John Howard - Senior Program Manager in the Hyper-V team at Microsoft : Blogs

ADS to deploy Windows XP?

jhoward — Wed, 09 Nov 2005 16:43:00 GMT

I have to admit, I'd never thought of this one. Yes, I've looked into using ADS (Automated Deployment Services) for deploying Windows Server 2003 and use it as part of the Virtual Server Migration Toolkit (VSMT) solution but never thought of using it to deploy Windows XP. Unsupported it may be, but Mark has some great info on how to go about solving some of the problems.

Free Technet Magazine Subscription

jhoward — Tue, 13 Sep 2005 12:32:00 GMT

...but only if you're US based. I know I get readers from all over the world, and know many of you are US based. I'm hoping to follow up with the powers that be to see if we can get some free subscriptions also in the UK too! The Technet Magazine, Microsofts magazine for IT Pro's is going to be beginning a regular publishing schedule from this autumn. If you're also a talented budding author, please also let me know - they're looking for authors covering all subjects including Exchange, Office, Active Directory, IIS, Security,..... and so on.

Also, don't forget the Industry Insiders blog. If you haven't seen it, here's your chance to be able to demonstrate your ability in solving real-world problems publicly and on microsoft.com. If you would like to make a contribution, drop me an email for further details.

Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) Download Link

jhoward — Mon, 13 Jun 2005 14:41:00 GMT

While on the subject of patching here is the home page for the newly released Windows Server Update Services (WSUS), the next generation of SUS. To find out more about patching, management and securing your networks, have a browse through Eileens or Steves blog.

WSUS is a patch and update component of Windows Server which offers an effective and quick way to help you get secure and stay secure. WSUS is an important step towards delivering a core software distribution and update management infrastructure in Windows. WSUS has both server and client components.

Most of your immediate questions about WSUS are answered in the FAQ site.

Virtual Server 2005 comparison with Virtual PC 2004 - definitive statement

jhoward — Wed, 25 May 2005 23:37:00 GMT

Now this is worth a read having just found about it internally. Megans whitepaper which I blogged about recently is now available in its completed from on microsoft.com. The whitepaper discusses in detail the differences between Virtual PC 2004 and Virtual Server 2005. I know from my own experiences that this is something which many people do not fully understand, not just be those outside of Microsoft, but more often from internal people (who I won't mention my name just to be on the safe side :-)). This paper provides you with all the information you need and can be downloaded here.

Megan Davis - Virtual Server Superstar

jhoward — Mon, 16 May 2005 21:57:00 GMT

I blog about Virtual Server a lot (as you may have noticed), but I'm not alone. Megan Davis is a technical writer/author at Microsoft who especially focuses on Virtual Server & Virtual PC and is extremely active both internally within Microsoft answering employee questions on discussion groups and the like and externally via her blog and newsgroups. Rather than me regurgitate what Megan has recently blogged about which would hardly be fair (and she did beat me to it:-) ), here's some links which I think will be really useful to you if you're interested in knowing more about Virtual Server. These entries have all posted by Megan over the past few weeks.

Dealing with a VHD that grew too large is about how to compact your hard disks
Increasing the size of a VHD is a couple of ways to do exactly what it says in the title
How Microsoft is using Virtual Server documents some really cool ways we're using VS to solve solutions internally.

There's lots more up there - have a browse through, I promise you won't be disappointed. Megan, you're a star :-) Keep up the fantastic work!!!

Virtual Server Migration Toolkit (VSMT) Guidelines

jhoward — Fri, 06 May 2005 11:11:00 GMT

If you're interested in using VSMT (Virtual Server Migration Toolkit) for migrating a physical machine into a virtual machine, there was a new KB article posted up a few days ago which gives you some general guidelines. Note that there is one error in the article - it currently says it applies to Virtual PC 2004. This is incorrect (and I've submitted feedback). It actually applies to Virtual Server 2005.

If you want to see the VSMT steps through a series of blogcasts, have a look here . Thanks to Kevin for giving me the link to the KB - it was one which had slipped me by.

Virtual Server 2005 SCSI Shunt Driver

jhoward — Tue, 03 May 2005 08:15:00 GMT

It's rare you see something in a beta release which makes such a dramatic difference to performance. This is one such instance. If you want to save yourself over 5 hours when installing a Virtual Machine under Virtual Server 2005, read on....

Last week at home, I was installing a new Windows Server 2003 R2 beta server configured with single virtual SCSI hard disk under Virtual Server 2005 SP1 beta. This was on my "big" laptop which physically has an IDE disk (don't they all though?). I was getting really frustrated by the length of time it took to install - just under 6 hours at 100% CPU throughout. At least I didn't need the heating on that day.

At the time, I hadn't even thought about using the SCSI Shunt Driver floppy which is introduced by Virtual Server 2005 SP1, as my understanding was, as per Ben's blog entry last week, that it generally only made a difference to users who had physical SCSI hard disks in the host.

To find out the difference the SCSI Shunt Driver floppy made, I repeated the installation once more but using the driver floppy using F6 during the text mode install portion. The difference was staggering: 6 hours down to 55 minutes including patching, anti-virusing, defragmenting, pre-compacting, compacting and the installation of VM additions. I was just astonished. That probably means the actual install was more like 40 minutes. Of course, I can't guarantee that you'll necessarily see quite that much difference, but it has to be worth a try next time you're installing a VM.

Remote Desktop Assistant 1.0

jhoward — Thu, 28 Apr 2005 04:23:00 GMT

Sometimes the most blindingly obvious and simple utility become a weapon of choice in your toolbox arsenal. Here's one such example I stumbled across a few days ago and am now wondering how I ever coped before. Over on longhornblogs.com, Robert (who I remain indebted to) has put up the Remote Desktop Assistance utility to make sure your list of remote desktops is up to date. Take a look for yourself - if you use Remote Desktop Connections a lot, this could be the tool of choice for you.

Do you use blogging software?

jhoward — Tue, 19 Apr 2005 10:01:00 GMT

Something which cropped up internally over the past couple of days has been a discussion about how many people at Microsoft must have moved on beyond using the standard HTML interface to their blog engine for posting. I kept quiet at this point once discussions got round to all sorts of software I'd never heard of, not wanting to admin that I still use just the basic interface. It works afterall...... On the assumption that my colleagues won't be reading this, for those who blog regularly, do you use any particular software and if so, which one and why? I'm expecially interested to hear from you if the software works with Community Server which is the engine behind blogs.technet.com and also runs under Windows Server 2003.

My blog has moved - please update your links

jhoward — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 17:39:00 GMT

Some of you may have noticed recent changes to the blogs.msdn.com site. In case some of you are subscribing to http://blogs.msdn.com/jhoward to read my blog, or are linking to the blogs.msdn.com/jhoward site, please can you update them to point to http://blogs.technet.com/jhoward instead. Thanks!

MSN Messenger 5.1 Tab Functions

jhoward — Sat, 12 Feb 2005 02:49:00 GMT

I just stumbled across Marts blog entry and thought this was such a cool way to use of the tabbed capability of Windows Messenger 5.1 to embed a view of your Exchange email. Had to share it! Nice one Mart & Stef- great tip.

PKI and Certificate Management Information in Windows Server 2003

jhoward — Wed, 02 Feb 2005 22:16:00 GMT

While on the subject of Certificates/Encryption/IPSec/PKI in general yesterday, I was looking around for some good information on how PKI works to post up. One white paper which stuck-out from the pile was published in December last year (so it's reasonably up to date) by David B. Cross and Avi Ben-Menahem entitled "Key Archival and Management in Windows Server 2003". Now this isn't exactly going to be a best seller, but I found it very easy to read and understand, so all kudos to David & Ali. Joking aside, it is crucial to pay consideration to this subject if you are planning to implement or already have implemented a certificate authority within your organisation.

For further info on PKI in general, this link is a good starting point. The home page for Cryptography on Technet is here and information on EFS (Encrypting File System) in XP and Windows Server 2003 can be found here. Otherwise my colleague Steve Lamb will be able fill in the gaps.

MSN Search Launched

jhoward — Tue, 01 Feb 2005 22:29:00 GMT

Kind of hard to miss the launch party. Well, as it happens I did :-)

Even though I'd consciously seen Bill Gates plastered over the home page of both www.msn.com and www.msn.co.uk on-and-off all morning, it never dawned on me to read what the story might be about.

You can find out more from Christopher Payne, Corporate VP for MSN Search on the msnsearch blog, who cunningly blogged it just before midnight last night.

Links:
MSN Search: http://search.msn.com or http://search.msn.co.uk for the UK audience.
MSN Search Toolbar: http://toolbar.msn.com or http://toolbar.msn.co.uk/ for the UK Audience

VMRC - simultaneous sessions

jhoward — Fri, 28 Jan 2005 18:32:00 GMT

This is fantastic. I love using the Virtual Machine Remote Console for accessing VMs running under Microsoft Virtual Server 2005, but it never dawned on me until I saw this blog entry by Peter Provost, that you could run up two instances of the VMRC client from two different machines to connect to one Virtual Machine "guest". This is great for true remote desktop sharing, which is absolutely not easy to do when connecting through NAT/firewalls/routers etc. And yes, before you ask, I have attempted this with Messenger (and failed).

Makes me wish I was doing Extreme/Pair Programming (XP) - this capability is a great enabler. Combine it with IM, VOIP, a WebCam and VPN, you truly can collaborate very effectively from anywhere.

The other things I particular like about VMRC (apart from being able to access the BIOS space which I blogged about a few days ago) is that it's light-weight in terms of screen "real-estate". I find the client in the web-based admin console a bit bloated due to the space taken up by the browser itself. VMRC is minimalist in this respect. Don't forget, you can also maximise the screen with the Host-Key+Enter sequence, so the experience ends up just like a maximised RDP session - except that multiple users can join the party.

Next stop is to find some sort of analysis comparing the merits of the VMRC, RDP and "Messenger" protocols, all of which provide very similar functionality. Is one any more efficient than the other in terms of compression/throughput? If anyone has any links or info on this, please let me know.

Blogcast on Channel9 - the name is here to stay!

jhoward — Wed, 19 Jan 2005 07:35:00 GMT

How cool is this - Robert Scoble just posted up on channel 9 about Blogcasting. My colleague Eileen has already recorded couple of blogcasts - for example here, and I've done a series of blogcasts to explain about VSMT - there's lots more in the pipeline especially from the UK IT Pro team, so stay tuned!

There's been a lot of contention over the name blogcast, but it looks like it's here to stay..... A blogcast differs from a podcast in that it is audio plus video.