Well, today I took the plunge and installed Windows Server 2008 x64 on my computer at home. Really, I was hoping to take advantage of hyper-V. I had bumped up the ram to 8gb and was thinking that I should be able to run a couple of virtual pcs at the same time...

There are a lot of reasons for wanting to do this:

• I have some hardware (an hp photo printer, for example) that requires funky drivers and my hope is to isolate those drivers in a virtual machine so that I can turn easily turn them off and on when I need them.
  
• I'm also thinking that if I do my browsing in a virtual machine, then any viruses I might happen to catch would be contained within the virtual machine.
• I'd like to be able to isolate my VPN connection to work in a virtual machine. This will also enable me to "save state" so that I can quickly come up to speed with sql management studio, visual studio and the other tools I might need to solve a problem remotely.
• I'm doing some development work on a DLL that has to run in a variety of different environments. I'm thinking that hyper-V will be faster than VMWare workstation, for testing in different flavors of Windows.

So far, so good. My PC uses an Intel BLKD975XBX2KR motherboard and a Intel® Core 2 Duo E6700 Conroe Processor. The latest bios updates (available from Intel's web site) enable support for hardware virtualization and once I installed Server 2008 I was able to start using Hyper-V immediately.

I did have some problems with the motherboard's Marvell raid. I had been using a 4-drive RAID 5 configuration. The Marvell RAID device requires a software driver for the RAID drive to be recognized and I downloaded what I thought was an appropriate driver from Intel's web site. The RAID device did initially appear, but about an hour later I lost touch with it. I tried to reinitialize the array. Once I did that, my computer refused to boot into windows while the Marvell array was active. I had to unplug all four drives to get the computer to boot.

To be truthfull, the fault may have been my own tweaking. I've found several blog postings from people who are using Server 2008 as a desktop operating system and have been trying out tweaks found there. One of those tweaks could well probably have been behind my Marvel RAID malfunction. In any case, in the future I hope to go with a hardware RAID adapter that does not require windows drivers of any kind.

Here are some of the blog postings that I've found that contain useful hints and tips for using Server 2008 as a desktop O/S:

• Using Windows Server 2008 as a SUPER workstation OS
• Hyper-V and VMWare Workstation
• VS2008 Remote Debugger -- Here, I found that I could run the 64-bit remote debugger install directly from the VS2008 install CD. For some reason it did not install automatically.
• Use Flip3D with Windows Server 2008

I'm trying to get Nero to work in a VM now. If I succeed, I'll let you know.

Like many software developers, I spend some time thinking about my competitive strategy. How will I remain employable and employed in a flat-world future dominated by outsourcers? BaseLine magazine is one of my favorite IT magazines and they've published an encouraging analysis of the risks and dangers of outsourcing. Key points: The actual cost advantage of outsourcing is typically something like 20% and there are large risks including high staff turnover and poor communication.

Also in the same issue is an article about buy-vs-build which is interesting but which hashes over already standard rules of thumb, such as "Build if the system will give you an advantage over your competitors. " IE: Don't invest your resources in building commodity software even if it seems cheaper. In the long run, once support and maintenance are factored in, it won't be.

Infoworld has a related article, "how to keep your tech career afloat" which is interesting in that it spotlights unified communications as a hot area.

The New York Times ran an article a couple of days ago on a data visualization website sponsored by IBM called Many Eyes. On this web site you can use free visualization tools to examine your own datasets for not-obvious relationships. My favoriate visualizations are word trees, like this one for Sun Tzu's Art of War.