Month: July 2008

ConfigMgr 2007 R2 Release Candidate Available

System Center Configuration Manager 2007 Release 2 (SCCM R2) is available for download for the purposes of testing and evaluation.  What does this offer you?

  • Support for application virtualisation (SoftGrid) – I like the sound of SoftGrid and know some people who rave about it.  Haven’t played with it yet because it’s got a limited (Software Assurance) market.
  • ForeFront Client Security integration – I was just asked about this yesterday.
  • Report on SCCM 2007 R2 using SQL Reporting Services – This will probably appeal to the larger customers who have SQL Reporting skills in house.  Honestly, that’s not all that common a skill.
  • Client health monitoring using a set of tools and reports – Yeah!  This is necessary.  The most common problem I have had with the SMS family is clients failing because of "stale" computer accounts.
  • OS Deployment Improvements: Deploy to a computer without pre-configuring a computer account.  Excellent!  Who needed all that extra manual work.  I might as well have just used ImageX.  Now we have a solution I can live with.  Multicast Deployment is added.  That’s the last justifiable criticism the Ghost fans had.  You can also now run command line tasks using alternate credentials.

One final note.  Some of the rather quick SCCM MVP’s have found that the R2 installation (20MB which installs on top of SCCM 2007 SP1) will only install on an evaluation edition of SCCM 2007 SP1.  Doh! 

I’m planning on installing a Hyper-V lab at home this week so I can get playing.

Hyper-V KVP Exchange aka Data Exchange

Taylor Brown has been running a series of posts on his blog about Hyper-V Data Exchange.  It’s one of the integration services available on each VM.  The idea is that you can query a certain section of the registry (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftVirtual MachineGuestParameters) on either the guest or the parent.  You can also write to there as well.

That brought up a question in my mind.  There are some environments where this would be very bad.  Can you disable this?  Sure you can!  Open up the properties of the VM in question and clear the tick box for the Data Exchange integration service.  Voila: it’s disabled.

Windows XP Service Pack 3 Coming to an Automatic Update Near You

Windows XP SP3 will be released via Automatic Updates pretty soon.  This means that unless you take certain steps, you can expect SP3 to install onto all XP PC’s that have AU enabled.  I’m extra careful with service packs because they can affect business application support.  So a complete automatic deployment without manual testing or control is not probably ideal.

There’s a few things you can do:

  • Allow this to happen: That’s OK is a smaller company where you’re happy with it already.  Maybe you already trust the installer on your hardware platforms and with your software.  Beware anyone who has a HP machine with and AMD processor and OEM installed XP Media Edition.  There’s some gotchas there you’ll want to Google.
  • Block the install using the Vista SP1 and XP SP3 blocker tool:  This works for 12 months from the release of the service pack.
  • Control you updates: Use something like WSUS or System Center Configuration Manager to control what updates are approved and deployed on your network from a central console and use a test lab to evaluate and test.

Ramsay’s IT Nightmares Revisited

Way, way back I talked about the parallels between running a restaurant and running an IT infrastructure/business.  I’d been watching Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares and everything Gordon Ramsay was saying rang true to me.

In my original post I pointed out the following as being keys for a successful IT implementation or business:

  • Ingredients: Use the best products that are suitable for your business.  Don’t just look for what is cheap or what you’ve been comfortable with in the past.  Anticipate your future growth and requirements.  Engineer flexibility.  Learn from your mistakes.  And don’t accept mediocrity or down right awful software.  You’ve also got to find the correct blend of ingredients.  Find solutions that work together as easily as possible.  In my college software engineering classes we learned that sometimes buying in the more expensive off-the-shelf solution that did the job was often cheaper over the long term than developing internally or reconfiguring something cheaper.  Be open to those alternatives.
  • Good communication: This is a 3 way process including the owner/management, staff and the customer.  The business needs to listen to the customer to know what service to provide.  Don’t just expect the mountain to come to you.  It doesn’t work like that for us mere mortals.  The owner/management must communicate their vision to the staff.  And the owner/management needs to listen to the staff because they are the eyes and ears of the business.  If the business has recruited well, then they have hired experts.  Use that internal expertise and develop the business using well founded knowledge instead of pipe dreams founded on misinterpretations of breakfast seminar.
  • Keep it simple: I’m all for being creative.  That little script here or a scheduled job there can be the difference between being OK and looking like a genius to your customer.  Building an enterprise out of a cobweb of that is pure nuts.  Imagine an administrator planning on managing many hundreds of mission critical Windows servers via scripts?!?!?  Talk about a nightmare.  I can install SCOM to do that in 3 days and have a 100% completely managed infrastructure with reporting, in-depth control and trust in the solution.  Sometimes doing the MacGuyver thing is cool.  Sometimes you’ve got to step back and thing bigger and simpler.  It’s almost like a state of mind where you let your focus drift back from the detail while keeping it in vision.
  • The customer: There is no business if there is no customer.  That customer might be the business you work for – they can "leave you" by outsourcing your job if you don’t cut the mustard.  And they still might just do that if management has a brainfart to cut costs, e.g. a company laying off 15 staff and replacing them with 77 consultants :-).  It might be a traditional customer who will leave you or never sign a contract if what you provide isn’t what they want or need.

I’m going to add a couple of more bullet points to this:

  • The owner/management: The latest series of Kitchen Nightmares showed how a restaurant can fail if the owner is not up to the job.  This applies equally in IT.  I’ve worked for a few companies in the last few years and I’ve seen how the owner/management can steer a boat towards the inevitable fall over a waterfall.  Whether it was those who locked themselves away in an office and surfing the web and chatting with friends about pipe dreams, those who think they know everything there is to know and put their fates in the hands of a consulting firm that’s being screwing up and ripping them off for years while ignoring advice to the contrary or those companies that split IT into competing factions where work is not done because it falls between the cracks.  One thing that was common was that their IT infrastructures were 100% s***.  I was brought in and either given nothing to do or they didn’t want to listen.  Unless the captain wants to work, the boat will never reverse course.  It’s more than just talking.  You’ve got to get down and get your hands dirty.  Decisions need to be made.  Work must be done.  Changes need to start at the top.  Sorry!  I’ve also had the opposite experience where the owner/management are completely committed and passionate about the success of the enterprise.  I’m lucky to be there right now.  I enjoy starting work in the morning for the first time since 2005.  That energy feeds from the top through the staff.
  • Staff: You must recruit well.  I guess I see three types of administrator/engineer.  There’s the 10:00-16:00 person who comes in to to a job.  They don’t care about the job.  They have no passion.  They don’t learn.  Anything new is work for consultants or contractors.  Anyway, "I just want to be doing XYSTSJ instead of this.  This is just to pay the bills".  Those folks are in the vast majority in the business.  They produce s*** and the infrastructure is s***.  There is the hard slogger.  This is the person who comes in 100% committed to working their best.  They want to learn and they are good, honest people.  There only downfall is that despite their great work ethic, things can be done a little bit more efficiently.  Then there is the lazy admin.  Lazy; isn’t that bad?  Not necessarily.  I class myself as a lazy admin.  I’d rather have someone or something else do the hard work for me.  Such as?  Why not let the network look after itself?  It is possible, you know.  It’s not just marketing.  I’ve done the Dynamic Systems Initiative and Optimised Infrastructure thing before.  A team of 3 of us ran 170+ globally located servers and were doing 3 hours a day of troubleshooting.  We could focus the rest of the time on more interesting work and on projects that added value to the competitiveness of the business.  In this case, being "lazy" was a good thing.
  • Passion/Commitment: Being in this business mean spending more time than just 7.5 hours a day a the office.  To be the best you’ve got to be flexible and work that little bit more.  All of the alpha geeks I know read IT blogs, books, etc after work.  They go to evening seminars.  The best owners/managers I’ve worked for make personal sacrifices for the sake of the business and their staff, e.g. coming in on that evening to help out an engineer who is working on a severity 1 issue or being in the office when there is a maintenance weekend, even if they have nothing to do.  This is a key to success.

So that’s what I’ve learned from the restaurant business over the last series of Ramsays’ show and how it applies to our business.  I just found a YouTube video where he gives 5 keys to success.  They seem to apply to our business from what I’ve seen over the last few years:

  1. Passion: Everything you do as a leader influences the staff.
  2. Commitment: Don’t get into business if you’re seeing it as a hobby.  This isn’t a way to get yourself away playing golf, cruising around town in a fast car or playing Playstation all day long.  This is work, not just for your employees but also for yourself.
  3. Competition: Know them.  Strengths, weaknesses opportunities and threats – good old SWOT analysis from the marketing classes back in college.  Knowing your competition means you can beat them.  The best American Football players spend more time studying their competition in film rooms probably more than they’ll be in the gym or on the practice field.  Be able to offer something more, better or different.
  4. Creative Input: Don’t just rest on your laurels.  Always look for something new.  Invest time and money in R&D.  If you don’t, you will stagnate and your competition will leap ahead of you.
  5. The Customer is king: I’ve seen a company in a dominant position become the most hated company in their industry.  Awful sales ("sell them everything and we’ll break the bad news to them once the contract is signed"), atrocious support, failing operations and a laissez faire attitude from management turned off the market from them.  Their name became synonymous with everything that you could do wrong.  Ramsay makes an intersting point.  Some chefs cook for other chefs.  That’s wrong because you’re forgetting to cook for taste.  In our business, don’t do something because it’s cool or it’s geeky.  Do something because it makes your job easier or because it adds something of value for the customer.

Those who know me will find it a little funny that I find so much in common with a chef who’s famous for having a bad temper.  I don’t see any similarities at all 🙂

Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection Client for Mac 2

Here’s one for the folks who have "handbag computers" 😉

Anyone who attended the Windows Server 2008 User Group Ireland event on Terminal Services by Alex Yushchenko will have heard about Remote Desktop on the Mac and where it was going.  MS has released Remote Desktop Connection Client for Mac 2.  There lots more details on the new release on the Microsoft Mac site.  The requirements are as follows:

  • Supported Operating Systems: Apple Mac OS X
  • Operating System Versions: Mac OS X version 10.4.9 (Tiger) or a later version of Mac OS

Audit Collection Database and Disk Sizing Calculator for SCOM 2007

I went to TechEd for the first time in Amsterdam in 2004.  One of the cool things I heard about was a product in the works called Audit Collection Services.  This was going to be a free download from Microsoft (like WSUS) that would be an intelligent version of Syslog for Microsoft products.  Intelligent?  Have a look at the security logs on a Windows box when auditing is enabled and tell me if you can figure things out.  MS’s developers identified the important messages that allowed you to track those events and would gather them into a dedicated and centralised SQL database in near real time.

We waited and waited but nothing got released.  Nobody was talking.  Then the news came out: it was going to be in the next version of Microsoft Operations Manger (we were still at MOM 2005 at the time) and not a free download.  I first got to play with Systems Center Operations Manager 2007 while it was in beta back in 2006.  ACS was one of the components I was most interested in.  I listened to a MS webcast and immediately got scared.  They had no way to calculate how big the database for ACS would be.  It’s still a dedicated database, allowing auditors and security officers to have sole access.

Think about this for a moment.  Every network is different.  Some networks have normal amounts of user activity.  Some more and some less.  Some networks are Internet facing and are attacked a lot and some are quietly isolated.  There was no real way to calculate the disk requirements without significant empirical data.  All MS could say was that they used terabytes of disk every month, 8 I think (I could be wrong with that number – it was 2 years ago).

I’ve just read that a SCOM MVP called Pete Zerger has built a ACS requirements calculator using guesstimates.  According to the MOM Team blog, it looks pretty accurate compared to customer data that they are familiar with.

ACS is a really cool tool.  If you’re using SCOM 2005 and need some sort of security central logging or auditing solution then it just makes so much sense to enable it.  Have a read about Audit Collection Services and see what you think.

Credit: Pete Zerger.

Top 5 things to know about Hyper-V

The Microsoft Windows Virtualisation team has posted a blog entry on the top 5 things you need to know about Hyper-V.  It covers:

  • The Hyper-V architecture and how it performs much better than Virtual PC or Virtual Server.  It’s a hypervisor with a very slim architecture making it much faster.
  • Snapshots – Yes!  Hyper-V has snapshots just like we lab rats have been using in VMware Workstation for years.  It’s quite fast too, even on a less than recommended disk specification.
  • Quick Migration – No, it is not VMotion and we likely won’t see "live migration" for a few years in Hyper-V.  Question you have to ask yourself is: do you really need it?  Think about why you would willingly move a VM in ESX (not failover because both products are essentially the same here).
  • System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008: Offers that layer of management that ESX admins associate with Virtual Center.  However, it integrates with SCOM 2007 and can manage Virtual Server and ESX.
  • Hyper-V can run on Server Core.  This minimises your resource requirements for the parent partition, reduces the attack surface and reduces the numbers of possible patches.

More High Skilled Job Losses in Ireland

This time last year, I said there was an economic slowdown on the way and that it would hit the higher skilled jobs.  Our politicos said that any downturn would only hit lower skilled work.  We knew 100% for certain that construction would get hammered because that industry was  a bubble ready to burst.  Well guess what: I am one to say "I told you so".

Dell announced layoffs with plans to relocate some work to Poland.  That’s just the first trickle in that inevitable flood.  I heard yesterday that Allianz is planning to layoff IT (and probably other) staff in some sort of relocation.  HP have been rumoured to be relocating work.  Today Avocent (IP KVM’s) are in the news with plans to make people redundant in a move to Asia.  There’s been lots of other smaller firms who’ve laid off people who didn’t hit the headlines but a quick google shows them up.

Unemployment numbers are double what they were at the start of the year.  The scary thing is that a significant percentage of those are high skilled workers.  Most live in the commuter belt.  It’s not just IT being hit either.  Traditional manufacturing, construction, finance, sciences are all in the mix.  IT is seen as easy to move because we have the technology to manage an infrastructure from anywhere.  And it’s easy to move that infrastructure if you have virtualised. 

Speaking from my own personal experience at the start of the year here’s what I reckon the newly unemployed are seeing.  They’re hearing stories about firms not being able to find high skilled staff.  However, a look at the recruitment sites shows there’s only a few companies hiring (through dozens of agencies at once – it’s easy to decipher the adverts if you spend the time at it so the total number of adverts is misleading).  You look at the salaries and they’re paying ridiculously low amounts with demands for high skill levels.  You’d be taking a massive pay cut and unable to pay the mortgage.  The work is often in the outskirts of the city.  Most of what I saw in January was either in the extreme north or south of Dublin, well away from public transport.  North for me is a no-no because I’d be on the "south" of the infamous M50.  South is just as bad because it would be 4 hours a day in the car – for a 70 mile round trip!  So really, I was restricted to the my side of the city outskirts (car) or city centre (train). 

I was lucky; I got a great job where I’m in a strategic position and my opinions are listened to and respected by the directors – imagine an IT firm actually listening to it’s senior IT staff!  How revolutionary!!! ;-)ns

Anyway, we’re hearing more and more about "we can’t hire enough high skilled people" and "there aren’t enough people studying technology and sciences in college or university".  Well guess what Sherlock, people have seen since 2002 that these graduates get paid peanuts compared to other skills and are usually the first to be laid off or relocated.  Most organisations (there are exceptions) don’t value IT as a strategic asset and fail to recognise that the internal skills they have are a valuable asset not to be easily tossed away.  I know of a finance firm that laid off an excellent department of 15 and had to hire in 77 consultants to replace them.  Bean counters, eh?

The last time we experienced something like this downturn was back in 2000-2002.  IT jobs were scarce back then.  Pay for those available jobs was low, e.g. an MCSE/CCNA/Oracle/SQL/Exchange/AD expert for €18K/year – I saw that advert.  But this one is different.  Back then it was just redundancies and companies freezing their IT spend.  Now it’s job migration to continental Europe and Asia.

What can be done?  Support those firms who do stay local.  Complain about support when you have that awful experience with bad phone lines and non-english speaking support engineers, e.g. HP (I had to go through 3 people in India on a crackly line to log a call about a failed EVA 8000 SAN controller – not quite the professional experience I expected for an enterprise solution).  I remind every HP employee I meet about that phone call.  Americans did the same and now they are seeing support moving back to the USA/Canada.  If you have equal competition between vendors, one Irish located and one not, then go Irish.  Spread the word about good and bad experiences.  The IT industry in Ireland is very like a small village – we all know someone who knows someone, e.g. 2 degrees of Kevin Bacon. 

Will things pick up?  Maybe.  I think the good times are well and truly over.  Corporate’s want to move internationally.  The cost of living has gotten too high here so salary demands have had to match.  I’ve no faith in the politicos.  They’ve consistently lied and mismanaged and they’re trying to make us swallow Eurocrat legislation that will introduce further job market competition within the EU. 

However, the industry I’m in is busy.  Native Irish firms are trying hard and generating new business.  That will be what keeps this economy going.  Just like in the 80’s, international firms will only stay until they find somewhere better.  Native firms stick around through the good times and bad.  They seem to be doing something so that’s at least a silver lining on the gray and gloomy clouds.