I have covered some of what we do at IT camps in a couple of previous posts, but what we did in Birmingham and London this week was to launch a new kind of camp, on Private Cloud.  This builds on knowledge gained at a Hyper-V IT camp and on Microsoft Virtual Academy and explain the how and why of managing virtualisation at scale in your data centre..

Virtualisation at scale obviously means that you are working in a larger organisation, and the concepts of a private cloud such as charge back, scalability and self service are really only appropriate to those business with lots of physical servers, a departmental structure and a group of dedicated IT professionals (although these might be outsourced). 

System Center 2012 is designed to make the private cloud work and that’s what we show in this camp.  However the individual components in the suite can also be used to proactively manage servers and applications in organisations that only have tens of virtual machines rather than hundreds.  So some of what we talk about at a private camp is relevant to the IT Professional in a smaller business but the main thrust of the camp is Private Cloud. Please bear this in mind when registering to come along.

I also realise that the the term private cloud is not popular with IT Professionals because it is either seen as marketing spin or its all about reducing costs and IT jobs.  I disagree this stuff is important because

1. a.  The standardisation and automation that the private cloud brings to a data centre frees you up from fire fighting and lets you concentrate on the projects the business want to implement as the business changes.

2. Tools like System Center track what is being done to your data centre be that in response to fixes or requests for change, so you don’t have to.  For example if a new virtual machine is deployed it will show up as an asset you will know what operating system and applications are on it who owns it and how long it is needed for

3. Both of which go to make  the IT department look more like a service and less like and overhead.  On an individual level you will have more respect from the business and that can be more important than a pay rise in my opinion.

Back to the camps we are running just one more thing; if you are coming to our camps on Hyper-V and you are already running Hyper-V in production then we may well be covering the basics you are already aware of. However because Hyper-V has its place in the smallest of businesses, then this camp is a great introduction for an IT Professional in any organisation, and we know this because we have had some really good feedback from running these camps.  

Cooks would rather not wash up, and the best chefs have someone else do the shopping prepare the vegetables etc. and often end up planning and managing the menus and kitchens. In our IT professional world I would rather not worry about patching, I hate doing all the repetitive boring stuff and would rather work on projects.  Essentially that’s the promise of the cloud, so I am continually surprised that so many of you don’t get it, possibly you don’t think this stuff applies to you.

I have been trying to explain this at the various IT Camps we have been running up and down the country, but I also got a cameo role on cloud at SQL Bits with my good friend Buck Woody.  We were filmed so that should be out on the SQL Bits portal in the next month, but we also shot a 2 minute intro while he was making pizza at my house..

Which I hope you enjoy as much as we enjoyed his proper American pizza!

Dogfood is the commonly described term for running your own beta software, however I prefer the term drinking your own champagne and to that end I have spent  a days leave today playing Window Server 8.   Yes its very different to what you have seen before and rather like having the decorators in while you are away it can  be difficult to find your old stuff when you return. However the new UI is a lot cleaner and once you know what your doing you will be more productive than you are now. 

Anyway a server OS is not much use without services running on it so I thought I would see if SQL Server 2012 would be at home here now that it’s been released.  The first thing I do when installing SQL Server is to declare the server as an application server by adding that role, which adds in the .Net framework.  SQL Server 2012 needs the >Net Framework 3.5 sp1 and to get that onto Windows Server 8 you’ll need it connected to the internet when you add the feature in, as it’s not included in the install media (as I found out at #SQLBits).  So having got that installed..

I can then crack on with the install.  notice that the SQL installer does tell you about this in the install screen bottom right below..

I imagine the SQL installer will do this for you but you’ll need that internet connection for it to work.

Anyway after a clean install I know get a load of icons on my metro desktop..

Right clicking on any of these means you can remove them and of course drag them round as you need to.  You might wonder what that interface is doing on a server OS.  My answer would be that many of us manage servers via remote desktop and if your client device has touch then this interface will work well with that.

I also included Reporting Services in my install to see if that would work and it does..

Although I had to turn on IE compatibility mode as it didn’t render quite as it should.

Of course this is all just evaluation as we are a long way from releasing Windows Server 8 and I would imagine that there will be a service pack of SQL Server 2012 that will fix any issues when Server 8 does come out.

I will be doing SQL Relay for Tony Rogerson in May (Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham & Bristol) and I’ll have this running if you want to know more.

If you have looked at any of the new components of System Center 2012 you may have noticed that everyone seems to have a bunch of reports, some of them have data marts or data warehouses and some of them have analytics in the form of analysis services cubes.  Apart from the confusion over when to use what, why has so much effort been put into this?

In order to answer that let’s consider what information we need from System Center. I use the term information here deliberately as you may be aware that System Center chucks out tons of data, e.g. virtual machine X is running SQL Server, this update failed, that server has restarted, etc.etc. A good example of this how a badly setup Operations Manager will swamp the IT team with all the messages it throws out.

Rather than all this noise what we need is answers such as:

• What tasks are assigned to me?
• Is everything that needs to be running actually working OK?
• How can I predict demand and so be more proactive?

This isn’t an exhaustive list rather these questions characterise the way you might interact with the information coming out of System Center, and help frame an understanding of how business intelligence fits into the picture.

What task are assigned to me ?

This is operational reporting also referred to as consumption reporting because in the process of acting on the report the data in it becomes obsolete.  In this case If I action a task assigned to me from a report. it’s then closed and won’t appear on the report if I run it again.  This is the simplest type of report  and is usually directly sourced form the operational database (hence the other name).  In System Center 2012 these reports are usually built in to things like management packs in Operations Manager and Service Manager.

Is everything that needs to be running actually working OK?

This often expressed as a dashboard and is often found running on a large screen in a large helpdesk or operations room. In order to answer this type of question you might need data from more than one source and a deeper understanding of the source data is needed, for example to understand what systems need to be monitored and what the components of those systems are. In the BI world we might use a dashboard for this kind of analysis which might be interactive rather than static, enabling the end user to drill into a problem area to see more detail. Dashboards typically get their data from a data warehouse which is nothing more than a specialised database where the design (schema) is optimised for reporting rather than input. System Center does include some dashboarding capability but this a set of components and tools rather than a finished solution as dashboards are very individual to an organisation so there’s no right answer than can be implemented in a product. For example your System Center dashboard would probably compare actual performance against service levels, across time across business units. However the SLAs in your business will vary considerably e.g. “server uptime bust be greater than 99.999% between 8am- 6pm on working days”  or “client login time on our corporate internet site must be less than 500ms “ so you’ll have to do some work to get those to show up.

How can I be more proactive?

In order to answer this kind of question a data warehouse is also needed because the answer might depend on what’s happened before where operational systems e.g. Operations Manager are routinely purged of older data to maintain performance.  However writing endless reports and running them to get an answer as vague as this would take too long what is need is an interactive way to navigate through the data to understand the trends and discover patterns that might not immediately be apparent. This is the realm of OLAP and data mining both of which are built into SQL Server standard edition, (which you get with System Center 2012), and there’s an option to use this as part of Virtual Machine Manager 2012 for this kind of reason. 

Hopefully that’s got you thinking, but if not let me leave you with a though and a question

• The question: With so much reporting and analysis in Systems Center how can I make sense of it?
• The thought: I spent ten years in business intelligence and saw numerous attempts by software vendors to deliver vanilla BI on the back of their erp systems which were of only limited value.

Four cities,  in four days makes for one tired evangelist, so why am I doing SQL Relay with the SQL community I hear you ask.  Well that’s your answer really -  I can’t hear you ask anything when I am sat in darkest Surrey blogging away so I am actually doing these events not so much to speak as to listen.  For a start we have some of the best experts on SQL Server in the world giving up their time to go on tour as well so I can learn from them.  More importantly I am interested in what’s going on with SQL Server in the real world; are you virtualised, are you still on SQL Server 2005 or even 2000, and are you dedicated or is SQL just something you do in between Exchange, and Active Directory.

 

With lots of Power% and %Point stuff in SQL Server I thought I might skip the actual PowerPoint to avoid confusion.  I also want my talk to be based on what you want to hear about so if you do plan to go:

• Edinburgh 21 May
• Manchester 22 May
• Birmingham 23 May
• Bristol 24 May

and the following we’ll be in London on 30 May

Please register, and then drop me a tweet (@deepfat) or a drop me an e-mail with your questions comments or suggestions, and I’ll see if I can get some swag for those who send me ideas

Curiously one of the topics we hardly ever get asked about at our IT Camps is security in Hyper-V.  Perhaps it’s because you all have total confidence in our approach security, or you already have the facts to hand, but more likely is that you forgot to ask about because it’s not top of your agenda.

That’s OK, and anyway I need to write this so I have the definitive answers to hand when someone asks me.

So what do you need to consider when virtualising your data centre?

The best resource I have seen is by the US Government specifically the National Institute of Standards & Technology in their Guide to Security for Virtualization Technologies.  It’s a big read but the three key sections are:

4-2 recommendations about locking down the hypervisor.  the key points are:

• No unauthorised access to the operating system controlling the VMs
• Resources shared by the managing operating system and the guest VMs are kept to a minimum
• that the host or physical operating system is kept up to date with patches
• The host operating system is only used to run virtual machines

4-3 recommendations for securing the virtual machines themselves

4-4 recommendations for securing a virtual desktop infrastructure

So having got your head around that and carried out your own risk assessments be that by contacting CESG if you are in UK government or the risk assessment advice put out by the UK government for businesses in the UK, you then need to apply this to your environment.  For Hyper-V the three key resources you need are: 

• Hyper-V Security Guide on TechNet:
• Hyper-V Security Guide
• Planning for Hyper-V Security

I would argue that you’ll also need System Center to manage your data centre security, check and rectify compliance issues as well as to audit and changes.  To help with that there is a Governance Risk & Compliance Process Pack which uses the integration between Service Manager and the rest of System Center (Config Manager, Ops Manager, Virtual machine Manger via Orchestrator).   It has extensive guidance for the non IT functions and  has the side benefit of showing you how to unify System Center to better support the business.

Finally You’ll want to lock down windows server as well whether that’s the physical operating system or the guest and there’s a Security Compliance Manager to help with that.

I wanted to something different for SQL Relay last week as this is a community driven event and I didn’t want to cover areas that the other experts on the Relay team would cover. This left some gaps and I have had several follow up questions via twitter and e-mail which I want to cover in this post.

Columnstore

I covered several uses of the in memory column based technology in my session 2 of which are in SQL Server 2008 R2 (PowerPivcot for Excel and PowerPivot for SharePoint) and two are new for SQL Server 2012: Tabular Analysis Services and Columnstore indexes.  Columnstore indexes are part of the database engine rather than part of Analysis services and are created much in the same way as for other indexes:

CREATE NONCLUSTERED COLUMNSTORE INDEX [IX_CS_FactProductInventory]

ON dbo.FactProductInventory

(

ProductKey, DateKey, UnitCost, UnitsIn, UnitsOut, UnitsBalance

)

They can speed up a query  by 10-100x compared to a normal index however you can’t update a table with a Columsntore index on you have to disable it and then re-index after you have made your changes.  There a good guide on its usage on the SQL Server wiki.

Security

I would like to have covered of contained database security which as the name suggests means that the login credentials of users get stored in a given database rather than in master and for SQL Server authentication this means that the password is in there as well.  As well as making the database more portable a user who just has their credentials in that database can’t change to another database and have little or no permissions outside that database.  Therefore when you connect to a contained database you need to specify the database as well as the server/instance (for example in management studio)  I can see there being huge advantages of this approach for developers wishing to make applications cloud ready and ISV’s can make deployments of their applications more easily.

I also got asked about crypto enhancements in SQL Server and these are:

• Create certificate from bytes
• 4K certificates supported for import
• SMK/DMK default to AES256
• Key backups encrypted with AES256
• SHA2 (256 and 512) support
• Password hashes use SHA512
• RC4 deprecated

LocalDB

I have to admit to glossing over this as I am not primarily a developer and I rarely play with SQL Server Express.  LocalDB is an installation option in SQL Express and allows for a cutdown version of SQL Server to run against a local database. Note LocalDB doesn’t support Filestream and cannot be a merge replication subscriber and for more on this refer to LocalDB in MSDN

Power View

I have now checked and there is currently no drill down capability in Power View.  If htis is important to you r business you can register your interest in this feature oadn/or clusteringn Connect (Microsoft portal for feedback on products)

SQL Server Guest Clustering/Always On

No matter how good your virtualisation stack is if you want to make SQL Server highly available you need some form of solution whereby a virtual machine can hand off the running of a SQL server database instance to another virtual machine for planned and unplanned downtime.  Correct me if I am wrong but Vmware DRS simply doesn’t do this (neither does Hyper-V so I am not trying to criticise Vmware per se).  Your choices were mirroring before the launch of SQL Server 2012 and now that’s out you have Always On.  This should work well on Vmware as well as Hyper-V as there is no dependency on shared storage and hence iscsi support in your VMs.   

So hopefully that helps clear up a few things I had to skate over in the interest of time, do ping me if I have missed your query off and look forward to chatting with you all agin at SQL Bits or some other community event soon.

You may be aware that I am still keen on SQL Server and despite the changing nature of my role at Microsoft I still try and keep my hand in with the latest version.  One thing I overlooked until I did SQL Relay was contained database security which is easy to use and can make your life a lot easier.

In previous versions of SQL Server logins are stored in  the master database whether you use windows or SQL Server authentication.  That’s fine until you want your database to move to another instance of SQL Server. For example if you enable mirroring your database could end up running on a secondary server and if you haven’t got a separate process to move the logins across to the secondary this could cause problems if those logins have changed or new ones have been created.

SQL Server 2012 fixes this with contained databases and makes deployment easier by enabling you to put the logins into the application database.  As well as making database more portable it also means that uses connect to specific database rather than to the whole the instance thus limiting what they can do to just that database.  For example they won’t even be aware that there are other databases in that instance. 

For this to work you need to alter the properties of the instance either in options form the GUI:

 

or using the following TSQL:

EXEC sys.sp_configure ‘Contained database authentication’, 1

GO

RECONFIGURE WITH OVERRIDE

GO

I would then configure my database for contained security again either form the UI..

or in TSQL..

USE Master

ALTER DATABASE [DeepFat] SET ‘containment = PARTIAL WITH NO_WAIT

GO

If I then create a login..

USE [DeepFat]

CREATE USER [Deepfat] WITH PASSWORD = ********

I can do a simple test to see how this works.  I open Management Studio and try and use this login to connect to my instance and it will fail..

because I also need to specify the database I am going to (by expanding the options and selecting the database to connect to) …

If I do that I will be able to connect but all I will see in management studio is my database..

 

This will work for all the other kinds of logins like windows authentication.  So a nice simple way to contain the enthusiasm of your uses to wander around your SQL servers as well as making the database more portable.

If you want to try this you’ll need to use SQL Server 2012, and you might want to see what else is new in this release on the SQL Server track in the Microsoft Virtual Academy

We aren’t all the same, we learn differently, we work in a wide range of business that have very different needs, and we learn at different speeds.  So spending a day being lectured to on technical stuff,  isn’t going to be the right answer for everyone and no matter how good the speaker is he has to tread a middle line to keep the experts in a topic interested while ensuring those new to it aren’t left behind.  Talks on overall positioning or to show off some new cool stuff work well, but if you want to know how to get stuff done and get inside the technology, then a different approach is needed. 

So Simon May and I have cooked up a different style of event, an IT camp,  where the content is driven by the audience, but within a general topic areas. We wanted to test this out by running a limited public beta,  so we invited a select group of IT professional guinea pigs to a day in London to test the idea.  We thought a basic day of clustering and server virtualisation would have the broadest appeal as Hyper-V is being more and more widely adopted.

One of the problems with this kind of unstructured event is that we didn’t have the usual pile of PowerPoint decks as hand-outs,  Simon manned the whiteboard and I manned the keyboard.  One thing I thought would be useful would be to share some of what we built as we plan to run a lot more events like this next year..

 

 

My rough guide for installing Hyper-V server and adding it to a cluster with iscsi storage is up on skydrive ..

and the resources we used were:

Software:

• Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 with sp1  is a lightweight (based server core for those that know it) edition of Windows Server that is not licensed and can only be used to run Hyper-V.
• Windows Server 2008 R2 with sp1 Evaluation edition If you aren’t comfortable using the minimalist interface in Server core then you could use this and enable the hyper- role on it.  You will also need it to create some VM’s with
• Core Configurator is a PowerShell based interface to make Hyper-V server and server core easier to manage directly than it is with SConfig
•  iscsi target software allows you to emulate shared storage using Virtual Hard Disks (.VHD)
• RDCMan allows you to control a lot of remote desktop sessions
• Zoomit (part of Windows sysinternals) allows you to pan and zoom around your screen when presenting
• System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 manages large server virtualisation deployments and is now in release candidate.  There’s also a prebuilt VHD which can integrate into your test sandbox / demo rig here

Learning resources

Microsoft Virtual Academy

Installation and setup guides..

Hyper-V Survival Guide on TechNet , this has sections on dynamic memory networking, clustering with iscsi and just about anything else you’ll need

Our IT Camp guinea pigs seemed to like the event but also gave us a lot of helpful feedback which will be baked into the next events we do, so keep an eye out for IT camps coming to a location near you in 2012.

I can only run 11 server based  Virtual machines on my laptop, but all bar three of them are running SQL Server:

• 3 x VMs running SQL Server 2012 beta and the new AlwaysOn Cluster. Note one of these is running SQL Server 2012 on Windows Server Core
• 1 x VM running  SQL Server 2012 the database engine plus 3 x instances of analysis services, master data services and data quality services not to mention SharePoint with Office Web Apps enabled.
• 1x Windows 7 VM with Office 2010, Visual Studio 2010 ultimate and all the System Center client tools, remote server administration tools
• 2 x System Center Service Manager 2012 beta VM’s one fore the service and one for the data warehouse
• 1 x VM for System Center Orchestrator 2012 RC
• 1 x VM for System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 RC together with then new System Center App Controller
• 1 x VM for System Center Operations Manager 2012 beta
• 1 x VM for Red Hat Linux
• 1 x VM as my domain controller and DHCP server

The limiting factor I face is RAM -  the minimum memory requirements of many of the System Center tools limits what I can cram into to 16Gb, but dynamic memory is a great help here.  Anyway it’s a fair increase over the four VM per server density that was discussed when Hyper-V came out.  That ratio of virtual to physical can of course be pushed much harder on ‘proper servers’ designed for Hyper-V rather than my laptop mash-up.  A good example of this was the labs run at various big events like the Microsoft Management Summit in May where they were able run 225VMs per host although with 128Gbs or RAM they would only be getting a basic 512Mb per machine.

However there is another way and that’s what Microsoft does in its newer data centres, like the one I visited last week.  The whole data centre runs on a modified Hyper-V but what’s different is that there are thousands of low cost basic servers rather than hundreds of huge monsters.  Blogging in more detail about how these work is more than my job’s worth so if you want to know more then the Global Infrastructure Services site is the place to go (there’s a video tour of one of the data centres  here) .  However what I can say is that all the lessons learnt from operating at this scale are then put into the next releases of Hyper-V and System Center, for example:

• the bare metal host provisioning in Virtual Machine Manager 2012
• the separation of duties in Virtual Machine Manager 2012 where the team who look after the physical servers don’t control the services that run on those servers, that’s down to the application teams.
• the integration of AVIcode into Operations Manager 2012 to understand what problems are affecting the applications themselves.

So if you want to get an idea of how to run a data centre at scale then you’ll want to spend your downtime over Christmas learning virtual Machine Manager either by watching the new content on the Microsoft Virtual Academy or by pulling down the Release candidate (which you can install or uses a preconfigured hyper-V virtual machine)

My Christmas card for 2011 is inspired by a frequent visitor to my back garden the Goldcrest.  The trick to seeing them is to resist the temptation to tidy up and dead head too much, whereas that’s exactly the sort of thing you should be thinking about in your data centre to keep it clean and tidy.  The problem here is often knowing what you’ve got, and why it’s needed especially with an explosion of virtual machines.  So before you hit the delete key I would suggest you download and run the Microsoft Assessment & Planning Tool (MAPT).  This not only reports on Microsoft stuff it looks at 3rd party software and your hardware and virtualisation environment.

I will certainly be doing lots of tidying up on my demo rigs to free up enough resources for System Center 2012 now much of it is at release candidate and of course the release candidate of SQL Server 2012 is now available as well.  The team have planned out lots events next year, IT camps, the System Center 2012 preview tour is still on tour and of course I’ll be at SQL Bits to complete my perfect attendance.

Until then, whatever you’ll be doing over the Christmas break, have fun and don’t hog the XBox.

 

Andrew

I have to confess I don’t know too much about the detailed mechanics of ITIL, but I couple of months ago I got chatting to an expert, Erin Palmer from Villanova University in the US, and over the Christmas holidays he’s written up a really good post by way of an  introduction..

 

So you think you have IT chaos to manage? Imagine the IT services needed to tame the chaos of a multi-billion dollar conglomerate of 11 large-scale theme parks, two water parks, over 40 resorts, and a pair of cruise ships – and over 118 million customers annually. Did I mention these services also operate in all time zones across many languages and international borders every day all year long? Can you imagine an IT department of 1000?

These are the statistics from the Walt Disney Company (TWDC) case study as they took on adopting ITIL best practices in the mid-2000’s. Used since the 1980’s in the United Kingdom to manage the IT services of large governmental entities, ITIL has proven its value time and time again in a variety of large, medium, and small business settings worldwide. The IRS which processed over 236 million tax returns and collected more than $2.3 trillion dollars in revenue in the fiscal year 2009 uses ITIL, so does N.A.S.A., and a host of other business entities that aren’t nearly this big or complex. One of the reasons why ITIL structure continues to grow in popularity is that it is adoptable and flexible in nearly any business setting that uses IT to conduct its commerce.

Looking at recent ITIL case studies, several important points emerge when thinking about how ITIL might help you manage the IT chaos in your business setting, no matter how large or small.

1. ITIL processes are flexible and help manage the services IT provides as the business grows:

· Working with existing IT structures, ITIL grows the business efficiently

· Reducing redundant data storage, ITIL saves room on servers

· Centralizing data storage means increased security of company data

· Generating reports for monitoring progress is easier and more efficient with ITIL

· Increasing consistency and dependability is an ITIL goal; business is streamlined

· Maintaining the ITIL is efficient, resulting in less down time and “work-arounds”

2. ITIL best practices generates data to address IT and departmental problems pre-emptively

· Self-monitoring applications reveal areas that need attention before they become a problem

· Generating reports to track how various IT factors work together is easier and you can assess for glitches in the system before they cause a problem

· Measuring data and comparing goals across departments increases productivity and accountability

· Implementing company- wide IT standards and guidelines means less is overlooked, or repeated and that there is increased communication and cooperation among departments regarding company goals

3. Client Trust increases

· Less outages and down-time due to IT issues means increased client satisfaction

· Increased data security is a strong selling point

· ITIL provides strong back-office support which positively impacts the user’s experience

· ITIL means streamlines services that lead to faster response time when a client needs assistance

4. The ITIL structure helps team building

· When company goals are ubiquitous across all sectors progress is easier to monitor

· Each team plays a unique role in reaching company goals and can keep track of contributions toward the goals

· Teams know that company-wide standards are in place so everyone is on a level playing field when striving for a goal

· Reports are easy to generate and share regarding company-wide progress

· Communication between teams and with team leaders is more streamlined so response time can be faster when team members request changes or observe a situation where an IT adjustment would streamline services even more

· Help desk requests are processed more efficiently and data tracks trends that need more careful attention

As a business grows, the chaos of IT grows as well. By implementing an ITIL, not only can you harness some of that chaos, but you can make it work for you. By analysing the huge amount of data available to you in the ITIL framework, more specific reports are possible that indicate progress toward goals. Team building within the company is increased through the implementation of standard language, goals, and processes from one department to the next. Increased efficiency can mean increased profits, a more enjoyable IT experience, increased client satisfaction, and more “free” time for managers to promote company growth and increased profitability.

Even though your company goals may not involve IT that provides a literal thrill ride for your clients, through examining case studies of companies that have successfully adopted ITIL best practices, you may just find that the lucky star you were wishing for is closer than you think. With its internationally recognized standards of best practice, ITIL offers the possibility for unlocking greater potential and momentum for increased growth, efficiency, security, and profitability in your company no matter where you are and what service or product you provide. Chaos in the global marketplace will continue to increase; ITIL offers a proven method for harnessing the chaos and riding it all the way to the bank for those willing to put the time in to prepare, invest in, and utilize an ITIL framework to its fullest potential.

This article was submitted by Villanova University’s new ITIL training course. This course is part of the overall IT Service Management training program.

In the last guest blog post from Erin Palmer he looked at how to manage IT chaos with the adoption of ITIL infrastructure.  In this second guest post he takes a more detailed look at five key points from the TWDC case study that can help plan a successful ITIL implementation process of your own.

1. Generate the Buzz

ITIL adaptation takes skilful planning, a strategic implementation schedule, and the participation of key players who will be in full support of the transition. Follow the success of TWDC’s strategy and help your constituents see how the adaption of an ITIL infrastructure can address current IT concerns and will help them use IT more efficiently. Implement a top down educational plan and select key players for advanced training, or bring on talented ITIL leaders with the experience to help make the transition as seamless as possible. Once the people in the organization grasp the positive potential of ITIL for the company’s growth, then the process begins to form a life of its own. This process cannot take place without the commitment to funding resources, time, and human resource development necessary to achieve success.

2. Assemble Powerful Teams

Taking the time necessary to build talented teams with leaders that have both the technical experience and the strong communication skills to articulate the overall vision and goals for the team is essential for success. The TWDC case study underscores the fact that successful ITIL adaptation takes time. Looking at the current role of IT in your organization and being clear about what you would like to see with regard to data management, reporting, efficiency, delivery, maintenance, etc. is vital to building a plan with clear goals and measurable outcomes. Selecting a team that will help you implement the changes necessary to reach your new profit and efficiency goals is easier if you are clear about what you want to truly achieve with the adoption of an ITIL infrastructure. Putting the time in to train and assemble strong leaders for the project will build overall trust in the process and will help safe guard against breaks in service and diminish other challenges as the project gets underway.

3. Keep Clear and Regular Communication a Top Priority

From the moment you start to generate the buzz, until the process is complete and running smoothly, communication is vital to keep all constituents informed and connected to the momentum of the project. Every leader needs to be fully fluent in best practice methods for communicating technical and non-technical aspects of the process to a wide variety of users. The message needs to be adapted to the recipient, not the other way around. Skilled ITIL leaders are aware that the CFO, the help desk worker, and the marketing manager have differing IT related roles and will need to hear about the ITIL infrastructure engagement process in a language that makes sense with examples that are relevant. Throughout the process regular updates and the celebration of milestones builds confidence in the process and builds a more cohesive team.

4. Strategically Build an ITIL that Serves Your Needs

The best part about the ITIL infrastructure is that it is flexible. You can integrate what works without “reinventing the wheel.” Taking time to collect insightful research gained from involving all teams who use IT in the beginning of the project will lead to a stronger ITIL implementation with less adjusting later. Strong ITIL leadership can ensure that the ITIL infrastructure will grow with you. A strategic ITIL infrastructure bolsters revenue by streamlining processes like ordering, and delivering products. Redundancy in storage is decreased thus speeding up servers. Everyday processes like scheduling, stocking inventory, maintaining client communication, performing system maintenance, and generating specific data to track progress in key areas, are all made more efficient, timely, and profitable with ITIL adaptation. Data security also increases with ITIL which can bolster client confidence. In order for ITIL to serve you well, you need to be clear about the realistic goals within your budget and then proceed if the resources are there to support the project.

A strong ITIL infrastructure generates the data that is needed to make maintenance and long term adjustments efficient, leaving more time for growing your business and leading your organization into new markets with confidence. Engaging in industry-wide best ITIL practice methods will help you build the strategy you need to assure you have a successful and integrated ITIL infrastructure with all teams in your organization driving the momentum forward to new goals and profitability. As e-commerce continues to expand and competition in the global market place increases, ITIL data can be a powerful tool to guide your growth. Case studies show that implementing an ITIL infrastructure can increase profitability; these case studies also reveal that the plan takes time, company-wide support, and team cooperation to succeed -three important factors to weigh heavily when considering an ITIL plan for you organization.

 

As I mentioned last time Erin works at Villanova University and this article comes from their new ITIL training course. This course is part of the overall IT Service Management training program.

You may have seen that there are going to be some changes to the way SQL Server 2012 is licensed and the editions available, if you haven’t then the detail is here.  What I want to cover off in this post is what the various new features depend on so you are clear on what else you need besides the new licenses of SQL Server 2012.

SharePoint

The three components of BI in Microsoft are SQL Server, Office and SharePoint, and this has been true since the integration of Performance Point in SharePoint 2007. SQL Server 2008 R2 add PowerPivot to SharePoint to allow excel power users to share the analytical mashups they created with their colleagues.  This relied on Excel Services in SharePoint enterprise to create a PowerPivot gallery where other business users could slice and dice the PowerPivots created by their more technical peers.

SQL Server 2012 adds in two new BI features, Power View and Report Alerting in the new Business Intelligence edition and in the top end Enterprise edition:

• Power View (formerly known as Project Crescent) is a new ad hoc reporting tool that builds on PowerPivot in that its reports are designed to be previewed in the PowerPivot gallery and so it is also reliant on SharePoint Enterprise edition.
• Report Alerting allows users to put a rule on any report and be notified when the rule is met. The rules are defined in a simple interface can reference any value or field on the report.  This capability is only available if Reporting Services is in SharePoint integrated mode. However that only requires SharePoint Foundation edition.

Also not to get these new features to work you’ll need SharePoint 2010 sp1 or later

Windows Server

One of the other, if not the, top feature in SQL Server is AlwaysOn.  This builds on windows failover clustering services (but with no shared storage necessary) to provide mirroring like functionality across multiple databases with multiple secondaries which can be read only if necessary. This feature is only available in SQL Server Enterprise edition and because it relies on failover clustering  it will only work on Windows Server Enterprise editions and above (as per this editions datasheet). 

As for which version of Windows will run SQL Server 2012, it’s the same as for SQL Server 2008 R2 - Windows Server 2008 sp2, and on the desktop Vista Sp2 or later.  I am guessing  Windows Server 2008 is still supported as this is the last 32 bit server operating system but clearly the clock is ticking for 32 bit server support so you’ll want to start thinking about removing that as a dependency in your infrastructure 

Simon and I have spent most of last week on stand duty at BETT one of the largest education events in the world. We were there to field questions from teachers and some of the hardest working IT Professionals, those supporting the IT in schools.  Agility is essential to cope with the new influx of students every year as well as is the need to deploy every more applications to keep up with the latest standards for the curriculum and the way each subject is taught.  Some of these questions are relevant to all of us so I thought I would post some of the discussions..

Teaching the next generation of IT Professionals. 

There was a lot of coverage in the press last week about teaching coding and development as part of ICT, however I had two separate requests from ICT teachers about teaching how to maintain and fix problems on PCs, because that’s what their students had asked for.  We discussed setting up virtual machines on Hyper-V and using snapshots to allow a damaged desktop to be fixed and then being reset with the problem for the next lesson.  I also think some of the information on clustering and virtual machines on the Microsoft Virtual Academy could be reused in class rooms. 

Remote Desktop Services & App-V.

One way to deal with the problem of matching up students and teachers to the applications they need , irrespective of where they are working is to use App-V (application virtualisation) as this deploys a virtual copy of an application to a desktop based on the groups a user belongs to i.e. it won’t show up in programs in control panel and can run side by side alongside earlier versions of the same application which it would normally conflict with.

Another approach is to use Remote Desktop Services (RDS) and it was no surprise at BETT to see all the hardware vendors sporting their latest thin client devices, and personally I like the LG and Samsung offerings where the thin client was just part of the LCD panel.  However not every application likes running as a remote desktop and you can end up creating a lot remote desktops for each type of user.  The trick here is to use App-V with RDS so that the applications run virtually inside the remote desktop session and a given user only gets the applications they need even though you only have one or two standard desktops in RDS (the guidance on how to do this is here). 

Another good thing about RDS is that it reduces heat in the classroom if thin client devices are used and also reduces the background noise, although the noise from pupils will still be the same!  It is possible to implement RDS without also deploying Citrix or Quest technologies on top, however both of these partners’ offerings add ease of use and manageability to what the raw RDS experience delivers.

Digital Inclusion

RDS can be setup so that these personalised remote desktops are available to staff & students working at home or other locations and this means they can use their own devices to interact with a school.  Of course laptops are expensive and can be difficult to justify on a limited budget, so to level the playing field there is Get On Line @ Home, which provides affordable reconditioned hardware with Windows 7 + Office 2010 with telephone technical support included.

..and Finally

One of my colleagues was asked for a whitepaper so he naturally wanted to know on what topic as we have loads of them,  the answer came back “no I just want some whitepaper” and the delegate grabbed some blank A4 sheets off the stand!

I have spent a lot if time recently briefing Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) on SQL Server 2012,so I thought a consolidated post on the subject might be useful for those planning to develop solutions on top of SQL Server 2012. 

New Features that will just work

By this I mean there are some new things in SQL Server which you can take advantage of without changing your application.

Always On allows you to make an application highly available by combining the best parts of mirroring and clustering without the need to have a SAN or other shared storage. Not this is in enterprise edition.

Report Alerting allows end users to setup conditions in simple interface on any report and get an email when those conditions are met.  This needs SQL Server standard & SharePoint Foundation (the free one) or higher.

New Features that you can take advantage of in your application

Development  SQL Server now has SQL Server data tools that you can deploy to Visual Studio 2010 to make application lifecycle management easier. For example simple tools to edit and compare schemas and data tier applications to make deployment of your application easier.  There is also Distributed Replay, which allows captured profiler traces to be replayed on another environment which might be a later version of SQL server or simply a test server. the tools can either be installed as part of installing SQL Server or via the web platform installer

Security.  The key security feature in SQL Server 2012 for ISVs will be contained database security which will allow you to have all the security credentials built into the database you are using.

File Table.  This builds on filestream to expose a new type of table a file table as a folder that can be used as any normal file folder except that each file and subfolder will now be stored as a row in the File Table.  This might be useful in storing any unstructured data as part of your application.  Note that full text search and the new semantic search work well with File Tables. I have post here on setting that up too

T-SQL. There are a few new functions in T-SQL, that might be relevant.

Self Service BI

In many situations the end user will want to combine data from your application with other sources.  The new self service BI capabilities in SQL Server 2012 can make it easier for users to do this in Excel and for this work to be scaled up and deployed to the rest of the business. To get the best out of this in your application you might consider:

• Creating a suite of reports designed to expose the dimension type information (product lists, chart of accounts etc.) that can then be consumed by the user as odata feeds in PowerPivot for Excel (odata is built into reporting services). 
• Creating a BI Semantic model to map how your data is structured and add extra business logic (calculations and aggregations) so that business users can quickly build their own analytics and report in such tools as the new Power View.  note: This requires SQL Server BI edition and SharePoint enterprise

What won’t work

There are a only a few things that won’t work in SQL Server 2012 that are in SQL Server 2008 R2. Microsoft has a process for announcing which features will go; in any given release there are a list of deprecated features, those that won’t be supported in a future release. This means there is plenty of advanced warning, both to stop using the feature if you are already and not to use a deprecated feature in any new design work.

In SQL Server the list of features that are no longer supported is very minor; i.e. if it works in SQL Server 2008 / SQL server 2008 R2 it will also work in SQL Server 2012:

• System stored procedures:
  • sp_ActiveDirectory_Obj
  • sp_ActiveDirectory_SCP
  • sp_ActiveDirectory_Start
• the Surface area configuration (SAC) tool
• and various command line switches to install SQL Server so if you are deploying SQL Server as part of an application you’ll need to change the install script. I mention this because various tools like the upgrade assistant will pick up what code is in your database and profiler and the SQL Server deprecated features object will track your usage of features that are going to be obsolete, there aren’t really any tools to check your installation process.

Upgrade Advisor and Upgrade Assistant

Two confusingly named tools exist to put some science into your upgrade planning, the SQL Server Upgrade Advisor is a Microsoft tool, and the Upgrade Assistant is also free and provided by a top gold partner Scalability Experts.  The Upgrade which does a high level check of compatibility issues moving from one version to another, and the Upgrade Assistant is a detailed tool for preparing making trace replays to confirm that the code that is actually executing in an application works in the new version, so this can be used to track an installation code executing in multi tier applications as well as the objects inside any given database.  If you’re an ISV you’ll probably want to use both in your testing.

DTS

DTS won't be supported in SQL Server 2012 for more on this check TechNet and my post on the subject.

 Anyway I hope that’s useful, full details on SQL Server 2012 Editions & Licensing are here, and for more information on those new features visit the main SQL Server 2012 Resource Centre.

There is a lot of advice on whether to virtualise SQL Server and many dbas are under pressure to do this.  There’s good advice here from SQL CAT on best practice on hyper-V and if you are in the business of acquiring hardware to run SQL Server virtualised then there are two reference architectures that are relevant depending on how many databases in your organisation:

Hyper-V Fast Track is a generic hyper-v solution available from several hardware vendors including HP designed to maximise generic workloads running on Hyper-v, including SQL Server.  Up from this you might consider putting all your SQL Server virtual machines on one optimised server and HP have their Database Consolidation Solution for this.  Like the Hyper-V Fast Track, this is preconfigured with System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM). What makes it different is that there are ready to use template SQL Server VMs of different sizes which you can then quickly deploy.  

However there comes a point when a SQL Server database is so large and so widely used that it is consuming all the resources of a physical server an obvious example of this is business intelligence.  Rather than work out how to set this up there Fast Track reference architectures and appliances for this.

The Microsoft Fast Track Data Warehouse reference architecture built into the HP Business data Warehouse provides for data warehouses of up to 5Tb of compressed data. It has a bigger brother the Parallel Data Warehouse  (available from HP as the Enterprise Data warehouse and also from Dell) and this scales to 500Tb, but does so by using multiple physical servers which behave as one.

The other interesting appliance is the is the Business Decision Appliance which is specifically configured for PowerPivot for SharePoint as this can be a little tricky to set up and even if you have a SharePoint 2010 farm you’ll probably want a dedicated server for PowerPivot if it is to be used widely in your organisation. So this appliance has SQL Server enterprise with all the BI components installed plus SharePoint 2010 enterprise with all the integration configured for you. All you have to do is to use the HP web config tool to join it to your network domain and you are ready to use it.

So these appliances might seem a little bit different from a scalable elastic private cloud, and that’s because what you typically want from a database platform is predictable performance.

The Accountants, sales guys and lawyers in your business don’t understand or care about how fast your hypervisor is or how many nodes there are in your cluster. What they care about is that the e-mail works the intranet is up and the business can trade with its customers. In short they care about applications, and they are paying you so they don’t have to worry too much about them.

Applications come in all shapes and sizes from a single install to the sort of server farm used by SharePoint, they can be written in house or bought in from  a vendor (ISV). So how is it possible to understand them all and keep them all running?

               
Let me answer this and the seemingly unrelated question: “Why are there so may tools in System Center?”

Are your applications working?

You could answer this by repeatedly trawling around all the event logs in your servers either manually or with the mother of all PowerShell scripts, but you need to know about problems, before your users do or at least as soon as they do.  A simpler black box approach would be to create a synthetic transaction against a key application e.g. to replicate a user logging into a site and opening a page, and then test how long this takes once every 15 minutes to check its working as planned.  This capability is built into System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) today and while it will tell you there’s a problem it doesn’t really tell you what’s going on under the covers unless there are good errors in the event log from the application. A new approach in SCOM 2012 is to peer inside the code and pickup issues coming from calls in the application code and show performance problems and errors in a simple interactive interface. This built in capability comes form an acquisition, AVIcode, so actually that’s one less tool you’ll need to stay on top of things.

Managing the application

It is important to understand the dependencies on an application e.g. database, web service and of course compute network & storage, especially if this is all running as virtual machines.  So in several of the System Center tools you can now diagram what these services look like in Virtual Machine Manager and in the new App Controller.  Templates in SCVMM let you scale these services or deploy more of them and a change to the template is automatically reflected in the instances created from it.

Moving the application

Application virtualisation , the business of separating the application from the operating system has been available for some time for desktop applications. However server applications are often multi-tier and also run as services, so delivering server application virtualisation is harder and is only now part of Virtual Machine Manager 2012. The clever bit about this is that you can deploy your non Microsoft developed app (e.g. java, PHP) onto a windows virtual machine that could be running on XEN Server, Vmware or even Hyper-V.

Joining the dots

The days of changing things at random in a data centre are largely gone, what is needed today is extreme automation and standardisation coupled with a set of standard operating procedures.  While PowerShell can certainly do this, interop with lots of disparate systems can be hard, event handling is rudimentary and the scripts can be hard to debug and maintain.  The processes are much better designed in Orchestrator as this has deep integration to the key vendors in systems management, it is very visual and easy to understand and it can be driven from or drive to your help desk, be that Service Manager, Remedy or similar.  This then ensures that all changes are properly tracked and all processes are consistent.

Back Up Plan

I often get told off  for not mentioning Data Protection Manager, not by the Microsoft sales team but by its loyal fans at events I go to. This is because it backs up all kinds of things in the data centre from VMs to databases, SharePoint sites and Exchange but intelligently so that it understands them and can restore individual documents, mails etc.

 

All of the System Center 2012 suite is still under development at the moment with most of it available as a public beta:

• System Center Virtual Machine Manager RC
• System Center Configuration Manager Beta
• System Center Operations Manager Beta
• System Center Orchestrator Beta
• System Center Data Protection Manager Beta

and you can get all of these from the System Center Evaluation Center.  However if you want to see this stuff in action rather than install it yourself then there’s a System Center 2012 road show coming to a city near you..

READING	Microsoft TVP	16th November 2011	Register Here
MANCHESTER	Hilton Deansgate	6th December 2011	Register Here
LONDON	Imperial War Museum	14th December 2011	Register Here
BIRMINGHAM	Maple House	18th January 2012	Register Here

Putting up a marketing slide that says SQL Server is a good private cloud citizen is good marketing, but what’s in the box to back the claim up?

My top three would be:

Windows Server core.  Patching is a major maintenance problem with lots of virtual machines, and server core cuts that in half.  Getting the most out of the physical server is also important and with windows server core being the bare minimum of windows needed to run SQL Server then that leaves more resources for SQL Server.  If you want to check this out I have a series of posts on getting it going.

Always On which combines clustering and mirroring to create a highly available set of databases (an Availability Group), without the need to muck about with shared storage which is not recommended by Vmware and only works with i-scsi storage on Hyper-V.

Contained Database Security, means that moving databases around doesn’t also require digging out the associated logins from the instance and then stuffing them into the instance where you are moving the database to.

This is on top of two other private cloud friendly features in SQL Sever 2008 R2:

Image prepare and Image complete allow SQL Server to be installed (prepared ) on a VM which can then be used as a template for example in System Center Virtual Machine Manager. Part of creating these templates is sysprep so that when a new VM is created from it it will have a unique SID for Active Directory.  SQL Server doesn’t like sysprep but image prepare gets around this by doing a preinstall which can then be completed from a script once the VM has been sysprepped, named and joined to a domain.

Data Tier Applications.  This allows the design of a database to be abstracted from SQL Server, and allows the database to be moved as part of the new Server Application Virtualisation feature in System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 and to move the database to SQL Azure i.e. the public cloud.

I will be going into these into more detail in the coming weeks, now I am back from my travels, but in the meantime, if you want to do your own evaluation, there are three things you’ll need to get started, exploring these features.

• The SQL Server 2012 beta (ctp3)
• The SQL Server 2012 Product guide
• The SQL Server 2012 Developers Training Kit

I am getting ready for a series of interactive events next month and one of the things I wanted to show was a hyper-V cluster.  No doubt Simon and  could have blagged some kit, but we decided to use what we had lying around in the office.  This meant I had to muck about with my shiny Orange Dell Laptop so I eventually decided to dual boot so that I could run my old demos or use the laptop for these new events.

Currently when I run my demos I am actually booting to a VHD running windows Server 208 R2 with the hyper-V role enabled, not that boot to VHD is not virtualisation , you are just using the VHD as your hard disk.  This means you can back up the environment by just copying that VHD. What I wanted to do today was to setup another VHD for these new events and the easiest way to do that is to break out  of the windows server installation process by hitting control F10 to bring up a control screen and then use DISKPART to create and attach a VHD which you can then install the operating system to. you’ll enter command like this..

select disk 0

select partition 1

list volumes (to see which drive you want to create the VHD on)

create vdisk file=”c:\deepfat.vhd” maximum=20000 type=fixed

select vdisk file=”c:\deepfat.vhd”

attach vdisk

exit diskpart and refresh the list of volumes and you’ll see the vhd you just created and then you can select it and  install to it (this work in Windows 7 or Windows server 2008 R2). The nice thing about this is that it creates a boot entry for it.  However if the worst happens and your disk dies and you want to rest your environment on a new hard disk what do you do?  In my case I had my first boot VHD on a volume I wanted to combine with another so I needed a simple way to put the VHD on a volume and then get an entry for it in the boot menu so I could boot from it.

If you have used BCDEdit by itself you’ll be aware of how fiddly it is and if you haven’t trust me.  However Simon pointed out a related command BCDBOOT which is a lot simper to use..

simply mount the VHD so it appears as a drive letter (

select vdisk file=”c:\deepfat.vhd”

attach vdisk

assign letter v

and then run bcdboot to add an entry for it ..

bcdboot v:\windows

the only problem you might end up with (and this happened to me) is that the description for each entry will be the same so you won’t know which one to select at boot time.  You’ll have to use BCD edit for this by running bcdedit with no arguments look for the bit of the output that has the entry to your new VHD and copy its GUID to the clipboard. Now you can run

bcdedit /set (paste your GIUD here) description “meaningful description in double quotes

Update [1/12/11]

Having made these changes my original demo rig wouldn’t run hyper-V and it turned out this was because of the boot store (which is what BCDEdit writes into), so I also had to run another BCDEdit command to start the hyper-V service as part of the boot process..

bcdedit /set "{default}" hypervisorlaunchtype auto

the {default} refers to the default entry in the boot store which in my case is my demo rig, you could of course specify the GUID for a particular entry.

Hopefully this is useful but to be honest I wanted to post it so I could refer back to it later.

One of the reasons the term Private Cloud is getting a bad press is that it’s all marketing fluff and isn’t real. In any data centre you are going to be doing thing like..

• deploying applications
• fixing applications
• performance tuning
• load balancing
• resource planning
• decommissioning applications
• patching and maintenance
• backup! …and you might also need to do a  restore on occasion
• audit and compliance
• bid for more resources from management

This list isn’t much different to what I used to do as a Unix admin back in the nineties, however how this stuff gets done is now totally different; I used to send out patches & fixes on CD out to branch offices, and had to visit these offices to setup TCPIP.  If a server or desktop died rebuilds were tortuous and painful and if that server had an application on then we would have to reinstall on another server and break out the backup. 

Later on we could cluster servers but this was painful and expensive and only a few services, like SQL Server, could failover properly.

Virtualisation changed things a lot, but I feel this was a bit like moving to a bigger house; you pack up everything and get rid of a lot of clutter, however a year after you moved in all the extra space has gone and in some cases there is more mess than there was before.  What matters in a post virtualised world is how much effort is required to manage those virtual machines    This takes me back to another old discipline; systems analysis -   every entity needs a process to create , read update and delete (CRUD) and this should apply to VMs as well as to data stores.  Applying CRUD to VMs means that there should be processes in place to

Create. Use a self service portal or via a service desk request.  Another Private cloud scenario is that they might be created automatically to meet demand when  a service gets busy

Read. Access them and continuously monitor them to ensure they are healthy

Update. Apply fixes and patches to keep them current

Delete. remove them when they aren’t needed any more, the service they are providing might be scaled back or it may be that the whole application has been superseded

None of this is new to the public cloud vendors, Amazon, Google, Microsoft etc. this is what their data centre staff have setup long ago for their online services like Mail, Search, and shopping.  What is new is that the best practices arising from doing this at scale (e.g. one data centre admin per 1-2000 VMs) are being built into software like System Center 2012 so you can operate you own infrastructure as efficiently.  For example patch management is automatic,  a new VM is a mouse click, and you are fixing the problem before the user realises there is on. 

So to quote from that well known group of IT pundits the Fun Boy Three/Banarama “It ain’t what you do , It’s the way that you do it .. and that’s what gets results”.

 

Further reading:

 Microsoft Virtual Academy (which now has a separate module on System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012).

The System Center 2012 road show touring the country:

• Birmingham on 17th January (register here).
• Edinburgh 28th February (register here).