The October edition of TechNet Magazine goes Green. Green is a hot topic and I think that we as an IT community don't do enough to make sure we don't waste energy. How many of you shutdowns his PC or has a server running constantly at home? I have to admit I don't do it every time. I am wasting money, resources and energy. We should all be more concerned about this and that is exactly the reason why I am trying to organize a Green IT Panel discussion at IT Forum 2007 in Barcelona. I want to have some of the major vendors in the Market like Intel, AMD, Dell, .... and beside the hardware manufacturers I want to have one of our Data Center Managers, MSIT and other IT Managers from major companies.

What I would like to know from them is how the hardware will change in the future to reduce the energy consumption even more. Secondly I want to know what we Microsoft are going to do with our software, management tools to support the Green IT initiatives. What can we do as an IT Pro to reduce the needed energy, where do we have to look when we buy hardware?

What are you thinking about Green IT, is it something we should care about or not? Send me your comments I want to open up the discussion here, I am really interested to know what you think about or what you are doing for it.

If I find all the speakers this will be a session not to miss at IT Forum this year, keep my finger crossed.

Read the preview article about Green IT:

OCTOBER 2007

Green Computing

Green is hot. Green computing is the next frontier, and building a green, ecologically friendly data center has surprising rewards. Learn about the benefits, the costs, the savings, and how to plan, right now.

Windows Administration

The Active Directory replication model defines the ways in which updates are communicated to all domain controllers within an environment, as well as how to handle any conflicts that arise as a result of the ability to make changes from practically anywhere.

System Center

In the past, update status was reported via hardware inventory. SCCM 2007 uses a new mechanism, the state message, to ensure better compliance and update enforcement on each client. See how the new approach to update management in SCCM 2007 represents a significant improvement.

Communications

Blocking nearly 10.5 million articles of spam on a typical day, Microsoft represents a perfect example of the spam landscape today. Here the architecture and features of anti-spam and antivirus agents in Exchange Server 2007 and Forefront Security for Exchange Server are discussed as a solution to this growing problem.

SQL Server

A number of things can sap SQL Server performance including recompilation of SQL statements, missing indexes, multithreaded operations, disk bottlenecks, memory bottlenecks, routine maintenance, and more. Find out where to begin your search when encountering performance issues.

Get Details for How to Move from Rationalized to Dynamic

The guide describes each of the four levels, and explains each capability in the Microsoft Core Infrastructure Optimization Model. You can use the information in this guide to help an organization move from the Rationalized level to the Dynamic level.

The document is structured in two parts for a broad audience of IT pros, from IT generalists, who may need to read the document to discover all major product features and best practices, to more sophisticated IT pros, needing only concise attributes per requirement and high-level references to larger bodies of content. It also provides a checklist job aid for planning and scoring progression against requirements of the Core Infrastructure Optimization Model.

Previously released guides focus on moving from the Basic to Standardized level and from the Standardized to Rationalized level.

Download the Guides

To learn more, download the Core Infrastructure Optimization Implementer Resource Guide: Rationalized to Dynamic.

Also see the previously released guides:

Core Infrastructure Optimization Implementer Resource Guide: Standardized to Rationalized

Core Infrastructure Optimization Implementer Resource Guide: Basic to Standardized.

If you are looking to Virtualize your physical servers, applications than you will find valuable information in the cookbooks we've created for you.

You will find information about Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1, Data Protection Manager, System Center Virtual Machine Manager and Terminal Servers.

Enjoy!

Did you ever hit the sent button too early? I do it from time to time and when it happens it's always oh sh*t it was not supposed to be sent to this person, forgot to put someone in cc or I needed to add the attachment, etc ... . Now I was playing around with some outlook rules and why not apply it onto the Outbox. So what I mean is to apply the rule to an outgoing mail instead of the mostly used inbox rules. By default, I now defer my outgoing mails with 5 min's which gives me the time to change the mail, add recipients or add the attachment that was needed. What I did is I created the following Rule in Outlook:

Apply the rule to all mails that you wish to send.

Defer the mail with a number of minutes, in my case I selected 5 min's.

And I don't want to apply this rule when I mark the mail as important. You could also apply another rules for those type of mails but I didn't want to create to much rules neither.

The first few hours I used this rule I didn't always realize that the 5 min were counting down before the mail left my outlook and I thought that my mailbox was full again (it happens) and therefore could not be sent out.

Once you are used to it you will see that it's very handy to have this. Note that this obviously a Client Only rule which means that it can only run when your Outlook is running.

There has been quite some noise around the talk that Eric Traut (Distinguished Engineer) give at the University of Illinois. During his talk Eric showed something is called MinWin which is a stripped kernel of Windows 7 that will be the basis of our future products. Not just the Windows OS but it's also the OS used for media centers, for servers, for small embedded devices . However MinWin is internal-only and won’t be productized as such.

MinWin is 25 MB on disk; Vista is 4 GB, Traut said.  The MinWin kernel does not include a graphics subsystem in its current build, but does incorporate a very simple HTTP server. The MinWin core is 100 files total, while all of Windows is 5,000 files in size.  This is something big, the kernel is so small that there is no graphical subsystem, in the screenshot below you see that when booting the Logo is build from ASCII characters. Pretty cool.

If you only want to see the MinWin demo, istartedsomething.com has an 8-minute excerpt

Further Eric also explains that in the Windows Server Virtualization technology we expose Hypercall's which can be compared to kernel calls and earlier this week we announced that those Hypercall API's will be available via Open Specification Promise. Read more about that at the Windows Virtualization Team Blog

I encourage you to watch the full video of Eric Traut’s talk ,because he explains our Virtualization technology more in depth.

Recently I received a mail from one of my colleagues with some links to PowerShell stuff. I just wanted to share them with you.

PowerGui has been available for quite some time now and the new release includes a script editor now, they call it "NotePad for PowerShell"

This editor has all you would expect:

• Syntax highlight,
• Intellisense for PowerShell cmdlets and cmdlet parameters,
• Tooltips with syntax information,
• Matching brackets, search/replace, regions,
• Ability to export, run, print, etc.

Peter Provost writes about PowerShell++ and his love for PowerShell. In his post he talks about PowerTab which is a tab completion snap-in that has been developed by the PowerShellGuy and is much completer than the tab completion we have out of the box. Further he talks about an IRC channel FreeNode.net, mmm I didn't know people where still using IRC. :)

We are pleased to announce that--while broad RTW availability is still scheduled for March--the SP1 Update RTM bits are available now to TechNet subscribers. If you are subscriber, please visit TechNet Plus Subscriptions and sign in to access Top Subscriber Downloads. If you have a prior version of the SP1 beta installed, you must uninstall it prior to installing the final version.

Check out Things to know before you download Windows Vista SP1 for more information, and for updated details on all aspects of Windows Vista SP1, stop by the Windows Vista TechCenter.

For a closer look Inside Vista SP1 File Copy Improvements pull up Mark Russinovich's blog and learn about the evolution of the file copy.

Walter Stiers a colleague of mine points to some online training resources for Performance Point server.

Building a planning budgeting or forecasting application

• Module 1: Business integration
  video | workbook
• Module 2: Architecting a PerformancePoint Server2007 planning application
  video | workbook
• Module 3: Fundamentals of a planning application
  video | workbook
• Module 4: Building business models and data dimensions
  video | workbook
• Module 5: Data Loading
  video | workbook
• Module 6: Managing roles and security in a planning application
  video | workbook
• Module 7: Fundamentals of the Excel add-in for PerformancePoint Server 2007
  video | workbook
• Module 8: Embedding rules and calculations into a planning application
  video | workbook
• Module 9: Planning process management and workflows
  video | workbook

Building a scorecard, dashboard, or analysis application

• Module 10: Fundamentals of monitoring and analyzing data with PerformancePoint Server 2007
  video | workbook
• Module 11: Fundamentals of dashboarding, scorecarding and analytics
  video | workbook
• Module 12: PerformancePoint Server 2007 elements for monitoring and analysis
  video | workbook
• Module 13: Building dashboards with PerformancePoint Server 2007
  video | workbook
• Module 14: Managing security in dashboards, scorecards and analytic
  video | workbook

Thought it might be interesting for some of you!

A few weeks ago when I was presenting the Windows Server 2008 overview session at our launch event in Ghent I talked about the fact that with Windows Server 2008 and the new admx Group policy administrative templates we would be introducing something called "Starter Group Policy Objects".

Yesterday we released two of those starter GPO to let you apply Group Policies for Windows Vista and Windows XP SP2 or later.

The Starter GPO's in the Windows Vista package are based on recommended settings for the Specialized Security— Limited Functionality (SSLF) and Enterprise Client (EC) environments, as documented in the Windows Vista Security Guide (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=74028).

The Starter GPO's in the Windows XP SP 2 or later package are based on the same settings for the same environments, as documented in the Windows XP Security Guide (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=14839).

Download now: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=115690

In the two previous parts of this topic we created the Server Core Machines, connected them to the storage and added the Failover Clustering Feature. In this last part we are going to configure the Windows Failover Clustering feature and form a 2 Node cluster. For doing this you have two options one is using the cluster.exe command line tool and do everything from the command line or by using the RSAT tools and remotely create the cluster. I've chosen for the second and easiest option.

Step 1: Open Failover Cluster Management Console and Validate the configuration

In my case I will open up the mmc from my Domain Controller but with the RSAT tools you can now also remotely manage failover clusters from an Windows Vista SP1 box.

The first action that needs to be performed prior building the cluster is running the validation tool. This is not needed for a test environment but if you want to get support from Microsoft you need to run this and keep the report, you also need to run the validation tool each time you make changes to the cluster infrastructure, changes like adding an HBA requires a new validation report.

The Validation tool will run tests to determine whether your system, storage, and network configuration is suitable for a cluster. These tests include specific simulations of cluster actions, and fall into the following categories: System Configuration tests, Network tests and Storage tests.

Click on "Validate a Configuration" in the action pane.

 

Add both nodes to be validated.

Run the tests needed for support and to know if the cluster config is correct.

After all tests have completed you will be able to review the report by clicking onto the report button or if you want to open it afterwards we store all reports in the following directory: "c:\windows\cluster\reports"

If the validation tool completes successfully then you can go on with the creation of the cluster. Let's assume everything is fine and perform the actual cluster creation wizard.

Fill in all nodes that will be part of this cluster, this is a huge difference comparing to Windows Server 2003 clustering because now the setup wizard is going to configure all nodes at once.

Give your cluster a name and IP Address in my case I only selected the 192.168.0.0/24 network because that's my public LAN and the second network is only used for heartbeat configuration.

After this step the setup tool is going to create the cluster and making configuration changes on both server core nodes to form a cluster.

The cluster is now ready.

The next step you need to perform is that the correct Witness disk has been used in my configuration it was not the case and I had to change Witness disk config.

You can do that as follows:

In the action pane click on more action and then select the "Configure Cluster Quorum Settings" as can be seen in the picture below.

In the following Wizard you are able to change the Quorum configuration model or change the details of the current Quorum.

In my case I just clicked on next and in the screen that follows you will be able to change the disk configuration of the Witness disk.

That is what I've done and now my cluster is up and running and I can start clustering Services or Applications

I hope that these three blogposts will help you to create a Windows Failover Cluster on a Server Core.

The Infrastructure Planning and Design guides are the next version of Windows Server System Reference Architecture. This series aims to clarify and streamline design processes for Microsoft infrastructure technologies, each addressing a unique infrastructure technology or scenario. All guides share a common structure including:

• Definition of the technical decision flow through the planning process.
• Listing of decisions to be made and the commonly available options and considerations.
• Relating the decisions and options to the business in terms of cost, complexity, and other characteristics.
• Framing decisions in terms of additional questions to the business to ensure a comprehensive alignment with the appropriate business landscape.

These guides complement product documentation by exposing and focusing on infrastructure design options.
Accelerator Description
Infrastructure Planning and Design: Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services
This guide leads the reader step by step through the process of planning a Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services infrastructure. The guide addresses the fundamental decisions and tasks involved in:

• Deciding what applications are to be delivered by Terminal Services, and whether or not Terminal Services is the right approach to use.
• Determining the resources needed to employ Terminal Services to serve the selected applications.
• Designing the components, layout, security, and connectivity of the Terminal Services infrastructure.

Infrastructure Planning and Design: Windows Server 2008 Active Directory Domain Services
Active Directory® controls the core security of the Microsoft Windows® network environment. The directory service is responsible for authenticating user and computer accounts within the Active Directory infrastructure. In addition, the directory service provides a mechanism for centralized, delegated administration of resources within the forest.
To develop and implement a successful design of Active Directory, numerous questions must be answered and many decisions and strategies must be determined. Considerations for performance, security, manageability, scalability, and many other criteria must be addressed if the design is to be successful.
The purpose of this guide is to assist designers in the decision-making process by providing a clear and concise path for designing the Active Directory infrastructure, given the relative context. This guide relies on best practices and real-world experience to offer considerations and alternatives at each point in the design.

Infrastructure Planning & Design Beta Releases
The Infrastructure Planning and Design Beta Release for Windows Server 2008 Active Directory Domain Services and Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services are available as an open beta download.
To download, please follow this link:
https://connect.microsoft.com/Downloads/DownloadDetails.aspx?SiteID=14&DownloadID=7925

TechEd IT Professionals 2008- Available Videos

TechEd IT  Professionals 2008 Event Page: http://www.microsoft.com/emea/spotlight/event.aspx?id=104

Links to Session Videos:

• Introduction to Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Susan Sauls
• Intro to SQL Server Data Services,  Soumitra Sengupta
• The Spy Who Hacked Me! , Alex Smolen, Rudolph Araujo
• How Microsoft SQL Server Helps You to Lower Your Cost of Storage, Torsten Grabs
• Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008: Overview, Edwin Yuen
• Advances Microsoft SQL Server PowerShell Tips and Tricks, Dan Jones
• Technical Introduction to Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager 2007, Jason Buffington
• Introduction to Microsoft Forefront Code Name "Stirling", Brad Wright
• Windows, PowerShell, and Windows Management Instrumentation: Unveiling Microsoft's Best Kept Secret,  Ben Pearce
• Windows Logins Revealed, Mark Minasi
• Windows Security Boundaries Mark Russinovich
• Deploying Windows Server 2008 Hyper V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 Best Practices Edwin Yeun, Alan Stewart
• Deploying Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Ryan Casey
• Microsoft System Center Service Manager Paul Ross, Travis Wright
• Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V: Scripting & Programmatic Management for Fun & Profit (VBS & PowerShell), John Kelbley, Alexander Lash

Yesterday we announced that SQL Server 2008 is being released to manufacturing. With SQL 2008 we bring new quite a lot of new functionality to the data platform product:

• Transparent Data Encryption
• Extensible Key Management
• Auditing
• Enhanced Database Mirroring
• Automatic Recovery of Data Pages
• Log Stream Compression
• Resource Governor
• Predictable Query Performance
• Data Compression
• Hot Add CPU
• Policy-Based Management
• Streamlined Installation
• Performance Data Collection
• Backup Compression
• SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) Pipeline Improvements
• Report Server Application Embedding
• and much more

Check out this link for an extended version of what’s new in SQL Server 2008

SQL Server 2008 is now available to MSDN and TechNet subscribers and will be available for evaluation download on Aug. 7, 2008. SQL Server 2008 Express and SQL Server Compact editions are available for free download today at http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver.

Read the official press announcement: http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/press/2008/aug08/08-06SQLServer2008PR.mspx

One of the new functionalities of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 is that you can boot directly from a VHD file.

Next to that you will also be able to natively create and mount VHD files using either the diskpart command or the Diskmanagement mmc console.

In this post I”ll explain to you how I created my VHD file, deployed an OS onto and added as a boot device. The OS we are going to deploy is my Windows 7 demo machine. I like the fact that I now have a multiboot machine without the need for local installations. So my default boot device is just my normal production installation and my second boot device is my VHD file.

Let’s start with creating the VHD file. First open the Computer Management MMC and right click onto Disk Management

You will se that there is now the option to create or attach (mount) a VHD file. In our case we will create the VHD file.

Here you have the choice between a dynamically expanding disk which allows you to start with less disk space allocated comparing to a fixed size disk. However this comes at a cost, which is a slight performance impact.

For my demo machine i decided to create a fixed disk of 25GB called W7Demo.vhd, know that you will need at least 25GB of free space on your physical disk. The fixed size disk takes the defined amount of disk space even if you don’t use it within the VHD file. This takes a while to create.

Once the VHD file is created the system will mount it as a drive and you need to initialize it and finally create a partition onto the disk.

When this step if finished you will see that you have an additional disk into your system that you can use to write data onto it.

My goal now is to get an OS deployed onto the VHD file. This is actually a quite simple process:

First you take either a Windows DVD or an existing WIM file. In my case I had a WIM file that was used to deploy Windows 7 demo machines. The WIM file included the W7 OS install and all Office application I needed for my demo machine. Now you use the tool called ImageX which you can find onto the  “Windows Automated Installation Kit” (WAIK).

Open a command prompt with Administrative rights and type the following command to deploy the image:

D:\mywim.wim is my WIM file that I want apply.

F:\ is my mounted VHD file.

Now that our OS is deployed we need to add the VHD as a boot device.

Bcdedit.exe /copy {current} /d “Description”

Note: Returns a GUID that you’ll use to replace ‘GUID’ below

Bcdedit.exe /set GUID device vhd=[locate]\<dir>\<fname>

Bcdedit.exe /set GUID osdevice vhd=[locate]\<dir>\<fname>

Bcdedit /set GUID detecthal on

Now just reboot your system and you will be able to select the VHD entry we just made and boot from the VHD file. You will notice that you have access to all HW resources and that the only the disk is loaded through a Virtual Disk Service. Just to be clear this has nothing to do with Virtualization as we are running the OS directly onto the physical box and not from a virtualization platform.

Make sure that the VHD or WIM you deploy is a Sysprepped one which will remove all HW specific information. For more information about sysprep visit How sysprep works ? and What is Sysprep ?

I saw an awesome session about this new product called System Center "Essentials 2007" (SCE 2007).

SCE 2007 is an integrated management solution designed for the small & medium businesses with ~50 - 500 pc's

The foundation technologies of SCE 2007 are:

• Operations Manager 2007
• Windows update services "v3"
• Microsoft Update
• SQL Server Express

There is one unified console with different spaces dedicated to performing specific management tasks, with customizable views.

Getting and Staying Secure

• Update management capabilities built on WSUS technology
• Support for third party updates, drivers , hotfixes and QFEs
• Multi member group support for flexible targeting and deployment
• Update compliance reporting
• ...

Monitoring

• Monitoring is provided through the Operations Manager 2007 Management Packs and diagnostics tasks
• Management Packs have been tuned for medium sized businesses to reduce the monitoring noise
• Distributed Application monitoring
• Inline tasks to "fix it now"
• State, diagram performance and dashboard views with a neat "Daily Health Report"
• ...

With this daily health report you will easily have an overview of what is happening on your network, pretty cool I think.

Server and Support End Users

Deploy software to servers and clients on a simple manner:

• Support for MSI and EXE applications
• Deployment status reporting
• Troubleshooting tasks and views
• ...

Take Remote Control of the servers and workstations in your environment.

Keep track of what you have

With more than 30 attributes collected about the hardware installed on your computers the SCE 2007 keeps track of your client and server environment.

With this summary page you are able te see how many and which type of clients you have. It even shows you which applications and how much installations of them there are on your environment.

Everything a small or medium business would ever need.

Service Provider

• Provides a single entry point for remote management over the internet of your customers server and client environments
• Leverages Operations Manager 2007 as the Service Provider console

Management services enabled include:

• Manage customers over the internet in a secure manner
• Centrally view customer problem data and health from a single console Report on problems and time spent working on customer issues
• Perform remote diagnostics and troubleshooting
• Provide a lightweight, simple setup and configuration
• Site aware reporting
• ..

With the service provide you can easily monitor and update the health of your customers infrastructure.

Roadmap

Beta 2  - 2H  06  - Public beta available for download

RTM     - H1 07

This is a great product which has it all monitoring , deployment remote connections, it rulez.

This was the best session I attended yet.  I can't wait to get my hands on it.

Tags: SMS , MOM, System Center, Microsoft, System Center Essential

Finally that is what I could say about the fact that my great colleague Tom Mertens has started blogging about Windows Vista.

A time ago David and I talked to Tom that he should blog about Windows Vista, ok he said if I have a Vista machine I will. So what was requested happened he got a brand new Toshiba Tablet PC M400. He promised David and Myself to blog about his view on Vista as an end-user (read dummy).

Weeks later he finally posted two posts about Vista:

• Renaming a file In Windows Vista (Mmm I learned something here)
• Windows Vista running on his 2 years old pc

I hope he will continue with his posting about Vista.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, Vista

I’ve been using IE7 Beta 2 for a few weeks now and I must admit I like it alot and no it is not because I work at Microsoft.
I was a huge fan of firefox and was still using it at home but when I tried the IE7 Beta 2 with (finally)
tabbed browsing and a much cooler feature grouped favorites.

What is it, it’s simple you open a bunch of sites you visit a lot in different tabs and you add them as a favorites group onto your favorites.

Just click on Add/Subscribe button on the toolbar and choose the “Add Tab Group to Favorites”

With this done you can now open the sites within this group by a simple click on the blue Arrow.

All sites will now open in different tabs.

Try it and enjoy.

I was playing around with my new Vista build and wanted to log off the system, but I did not save my Word document so I've got the following error:

I really liked this error window, it is exactly telling me why the system cannot log off. So I had the choice continue log off and loose my document or click cancel and save my document.

This will really help the end-user to understand what is happening.

Today during Bob Muglia his keynote at the MMS 2006 conference he announced the new name of the formerly code name "Monad" as Windows Powershell

Windows Powershell will be available for download in Q4 2006, but the RC1 can be downloaded from now on:

• X86 Windows PowerShell latest build
  
• X64 Windows PowerShell latest build
  
• Windows Powershell documentation

Some of the key features of Windows Powershell are:

• Over 130 standard commandlets ("cmdlets") for completing common system administration tasks such as working with the registry
• Intuitive task-based scripting language and support for existing scripts and command line tools
• Designed to allow command line and graphical user interface integration. For example all commands in Exchange 2007 can be completed either from the GUI or the command line

Another interesting item is that Windows Powershell will be available for the following operating systems:

• Windows XP Professional SP2
• Windows Server 2003 SP2 and R2
• Windows Vista
• Windows Longhorn Server

You can find even more information on the blog of the Powershell team or if you want to find some sample scripts

Exchange 2007 and the new version of MOM will be the first products wich will rely on the powershell functionalities.

Bob announced even more new products like System Center "Service Desk".

I will post more on that later I have to go to the next session which is Data Protection Manager which is given by Jason Buffington, who was also delivering a DPM session at the Dev & IT Pro days in Belgium.

Update: Exchange 12 will now be called Exchange 2007

Tags: Monad, Powershell

You might already have noticed it we released Windows Powershell RC2.

Go ahead and download Powershell RC2

Some resources about Windows Powershell:

• /\/\o\/\/ PowerShelled
• Bart De Smet
• Powershell Team
• Powershell script center
• Vivek Sharma
• Lee Holmes
• My blog

Update:

• Thomas Lee
• Powershell Information center

Work in progress: Manning Publication

Yesterday I discovered the following, If you have two machines that are member of the same Active Directory domain and you change your domain password on one. And if you logon to the second machine without network connection. So far so good. After a while you connect the second machine to the network then Vista will give you the following easy to understand dialogue box. I am not quite sure if this existed on Windows XP, it has been so long ago since I used this OS.

Just lock your computer, unlock it and type your new password and you are done. I call this a neat User Experience, easy to understand and very visible dialogue boxes.

Any feedback about the existence of such feature in Windows XP is welcome.

Update: Apparently it is the same on Windows XP and Windows 2003, I just never noticed it because as a good Admin I always lock down my machines. Thanks for the feedback

Yesterday I was talking to Kris Hoet about blogging and feedreaders. We talked about how many blogs we read and which feedreader and which editor to use, etc ...
If you read my blog often you know I like RSS bandit but had some issues with this piece of software on my Vista box. Now Kris told me he was using a new feedreader, it's called GreatNews.

If you read his blog "Cross The Breeze" you noticed that he really love this reader and he convinced me during our talk about blogging to try it out and guess what. I have GreatNews no, I installed it and must admit it has sort of the look and feel of RSS bandit but faster and some nicer features.

I can now read my +100 feeds without have to click to every feed I subscribed to. If you use the keyboard just hit the space key and with the mouse you can scroll through the blog posts. By the way Kris celebrated his 400th feed subscription.

A last nice thing I just discovered is that there  is a Windows Live Writer (which is my blogpost editor) plugin for GreatNews.

Thanks Kris for showing me this awesome feedreader. It works so much better on Vista then RSS Bandit.

Just got back from dinner with Thomas Lee  who is an MVP and Ilse Van Criekinge who is one of the founders of Pro-Exchange and guess what we talked about yeah powershell. I enjoyed talking about powershell providers and cmdlets. You know that Exchange 2007 has a lot of cmdlets to make the management of an Exchange 2007 infrastructure much easier and Operations Manager mostly rely on the Powershell providers. But enough on that we also talked about many other IT Pro (geek) stuff and the fact that he maybe presenting at our Dev & IT Pro days.

And finally what Ilse did today is what we call Evangelism, she actually converted Thomas to like our Exchange 2007 product which what was not the case before. So I have to thank Ilse for doing a part of my job in evangelizing Exchange 2007.

As I was looking for the link to Thomas his blog if found a post  about a really cool product that leverages the power of Powershell to create so called gadgets. Go ahead and take a look at the Powergadgets site.

I am currently beta testing the Windows Mobile Device Center Sync features in Vista, this beta is only available for Microsoft employees but I wanted to share this with you.

I installed the Windows Mobile Device Center (WMDC) software, unfortunately it is still not yet ready for a public release and I know teams are working really hard to get this nice peace of functionality to you. Once ready the software will show up in the Windows Update list.

This application looks really slick and is easy to configure and use.

My device was already connected so I just clicked on Setup your device to start the sync configuration

Select which items you want to synchronize and click on next.

Once the configuration is done you can change to content sync settings. So you could change how mail, calendar, ... is synced.

I changed my calendar items to sync the past 3 months and saved this config.

This last screenshot shows that my mobile device has been added to the Sync Center. You can manually force the synchronization by clicking on the device and selecting the sync feature.

Once the configuration and sync is done you could use this tool to download images and video's from your mobile device.

This is how the software looks like today, I don't think it will change a lot (UI wise), however changes could still occur and the features list could change also.

Last week I started playing around with "Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003" (CCS) and for that I received 4 brand new machines (on loan :( ). The servers I received are Dual QUAD Core CPU's monsters. The hardware used has not yet been announced (officially) and we will show them to you at the HPC booth during the Business Innovation day.

In this post I will explain how we installed the compute cluster server in another post later this week I will link to a screencast that I will record showing you how fast these QUAD Core machines really are.

First things first. We started the CCS installation with the Windows CCS 2003 install. Wich is basically a Windows Server install. We did this for the 4 servers (nodes). The second step was to create an Active Directory domain which we called HPC.LOCAL (what a creativity). Once the DNS server and AD DC were running we could finally start with the Compute Cluster Pack installation.

During the setup of the first node we need to create the Cluster configuration. So select the create a new node and check the "Use this Node as head node". This server will then be responsible for the cluster.

Select the location where you want to install the Cluster Pack files and click next to go on with the next step.

After the installation of the pre-requisite components, like .NET framework 2.0, MMC 3.0 and SQL MSDE 2000 you can go on and start the the installation of the cluster software.

Once the cluster software has been installed we need to configure the Compute Cluster and the first step is creating the Network topology. For this demo purposes we selected the public network scenario where all nodes are connected onto the same public network. The only pitfall (for us) is that when selecting public network you cannot using the RIS technology to deploy the other nodes of the cluster.

You could also select from 4 other different scenarios like head node connected onto the public and private network and the other nodes only connected to the private network. See the screenshot left.

Any scenario has his advantages and disadvantages go ahead and look into the help file to see which scenario will suit you best.

If you select the same scenario as we did you should enable ICS to make sure that you can easily update your other nodes.

Once the network has been installed we go on and install the Compute Cluster pack onto the three other nodes of our cluster.

Because we don't use RIS we have only one choice to deploy the other nodes. We deployed the Compute Cluster software and management tools to every node of our cluster.

Now we have the cluster up and running with 4 nodes and 32 CPU's available for the HPC tasks.

We are using an Excel demo to show how fast this cluster is, there is only one pitfall in this demo. Which one ? Well our cluster is way to fast, when we send the 200 different tasks to the cluster it only takes about 15 sec to finish them all.

Here is a screenshot of the task manager off all 4 nodes executing the 200 tasks we assigned with the Excel demo. One remark we have 8 CPU's per box but only two physical per box because we have 4 Cores onto each CPU.

As you can see we opened 4 Remote Desktop session to the 4 nodes of the cluster and started the Task manager. We then sent the 200 tasks and the 32 proc's of the cluster executes the tasks.