Yesterday I wrote about end-of-life planning for OSes and so it makes sense to talk about the end of a service pack, as retirement – it is after all the word that is used on the product lifecycle pages. Of course we don’t mean retirement in go and live by the seaside sense…
Special police squads -- BLADE RUNNER UNITS -- had orders to shoot to kill, upon detection,any trespassing Replicants. This was not called execution. It was called retirement
Special police squads -- BLADE RUNNER UNITS -- had orders to shoot to kill, upon detection,any trespassing Replicants.
This was not called execution. It was called retirement
… that sense. Service packs, like OSes (and replicants) get an end date set well in advance, having explained OSes I want to move on to service packs (and if you want to know about Replicants you’ll have to look elsewhere).
The rule for service packs is simple. Two years after the release of a Service Pack we stop supporting the previous version. So although Windows Vista will be in mainstream support until 2012, and extended support until 2017, that doesn’t mean you can run the initial release , or Service Pack 1 and be supported until then. Lets use Vista as a worked example – I explained yesterday
Windows Vista [had] a General Availability date [of] Jan 2007.For Vista, five years after GA will be later than 2 years after Windows 7, so Vista goes from mainstream to extended support in or shortly after January 2012. We’ve set the date, April 10th 2012. The end of extended support will depend on when the next version of Window ships, but it won’t be before April 11th 2017.
Service pack 1 for Vista became available in April 2008, and Service Pack 2 became available in April 2009. So, the life of the original Release to Manufacturing of (RTM) version of Windows Vista ends on April 14 2010. In the same way the life of SP1 of Vista should end in April 2011, actually because we don’t retire things on the exact anniversary, SP1 gets an extension until July 12 2011.
If you are on Vista you must have upgraded to SP1 or SP2 (or Windows 7) by April 14 if you want to continue being supported.
So here’s the summary for what is supported with Vista, and when
Jan ‘07 – April ‘08 Only RTM release available
April ‘08 – April ‘09 RTM and Service Pack 1 supported
April ‘09 – April ‘10 RTM , Service Pack 1 and Service Pack 2 supported
April ‘10 - July ‘11 Service pack 1 and Service Pack 2 Supported
July ‘11 – April ‘12 Service Pack 2 only supported
April ‘12 – April ‘17 Extended support phase on SP2 only.
To simplify things, that assumes there is no Service pack 3 for Windows Vista, and that the successor to Windows 7 ships before April 11 2015.
Vista SP1 coincided with the release of Server 2008, and Windows XP service pack 3 came very shortly afterwards. The extra few days means the anniversary for XP SP2 falls after the cut off date for April retirement and the end of life for XP SP 2 is July 13th 2010 (the same as day Windows 2000 professional and server editions). Mainstream support for Windows XP (all service packs) has ended, after July 13 XP is extended support ONLY on SP3 ONLY.
I should have included in yesterdays post that July 13th 2010 also marks the end of mainstream support for Server 2003 (and Server 2003 R2), the RTM and SP1 versions are already retired. It would be very unusual to see a new service pack for something in extended support. If you still have 2003 servers, you need to decide what you will do about support / upgrades before Jul 13th
Server 2008 shipped as SP1 to sync up with Windows Vista and SP2 for both came out on the same date, so there are no server service pack actions required until July 12 2011. I explained yesterday why I have sympathy with people who don’t plan, but if you are on Server 2008 SP1 don’t leave it till the last minute to choose between SP2 or upgrading to R2 and then implementing your choice.
Update - Fixed a few typos.
No. I’m not talking about sorting out the music for one’s funeral* …
I think every manager I have had in my 10 years at Microsoft has grumbled that I’m not great with planning – it’s a fair criticism and I try to work on it. When the subject comes up a quote from a book by William Gibson comes into my head. “I try to plan in your sense of the word, but that isn't my basic mode, really. I improvise. It's my greatest talent. I prefer situations to plans, you see.... Really, I've had to deal with givens.” the speaker is actually an artificial intelligence, but I think that is how a lot of IT people work: improvise, deal with the situation at hand, then deal with the next situation. It may be what we prefer – but be it training plans or plans for rolling out new software you’ve got to do it.
We do try to help on the software side, by being both transparent and predictable. The rule for core things (like desktop and server operating systems) is at least 10 years of support. (Embedded operating systems have a different support model which runs for longer). Mainstream support runs for 5 years from release OR until 2 years after the successor product releases whichever is later. Extended support runs for 5 years, or 2 years after the second successor product releases. After that those who can’t move forwards, but have deep pockets have the option on custom support. In order to be supported you have to be running a supported level of service pack, and I’ll cover that in a later post.
So let’s take a worked example.
* Windows 2000 professional’s General availability date was March 2000.
* The “n+1” release is Windows XP, which had a General availability date of December 2001.
* Two years after Windows XP would be December 2003 , less than the 5 year minimum so mainstream support for Windows 2000 runs to March 2005 when extended support begins. (In practice it got a mainstream June – products only go off the support list on particular days and they live on to the next one after the anniversary)
* The “n+2” release is Windows Vista with a General Availability date was Jan 2007.
* Two years Vista would be Jan 2009, again less than the 5 year minimum, so extended support support runs to June 2010. Again there is a few days extension.
So the cut off date for Windows 2000 professional is July 13th 2010. After that there will be custom support only for 2000 and if you are still running it you should understand that means we stop the routine distribution of security updates for it.
As it happens the cut off dates for Windows 2000 Server mainstream support was 2 years after the release of Server 2003 – putting it in May 2005 - so 2000 professional and server sync’d up. The 2 year point after Server 2008 and the 5 years of extended support take it to the same time, June 2010. So the cut off date for Windows 2000 Server is July 13th 2010.
I like to think that no-one reading this blog would still be running Windows 2000, but I know a good many are still running Windows XP. So let’s carve the dates on XPs tombstone:
5 years after XP’s GA date would be December 2006, but Vista had not shipped by then. So Mainstream support for XP ends two years after the GA date of Vista which takes us to Jan 2009 (In practice it was April 2009). Unless you have taken out a contract for extended support, you have only been getting security updates for XP since then.
5 Years after that is April 2014. Windows 7 had a GA date of October 2009, so 2 years on from there would be sooner. Extended support for XP ends on the later of the two dates, so April 2014.
For Vista, five years after GA will be later than 2 years after Windows 7, so Vista goes from mainstream to extended support in or shortly after January 2012. We’ve set the date, April 10th 2012. The end of extended support will depend on when the next version of Window ships, but it won’t be before April 11th 2017. Both dates for Windows 7 depend on future versions of Windows but won’t be sooner than January 13th 2015, and January 14th 2020. Put them in your diary now, with a reminder a long time in advance :-)
You can get all the dates from the Product lifecycle page
* Strange Angels by Laurie Anderson if you must know.
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On the MDOP blog there is an announcement of new releases of both APP-V (which runs applications in a Virtualized “bubble” so they don’t clash with each other) and MED-V (which runs a centrally managed virtualized OS)
App-V 4.6 can be accessed immediately via MDOP 2010. Existing MDOP customers can download MDOP 2010 at the Microsoft Volume Licensing Site (MVLS). For evaluation, MDOP 2010 can be downloaded from MSDN and TechNet.
App-V 4.6 for RDS (formerly App-V for Terminal Services) is on the Microsoft.com/downloads site.
MED-V 1.0 SP1 Release Candidate is available for immediate download and evaluation from the Microsoft Connect site.
The major points App-V 4.6 is now compatible with 64-bit Windows client and server platforms, enabling IT to take advantage of x64 for client hardware refresh AND also deploy App-V to Windows Server 2008 R2 using remote desktop with scale advantages that come from 64 bit. The springboard site has a Q&A on App-V
MED-V adds support for Windows 7 (32bit and 64bit) – this is what large organizations should be using to deliver similar functionality to XP-Mode but with central management.
Bonus link:
On the Windows Team blog, Gavriella explains why this important to improving the Total Economic Impact – and Forrester have already published some very positive numbers on TEI for Windows 7
One of the things that seemed odd when I first came to Microsoft, was the way we put up posters for our own internal consumption. I’ve long since grown used to it: inevitably some of these are interesting, some are not, some are eye-catching and some are not. In the atrium of my building this week is a picture of a lifeboat and as a Scuba diver I have a bit of an interest in lifeboats, an organization I hope not to see when they are on duty but really want to be there. So a picture of one is bound to get my attention.
It turns out that the RNLI is one of the early customers using real world – sorry for being melodramatic – life and death applications on Windows Azure (the system handles man overboard alerts: email might seem like life and death at times, but getting this right is the difference between lives saved and lives lost.) This is one of a set of posters around the place advertising the LiveOnAzure website using different case studies (you can go straight to the UK-Focused case studies themselves)
“Stuff in the cloud” is unknown territory for many people. There are those run away with the idea and and start talking as if it means getting rid of all the IT in a business or the talk degenerates into something like “Buzzword, Buzzword, cloud, Buzzword, utility, Buzzword, Buzzword, services Buzzword cloud cloud Buzzword, platform, Buzzword,pay as you go, Buzzword,Buzzword” …
… The LiveOnAzure site links to some great resources, including the 4 Minute video I’ve linked to here. If you want to cut through to quick understanding of what Azure is about, it’s 255 seconds well spent, afterwards, if you’re interested, there is plenty more to study on the live on azure site.
Earlier this week I went to “Oxford Geek Night” and the title of one of title of one of the sessions was “The Zombie Cookie apocalypse” delivered by David Sheldon (I wish his slides were on-line so you could read more and I could give him a proper credit), it wasn’t the only informative session – there were bunch of those - but it was one which sent me away thinking “I should have known that”.
Here’s the Gist. We all know about cookies, the little bits of information which web sites send to to your browser to make applications work, or to follow you round the web. Even IE6 knew that cookies could be bad and could reject the tracking ones. Adobe Flash keeps its own cookies, which bypass the normal rules. Although it doesn’t seem to widely known (I was in a roomful of people where internet expertise was the top skill, and no one seemed to have heard of this before) – it is reasonably well documented – often using Adobe’s name of “Local stored objects. You can read more information in Wikipedia’s dispassionate style, or you can have it in they’ll suck out your brains style if you prefer (of course you do !)
This has 3 main impacts.
I thought “the handful of sites where I use In-Private Browsing aren’t flash sites.”, the flash handling the cookie is not always visible. When I did a quick search I found something from the Electronic Privacy Information Center which quotes one tracking platform vendor as saying "All advertisers, websites and networks use cookies for targeted advertising, but cookies are under attack. According to current research they are being erased by 40% of users creating serious problems.". Indeed: as EPIC puts a little later “By deleting cookies, consumers are clearly rejecting attempts to track them. Using an obscure technology to subvert these wishes is a practice that should be stopped”
So: How do you see, clear and block/allow Flash Cookies ? That announcement from Adobe suggests that in 10.1 you will be able to this by right clicking on flash in the browser and going to settings. Until you get 10.1, you have to visit a page on Adobe’s site –which isn’t espcially easy to find.
Clearing the information from my computer I made a note of some of the sites which were leaving information on my PC which I was certain I hadn’t visited and got a little PowerShell script to get the title from their home page. (Which worked for most sites, some take a little fiddling). Here are the names and descriptions.
You can see what business they are all in. I’ve added them to my list of sites blocked by InPrivate Filtering. Which reminds me, I must post part 2 of that.
Dave Heiner, one of our Vice Presidents and our Deputy General Counsel has posted an explanation of exactly what will be happening.
I would expect something in due course to explain how organizations can prevent their users being presented with the choice screen (if you are using WSUS – and you should be – you should be able to choose not distribute that update. If you are distributing images apply the update and make your browser choice before creating the image, etc.) .
Over the next few weeks I’m going to be talking about IE8 (and depending on what gets announced at Mix maybe IE9 as well). Whilst I don’t have the data to prove it I’m convinced a lot of people running Firefox are doing so as a way of getting a modern browser when their company still has something from the last century tying them to IE6. I suspect a lot of those people have seen demos which prove IE7 is much better than 6 and that IE8 is better, but the demos are always simplified, and you see pages with a single issue conveniently fixed using a click of a button. But it is definitely not that easy. You could have thousands of apps, many of them packaged, or you could be prevented from accessing the code because it is part of a product you bought.
Why is that last bit in italics ? It’s part of the session abstract for a webcasts which is being run different times of day, over the next few weeks.
The presenter is Chris Jackson, Principal Consultant and the Technical Lead of the Windows Application Experience SWAT Team, Microsoft Corporation (a widely recognized expert in the field of Windows Application Compatibility) . Although I haven’t had a chance to watch it myself, I’ve seen the scores for the first run which said the audience rated it very highly. So if you still have IE6 in place and want to do something about it, this seems like a good place to start.
Over on the MSPress blog they have an announcement
Mitch Tulloch has updated his free ebook of last year. You can now download Understanding Microsoft Virtualization R2 Solutions in XPS format here and in PDF format here.
I’ve worked with Mitch on a couple of books, including the first release of this one, and seen a couple of others they’ve all been good (poor books from MS press are very few and far between). If this was a paper book which you had to pay for I’d suggest it is well worth looking at - but it’s a free download (print it or view it on screen : your choice) so, seriously, if you expect to be working with Hyper-V in the foreseeable future you’d have to be daft not to download it.
I had a mail earlier telling me about desktop virtualization hour , planned for 4PM (GMT) on March 18th. (That’s 9AM Seattle time, 5PM CET … you can work out the others I’m sure). More information and a downloadable meeting request are Here.
Some effort seems to be going into this one, which makes me think it is more than the average web cast.
In theory I was supposed to be taking a day off on Monday to look after my children on half term. (Note for parents, making hot cross buns at home is a fantastic way to occupy the kids.). A spot of car trouble killed off our trip to go swimming so I ended up spending a fair chunk of the day following the announcement of Windows Phone 7 series and the reactions to it.
Blogging about my experience with my new 6.5 phone so close the launch of Window Phone 7 Series was setting up a hostage to fortune. I had 3 factors in mind when I decided to get it.
(1) Windows Phone 7 Series (as we now know it) was in the works.
(2) It always takes time from the announcement of a new release of Windows CE / Windows Mobile / Windows Phone to get new devices to market.
(3) My old phone was falling apart, and needed to be replaced.
Past experience tells me to allow of six months from release of software to device makes, to device availability, with potentially another couple of months before they are available as my corporate phone.We’re setting an expectation of “Holiday season” for general availability of the Windows Phones with the 7 Series software on them. One article I read said the prototypes on show in Barcelona this week are made by Asus, but Dell, Garmin, HP, HTC, LG, Samsung, Sony Ericsson and Toshiba are all listed as launch partners. Qualcomm are listed as the partner we are working with on the silicon. Orange supply phones to Microsoft UK and were given special prominence as a launch carrier, with Vodafone, T-mobile and Telefonica (who own o2) also named.
If “holiday season” is right it’s quite possible that ordinary phone users inside Microsoft won’t get the new phones until January next year: I couldn’t wait that long. Whether it is cameras, PCs or phones – you know that whatever you get today, there will be something better (and probably cheaper) in a year’s time. This looks like being true here in spades, I have the latest version of Pocket PC phone edition which has changed in small increments since 2001, and the next generation will be a big change – but there was no sensible alternative. The upside of having a 6.5 phone for roughly a year before 7 is available set against the downside of having it for roughly a year after compromise I’m happy with.
One thing that amused me about what came out in the launch is that every Windows Phone 7 series will be a Zune. Having heard my colleagues in Redmond saying over and over “Microsoft is not going to manufacture a Zune phone” the answer turns out to be that lots of people are going to Manufacture Zune phones. How long before rumours start that Asus, Dell and the rest will be able to make non-phone devices based on this software (i.e. Zunes) ? [No, I have not heard any such thing, and I’m not trying to start the rumour] Beyond that – there is hardly anything I’ve seen internally which isn’t viewable externally. This is perhaps the best demo. (Found among other places on the Windows Blog)
There’s more at http://www.windowsphone7series.com/. I like what I have seen, no two ways about it. I didn’t see anything much in the way of negative commentary – though a few people were reserving their final judgement until questions like “How will the Marketplace work ?”, “What exactly is the Multi-tasking model ?”, “How much app rewriting is needed ?” There’s an intriguing point on the last two in a tweet by Charlie Kindle, but the real answers will have to wait for Mix.
Gizmodo seemed blown away saying “Windows Phone 7 is almost everything anyone could've dreamed of in a phone, let alone a Microsoft phone. It changes everything” - although I found their comparison of philosophies with the iPhone more interesting. Engadget were similarly enthused starting “Forget everything you know about Windows Mobile. Seriously, throw the whole OS concept in a garbage bin or incinerator or something” and ending “for the first time in a long time, we're excited about Microsoft in the mobile space.” Techland were just as excited “it's a brand new decade, and Microsoft is about to leapfrog Apple and every other player in the mobile space with Windows Phone 7”
Sharon picked up that beyond the headline grabbing UI, Zune and Xbox live hook-ups, this is a useful business platform not just with Exchange ActiveSync for mail and mobile office apps but Sharepoint integration.
Tim Anderson had – let’s call it “an interesting take” - on Microsoft’s partner model and how it plays in the phone world, translating one set of Steve Ballmer’s words as “we are being hammered by OEMs who wreck our product with poor quality hardware and add-on software”. Ouch: it is a charge that some – including Tim have levelled at PC suppliers; once we might have had the ability to say what software should or shouldn’t be on a machine, but courts decided we abused that ability and took it away. Having a smaller market share in phones we mean we can be much more prescriptive about the hardware and what the OEMs can change in the software. Some Microsoft cloud services (notably Bing search, but also Xbox live and Zune) can’t easily be removed without changing the character of the phone, so those seem to be fixed points: the words that Tim translated were “We want to lead and take complete accountability for the end user experience”. The danger doing that is reaching a point when things are so nailed down when everyone says “Wouldn’t it make more sense for Microsoft to take charge of making and selling the thing – as with Xbox.”. But things have gone too far in the opposite direction and what is available on the devices vary so widely that developers can’t be sure that what they write will work on two different devices which supposedly run the same OS, and we’ve moving back from that.
Tim also responded to a statement from Andy Lees “[Mobile operators] have tremendous value to add. They are not just dumb pipes” I know from my time working on Mobile Information Server (the forerunner of Exchange ActiveSync) that Mobile Operators hate the idea of being a dumb pipe, but I don’t think Tim is alone in thinking “I find it hard to think of tremendous added value from the operators”. I recall a time when Orange reduced the value of the phone (adding applications which killed the battery, blocking installation of apps they had not signed). The iPhone has shown that a platform is better for developers of it (a) is one consistent platform, and (b) it bypasses the carriers for sale of applications. Today my phone has Orange Maps and other services which only work if you are connecting over Orange’s network, not over WiFi for example. A service I have to disconnect from my WiFi to use ? Forget it, I’ll use Bing Maps (or Google Maps or whichever other Map provider I use on my desktop computer). It will be interesting to see how the operators change their game as phones get smarter.
I’ve been sorting out photos recently, and came across a ton of miniature Formula one images which I turned into a Mosaic which ran to about 60MegaPixels. That was in 2002 and I haven’t done much with mosaics for several years and keep meaning to try out the Mosiac software that is available today.
One of our partners is making a name for themselves with Mosaics and Silverlight DeepZoom. , the latest is for Fauna & flora international and their campaign for the Sumatran tiger. The mosaic is made up of pictures of endangered species and habitats – according to Steve 180,000 for them which makes this the biggest Deep Zoom to date. Fascinating stuff, and since we are now in the Chinese year of the tiger it seems suitable cause to be promoting.
Our press site says Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer will host a press conference at Mobile World Congress 2010. Watch the live Webcast Recording here on Feb. 15 starting at 6 a.m. PST/3 p.m. CET. That’s 2PM UK time, and thanks to other commitments I’m going to have to watch the recording which should show up in the same place.
Commercial sensitivity means the detail of what Steve will say has not been shared widely within Microsoft (though having him make an announcement suggests it is important, and MWC is the place to announce phone-related things : that much is obvious) . We have had a small amount of information about the topics areas which will be left for another day*, and the correct and incorrect way to write product names when the time comes. This came from Charlie Kindle, who has a new blog which may be worth keeping an eye on. Charlie is also on twitter.
* Update. Charlie now has a post on-line which says
There’s a whole bunch of stuff we did not announce today. Specifically we did not announce anything about building applications & games for the new Windows Phone 7 Series operating system. We did this because
(a) The new phone user experience we are talking about is so hugely cool we want people to be able to absorb it for a while, and…
(b) We are working on being able to tell the full story in March at the MIX10 conference in Las Vegas. We have at least 12 sessions lined up and attendees will be the first to get access to the bits.
Which is what were told. That and “Windows Phone” – capital P – for devices in general - and Windows Phone 7 Series for the new release is the proper naming.
An update of the PowerShell library for Hyper-V has been posted to Codeplex.
This is the R2 version which takes advantage of PowerShell 2 which is available on R2 versions of Hyper-V server and Core installations of Windows Server. It will manage Hyper-V on the original release of Server 2008 provided it is running in a the V2 of PowerShell.
The original library allowed the creation and maintenance of VHD files, creating and deleing VMs, starting, stopping and saving them, managing their settings, taking and applying snapshots and configuration of the Hyper-V host. The following changes were made for the R2:
In addition this “Gold” release adds support in two areas which were not in earlier R2 builds.
There is a video showing the module in action on Technet Edge
There are now 122 functions, and 16 aliases for backwards compatibility so that any scripts written for V1 of the library should not break. V1 continues to be available for server 2008 customers who have not upgraded to PowerShell V2. The RC has had a large number of downloads and very few bug reports (all of which have been fixed). The scope of changes between RC and this build meant it is designated as “Gold” rather than “Release”, it is expected that there minor errors in the on-line help, which will be properly proof read and corrected before release is declared.
Feedback of all kinds is welcome (via codeplex or via this blog).
Top level menu. Note that Cluster networks for Live Migration and cluster shared volumes are displayed. [This allows the path to a CSV to be copied and pasted into the Create virtual machine part of the menu], and there is a menu Item to Live Migrate Virtual Machines.
VM menu, note that the cluster status of this machine shows as on-line. Machines can be moved between cluster nodes , or set as highly available.
Disk management menu for a VM.
I mentioned a few days back that I was going to write some posts about deploying Windows 7, but there is some good material out there already and there is no sense re-inventing the wheel
So I’d like to recommend 3 posts from fellow evangelist and all-round good chap Alan Le Marquand,
Choosing the path to Windows 7
Building Windows 7 images
Deploying Windows 7
These are as useful as collections of links to other subject matter as they for the writing which Alan has done. I expect to be referring people to these via this post (if you see what I mean) for some time to come.
Over on the Windows blog there is a post talking about the update we are about to send out which is designed to catch some of the tricks being used by large scale pirates against Windows 7. There was a time were an update to this technology would have me reaching for my tin hat and flame-proof underwear but I came read a Post on the subject from Ed Bott who (as I’ve said before) can be assumed to know what he is talking about.
I was a fierce critic of the initial [Windows Genuine Advantage] efforts, primarily because the user experience was so awful and the tools it used were inaccurate. Back in 2008, I gave Microsoft a C+ for its efforts, a significant improvement over the “big fat F” it earned in 2006 and 2007. Over the past year, I have been visiting the Windows Genuine forums at least once per quarter to survey performance and have found that activation issues have become a non-issue. In every example I have found, the problem could be traced to malware or a major hardware change, or (surprisingly often) to a customer who had unknowingly purchased counterfeit software. Where false positive reports were once a serious problem, they’re now practically nonexistent in my experience.
My experience backs this up. As a percentage the false positives were always small, but if you were affected it didn’t matter. And with an installed base as big as Windows a small percentage is a lot of people. There a story (which is widely told, but may be an urban legend) of a major retailer whose repair operation always used the same key when reinstalling Windows: customers with licences hit problems later because their licences hadn’t been used and the one which had was designated “pirated”. Those customers just had to enter their own product keys but the experience made many go ballistic. A repair shop wouldn’t do that today.