blog://brycem@microsoft.com : EEC Posts

The Windows Server System Song

BryceMilton — Tue, 10 May 2005 05:36:00 GMT

Jeff Swift was asking me about royalty-free music earlier today and the first thing that popped to mind was Richard Stallman's magnificent "Free Software Song" - Jeff thanked me for my suggestion, but pointed out that it wasn't very appropriate fare for a Microsoft blog entry... He was of course right as usual, but he got me thinking: Why not introduce my very own version of this timeless classic that is (slightly) better suited to a Microsoft blog? Without any more ado, I present to you the Windows Server System Song for your listening pleasure! (MP3 version here)

Run Windows Server System Software;
Time and money, admins, spend less of both.
Run Windows Server System Software;
Time and money, admins, do more with less---

Penguinistas get tons of free press,
Sad but true, admins, sad but true
Hippy freeware can't run an enterprise;
Not "good enough", admins, hold out for great---

If you buy Penguinista freeware
Support costs, admins, Kernels Panic,
Just fdisk that kludgey OSS
Windows Server, admins, ever more---

Run Windows Server System Software;
Time and money, admins, spend less of both.
Run Windows Server System Software;
Time and money, admins, do more with less---

-Bryce

6/21/05 note to Groklaw.net readers: I wasn't my intention to mock the FSF itself, so much as it was to mock Richard Stallman's taste in music and I stand firmly by that criticism :-)

Terminal Dodgeball

BryceMilton — Fri, 15 Apr 2005 06:15:00 GMT

Last week the Terminal Services Team squared off against the EEC crew in a very one-sided dodgeball game at the ProClub in Redmond... I wasn't able to make it, but as I hear things, the score was something like EEC=3, TS=0! Stanley Jones took some video of it using a Kodak digital camera which I've put up on a streaming media server for your viewing pleasure :-)

-Bryce

iSCSI in the Real-World

BryceMilton — Wed, 13 Apr 2005 22:49:00 GMT

The EEC has recently been evaluating iSCSI technology options from some of our vendor partners - Really interesting stuff. We haven't had any requests from customers for this technology yet, but we want to get up to speed on it and gain some operational experience before they do. There are iSCSI options for our Brocade SilkWorm 24000 and are evaluating an IP7500 unit from Intransa that looks promising (below). Have any of you deployed or are you considering the use of iSCSI in production yet? What iSCSI hardware? What are you using it for?

-Bryce

Inappropriate relations with a Sun server...

BryceMilton — Sat, 12 Mar 2005 02:50:00 GMT

Wow! If a Microsoftie has a few complimentary words to say about Sun's latest Windows-compatible hardware, should he be fired for revealing his latent "hardware fetishist" tendencies? According to TheRegister, the answer is a logic-defying "yes". Fortunately, my boss doesn't look to the Register for staffing guidance, and colleagues assure me that having the Register tear into you personally is in fact something of an honor:-) At least el Reg managed to preserve the core message that Microsoft and Sun are capable of putting the customer's needs before egos (even if it was sandwiched between baseless hints at an impending termination) I'm thinking of having some nice t-shirts made for my team here at "the Beast's Enterprise Engineering Center", what do you think of enlisting Beastie's help, now that he's about to be unemployed? Ok, ok - Perhaps not that's not such a great idea, after all...

-Bryce

My boss is running a SUN workstation on his desktop!

BryceMilton — Fri, 04 Mar 2005 05:59:00 GMT

I never saw this one coming: After playing with the new WindowsXP x64 Opteron-based Sun workstations at tonight's Sun mixer held in honor of the deployment of two racks worth of new SunFire Windows Server 2003 gear, my boss cleaned off his old HP desktop and and rolled in a new Sun Workstation to use as his dektop! Am I jealous? Nah - I have an AMD 4-way reference SDV that's loaded for bear sitting under my desk that can run a small server farm of Virtual Servers, but I gotta admit that those Sun monitors have as nice a picture as I've seen yet!

-Bryce

What would an http://www.asp.net style community site look like for the Server Community?

BryceMilton — Sat, 29 Jan 2005 23:58:00 GMT

There's been talk around the halls of building 25 of exploring an IBuySpy/CommunityServer/CommunityStarter type web site to host community-generated ITPro content, provide community resources pertaining to Windows Server System products, and perhaps add a sandbox.msn.com type of area to help get early feedback on some of the things we're working on... I love the feel of the Visual Studio teams' non-Corporate feeling Community Portals like www.asp.net and www.gotdotnet.com, and the community-generated articles are my favorite feature. I had lunch the other day with Brian Goldfarb to pick his brain on his experiences in getting www.asp.net off the ground and he was full of enthusiasm and good information. What do you folks think?

-Bryce

Defining the "Windows Server System"

BryceMilton — Fri, 21 Jan 2005 04:42:00 GMT

It's a widely acknowledged fact in the software industry that we've got a pretty hot marketing machine here at Microsoft that is fueled by an endless stream of excellent products and creativity, but I've been thinking a lot recently about the "Windows Server System": While this brand name is neatly consistent with the "Microsoft Office System" brand name from a marketing perspective, from a usage perspective it is much less so...

To illustrate the point, here are some examples of the Office System at work:

When a user hits CTRL+C from Excel and CTRL+V into Powerpoint, the right things happen - The content is transformed into a dialect of the ubiquitous HTML or XML standards and transferred into your slide with formatting intact, or alternately, a Paste Options button appears in your workflow with helpful options that allow you to indicate your intent
When installing elements of the Office System, they use the same installer technology that gives the admin a tremendous amount of control over the process
They have nearly universal support for upgrading previous releases
They use forward and backwards compatible file-formats that ease transitions between versions
They have a very complete and consistent programming model
Shared functionality is engineered into shared components
Common and consistent UI design guidelines
Unified help systems
Unified product update procedures
This list could go on and on because the Office System has been engineered as a complete system of applications for several versions now...

The current suite of Windows Server System components do not yet exhibit this same level of integration and shared direction in my opinion. CTRL+C'ing a bunch of computer objects from the AD Users and Computers Snap-In and CTRL+V'ing them into a directory on my hard drive doesn't result in a nifty Paste Options menu asking me what I intended to have happen... I don't have the ubiquitous and intuitive CRUD across every object on the system through the consistent programmatic administration interface my heart aches for. I recall once having gone through the exercise of installing the majority of Windows Server System components and Microsoft Business Solutions applications onto an SBS2003 server and ending up with no fewer than 7 instances of MSDE and SQL that all had to have the SQL patches applied to them separately. Half of the databases had backup models that were not compatible with NTBackup, and that test machine must've had the worlds most fragile port 80, not to mention the half-dozen IIS vServers it took to get everything working on a single host!

There's a lot going on at Microsoft to achieve a much improved level of consistency and operational harmony\efficiency\simplicity between the various components of the Windows Server System, and to tell the truth, I'm not super-clear on what's public and what is not so I won't go into detail, but I'd like to hear what kinds of things you would suggest be included in a clear articulation of the the kind of engineering substance behind the Windows Server System Logo that you'd like to see. I'm not suggesting a server system designed by committee, but I'd love to hear what kinds of great ideas the community can add to the discussion in the hopes of arriving at what the user actually wanted in a more direct fashion.

-Bryce

Fun with PhotoStory - EEC's Morale Event

BryceMilton — Sat, 06 Nov 2004 04:01:00 GMT

After executing on grueling schedule this Summer, the EEC crew decided top blow off some steam by tearing up my boss's cabin a few hours north of here one weekend... Lots of sun, fun, and hurricanes :-) I decided to try out the new PhotoStory package to see what I could do with some of the pics we took and was impressed with its' ease of use. Without anymore ado, here's a tiny glimpse into what the "Borg" does when disconnected from the collective (and thus the reason they don't let us out of the lab much):

http://bryce.milton.com/eecblog/miscellany/Picnic2004_big.wmv (640 x 480, 9.29mb)
http://bryce.milton.com/eecblog/miscellany/Picnic2004_small.wmv (320 x 240, 2.35mb)

-Bryce

The EEC is hiring!

BryceMilton — Fri, 05 Nov 2004 05:40:00 GMT

The Enterprise Engineering Center has two really cool positions available to the right candidates... We're looking for some rare and talented professionals, and I'd be extremely grateful for any truly outstanding referrals you'd care to send our way! We need a pair of experienced consultants with the right mix of technical expertise, Enterprise solutions design and implementation experience, business acumen, customer focus, passion for technology, work ethic, server hardware expertise, networking, communications, project management, and customer skills. The two positions are, in practice, quite similar but one has a slightly heavier emphasis on Infrastructure Expertise, whereas the other places a heavier emphasis on Solutions Development Expertise. Sourcing, planning, building, executing, and evaluating EEC customer engagements is an extremely complex, challenging, and rewarding line of work that makes an impact on the full spectrum of Enterprise Server software Microsoft ships... Openings on this team come but once in a blue moon, so I'm really excited about getting the chance to add two new consultants to this team! Maybe you (or someone you happen to know) might be one of the professionals we're looking for!

-Bryce