More Virtualization improvements from Microsoft

While I still don't think that Microsoft's virtualization is ready for the enterprise space, they do continue the incremental growth that it takes to get to that point. The most recent instance of this that I've seen is their Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool (that link might be restricted to Partners only - I'm not sure). The idea behind the tool is that there are often virtual machines that are used for some function or another but that might not be left in a powered on state all the time. These VMs will quickly fall out of compliance in terms of patch management and potentially have their Kerberos tickets expire, booting them out of a domain if they were a member. To address this issue Microsoft has integrated a management process into their Virtual Machine Manager toolkit. The process leverages PowerShell to wake up a machine, patch it and then put it back to sleep:

Image from Microsoft

The whole process is integrated with PowerShell scripts, so it has some incredible flexibility. I'm looking forward to a configuration that can update a "gold" image and run the sysprep process again, which I'm sure is just a matter of someone figuring out how to script. But the idea of having your new systems deployed fully up to date every time has me drooling in anticipation.

Of course, this is still beta stuff right now, but it seems to have a lot of promise.