Month: March 2009

Whitepaper: Designing a Hyper-V Solution

I’ve just shared the latest document I’ve written on Hyper-V.  This one is aimed at helping you with architecting your machine virtualisation infrastructure.  I cover the hardware sizing, choosing the right licensing, networking, using VLAN’s with Hyper-V and various other subjects.  There’s a huge number of variations on how you can put this together so I’ve done my best to get you going.  I’ve added a few practical examples at the end to illustrate how I’m using the content of the document.  Give it a read and let me know how you get along with it.

All Booked For Minasi Forum 2009

I’ve just booked my hotel for Minasi Forum 2009.  It’s being hosted by Mark Minasi in Virginia Beach from April 19-22.  Mark will, of course, be talking about what’s coming in the Windows World.  Often in the past, he has debuted his presentations at this conference for the new “season”, e.g. TechEd North America.  There’s lots of other notable names and MVP’s speaking about a range of topics that are relevant to those of us that work in Microsoft-based IT infrastructure.  I’ll also be talking about Hyper-V:

  • The architecture and what we can do now
  • What’s coming in R2
  • What the long term strategy appears to be

I’m looking forward to it.  It’ll be great to meet up with some friends from all over the place again, not to mention spending a few days in the warmth and maybe getting out with the camera gear for a while.  I bought a new Computrekker AW bag while I was up in Belfast (saved about 33% over buying it in the Republic) so I can bring the essential camera gear and my laptop.

Presentation: Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V “R2”

Attached is the presentation that I did with Dave Northey from Microsoft Ireland at the recent "TechDays for IT Pro’s" events around Ireland.  I was presenting from the slide deck and Dave was bravely doing demonstrations of BranchCache using pre-beta builds of Windows and Hyper-V "R2".  Dave got really brave in Dublin/Belfast and even built the Hyper-V cluster from scratch live in front of the crowd on his portable lab of 3 laptops.

I opened the presentation by stating that there was no way we could mention every new feature or even get into detail on all of the highlight features.  So the aim of the presentation was to list the "better together" features that would add value to a business that will deploy Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.  We then went into some detail on and did demos of BranchCache and Hyper-V "R2".  The Windows User Group (Ireland) will be following this up on April 30th with a deep dive session on Hyper-V.

This presentation originally had animations but they are stripped out by SlideShare.  The TechNet Ireland crew will likely be sharing the originals pretty soon.

 

Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V R2    

View more presentations from joe_elway.

KB967124: Incorrect or Missing Hyper-V Counters on W2003 Performance Monitor

This is a hotfix to resolve an issue you can experience when using Performance Monitor on a Windows 2003 server to monitor a Windows 2008 server with the Hyper-V role enabled.  Counters may be missing or displaying incorrect information.  You will apply this patch to the W22008 Hyper-V server.

The Award For 2009 “Best IT Tip” Goes To …

Rhonda Layfield for NCPA.CPL.  Don’t you just hate how long it takes to get to the window where you can adjust your NIC properties in Windows Vista or Windows 7?  It’s these little things that potentially turns IT pro’s against a product.  Rhonda has a great shortcut: just run NCPA.CPL from “Start – Run” and you’re brought right there.  Even create a shortcut if you need to get in there often enough.

OCS 2007 R2 Management Pack for Operations Manager 2007

Microsoft has released a new management pack for OpsMgr 2007 monitoring of Office Communications Server 2007 R2.  Here’s what they have to say about it:

“The Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Management Pack monitors Standard and Enterprise Edition of Office Communications Server 2007 R2. This release also incorporates the Quality of Experience (QoE) MP which was previously a separate Management Pack. Monitored types are event log entries, performance counters, as well as stateful monitoring of QoE. Note that this version of the Management Pack only monitors Office Communications Server 2007 R2, and cannot be used to monitor Office Communications Server 2007”

Integration/Migration to Microsoft Online Services

Microsoft has released a bunch of tools or utilities for integrating with or migrating to their online services, e.g. BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite):

  • Sign-In: A client application to allow a user to access the services such as SharePoint, LiveMeeting or Online Mail.  it can also configure your Outlook (if it’s the same as the trial edition I’ve used).
  • Migration Tools for Exchange (x86 and x64): Migrate users to the hosted Exchange service.
  • Active Directory Integration: Integrate your corporate AD with the hosted service for a branch office!