Month: June 2009

Windows User Group Event: Office Communications Server Technical Overview

The Irish Windows User Group will be running a session focusing on OCS, aka Office Communications Server.  The speaker is John McCabe, a senior engineer with CDSoft. 

Mobile users and mobile computing have enabled a more flexible workforce but there is a challenge in enabling communications that are just as flexible and mobile.  OCS can be used to resolve these issues.  For most of us, this is an alien world and we just wouldn’t know where to start.  This session aims to show you how you can use OCS to resolve communications issues in your business.

The Agenda

  • Discussion about unified communications (UC) and a quick open forum: This is to facilitate if people know what UC is to give them background information and concepts regarding it and then a quick open forum of topics/questions they would like emphasised in the run through
  • Deployment Scenarios – Internal Deployments: A Discussion on the types of deployment you can have internally in your organisation
  • Deployment Scenarios – (Remote Access/Federation/Public IM): A discussion on the types of deployment you can have for external users and internal users to communicate outside the organisation
  • Break
  • Planning For Unified Communications: Detail the process about planning for a deployment in your organisation and some of the factors you have to think about

About The Speaker

John McCabe works for CDSoft Limited based in Celbridge, Kildare. He has worked for over 12 years in the IT industry in various different fields ranging from telecoms, security, deployment and design. Over the last 12 months he has focused his attention on pushing Unified Communications in the Irish market place. He has presented alongside Microsoft on “Tech Days” about Unified Communications and many times in Microsoft “Envision” Centre. John has attained the 088-924 and 074-924 Voice Specialization Exams from Microsoft further complementing his UC skill set.

Where And When

Registration is mandatory for attending the in-person event at Microsoft.

The event will be held at Microsoft’s Microsoft European Development Centre (EDC), South County Business Park, Leopardstown, Dublin 18. 

  • July 9th
  • Registration: 09:00
  • Event: 09:30 until 12:00

Live Meeting

Although the best experience is to be on site for the presentation, we will be live webcasting the event using Live Meeting.  You should use the installed (not the web) client. 

There is no need to register for the live event if you only wish to tune into the webcast.

The URL for the meeting is: https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/usergroups/join?id=OCSOverview&role=attend

What is the Deployment Image Servicing and Management Tool

This document from Microsoft explains what DISM is.  Be prepared for lots of long winded commands and names.  You’ll be using DISM if you use Microsoft’s products to automate or customise Windows desktop or server deployments.

“Deployment Image Servicing and Management (DISM) is a command-line tool introduced for the Windows® 7 operating system that can be used to service a Windows image or to prepare a Windows Preinstallation Environment image. The functionality that was included in Package Manager (pkgmgr.exe), PEimg, and Intlcfg is now consolidated in DISM, and new functionalities have been added to improve the experience for offline servicing”.

Service Level Dashboard 2.0 for Operations Manager 2007 R2 RTM

SLA reporting on services (“service” in the ITIL/MOF world is a service we provide to a customer/user, not a windows service) is critical in a service industry.  More businesses view their internal IT as a service.  Those of us in the hosting industry are fully aware of the contractual importance of the SLA.

OpsMgr 2007 can gather health/performance information on a “service” using a Distributed Application.  A DA assembles components, e.g. websites, SQL databases, network devices, etc in a “service” that you can alert on when it’s offline, e.g. a SQL DB in a DA going offline would bring down the customer service and thus be reflected in the status of the DA.  OpsMgr 2007 R2 can even include a hybrid of Windows, Linux and UNIX components into a single DA, e.g. a firewall running on Solaris, a MySQL database running on RedHat and a web server running on Windows.

With all this health, performance and availability information that we can store in the Reporting Database, we can generate reports and consoles for SLA reporting.  The SLA 2.0 console for OpsMgr 2007 R2 enables this.

It’s a free download so give it a look-see in your lab.  You can learn more about it here.

Using OpsMgr To Identify Virtualisation Candidates

I just saw this quick post that shows you how to identify virtualisation candidates using Operations Manager 2007 and 2007 R2.

OpsMgr is constantly gathering performance information from monitored servers.  This information is archived and stored for just over a year if you use the reporting database.  The VMM reporting pack allows you to report from this data to identify machines that might be underused as dedicated servers and are more suitable as virtual machines.

Obviously, there’s still some human decision making that’s involved in the final process.

Once you’re happy, you can use VMM 2008/2008 R2 to P2V (physical to virtual convert) your physical server so it becomes a virtual machine on a Hyper-V host.  Some OS’s or server deployments mightn’t be suitable so you might look at using something like the cloning solution from Acronis to convert the machine into a VM.

Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and AMD’s 6-core Opteron

AMD is releasing a 6 Core Opteron processor.  Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2 will be fully able to take advantage of that:

  • There is support for 64 logical processors or physical processor cores
  • With support for 8 virtual processors per physical core, that’s 512 virtual processors that you can have on a single host
  • There is support for up to 384 running virtual machines per host.

Those are some pretty wild numbers.  You’d probably need to push your RAM up to the supported limit of 1TB.  In a 3 host cluster you could be running 768 virtual machines with host fault tolerance.

I’ve been involved in an online discussion about the merits and scalability of Hyper-V versus ESX.  These numbers came up.  As one guy correctly pointed out, these are purely theoretical numbers for most of us.  When you start looking at network cards, storage HBA’s and bandwidth then you really want multiples of connections per server when dealing with that many VM’s per host.

The other preventing factor is RAM costs.  I found the sweet spot for a host server was 32GB RAM.  Once I looked at putting 64GB in the price jumped exponentially.  Virtualisation at those levels isn’t quite as cost effective.

So yes, Hyper-V in 2008 R2 has huge scalability but for 99% of us, that’s not going to matter for quite some time.

Virtual TechNet Conference

Microsoft is hosting a virtual TechNet conference on June 19th.  Details on what’s going on are pretty light.  I do know they are covering the new versions of products, e.g. Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows 7, OCS, etc.  You can register for free.

There’s a little bit of blurb on the events site.

“We’re pleased to announce the launch of the very first TechNet Virtual Conference taking place on 19 June 2009.

You told us that time and budget pressures make attending in person events difficult – so to help both you and the environment we decided to take the TechNet Conference virtual. Now you and your colleagues can join us to get a flavour of some key Microsoft technologies from the comfort of your own desks.

The Technology sessions, selected by the readers of the UK TechNet Flash, feature key products including:

  • Windows 7 – Deployment and Management
  • Windows Server 2008 R2 – 10 things to make life easier for IT Pros
  • An overview of Office Communications Server R2 and voice capabilities
  • The trials and tribulations of SharePoint implementation

We are also really pleased to announce an exclusive Keynote featuring Mark Russinovich, Microsoft Technical Fellow specialising in the Windows platform.

And that’s not the only difference this year. In addition to Microsoft technology news and product overviews from the experts, the TechNet Virtual Conference will also feature a second auditorium focused on IT Management, including:

  • How IT will change over the next 10 years and why you should care – an exclusive session delivered at TechEd EMEA
  • Growing the Business and Managing Costs at Microsoft – An Insider’s View, presented by Asif Jinnah, IT Manager, Microsoft UK

Be sure to get the most out of your day by getting involved and asking our speakers questions via live chat. But if you can’t make it on the day, all the content will be available after June 19th for you to watch on demand.”

PubForum Dublin 2009

This weekend PubForum was in Dublin.  PubForum is low cost conference that tours Europe and has been educating people on the various virtualisation technologies that are out there.  These folks were talking about machine and application virtualisation while the rest of us were still getting to grips with Terminal Services.
 
Yesterday I spoke there about Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and Hyper-V Server 2008 R2.  It was the first time I was able to talk about a few new things such as the new Hyper-V scalabilities announced at TechEd North America 2009 and some of the new features in VMM such as Storage Quick Migration.  I also brought up some of the future technologies such as server role virtualisation as seen in an MMS 2009 demo video.
 
This is normally a very pro VMware and pro Citrix audience.  The reactions to the above were pretty excellent.  People really were impressed by what MS is up to.
 
Here’s my presentation: 
Pub Forum Introducing Hyper V R2