In my previous job I had a lengthy commute home by car, which consisted of heading round the M4 and the M25 everyday. This surely is some people’s idea of hell on earth, and by the end of three and half years it was pretty much mine too.

One of the highlights though was that I often was in a good place to listen to Radio 4’s comedy half-hour, which consists of some real classics such as Just a Minute and I’m sorry I Haven’t a Clue. Also in this slot was a programme, originally hosted by David Baddiel, called Heresy, where, “opinionated panellists use their wit and wisdom to argue against narrow-minded thinking and received opinions of the day,”  as it says on the BBC Radio 4 web page that described the programme.

I mention all this because the show came to mind after a briefing I had yesterday with a Microsoft to get a demo of its new virtualisation management tool, System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008.

Now ‘received opinion’ goes like this: Google – good, Microsoft - evil but I was thrown a curve ball by the fact that the virtualisation guys, Neil and Julius, are as nice a couple of chaps as you could hope to meet. So you clearly don’t have to be evil to work there.

On a practical note it was genuinely useful to actually see a virtualisation tool in action. Now I don’t know about you, but I don’t actually run a virtualised server of any description so getting a demo of how it actually works made the whole virtualisation thing, well, a lot more real.

Julius was demoing by making a VPN connection into his test network and viewing System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008, (which looks just like Outlook) over a remote desktop connection. In turn, the tool gives you then see a snapshot of your virtual hosts and the virtual applications running of each host. It’s all quite zen really when you think about it.