I had a comment from my last post about the new SMB2 protocol that I wanted to follow up on...There was mention of support for 'Symbolic Links' in the post and Mr. Kevin Owen asked for some clarification.  So, Kevin - straight from the developer who wrote the code:

In Vista/Longhorn server, the file system (NTFS) will start supporting a new filesystem object (examples of existing filesystem objects are files, folders etc.). This new object is a symbolic link. Think of a symbolic link as a pointer to another file system object (it can be a file, folder, shortcut or another symbolic link). So then you ask how is that different from a short-cut (the .lnk file)?  Well, a shortcut will only work when used from within the Windows shell, it is a construct of the shell, and other apps don’t understand short-cuts. To other apps, short-cuts look just like a file. With symbolic links, this concept is taken and is implemented within the file system. Apps when they open a symbolic link will now open the target by default (i.e. what the link points to), unless they explicitly ask for the symbolic link itself to be opened. Note symbolic links are an NTFS feature.

Now why is this relevant to the SMB2 protocol? This is because, for symbolic links to behave correctly, they should be interpreted on the client side of a file sharing protocol (otherwise this can lead to security holes). SMB2 understands the concept of symbolic links and evaluates the links on the client. This is the support that is added in SMB2.0

- Ward Ralston

So I'm super late sharing info on MSFT's first time presence at VMworld conference and other spots. VMworld took place Oct. 18-20. Instead of me saying it, here's comments from a guy down the hall who attended the show:

“What are you doing here?” was by far the most frequently asked question at our booth at VMworld this year.  Attendees were pleasantly surprised to see that we had the audacity to show up, and that VMware allowed it!  Regardless, the booth was pretty much packed from the start of the show.  We distributed thousands of CDs and vouchers for Virtual Server and Virtual Server R2, and distributed thousands of Windows Server R2 RC0 CDs.  The high-availability demos for Virtual Server were a big hit and the team was in constant delivery mode. There were also quite a few questions regarding the licensing changes and whether they applied to both VMware’s products and Virtual Server.

Another highlight of the show was Diane Green (CEO of VMware) stopping by our booth to receive her free copies of Virtual Server ... I'm waiting for the pictures. And if their show moves outside the U.S., we'll be set because Virtual Server 2005 R2 will be localized in French, Italian, German, Spanish, Korean, Chinese (traditional and simplified).

Last week was also Gartner's IT Expo and Symposium conference. Tom Bittman, the Microsoft watcher at Gartner, spoke favorably of the virtualization licensing announcement in his session on Microsoft and Windows overall. He commended Microsoft for its leadership in virtualization pricing based on instances running instead of installed. In addition, he said that "the whole software market needs to change" in reference to software licensing models. Alvin Park, Gartner's licensing analyst, has also made positive mention of Microsoft’s work with both multicore and virtualization licensing – noting other vendors will follow suite.

Also last week of HP's Tech World conference. Here's a summary of that trip report:

Virtual Server was the hit of the symposium.  We started off stingy and then opened the flood gates.   We had the Virtual Server demo displayed on the plasma. Virtual Server was actually running on the [HP] DL380’s  (3 total) with 4 virtual machines on each.  The story of our booth was consolidation through virtualization using blade technology.  

According to this article, IDC sees the fastest virtualization adoption on Windows and Linux servers. Here's the excerpt:

According to surveys by IDC, more than 75 percent of companies with more than 500 employees are deploying servers with virtualization technologies, and customer satisfaction with these technologies is very high. More than half of the virtualized machines deployed to date are being used in production, including for mission-critical workloads. As for revenue, virtualized systems that run Unix, OS/400, and mainframe operating systems like z/VM and z/OS currently account for the bulk of spending on virtualized systems, but there is rapid growth on Windows and Linux platforms, says IDC's analysts. Server buyers are telling IDC that, on average, they expect about 45 percent of all servers they buy in 2006 to have virtualization technologies.

Patrick

Want to get a better understanding of the new DFS Namespace and Replication in the upcoming release of R2? Join the DFS chat on Oct 27 at 10AM PST. This is your chance to chat with the developers and product managers responsible for this nifty new technology.

This chat will focus on the introduction of the new DFS Replication engine. We will discuss the feature set that enables it to efficiently replicate large quantities of data over the WAN. We will discuss mechanisms designed to optimize replication in challenging environments.

October 27, 10:00 AM  http://www.microsoft.com/technet/community/chats/default.mspx

As we get closer to Beta 2 of Windows Server codenamed "Longhorn" - there will be a lot of talk on the bigger features that Longhorn will deliver....Network Access Protection, Read-Only Domain Controller, Server Core, Secure Startup, Role Management Tools, the list goes on.

These are all no doubt nifty and cool features, but the lesser-known features of Longhorn Server are sometimes the ones that can really make a difference to a customer. 

One of the features that have come a long way with Longhorn server is the SMB protocol - now SMB2. The original SMB protocol is filled with many limitations that were acceptable when it was designed, but seems completely inadequate now that technology has grown significantly.

We have listened to our customers on the limitations that were present with the original SMB protocol and have removed the restrictive constants in the protocol so we never need to worry about the protocol itself being the limiting factor for scalability. This includes increasing the number of concurrent open file handles on the server, the number of shares that a server can share out amongst other key enhacements which inlcude:

• SMB2 will have transaction support, i.e. full two-phase commit transactional semantics are available over the new SMB protocol. This takes advantage of the new Transactional File System (TxF) feature in NTFS in Longhorn Server
• Client Side Encryption. This allows over the wire encryption of data, i.e. a file is encrypted on the client and sent out to the server where previously the file would have been sent in the clear over the wire and encrypted on the server
• Support for symbolic links over the new protocol
• Supports an arbitrary extensible way of compounding operations to reduce round trips. This is what will primarily enable less chattiness which has often been a major pain point
• The new protocol supports larger buffer sizes than previously allowed

Cool, huh?

- Ward Ralston

Rarely do we see/hear public comparisons -- stripped of marketing -- of server technology at vendor conferences. Even more rare (I'm thinking ivory-billed woodpecker) do we see/hear a vendor say that one of its partners products is flat-out better than the other. But such was the case at HP Technology Forum 2005 when a program manager for HP ProLiant came clean on the performance and architecture differences of AMD Opteron vs. Intel Xeon processors. Here are excerpts from the IDG News article:

Opteron's Hypertransport interconnects and integrated memory controller will allow it to maintain a slight advantage over Dempsey and a significant advantage over Tulsa, Cooper told a group of HP users and partners looking for more information on dual-core processors.

Even though Intel is increasing the speed of the links between the Dempsey and Tulsa processors and the rest of the system, Opteron's connection to main memory runs at the clock speed of the processor, 2.4GHz in the case of the fastest Opteron chip, said Steve Cumings, group manager for ProLiant servers, during the briefing. This gives the single-core Opteron an advantage over the single-core Xeon, but in the dual-core world Opteron also benefits from another high-speed link that directly connects both cores on the chip, he said. The two cores on Intel's dual-core processors have to send data outside the processor, and then back into the chip, in order to exchange information.

Dempsey, Intel's dual-core Xeon for servers with two processors, should be very close in performance to Opteron, Cooper said. AMD's advantage over Intel's designs are more pronounced in servers with four processors, and the Opteron 800 series should have a clear advantage over Intel's Tulsa processor early next year, he said.

From folks I talk to, the 4-way ProLiant DL585 has been a big success with enterprise customers. And we all realize that AMD built a better mousetrap with the 64bit Opteron. But to hear it from HP, who sits at the crossroads of so many tech vendors and typically takes a neutral position, is refreshing and certainly adds greater validity to the comments.

Patrick