Virtual machine manager 2008 has been out in beta for a decent amount of time. I have been working closely with it over the past couple of weeks. One of the things that had me stumped is what Microsoft used for a refresh rate for the stats that virtual machine manager reports on. Thankfully Cheng Wei took some time to write about the refresh rates in virtual machine manager. You can find the post by following the link below.
Cheng Wei – All about the refreshers
http://blogs.technet.com/chengw/archive/2008/10/01/all-about-refreshers.aspx
I have been looking at several solutions over the past few weeks for a virtual desktop manager. As we are pushed to deliver more results with less it becomes very important to become very efficient. Dexpot 1.4 helps deliver some of this improved efficiency. With having different virtual desktops you can quickly change what hat you are wearing. One thing I was a little skeptical about was how it would handle dual monitors, but this program did not skip a beat.
Dexpot 1.4
http://www.dexpot.de/index.php?lang=en
Another one of the tools that I have become very used to using is Process Explorer. You can get detailed information on what exactly is going on with your system. The display mainly consists of two windows. The top window displays what processes are currently active. The bottom window can run in a couple different modes. If you are running process exporer in handle mode you well see the handles that have been opened by the processes in the top window. You can also run process explorer in dll mode. The bottom window will then disaplay the memory mapped files that the process in the top window have loaded.
I highly recommend that you get used to using this program. It will give you detailed information that task manager just can not give you. I guarantee that knowing how to use this program will separate you from just being another server administrator.
Current Version – v11.20
Process Explorer Website
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx
