VIRTUALBOY BLOG
Admittedly, a little late notice, but it’s only just landed in my inbox!
The Client Management Bootcamp is a 4-day technical Instructor Led Training designed to enable System Center, Windows Client, MDOP, and Desktop Deployment SI partners to deliver successful POCs based on top customer scenarios around client management. The course coverage includes Optimized Desktop architecture, deploying and managing Windows 7 and Office 2010 in the enterprise.
In terms of agenda, it looks pretty darn useful actually, and if I could clear my schedule, I’d go myself!!
As I said earlier, it’s over 4 days, and is located in London. It's on the 23rd March, and you’ll need to register via the usual Partner channels. Do you know what the best bit of it all is? It’s subsidised down to just £250 per delegate. Bargain! :)
It’s hard to believe I’ve used the word ‘plethora’ in the title of a post 3 times in the last 3 months! I need to start broadening my vocabulary!
Anyway, I blogged about the RC release of App-V 4.6 way back in November, and have been using it in my demos since then, however as of yesterday, the final release of App-V 4.6 has launched, as part of the Microsoft Desktop Optimisation Pack (MDOP) 2010.
In terms of getting hold of the bits, from the MDOP blog:
So, what’s new in 4.6?
There’s even more info on the MDOP blog.
Enough about what’s new in App-V 4.6 – let’s move on to the resources that can help accelerate your knowledge around the technologies. Brace yourself here, there’s a fair few on offer!
1) IPD Guide
The Infrastructure Planning and Design Guides help, as the name suggests, to plan the rollout of a particular technology, and the App-V IPD guide has just been updated to reflect the changes and improvements in 4.6. It helps to streamline to planning process by:
This specific IPD guide provides actionable guidance for planning your application virtualization infrastructure. With App-V, your organization can respond to the complex challenge of managing applications. This guide simplifies your App-V planning process; updates now include support for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, including such features as BranchCache; support for 64-bit clients; and server-sizing data. Strategically planning your infrastructure can help you avoid problems before they begin, allowing you to save time and money.
Grab the IPD Guide here.
2) Virtual Labs
<cheesy salesman voice> Don’t have the kit to try this out? Don’t want to set it up for yourself? Today is your lucky day! </cheesy salesman voice>
The Windows 7 Virtual Labs are designed to let you work through a script, in your own time, to configure a certain area of technology. The App-V labs are listed with the Windows 7 labs as they all form part of this Optimised Desktop. From an App-V perspective, there are a couple of full labs (90 minutes), and a couple of express labs, which are shorter in duration (30 mins). Here are the full labs:
and the express labs:
They’re all free to use, and run in the browser, but you’ll need to enable some relevant browser plug-ins to make it work. You can download the manual from the top right of the screen, and interact with the lab in the center, like so:
The manual will guide you through what steps you should take, and explain the scenario in more detail. Definitely worth a look if you’re interested in brushing up on a few new areas without having to sit down and configure everything.for…
3) Videos
If the labs aren’t your cup of tea, and you’d prefer to break out the popcorn and watch a video, this next set of resources could be right up your street, and with this number of videos on offer, it’s going to be a long street:
These are just the videos for App-V – if you head on over to this page, there are videos for the whole MDOP suite!
4) Documentation
OK, so it’s the least exciting, but equally useful!
That’s all for now, and there are some more bits in the works that we’ll reveal over coming weeks and months, so stay tuned, and enjoy the stuff above!
Following on from yesterday, Iftekhar, a fellow Partner Technology Advisor and blogger, got in touch and pointed me to another ‘Optimised Desktop’ resource.
This video is 15 minutes long in total, but gives a pretty nice, integrated story across different platforms. If you’re looking for the detail, make the video full screen and you’ll see it in all it’s glory. Quite a good one in my opinion.
I mentioned in my previous post, there are a number of choices available to customers around their desktop strategy going forward, but where do you start? Well, here’s a few resources to get you going on the journey. Now, admittedly, these are cut and pasted from various Microsoft websites, yet I always adhere to the belief that “you don’t know, what you don’t know”, so if you don’t know this info exists, you’ll never find it!
The Vision of the Optimised Desktop - http://www.microsoft.com/windows/enterprise/solutions/default.aspx
People are the most important resource in any organisation. The role of technology is to unlock their potential. The Optimised Desktop is about empowering your people to be more productive with a flexible technology infrastructure, while providing the IT department the needed level of control, manageability, and security. Learn more about five scenarios for enabling workers to be successful in their jobs with Microsoft desktop solutions, or read the Optimised Desktop eBook
Balancing the Needs of End Users and IT - http://www.microsoft.com/windows/enterprise/solutions/desktop/default.aspx
Organisations look to their people to drive business success, and to the information technology (IT) department to build and manage an infrastructure that supports and enables people to be successful in their jobs. Often, these expectations create a natural tension between end users, who want the flexibility to support a dynamic work environment, and an IT department that needs greater control and manageability.
The solution to this challenge is an "Optimised Desktop" infrastructure. An Optimized Desktop describes a state in which your organisation has attained the right balance in its desktop infrastructure - empowering employees with the flexibility they need to be productive, while providing IT the necessary level of control, manageability, and security
Ease Desktop Management with Microsoft Solutions - http://www.microsoft.com/windows/enterprise/solutions/management/default.aspx
Managing desktops across an enterprise is often time-consuming, complex, and costly. IT organizations face difficult PC manageability tasks on a daily basis. The Windows 7 operating system, Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP), and System Center provide you with the infrastructure to enable business agility for end users in addition to increased control, streamlined management, and cost reduction for IT.
How Desktop Virtualisation Transforms your Business - http://www.microsoft.com/windows/enterprise/solutions/virtualization/default.aspx
Now more than ever, organisations are looking to increase business flexibility while reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO) for their desktop infrastructure. Microsoft Desktop Virtualisation solutions provide IT managers with flexible desktop management options, from deploying virtual applications to gaining efficiencies with centralised and diskless PCs.
So, some great resources there, however, if I had to choose one, above all the others, based on my experience, I would point you to the Windows Optimised Desktop Scenarios. In a nutshell, Microsoft has identified 5 common scenarios, or, types of users, that exist within organisations. These are, Office, Mobile, Task, Contract and Home. Each have their own methods of working effectively, and require different tools based on their scenario. Each also require a different level of user experience. Some may require a rich, graphical OS environment, with local access to data, whereas others may require a very traditional, locked down, low-graphics type environment, for entering customer related information into a CRM system for example. Taking these scenarios, you can start to map these scenarios, on to the most optimal (in most cases) technologies that would meet their requirements. Take me for example. I’m a mobile worker, on the road a great deal. I can’t always guarantee an internet connection, and if I could, I couldn’t guarantee the quality of that connection. Would a remote working environment be ideal for me? No chance. That would actually have a detrimental effect on my working capabilities. A Windows 7 laptop, with locally installed apps, or App-V delivered apps, combined with some of the inbox features like DirectAccess and BitLocker, would give me a greater level of productivity. Once you’ve watched the videos, Microsoft also provide a tool, in the form of the Windows Optimised Desktop Scenarios, on which to work with a customer, or your business teams internally, to help define the different types of users in the environment. You can read more about WODS here.
OK, bit more dramatic than it actually is, but never mind! There’s lots of industry buzz at the moment around ‘VDI’, or, to elaborate, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, yet is it the right solution for everyone? Well, there are plenty of benefits to virtualising your desktop OS’s, however it isn’t always the right solution for all types of users. Some virtualisation vendors would lead you to believe this is the case, yet when all you have in your toolbox is a hammer, all problems do tend to look like nails.
Windows 7 is almost acting as a catalyst right now. A catalyst for businesses to assess, and define their desktop strategy going forward. For many, Windows 7 (or a Windows 7-like-experience, (more on this later!)) is the next logical step, but the aspect that’s generating the most head-scratching, is just how we deliver this experience.
So, if you read between the lines above, what I’m getting at is, there is choice. Choice around the OS we receive. Choice about how we receive it. Choice about how we manage and deliver applications and profiles as part of this service. The key word, time and time again, is choice, which can be a good thing, but also a bad thing. Choice can lead to confusion, confusion leads to management difficulties, and ultimately, no clear strategy or decision. That is, unless, choice is understood clearly.
On the 18th March, at 5pm GMT Microsoft, along with industry experts and IT leaders, will be delivering a Desktop Virtualisation hour, trying to articulate the choices customers have, for their desktop strategy going forward. I don’t envy the presenters here, as I regularly talk about our all-up Optimised Desktop strategy, and it takes a good few hours to deliver in such a way that confusion is at a minimum (but that could just be my lack of clarity!)
If you’re interested in understanding the choices you have in front of you, or, frankly, you think the numbers just don’t add up for VDI, you may find this session useful.
Click the picture above to register, or alternatively, click here to save the date to your calendar.
First look of Windows Phone 7 for me, and I' have to say, I’m impressed!
Very Zune HD-like. Very nice indeed. Hopefully the community will rally around Windows Phone 7 and build some half decent apps for it!
You just couldn’t write this script! Yesterday, I blogged about a new whitepaper which discusses the performance improvements of RDP7 over previous versions, and the kinds of factors you can expect to encounter that can impact the user experience using RDP7 and RDS. In that blog post, I also noted the number of requests for sizing guidance around the solution, specifically stating it was coming soon. Well, I didn’t think it would be this soon!
“The Remote Desktop Session Host (RD Session Host) role service lets multiple concurrent users run Windows-based applications on a remote computer running Windows Server 2008 R2. This white paper is intended as a guide for capacity planning of RD Session Host in Windows Server 2008 R2. It describes the most relevant factors that influence the capacity of a given deployment, methodologies to evaluate capacity for specific deployments, and a set of experimental results for different combinations of usage scenarios and hardware configurations.”
Definitely worth a read if you’re thinking about sizing RDS, including if you’re thinking of sizing it up on a Hyper-V platform. You can grab the document, here.
Hat-tip to the RDS Team Blog for this one.
One of the biggest requests I’m hearing around RDS in 2008 R2 and Windows 7, is for RDP performance information and benchmarks. For those interested, it’s a close call on requests for this information, or for RDS Sizing guidance. The sizing guidance is coming soon, trust me!
So, back to the RDP Performance Improvements, to quote the RDS Team…
“As with Remote Desktop Services in Windows Server 2008 R2, virtual machine-based desktop virtualization faces increasing performance challenges when enterprises attempt to use this technology to support a globally distributed workforce. A key consideration of performance relates to Remote Desktop protocol efficiency which continues to present an issue for bandwidth constrained environments. This limitation can manifest itself by limiting the number of users who can access virtualized desktops (user density) over available bandwidth, and with a degraded user experience. Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) 7.0, similar to previous RDP versions, provides a competitive experience for low bandwidth (e.g. 56 Kbps) connections. After bandwidth requirements, network latency is the second fundamental challenge for customers and partners that wish to deploy virtualized desktops for a broad range of end-users and applications”
Very true indeed. If you’d have said, 18 months ago, you can play a rich multimedia video over RDP, and it wouldn’t be jerky, out of sync etc, people would have laughed at you, yet that laughter would have been mostly based on older iterations of RDP, and it’s traditional, functional use within an infrastructure. Fast forward to now, with RDP7, that kind of experience is a reality, but would I expect that level of rich experience over all connectivity types, fast and slow? No, inevitably not. As you’d expect, the experience would degrade, especially over the WAN, which could, as the paragraph above suggests, degrade the experience for others too. Therefore, understanding the RDP protocol in the latest release is pivotal when evaluating an RDS infrastructure.
So, back to the whitepaper…
“With the release of the Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 operating systems, Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) is more feature rich, enabling new presentation and remote-oriented functionality such as accelerated bitmap rendering, multi-media redirection streaming, and network topology awareness. As these features become integrated in the enterprise environment, it is important to analyze and understand their impact on your current network infrastructure and the end-user experience. This paper details the various RDP features and the potential improvements to usability and quality of the end-user remoting experience, as well as system deployment metrics. To test the impact of different features and compare RDP 7.0 to the previous RDP 6.1 version, we performed a variety of tests by using automated and simulation tools to demonstrate the user scenarios outlined in this white paper. These tests are broken down into two broad groups: a set that simulated a user working with actual Microsoft® Office applications at realistic speeds, and a set of multi-media scenarios that simulated a rich media environment commonly expected by today’s and tomorrow’s users. To test the impact of different features and compare RDP 7.0 to the previous RDP 6.1 version, we performed a variety of tests by using automated and simulation tools to demonstrate the user scenarios outlined in this white paper. These tests are broken down into two broad groups: a set that simulated a user working with actual Microsoft® Office applications at realistic speeds, and a set of multi-media scenarios that simulated a rich media environment commonly expected by today’s and tomorrow’s users. In addition, some of the scenarios have been run at increased network latencies to demonstrate the viability of using RDP in distributed environments, such as in Branch offices or telecommuting scenarios where broadband capabilities exist”
“With the release of the Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 operating systems, Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) is more feature rich, enabling new presentation and remote-oriented functionality such as accelerated bitmap rendering, multi-media redirection streaming, and network topology awareness. As these features become integrated in the enterprise environment, it is important to analyze and understand their impact on your current network infrastructure and the end-user experience. This paper details the various RDP features and the potential improvements to usability and quality of the end-user remoting experience, as well as system deployment metrics. To test the impact of different features and compare RDP 7.0 to the previous RDP 6.1 version, we performed a variety of tests by using automated and simulation tools to demonstrate the user scenarios outlined in this white paper. These tests are broken down into two broad groups: a set that simulated a user working with actual Microsoft® Office applications at realistic speeds, and a set of multi-media scenarios that simulated a rich media environment commonly expected by today’s and tomorrow’s users.
To test the impact of different features and compare RDP 7.0 to the previous RDP 6.1 version, we performed a variety of tests by using automated and simulation tools to demonstrate the user scenarios outlined in this white paper. These tests are broken down into two broad groups: a set that simulated a user working with actual Microsoft® Office applications at realistic speeds, and a set of multi-media scenarios that simulated a rich media environment commonly expected by today’s and tomorrow’s users. In addition, some of the scenarios have been run at increased network latencies to demonstrate the viability of using RDP in distributed environments, such as in Branch offices or telecommuting scenarios where broadband capabilities exist”
There’s actually some very useful information in the whitepaper, particularly around what tweaks you could make to your user experience to optimise the bandwidth utilisation. One thing I found useful, is the frame-rate achieved with Silverlight content, versus Flash, at different colour levels:
I really didn’t know that!
This, and other useful bits of info, are available in the whitepaper. Check it out now!
If you have a look around the web (using your favourite Bing search engine), for virtualising/virtualizing SAP, you’ll find a lot of links for virtualising that workload on VMware, but what about Hyper-V? Do SAP support Hyper-V as a platform? Are there any recommendations if they do? Yes, and yes, and with the latest announcement, they now support Hyper-V R2 as the virtualisation platform, which brings in significant advantages around Live Migration, Second Level Address Translation (SLAT) support, and improved networking capabilities to name but a few.
Last year, there was a best practices white paper released, which detailed optimum configurations for SAP virtualised on R1 of Hyper-V, so this is still going to be relatively useful for R2, especially when combined with the Performance Tuning Guidelines for Windows Server 2008 R2 that I blogged about a few weeks back.
If you head on over to the SAP Community, and look at the Virtualisation on Windows page, you’ll see the statement of support front and centre, however one thing to be aware of, is that SAP will support Hyper-V R2 as the platform, but the guest OS that SAP runs on has to be Windows Server 2008, or 2003.
If you’re interested, there’s more guidance here:
If you’re thinking about virtualising SAP, ESX isn’t the only hypervisor in town…
If you’ve been following my coverage of DPM 2010 over the last few months (here, and here), you’ll be pleased to learn that the Release Candidate build has been declared, and released to the web, on the Microsoft Connect website.
If you’re interested in downloading and evaluating this release (which I’d strongly recommend!), you can grab all the bits here.