There was big hoopla over the turning of the first sod for the new Microsoft data centre in Grange Castle in Dublin (at the end of the New Nangor Road, not far from the N7 and Baldonnel). It turns out MS is anticipating slower demand for the services and is delaying the opening of the data centres until there is sufficient custom.
Month: February 2009
Microsoft.com Now Running Windows Server 2008 R2 Beta
I just read a post by David Lowe (Microsoft Redmond, originally from here in Ireland and was the keynote speaker at W2008 Ireland launch). Apparently, a significant portion of microsoft.com is running on Windows Server 2008 R2, Hyper-V and Core Installation on HP hardware. The performance has increased from Windows Server 2008. Odds are there will be some stats published in a few months time.
Up to 70,000 Graduates Unemployed By Year End In Ireland
In a country of 4 million, we’ll soon have 70,000 graduates on the dole. It’s said by our prime minister that 400,000 people will be unemployed by 2010. 1 in 4 of Irish unemployed are immigrants according to yesterday’s radio news. 19% of current unemployed were college graduates in mid 2008. That’s going to have increased greatly. Up to then it was construction that was hit the worst. Now it’s office workers.
Back when I graduated in 1996, I got my job offer during my finals. I wasn’t alone. Most of my class had a job before we walked outof our last exam. Things have changed 180 degrees. Since 2000, I’ve been telling young people not to do IT in college because (a) the high salaries were a myth and (b) the work really wasn’t there, despite the claims. Now, I’d tell them to take a year or two off and travel the world. Delay the career path because it isn’t there and go do something that most of us wish they had.
I found out yesterday that recruitment pages are a 100% joke. The majority of the ads on them are for non-existing jobs. Hence these open job surveys were hear about are nonsense. I’d long suspected that adverts were either used to harvest CV’s or were out of date. A few weeks ago a recruiter admitted to me that fake jobs were posted to harvest CV’s, e.g. one recruiter is trying to convince people that there are government agencies hiring senior IT staff at the moment 🙂 Despite how qualified you may be, they don’t respond to applications. Yesterday I was told that filled jobs continue to be advertised because "the sites continue to refresh the job automatically". Hmm, I guess they must not have a delete button?
Times are tough. It’s no better in Britain. The USA is stuffed (and impossible to get into legally) and Australia only wants builders … and stories are coming in that the situation really is no better there.
Microsoft To Offer XP-to-Windows 7 Upgrades
PC World is reporting that MS will be selling licenses to allow consumers to upgrade from XP to Windows 7. It will not be possible to do an XP-Win7 upgrade installation. You will need to do a clean installation. What MS will be selling is just a reduced price license for owners of existing XP licenses.
Hyper-V Server R2 on BladeCenter S Tutorial
If you’re using IBM blades or considering the small/branch office BladeCenter S solution for Hyper-V, you might want to give this a read. It covers Hyper-V from Windows Server 2008 R2 and installing it on the IBM blade server kit.
There’s a wee bit of the “I know VMware but not Hyper-V so what Hyper-V does is wrong” stuff in there at the end and the author wasn’t familiar with Core Installations but otherwise, a good article.
This probably equally applies to HP kit based on my quick read.
WIM to VHD (WIM2VHD) Converter
Windows Server 2008 R2 adds some new Hyper-V based technology called Native VHD. VHD (Virtual Hard Disk) is a file that simulates a hard disk. MS has been using it for virtual machines since Virtual PC and Virtual Server and published the format for others to use and integrate with. Normally, on a Hyper-V server we have lots of VM’s. What happens if we want the portability of VM’s but the power of a dedicated machine? Windows 2008 R2 allows us to have a small boot partition that surfaces (mounts) a VHD on another partition and boots from that. Now your VHD is on a dedicated server with all the performance that goes with it.
This gives us added flexibility, performance and drastically simplifies OS deployment.
That begs the question, what about Windows Deployment Services and ConfigMgr OS deployment? I don’t see WDS and OSD going anywhere but MS are strongly hinting that they only want 1 disk format in the future. ConfigMgr OSD is based on WDS. WDS and “Panther” (the installer used by Vista, W2008, Win7 and W2008 R2) all use WIM files. It appears that MS plan on moving away from there to only using VHD.
If you are using WDS for deploying dedicated servers that you’re likely using a captured WIM file. If so, you can switch from that to deploying VHD’s to W2008 R2 using Native VHD. What about your existing images? You’re not going to toss them aside. You could also use this to convert existing WIM’s into template VHD’s that you can stick into your VMM 2008 library for VM reuse.
There’s a free converter which will convert WIM to VHD, i.e. Windows Image Files to Virtual Hard Disks. There’s a video demo on the site to show you how it works.
Credit: Virtual Varia
The Business Case for IPv6
Dave Northey of Microsoft Ireland posted about a presentation he did recently in Dublin on the business case for IPv6. There is a video of the presentation.
With China having recently rolled out their IPv6 network and the pool of IPv4 addresses set to dry up in just a few years, it is worth getting your plans in place now.
SmarterTrack 3, Helpdesk Software
I was on the lookout for a new helpdesk solution that would give us something more interactive. I don’t want to waste money but I also want something that has the required functionality and with a professional appearance. I remembered a thread on the Minasi forum from a few years ago and dug it out. One of the products recommended (by a savvy engineer/manager) was SmarterTrack.
I checked out their site in hopes of finding a demo. Even better; they had a fully functional free version. It took just a little while to get the VM up and running to try it on. I also fired up a Vista VM as a client. The product runs on either a SQL (including 2005 and 2008) or MySQL backend. It can run it’s own web server or on IIS6 or IIS7. It ran fine for me on a W2008 x64 server with SQL 2008. I tested the functionality.
- I had a choice between self-registered, helpdesk registered (with optional mail verification) or AD integrated users.
- There is the ability to create support groups.
- You have a news page.
- There is a user searchable Knowledge Base (KB) page.
- The portal shows news, recent KB articles and the most popular articles.
- There is a web based live chat.
- Users can create their own tickets.
- It can integrate into your mail system.
- There’s a big reporting system.
I’m very impressed with it. The free version gives you all the functionality which you can run on your own server. You’re just limited to one agent. You can have many users/customers. There are purchase versions that give you more agents and there is a hosted option as well if you’re not interested in having your own server.
They eat their own dogfood too. Their support site runs on their own product. I availed of their LiveChat to disable user self-registration. That was a quick option in the settings and a change of the site default document.
Advanced Desktop Management Sessions
Kurt Roggen has posted some links to a series of sessions on advanced desktop management. They’re in English, French and Dutch:
Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V Security Guide (Beta)
Microsoft has launched a beta version of a security accelerator for Hyper-V. You can find it on Connect. It is a beta so don’t use this on production systems. You also need to be wary of breaking the ability to manage the host using VMM and OpsMgr.
“The Hyper-V Security Guide focuses on three key areas:
- Hardening the Hyper-V server role
- Virtual machine management and delegation
- Protecting virtual machines”