David Ziembicki on Infrastructure Architecture : Windows 7

Everything you ever wanted to know about VHDs

davidzi — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 18:33:49 GMT

The Virtual Hard Disk Getting Started Guide is 61 pages of great info outlining all the relevant scenarios, configurations, and options for using VHD files. This was release about 3 weeks ago but I missed it at the time due to training and TechReady9. The guide outlines basic scenarios like booting Windows 7 or Server 2008 R2 from VHD as well as more advanced scenarios like migrating at VHD between physical and virtual environments, etc. If nothing else this is worth a quick read of the table of contents because you will likely see things in there that you didn’t realize you could do with VHDs.

Here is the official description of the doc:

“Windows Server® 2008 R2 and Windows® 7 is the first version of Windows to provide native support for virtual hard disks (VHDs). This guide describes the scenarios that guided the development of this feature, detailed steps about how to employ the functionality (including image creation, deployment, and maintenance), and the associated tools, scripts, and APIs.”

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=d2afacbb-5af6-45c2-b275-932116e27b0b

TechReady9 Day 4 and 5 Wrap-up

davidzi — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 01:46:22 GMT

Day 4 and 5 of TechReady were action packed, I didn’t even have time to post yesterday. I skipped the first session timeslot on Thurs to prepare for the double session I was presenting with Citrix. The double session format basically allocates two sessions (3 hours) to one topic letting you get into a lot more detail. The session went very well and the feedback surveys so far have been very positive. We spent the first half of the session describing the Microsoft+Citrix VDI solution and its components. The second half was filled with demos of the solution with different types of clients accessing VDI sessions and walkthroughs of the administrator consoles.

After my session and some internal meetings, I attended a session on Microsoft’s Dynamic Datacenter Toolkit. I haven’t had much time to explore this yet but will be focusing on that a lot in the next couple months. For an example of a hosting partner using this solution, check out MaximumASP.com and their MaxV solution.

Finally on Day 4 I attended a session on the Remote Desktop Services (RDS) improvements in Windows Server 2008 R2, particularly the built-in VDI solution. I’ve been so focused on the Microsoft+Citrix solution that I haven’t had time to dig into the Microsoft in-box solution. This is being positioned toward branch and or lower complexity environments while the Microsoft+Citrix solution is targeted toward large or higher complexity implementations. The improvements to RDP and Hyper-V are the real enablers for the VDI scenarios in R2.

Day 5 opened with multiple demos of Office 2010 and Office Web Applications which are really going to open up completely new scenarios for rich collaboration. Next was a keynote from my favorite Microsoft executive, Bob Muglia, head of the Server and Tools Business. Bob covered improvements in Windows, Hyper-V, SharePoint, SQL. The thing TechReady is best for is stepping back and seeing the scope of this release of software we are going to have this year and the solid advancement in capability and features on almost all fronts simultaneously.

After taking care of some logistical items, I attended a session on Hyper-V security. Not much new info in that one, basically there is good security guidance for Hyper-V in the Windows Server 2008 Security Guide as well as the Hyper-V Resource kit. Finally, I attended a session on Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 branch office infrastructure. This covered the new Branch Cache feature which can substantially reduce bandwidth utilization in branches by caching content as well as other new features and improvements to SMB, DFS, etc.

All in all, TechReady9 was a great time. I’ve still got a list of sessions that I want to see that is longer than the list of sessions that I actually saw! I’m glad they were all recorded…

Tomorrow and Sunday I’ll be teaching a 2-day VDI class along with some MCS and Citrix colleagues. Should be a good class, the students will learn about and set up the entire Microsoft+Citrix VDI solution over the course of the two days. Then finally on Monday I will head home after almost two and half weeks on the mothership!

Networking and Remote Desktop Technical Resources

davidzi — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 20:15:15 GMT

The links below lead to a series of technical whitepapers on DirectAccess, BranchCache, and Remote Desktop Services in Windows Server 2008 R2.

Networking Resources: DirectAccess and BranchCache

Remote Desktop Resources: Kerberos, User Profiles, RemoteApp

Facebook, Twitter, and FriendFeed in One Client with .NET!

davidzi — Fri, 08 May 2009 23:56:15 GMT

So I’ve been using Seesmic Desktop as a Twitter and Facebook client for the last week or two. Very cool app built on Adobe Air. Today via @EverythingMS I heard about sobees, a .NET app that aggregates Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed (yeah!), and many other sources. I’ve only just started using it in the last hour but it looks very slick. In addition to bringing in a bunch of networks, it really shows off .NET/WPF and what you can do with UI design. It supports full Aero transparency, the ability to zoom text sizes in and out, multi-monitor support and a bunch of other UI niceties. There are several color themes available and a wide range of layout options for arranging the services. As an FYI it seems to run fine so far on my Windows 7 RC installation.

I don’t know anything about the makers of the software yet so other than pointing out that it looks like a cool beta implementation your mileage may vary.

Below you can see a screenshot of three services (you can add in more) updating in real-time (Note: I blanked out some of the Facebook status on purpose). Definitely worth checking out. They also have a video up if you wan to see it in action.

Remote Server Administration Tools for Windows 7 RC

davidzi — Wed, 06 May 2009 13:24:44 GMT

The Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT) have been updated for the Windows 7 RC build. I’ve been using a combination of the RSAT and the Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 Beta console on my Windows 7 machine to manage my Hyper-V lab machines and its been working very well so far.

The main download page is here.

Microsoft Remote Server Administration Tools for Windows 7 RC (x86): http://download.microsoft.com/download/1/F/C/1FC27A82-15D9-4D93-B3BC-24204175F9DF/Windows6.1-KB958830-x86.msu

Microsoft Remote Server Administration Tools for Windows 7 RC (x64): http://download.microsoft.com/download/1/F/C/1FC27A82-15D9-4D93-B3BC-24204175F9DF/Windows6.1-KB958830-x64.msu

RSAT Client is available to all customers as part of the supplemental Microsoft Software License Terms to Windows 7 licenses.

Once you’ve installed the update, you can manage what tools you want enabled via the Control Panel under Programs and Features, Turn Windows Features on or off:

This is the list of Windows Server administration tools which are included in RSAT Client for Win7 RC:

Server Administration Tools:

Server Manager

Role Administration Tools:

Active Directory Certificate Services (AD CS) Tools
Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) Tools
Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services (AD LDS) Tools
DHCP Server Tools
DNS Server Tools
File Services Tools
Hyper-V Tools
Terminal Services Tools

Feature Administration Tools:

BitLocker Password Recovery Viewer
Failover Clustering Tools
Group Policy Management Tools
Network Load Balancing Tools
SMTP Server Tools
Storage Explorer Tools
Storage Manager for SANs Tools
Windows System Resource Manager Tools

Are Solid State Drives in your Windows 7 Future?

davidzi — Wed, 06 May 2009 00:15:13 GMT

The E7 blog has an interesting article on SSD performance and optimizations made in Windows 7 to take advantage of them. The E7 post also links to an in depth AnandTech article that goes into more detail on SSD’s and has some benchmark comparisons between various drives. I’m definitely planning to get an SSD drive when I get my new laptop in a couple months. I’ll likely be getting one of the large workstation class laptops like the Dell M6400 or the Lenovo W700. The only thing that might make me wait longer is if we get a release schedule from Intel on their Clarksdale mobile processors which are basically mobile Nehalems for laptops. I’m leaning toward the M6400 since it has dual internal hard drive bays and supports up to 16GB of RAM which is insane for a laptop. With the two drive bays I figure I’ll run an 80GB SSD for the OS and get a large 7200 RPM SATA for the other bay. I’ll go with 8GB of RAM initially for budget purposes and expand next year when the prices come down. I’ll be dual booting (or booting from VHD) between Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. With the OS and Apps on an SSD that setup should really fly.

A new scenario that may be interesting (and demo a good chunk of our virtualization and VDI capability would be to set up a full Windows Server 2008 R2 / VMM 2008 R2 infrastructure on this machine. Basically run 2 – 3 VMs for the infrastructure to present a Windows 7 VDI client virtual machine. Then from the physical OS use Remote Desktop Services to access the Windows 7 VM. With Aero remoting I should get a near desktop like experience.

Back to SSDs, in addition to desktop/laptop scenarios, I’m hearing more and more about them in enterprise storage scenarios. A lot of the big vendors have really evolved their architectures over the last five years to take advantage of and virtualize different tiers of disk architectures and SSD are getting slotted in as the next tier closest to the cache in a lot of cases. From a virtualization perspective this will be interesting as I think SSD’s will be an enabler for somewhat better density and a lot better performance. Since I’ve been doing a lot of work recently with Hyper-V and Citrix’s Provisioning Server, I’m especially interested in seeing how VDI performance on pooled (shared virtual disk) scenarios is improved using Windows 7 VMs and SSDs on the Provisioning Server.

Running Windows Server 2008 R2 on a Laptop?

davidzi — Sun, 03 May 2009 16:18:00 GMT

Robert has a good post up for folks wanting to run Windows Server 2008 R2 on their laptops. A lot of us do that so that we can run Hyper-V for demos or development purposes. If you enable the Desktop Experience feature along with Wireless LAN and a few other things, you effectively get a Windows 7-like desktop and the ability to run Hyper-V.

One of the challenges of this setup is that for some of the hardware in your laptop, Windows Server 2008 R2 may not detect drivers for it whereas if you were running Windows 7, the hardware would be detected and appropriate drivers downloaded from Windows Update. Robert’s post describes installing Windows 7 into another partition on the laptop and letting Windows Update detect and download the drivers into the Windows 7 install. Then you can boot into Windows Server 2008 R2, go into device manager and search the DriverStore on the Windows 7 partition to find the drivers.

If you know specifically all the hardware in your notebook, either via the Vendor’s website or by taking a screenshot of Device Manager before you upgrade, another way to approach this without doing a separate install of Windows 7 is to search the Microsoft Update Catalog. This KB article talks about how to do that but basically you can search the catalog and download the driver packages directly without Windows Update having to detect your hardware. In my example, I have a Dell D820 with an NVIDIA Quadro NVS 120 display adapter. Sometimes Windows Server 2008 and R2 don’t detect this. Since I know exactly what card I have, I can go to the catalog, search for that adapter, and find then download the Windows 7 driver and install that. The screenshot below shows what the catalog looks like. You can search and add multiple drivers to the download basket then download them all.

Bottom line, if you don’t know all the hardware in your machine, use Robert’s method of installing Windows 7 in another partition to identify all the hardware and use the drivers you download there. If you know your hardware, give the update catalog a try.

Windows 7 RC Available: What a day for my MSDN to expire!

davidzi — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 19:33:45 GMT

By now you’ve probably heard that the Windows 7 RC is available for download for TechNet and MSDN subscribers. Unfortunately for me, my MSDN subscription expired in the last couple days #%$! and won’t be renewed for another day or two. Fortunately, with some help from a fellow subscriber, I will have a fresh ISO this afternoon. If you poke around the MSDN site some there is another RC in there you may be interested in as well… For those who aren’t MSDN or TechNet subscribers, the RC will be available on May 5 (see the link above).

I’ve been using the Beta on my primary laptop and my home desktop since it was released and have been really impressed. Can’t wait to upgrade both to the RC. I’m also interested in testing the Virtual PC and XP Mode betas. I’ll post thoughts on those once I’ve spent some time with them.