Windows 7 brought around a number of different improvements for my system administrator job, most notably the fact that it connects to the Win2k8 servers while the old XP system didn’t. However this morning during a mass patching, the Aero Peek feature really has shown its true nature.

Right now I’m installing patches on 6 identical machines to bring them up to date with the patches from our WSUS server. (There are reasons why we don’t clone the boxes to get patches on.) But picture the only, XP way, of doing this. 6 remote desktop sessions and randomly switching between them to see the progress. Switch to the Windows 7 way and it becomes open 6 Hyper-V connections, then mouse over the taskbar icon to get the image below.

Completely wonderful. Total time saver.

In the time normally spent flicking between machines, I’ve written this post, added some more nagios alerts in, and checked on a few other servers.