The customers include Lionbridge, Liverpool Institute for the Performing Arts (LIPA), and EmpireCLS Worldwide Chauffered Services, and the post focuses on how they use a combination of Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V server virtualization and System Center management tools to optimize their IT infrastructure and experience the benefits cloud computing has to offer.

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For Microsoft customers, the great news is that we acknowledged this shift several years ago and began laying the foundation for it with our investments in public cloud offerings such as Windows Azure and by integrating private cloud technologies into our existing Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V virtualization and System Center IT management offerings.

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We know that customers also frequently have mixed virtualization environments, and for years we have included the capability in the System Center tools to manage across these environments, including those offered by third-party companies such as VMware ESX.

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He then indirectly uses this analogy to announce that virtualization, today, replaces the hardware and that the application platforms replace the operating system.

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All of this is possible because of virtualization, a process which increases effectiveness by inserting a level of software between the operating system and the hardware.

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It is similar to what happened a few years ago when companies such as VMware Inc. began offering virtualization software that made it possible to run more than one program on a single server system.

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"When you use virtualization to build malware, there are no hooks, nothing you can see within an operating system, " she says.

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