The E7 blog has an interesting article on SSD performance and optimizations made in Windows 7 to take advantage of them. The E7 post also links to an in depth AnandTech article that goes into more detail on SSD’s and has some benchmark comparisons between various drives. I’m definitely planning to get an SSD drive when I get my new laptop in a couple months. I’ll likely be getting one of the large workstation class laptops like the Dell M6400 or the Lenovo W700. The only thing that might make me wait longer is if we get a release schedule from Intel on their Clarksdale mobile processors which are basically mobile Nehalems for laptops. I’m leaning toward the M6400 since it has dual internal hard drive bays and supports up to 16GB of RAM which is insane for a laptop. With the two drive bays I figure I’ll run an 80GB SSD for the OS and get a large 7200 RPM SATA for the other bay. I’ll go with 8GB of RAM initially for budget purposes and expand next year when the prices come down. I’ll be dual booting (or booting from VHD) between Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. With the OS and Apps on an SSD that setup should really fly.
A new scenario that may be interesting (and demo a good chunk of our virtualization and VDI capability would be to set up a full Windows Server 2008 R2 / VMM 2008 R2 infrastructure on this machine. Basically run 2 – 3 VMs for the infrastructure to present a Windows 7 VDI client virtual machine. Then from the physical OS use Remote Desktop Services to access the Windows 7 VM. With Aero remoting I should get a near desktop like experience.
Back to SSDs, in addition to desktop/laptop scenarios, I’m hearing more and more about them in enterprise storage scenarios. A lot of the big vendors have really evolved their architectures over the last five years to take advantage of and virtualize different tiers of disk architectures and SSD are getting slotted in as the next tier closest to the cache in a lot of cases. From a virtualization perspective this will be interesting as I think SSD’s will be an enabler for somewhat better density and a lot better performance. Since I’ve been doing a lot of work recently with Hyper-V and Citrix’s Provisioning Server, I’m especially interested in seeing how VDI performance on pooled (shared virtual disk) scenarios is improved using Windows 7 VMs and SSDs on the Provisioning Server.
The Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT) have been updated for the Windows 7 RC build. I’ve been using a combination of the RSAT and the Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 Beta console on my Windows 7 machine to manage my Hyper-V lab machines and its been working very well so far.
The main download page is here.
Microsoft Remote Server Administration Tools for Windows 7 RC (x86): http://download.microsoft.com/download/1/F/C/1FC27A82-15D9-4D93-B3BC-24204175F9DF/Windows6.1-KB958830-x86.msu Microsoft Remote Server Administration Tools for Windows 7 RC (x64): http://download.microsoft.com/download/1/F/C/1FC27A82-15D9-4D93-B3BC-24204175F9DF/Windows6.1-KB958830-x64.msu
Microsoft Remote Server Administration Tools for Windows 7 RC (x86): http://download.microsoft.com/download/1/F/C/1FC27A82-15D9-4D93-B3BC-24204175F9DF/Windows6.1-KB958830-x86.msu
Microsoft Remote Server Administration Tools for Windows 7 RC (x64): http://download.microsoft.com/download/1/F/C/1FC27A82-15D9-4D93-B3BC-24204175F9DF/Windows6.1-KB958830-x64.msu
RSAT Client is available to all customers as part of the supplemental Microsoft Software License Terms to Windows 7 licenses.
Once you’ve installed the update, you can manage what tools you want enabled via the Control Panel under Programs and Features, Turn Windows Features on or off:
This is the list of Windows Server administration tools which are included in RSAT Client for Win7 RC:
Server Administration Tools:
Role Administration Tools:
Feature Administration Tools:
Over on the MOF and Service Management blog, two new guides have been released detailing how the Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) complements the ITIL and ISO/IEC 20000 standards and how MOF can be used in concert with them. While oversimplified, I’ve always described MOF as specific Microsoft process guidance for implementing the vendor-agnostic frameworks like ITIL. Where ITIL describes a standard configuration management process, MOF describes how to implement such a process using Microsoft technologies. This simplification makes it approachable to new folks who mistakenly think that MOF directly competes with ITIL.
Late last year I earned the ITIL Service Manager certification and previously had earned the MOF Essentials certification as well. I’m looking forward to digging into the MOF v4 and ITIL v3 the second half of this year. Maybe throw in TOGAF 9 as well. I really like the direction these are going in taking a lifecycle approach not a “one true framework to rule them all” approach. The hard part is getting an organization to really adopt frameworks like these, or even just the parts that work for them. It takes sustained senior leadership buy-in as well as a core team who really understand them for something like this to become ingrained in an organization’s culture. Usually that is due to a lack of focus on metrics and reporting to document the value delivered in terms of lower costs, increase customer satisfaction, etc.
As you can imagine, a company full of great developers such as Microsoft has a bunch of folks that crank out a lot of tools and utilities in their "spare" time. One of those that has been extremely popular internally is VMRCPlus, an alternate interface for managing and interacting with Virtual Server 2005 hosts and guests. I'm a big fan of Virtual Server and use it daily. Like many, I've never been a big fan of the Web UI. VMRCPlus fills that gap by providing a much easier to use and more function UI for Virtual Server. Fortunately, this internal project has matured enough that it is being released to the public with the caveat that it is not officially supported by Microsoft. That said, Microsoft folks are very heavy users of Virtual Server and VMRCPlus is utilized by many of them and has been around for a while so it is pretty mature. It is also an extreme example of how much can be done using the documented Virtual Server COM APIs.
Keith has a good feature list and a link to download here.
Arlindo has some screenshots here.
Enjoy!
Over on one of the more creatively named Microsoft blogs: "So, a booth babe and a geek walk in to a bar..." there is information and a link to a LiveMeeting about certification paths and plans for MCSAs and MCSEs when Longhorn server comes out.