VIRTUALBOY BLOG
Patrick (of Microsoft Virtualisation User Group fame!) pinged me an email referencing a blog post he’d written over at the MVUG blog, covering his experiences (so far) with Broadcom NIC Teaming and Hyper-V. I didn’t even know Patrick was writing a blog, and skimming over his most recent posts, it’s definitely one that I’d recommend.
The post in question, around the NIC Teaming, is definitely an interesting one. NIC Teaming is one of those grey areas with Hyper-V. Partners and Customers with VMware experience ask if the feature is included with Hyper-V, and are sometimes surprised to learn that it’s never been supported by Microsoft on Windows Server. It’s always been the ballpark of the NIC vendor, hence Broadcom, Intel et al, are now starting to produce solutions for NIC Teaming, on Windows Server 2008 (and thus Hyper-V). Patrick details, in his post, his experiences with NIC Teaming and Hyper-V.
Before you read his post, if you’re not familiar with what NIC Teaming is, is basically another word for Link Aggregation, so having multiple physical NICs, teamed together, to provide additional redundancy, but at the same time, improving link speed in many cases. Wikipedia has a good explanation.
So, it’s over to Patrick’s post to get all the info – if you can’t wait, I’ve summarised below:
Good luck!
This discussion has been around the web for ages, and no doubt, if you're as geeky as me, you'll already know about it, however, today, of all days, it's become more relevant for me, as finally, I have a laptop with 4GB RAM. Woo Hoo!
Admittedly, it isn't as sexy as my Sony Vaio SZ3 (the one on the right, should you be wondering....), nor is it as light and mobile, but it packs a punch, with a 2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo CPU and 4GB RAM. Anyway, it's arrived with XP on there (and a number of Google apps I'll add :-( ) but that is about to get wiped, in favour of Windows Server 2003 R2 SP2 Enterprise Edition (x64), Vista (x64) and Windows Server 2008 (x64). I know what you are thinking. This is the GOD of demo machines!
Before I go ahead and wipe the machine, which, like I said, has currently got an x86 copy of XP SP2 on there, lets take a look at my System Properties:
So, there you have it, 3.5GB of RAM. I've been cheated out of some performance here! Well, yes and no. Yes, because I've lost half a gig of RAM, but no, because there are ways I can get it back. The easiest way would be to install the x64 version of the OS, as this loss of RAM isn't a Windows problem, it's an x86 problem. The current x86 architecture, as Doug Cook states supports access to up to 4 GB of physical memory, however, hardware reserves large chunks of the upper 1 GB of physical address space. Because of these reserved areas, a system with a 32-bit physical address space will be limited to somewhere around 3.1-3.5 GB of RAM. There is another solution to upgrading to an x64 OS - the PAE hack. I say hack, as it's not the most recommended solution, but it does work. Doug continues "To overcome the 32-bit limitation, recent x86 CPUs (Pentium Pro and later) have 36 address pins and can address 64 GB of RAM. The original design of the x86 32-bit protected mode only provided access to 32-bit addresses, so PAE (Physical Address Extensions) mode was created to allow access to 36-bit addresses." So, PAE is the answer? Well, not always. PAE can only access 64 GB of memory if all 36 address pins are properly wired up on the motherboard, which isn't always the case. There are other things to consider too, for which you should definitely check out Doug's post.
So, the moral of the story is, to address that full 4GB, you can take a risk, which for many people, pay's off fine, and go with the PAE extension, or you could upgrade to an x64 OS, which can take advantage of the full del monte. That's exactly what I'm doing, with x64 versions of Server 2003, Vista and Server 2008.
However, don't just install an x64 OS and assume it will show the full 4GB RAM - it has to be supported by the motherboard and chipset, as detailed in this KB Article.
If you really want to get geeky, down to the 1's and 0's, you'd be hard pressed to find a better post that Jeff's.
Patrick, from the MVUG Blog, pinged this through this morning, so I thought I’d share:
Microsoft is offering some free Hyper-V training. You will need to enter a specific access code 9350-Y2W6-3676 and sign in with your Live ID. The course “Collection 6319 - Configuring Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008” includes the following modules:
To sign up go to https://www.microsoftelearning.com/eLearning/enterCode.aspx
Following up on my post the other day, about partitioning and disk management in Vista, so I thought I'd build on that by revealing a little tool that a colleague has found, that you may find useful. Now, before you fly off the handle, judging by the title, and say "you aren't revealing the Disk Defragmenter! It's been around for years!" - hold on! I know that! What I want to talk about is...another disk defragmenting tool, which does the same job, but in a way that may be more useful to some.
So, in Vista, we have the Disk Defragmenter, and, all in all, it does exactly what it says on the tin, defragments your hard disk and looks like this...
Nice and simple right? Right. Only problem for me, and a few others have found this too, is that, although you can easily modify your schedule, and have it run in the background, every day if you want, if you want to do a manual defragmentation (I don't mean go and find and move each file yourself! Just press the 'Defragment now' button!), you never know how long it will take, how much is done, and you can't see a report afterwards, like you could with XP. You can't even pause it! Why was XP so feature-rich in this area in comparison?
So I guess some of the more 'advanced' features have been sacrificed for simplicity. Fear not, I have an answer, and it comes in the form of Auslogics Disk Defragmenter. Not only does this little beauty run fine in XP and on the current Windows Server offerings, but it also runs fine on Vista, and Longhorn Server! Some of the other benefits are:
So what does it look like? Click the screenshots to enlarge them! This is running on Vista by the way!
Overall, its a pretty good program, and for free, even better! It works well, its fast, its pretty clear to see how long it will take to complete, you can pause, stop and view reports (which are very comprehensive) - what more could you want? It's also getting good reviews over on Download.com.
It's a shame there is no scheduling - I guess you could use Task Scheduler to automate the process a little more, but unfortunately, unlike Vista's Defragmenter, it can't run in the background - for example, my Vista defrag ran today, while I was at lunch. Did I know? Nope. I guess it's swings and roundabouts. You either want automation and simplicity, or manual and more advanced controls. Until a product comes out with both - I guess it's one or the other! You decide! :-)
It's been coming for a while, and for those of you using Vista, you've had the pleasure of it for a long time now, but Windows Media Player 11 is finally here, and, in my opinion, its a huge step up from WMP10.
I posted a while back, when the Beta 2 was released, but now that it's here, I thought I would take the chance to share what I like about Media Player 11.
Firstly, the design. I find it now so simple to use, to find my music, to create and edit playlists, to sync devices, using back / forward buttons to navigate it a godsend for me, and the album art is such a good way to display your music, and looks cool when you are sat next to someone on the train! (Depending on your music collection of course!) You can, of course, go back to the old style menu's if you like!
Secondly, and I know I mentioned this in the 'Firstly' section, and it is something I bang on about a lot when talking about Vista, but Search, for me, is the quality improvement in WMP11. I love being able to find the exact music I want, really quickly, and I mean, really quickly. The search is also context sensitive, depending on your current view in the library. For example, if I am in the 'Artist' section of the library, all my albums are organised by 'Artist', with multiple albums from the same artist stacked in a cool way, but if I then use search, it returns just those albums by that artist:
I can then double click and drill down further, and I am presented with all the tracks for that artists, separated by album. From this view, I could play all the tracks from all the albums in order, or shuffle them etc. It's just a really cool way of accessing your tracks.
I also think the way that WMP11 accesses the meta services site, to automatically update your track information online, in the background, is really cool, and is even cooler when you pull those tracks into Media Center. It really makes a difference to the user experience, being able to visualise those album covers, just as if you were looking through your CD collection in a rack at home.
Seeing as I don't actually own a portable music player yet (I'm waiting for the Zune!), I haven't really embraced downloading music from stores such as URGE just yet, but the way they integrate with WMP11, providing a consistent interface, can only be good for users. Instead of using music download sites so far, I've stuck with ripping CD's, and WMP11 has many different ripping formats that you can use.
One of the final things for me, and it relates to the organising and searching, is the ability to jump between libraries of recorded TV, video and pictures as well as music. This is something I personally find very useful. Again, the search is all context sensitive, so you could search by actor in the video library, or tags in the pictures library.
Now you may have heard that today, there has been an update to the Xbox Live Dashboard and one of the new features is the ability to stream WMV video from a Windows PC running Windows Media Player 11, Zune software, or Windows Media Connect. This is great! We all know, as Chris Benard states on his blog, that Windows Media Connect is a CPU and Memory hogger, so streaming directly between WMP11's and Extenders is so much better! Chris gives a pretty good guide on how to set all this up on his blog too.
You can also read more about this over at Digital Home.
Does this scare you?
This, if you don’t know, is Hyper-V Server 2008 R2. No proper GUI, pretty-much command-line oriented, and without doubt, in my eyes, the optimal way to deploy Hyper-V into businesses of all sizes. Why this, over the GUI version of Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V? Well, there’s less going on, reduced patches, reduced services, and it’s kind of like the Ronseal version of Hyper-V – it does exactly what it says on the tin (that’s more for the UK guys!) i.e. it’s Hyper-V, and Clustering, and no other roles. Sure it has the driver model, and the core kernel, but that’s pretty much it. It’s still manageable and deployable like your normal Windows OS’s, it’s just, well, smaller. Best of all, is it’s free for everyone and unlike others, we don’t skimp on the features of our free version. Live Migration, High Availability, Hot-Add and more, it’s all in there, for free.
Question is, how to you deploy it, configure it, and manage it, and how quick can you do it?
Answer – watch this video, and be up and running in about an hour!
In this one-off video, I walk through a bare-metal installation of Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 (RC) on 2 physical nodes, hook them up to an iSCSI SAN, configure the SAN storage, and then, from a Windows 7 (RC) laptop, validate, and build a Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 (RC) Cluster. The end result? A Highly Available, Live Migratable, Virtual Machine!
Duration: 48m 34s
Download the video, and more, from the VirtualboyTV site
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!
There's a lot of great readiness and information on the Windows Server 2008 Learning Portal, however if you want specifics on how to go from an MCSE or MCSA up to a MCTS ((Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist, which replaces MCSA/MCTS) on Windows Server 2008, you need these links:
The key exam that MCSA's need to go to the new MCTS in Windows Server 2008 is 70-648 and the MCSE's need exam number 70-649.
*** Both of these exams will be available from the 29th October 2007 ***
When you pass 70-648, you'll get the following:
and when you pass 70-649, you'll get:
Not bad for 1 exam! Good Luck!
These 2 exams form part of this new wave of Microsoft Certifications. You can read all about these here.
I certainly think it could be. For those of you who may not know what I'm barking on about - it's all about the web. Well, to be more specific, it's about Windows, IIS, SQL and PHP, as oppose to Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. Notice the common factor in both of those; the P, for PHP.
This time last year, Microsoft and Zend announced a technical collaboration to enhance the experience of running the PHP scripting language on Windows Server however, just recently, as we get closer to the launch of Windows Server 2008, there have been a few more announcements.
Server 2008, if you didn't know, contains the new and improved version of Internet Information Services, version 7.0. So, what's new about this release?
So, that's enough about IIS 7.0 in general - back to the topic - why is WISP the new LAMP? Well, up to now, PHP developers, although they will be developing on top of Windows, the platform of choice for running their web servers etc, was Linux and Apache, with a MySQL backend. Why? Well, they were designed and written to work effectively together. PHP could be handled by IIS, using CGI, however it didn't give the level of performance that running PHP on a Linux/Apache platform gave, hence it became the platform of choice. With the announcement of FastCGI however, that's changing.
This FastCGI extension is built into Server 2008, but you can download it for free, for IIS 5.1 and 6. Just a quick note - IIS has had 0 critical updates. None. Nada. Zip. Secure? I'd say so. But what does this FastCGI do?
"Most applications built for IIS take advantage of the native, multi-threaded extensibility model of IIS. Many popular applications, particularly those written or originally designed for Linux, are not multi-threaded, and instead take a multi-process approach to concurrency. While the PHP engine itself is multi-thread capable, many of the popular PHP extensions are not, requiring a single concurrent request guarantee to operate reliably. This forces the use of CGI and results in poor performance on the Windows platform. FastCGI helps these application frameworks to achieve improved performance on Windows over CGI, while allowing stable operation in production environments"
So, that means that PHP will run much faster on a Windows platform. How much faster? A lot. In some cases, an order of magnitude quicker. Check out this video if you want the proof. Looking forward to Windows Server 2008, which has FastCGI built in, Zend will distribute Zend Core, that will be fully compatible with a Server Core installation of Windows Server 2008 - awesome news. This means Zend customers can run their PHP applications on a scaled down, efficient, dedicated IIS Server Core Web Server - more secure, easy to manage and more performant - sounds good, right?
It's not however, just about how PHP runs quicker on IIS - that's just 2 parts of the WISP vs. LAMP story. PHP still needs to be able to interact effectively with a database - before now, it's been pretty much a given that when using PHP, you'll go with MySQL, but now, there is an alternative.
"Microsoft is announcing the availability, this week of the first Community Technology Preview (CTP) of the SQL Server 2005 Driver for PHP. As part of Microsoft’s continued commitment to interoperability, the PHP Driver provides an optimized way for developers to leverage SQL Server 2005 in their PHP application. With this Driver, we are proud to address the needs of customers who have asked for a Microsoft-supported solution, and bring SQL Server’s scalability to PHP developers"
So, you've now got a strong platform for development and actually running your web applications in Windows Server 2008 and IIS 7.0, along with a great database offering, all of which connect with PHP in a way that enables efficient, streamlined and powerful performance - something that was only available to PHP developers running on LAMP in the past....
If you want more resources, check these out:
If you haven't heard of Microsoft Forefront, it's a comprehensive set of security technologies, that can help to protect your infrastructure, whether it be with Forefront Client Security for unified malware protection on PC desktops and notebooks, Forefront Security for Exchange Server and Forefront Security for SharePoint for protecting key information worker server products and don't forget the Forefront Server Security Management Console for tying it all together. Whilst these products are comprehensive, what they don't really offer is deep integration. That's about to change, with Stirling.
"Forefront codename “Stirling” is an integrated security system that delivers comprehensive, coordinated protection across endpoints, messaging, and collaboration applications, and the network edge that is easier to manage and control"
"Dynamic response, an innovative feature of the Stirling integrated security system, saves IT staff considerable time by automatically responding to incoming threats.
By sharing and using security information across the IT environment, “Stirling” and dynamic response help to save time while proactively securing the environment"
To put more of a real life scenario around the technology, I've found a useful example on the Stirling website:
In this scenario, a Trojan lodges itself on an employee’s PC, creating hundreds of open connections to the Internet. The network administrator notices the Trojan after receiving an alert or looking at logs on the firewall. At that point, he calls the desktop administrator or Help Desk, which in turn looks for the infected computer and resolves the issue by disconnecting the computer from the network. More often than not, this search-and-fix process takes several hours and exposes the organization to unnecessary risk.
In the same scenario with "Stirling" deployed, Forefront Threat Management Gateway detects the open connections to the Internet and relays that information to the other Forefront security products. The information automatically triggers a response by Forefront Client Security to start a thorough malware scan on the infected computer. Depending on the results, a subsequent response is triggered by the Network Access Protection technology to quarantine the machine and block e-mail exchanges. The entire process takes a few minutes and requires no manual intervention.
There's loads of information on Stirling here: http://www.microsoft.com/forefront/stirling/en/us/default.aspx and you can also pull down the beta of the software, and you can also read a great review of the technologies here: http://windowsitpro.com/article/articleid/98813/microsofts-next-security-suite-nothing-short-of-stirling.html
Final piece of info - check out the online flash demo: Microsoft Forefront Codename Stirling Demo