Month: October 2008

It’s Finally Started: Dell Lays Off 400

Dell laid off 400 staff in the Limerick plant today.  That follows up:
 
  • The construction of the plant in Poland that started at least 7 years ago.
  • The consolidation of offices in Dublin with reduced floorspace.
  • The stories in the Wall Street Journal about Dell selling the manufacturing plant in Limerck.

There’s no doubt what Dell’s plans are.  We’re told the plant in Poland is 2.5 times bigger than all the floorspace in Ireland. 

I can’t blame Dell or Poland.  A huge amount of their staff in Ireland are probably Polish.  Why hire Polish people in Ireland when you can hire them in Poland?   You pay them less and they’ll also have a better quality of life.  Yeah … the cost of living has rocketed here (it just got worse thanks to the budget) and salary demands have obviously matched the rate of inflation.  Dell really has had no choice.

We also have to consider that there’s stories of IT spending freezing with the global economy downturn.  Dell will obviously want to react to that.

Software Router For Hyper-V

There’s a good chance that lots of people will use their TechNet licenses and Hyper-V for labs and self training.  If so, you’re going to want a router or even routers.  There’s been many options for a software router or "appliance" for VMware.  I just did some searching and found a blog entry by Stefan Stranger on how to get Vyatta Virtual Router working on Hyper-V.  It looks pretty straight forward.

Credit: Stefan Stranger.

TechEd Europe IT Pro 2008

I’ll be off to Barcelona for TechEd EMEA IT Pro 2008 for all of next week.  I’ll be blogging as much as possible of my experiences.  I also aim to do a session for the Windows Server 2008 User Group Ireland on the highlights of the week.  I’ll be going out on the country night for the Irish party on Wednesday.  I’ll also be attending the MS International Community party on Nov 6th.  Things I aim to watch out for include:

  • Anything by Steve Riley.
  • I’ll also be attending the Mark Minasi sessions.
  • ConfigMgr.
  • OpsMgr.
  • Hyper-V and VMM.
  • Windows Server.
  • Hopefully some Azure briefings.
  • Anything that makes data centre management and remote access services easier.
  • Free t-shirts and assorted swag 🙂

Microsoft Floats It’s Cloud

Information is finally breaking out to the public about some of Microsoft’s new efforts to maintain it’s position as new approached to computing are gaining an accepted foothold.

To compete with Google Applications, Microsoft has the Business Productivity Online Suite.  This is an online solution that includes:

  • Microsoft Exchange Online
  • Microsoft Office Live Meeting
  • Microsoft Office SharePoint Online
  • Microsoft Office Communications Online

This all comes in under the banner of Software Plus Services or Software + Services.  You may know of "Software as a Service" or SaaS.  MS sees SaaS purely as a delivery mechanism, i.e. how to make software available to customers.  S+S is about wrapping services, e.g. customisation or management, of that software solution.  It’s also location independent, e.g. in a MS data centre, a hosting partner’s data centre, on the customer’s site or even a hybrid.  An interesting example of the hybrid solution is that some of an organisations mailboxes might be hosted by MS or a partner while the rest reside in a traditional on-site Exchange server.

The newest thing to break out is Microsoft Azure Services Platform.   Azure is Microsoft’s platform for cloud computing.  Cloud computing is where a solution lives out on the Internet and the consumer doesn’t care where.  It is mobile; this gives the application fault tolerance of hardware, data centre and maybe even country!  It’s available to try now as a Community Technical Preview (a pre beta release with no support).

Hyper-V 2.0 Feature Overview

HyperVoria has listed the features that will be introduced with Hyper-V V2.0, some of which were public knowledge (live migration, cluster file system), some of which a few of us heard about but couldn’t comment on publicly (boot from VHD – the VM has dedicated hardware and the bootloader loads an OS from VHD instead of hard disk) and some of which were new to me (dynamically pooled RAM for VM’s, i.e. RAM over subscription as in ESX).

The latter may not make it into RTM of Windows Server 2008 R2.  Hopefully it will.

Credit: HyperVoria.

Virtual Machine Manager 2008 RTM’s

Microsoft has released System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008.  VMM 2008 is to Hyper-V what VMware Virtual Center is to ESX.  Just like Virtual Center, it is an additional purchase.  Just like Virtual Center, it add’s additional management functionality to Hyper-V.

VMM offers:

  • Integration with other management products, i.e. System Center Operations Manager via PRO to give hardware to application (including all points in between including virtualisation) and cradle to grave management.  Your virtualisation layer is managed by the same management infrastructure as all your other platforms.
  • Improvements on the clustering experience for virtual machines.
  • A library for scripts and virtual machine templates.
  • A web portal for KVM access to virtual machines.
  • Simpler delegation, e.g. non administrators can be given a quote for self service VM deployment.
  • Manage ESX servers.
  • Perform P2V (convert physical to virtual) or V2V (ESX to Hyper-V conversions).

VMM 2008 can be purchased as part of the System Center CAL/SAL.  This includes OpsMgr, ConfigMgr and Data Protection Manager CAL’s/SAL’s at a price where you get 4 products for the price of 2.

There is a free evaluation and an online video demonstration.

Easy Print Experience

Like many, I’m dubious of claims where marketing people have been involved.  If you’re in IT any length of time, you’ve probably been burned.

I deployed a test W2008 Terminal Server last week and I configured RemoteApp (application publishing), TS Web (web interface) and TS Gateway (SSL access to the previously listed functions).  I got our networking folks to set up a firewall rule to the lab machine (on a  dedicated lab network) so I could access the test machine over SSL from the Internet.  All of this runs in our data centre in a remote and secure location.

I didn’t configure anything related to printers on the Terminal Server or the lab network.  Nothing.  Zilch.  Zero.  No drivers were set up and no configuration was made for Easy Print.  It’s literally log in and print.

I then logged in over the Internet to Terminal Services via the TS Web (SSL) from home.  I was able to print to my local photo printer with no delays.  I was in the office on Monday and connected to the TS Web (SSL) – remember that the data centre is still remote.  I printed to a Dell printer with no delays.  This included a Word document with lots of formatting and pictures as well as a PDF document.

Fantastic! The user experience easily exceeded my expectations.  Well done to the TS team in Microsoft!  This is a cracking solution to a major problem.