday is simpler to manage for large corporations, and overall a more secure approach.

If you're referring to the guest OS licensing, then yes the Standard edition of Windows Server 2008 R2 includes one guest OS license as long as you don't run anything else on the hypervisor. Enterprise gives 4 guest licenses and Datacenter gives unlimited (although it's licensed per-socket). Only the latter two allow failover clustering.

I was referring to Microsoft Hyper-V Server which is completely free and allows clustering to boot.

No, it's free as in beer.

http://www.microsoft.com/hyper-v-server/en/us/default.aspx

It's true that Hyper-V lacks the features of VMware, but it still has better bang for the buck simply because you can cluster and Live Migrate (vMotion) in the free edition. I don't know how Xen compares so maybe it's even better.

Also, much to my dismay SP1 doesn't support shared memory (overcommit). What it does have now is Dynamic Memory which I'm not all that impressed with. You can basically give a machine a minimum amount of memory and it can increase that on the fly based on the use of the guest OS.

VMware is still king when you have the money for it. ESX 4.1 allows vMotion now starting with Essentials Plus, but you need to shell out some big bucks for the really cool stuff like Storage vMotion and DRS.

Weird cutoff -- preview looked fine. Was trying to say that during normal operation the key is pulled from the TPM chip but in the event of failure you can use the recovery key to unlock the drive.

When you encrypt the drive with BitLocker you save the recovery key to a text file, or have it stored in Active Directory. During normal operation, the key is

Do you own a radio?

I use it all the time. Usually when I'm using a laptop without a mouse.

Then again, I've always been a keyboard junkie and lately I live in a Windows world.

Parent is dead-on.

As far as the trust issue, consulting firms typically have dozens of clients. Those of us in the consulting field don't go through your email, data, whatever, simply because we deal with so much of it, that it's all viewed holistically. The content of your data isn't important to us. The maintenance and protection of it is.

Your in-house admin, however, might not have much else to do besides muck around in your files when everything else is running smoothly. And if you fire him/her... well who do you think is more likely to exact revenge? Hint: it's not the consultant with other clients to tend to.

Here's an interesting discussion on the topic ;)

How is this off-topic?

Google was an improvement, but lately it's been going downhill.

It's gotten to the point where it assumes you're a complete moron typing with your fists. It doesn't even ask anymore if what I typed was what I meant, it just serves up what it feels like.

I find putting quotes around terms isn't good enough for some searches, I need to use +"search terms" which can be a pain in the ass sometimes.

I realize that it probably can't be done anymore with today's index engines, but bring me back the NEAR keyword and I'd be one happy camper. It was either Altavista or Lycospro (or both) that had that and it made searching so much easier.

Clicking NEAR Link would match "clicking on a link", "clicking on the link", "clicking the link", etc.