Month: July 2009

Windows E Might Never Be?

After all the hoopla, hand wringing and swearing (at the EU Eurocrats), there might never be a Windows E edition without a browser!

“Under our new proposal, among other things, European consumers who buy a new Windows PC with Internet Explorer set as their default browser would be shown a ‘ballot screen’ from which they could, if they wished, easily install competing browsers from the Web. If this proposal is ultimately accepted, Microsoft will ship Windows in Europe with the full functionality available in the rest of the world. As requested by the Commission, we will be publishing our proposal in full here on our website as soon as possible”.

If this passes then I suspect that in-place upgrades from Vista to Windows 7 should be possible for consumers in the EU.  It would be the perfect solution and should make everyone happy, no matter what their browser preference is.

By the way, if this happens and you do happen to get a “Windows 7 E” box, keep it in very good condition.  It could be a collectors item and be worth some money in 20 or so years.

Hyper-V Server 2008 R2: Bare Metal to Live Migration (In about an hour!)

“In this one-off video, Matt McSpirit, Partner Technology Specialist at Microsoft UK, walks through a bare-metal installation of Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 (RC) on 2 physical nodes, hooks them up to an iSCSI SAN, configures the SAN storage, and then, from a Windows 7 (RC) laptop, validates, and builds a Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 (RC) Cluster.  The end result?  A Highly Available, Live Migratable, Virtual Machine! All in about an hour!”

As people who have heard me talk about Hyper-V know, that claim of one hour is an honest one.  I built our initial Hyper-V production cluster from iron to quick migration stage in about an hour … from a hotel where I was doing a presentation afterwards.  WDS, some manual tweaks, Hyper-V, clustering … badda bing!  All done.  Sure, it was my third build so things went quick.  Why 3rd?  Initial build to develop, second to pilot, third for production.

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How To Easily Install Windows 7/Vista or Windows Server 2008/2008 R2 From USB Stick

One of the readers (“Aris”) of this site has written a clever little tool to take your ISO/DVD for one of the newer Windows OS’s and make an installer from a 4GB (or more) USB stick.  I got a 4GB USB with the Windows 7 RC installer on it and it’s proven to be very handy.  Anyone wanting to put a new version of Windows on a machine without a DVD drive (some servers, netbooks and desktops/laptops) will want to do this.

Well done to the author for writing this utility!

Remote Desktop IP Virtualization

This is a feature I’d heard of once or twice in passing but never really looked into.  The idea is that you can assign unique IP address to either a user session or to an application on a Terminal Server.  Why?  Mainly it’s to do with compatibility with applications or compliance with regulations where sessions are identified by an IP address.  Normally everyone on a Terminal Server is using the single IP of that server.  That might cause a problem with some situations.  Microsoft details some of those here. 

They continue to talk briefly about how to configure it in that post.  A follow up post talks about how to configure Remote Desktop IP Virtualisation using Group Policy.

Finally, there is a document you can download from Microsoft that covers the subject.

“Remote Desktop IP Virtualization provides administrators the ability to assign a unique IP address to a program that is available by using RemoteApp and Desktop Connection. In this guide, we will configure Remote Desktop IP Virtualization and access it as a standard user by using RemoteApp and Desktop Connection”.

Hey Europeans, How To Get Your First Browser Installed On Windows 7 “E”

As has been widely reported, MS has created a special edition of Windows 7 for the European Union called Windows 7 E.  It will not have IE installed.  This prevents upgrades from Vista.  In the EU, you will only be able to get this E edition via retail chains – there will not be the normal edition.  I suspect volume license purchasers will be able to get normal editions because they may be supporting users/customers outside of Europe.

This post tells you how to get a browser on your new Windows 7 E PC.

Virtual Hard Disk Getting Started Guide

Microsoft has published a VHD Getting Started Guide for Windows 7and Windows Server 2008 R2:

“This guide provides an introduction to virtual hard disks (VHDs) in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. It includes an overview of technologies that you use to configure VHDs, as well as procedures to help guide you through deploying VHDs”.

New to Windows Server 2008 R2? What’s New In Hyper-V?

I’ve done nothing but talk about this since last October when details first started to get out from Redmond 🙂  I’ve done a number of presentations including this one at PubForum recently.

Pub Forum Introducing Hyper V R2  

View more presentations from joe_elway.

 The virtualisation team at MS has done a blog post.  What’s new?

  • Support for 64 Cores with up to 384 running VM’s and/or 512 virtual processors.
  • Support for AMD RVI and Intel EPT.  That emerges in the form of SLAT which I blogged about recently.  Basically, we get offloading to the hardware for the mapping between physical RAM and virtual RAM.
  • On the networking side we get jumbo frame support.
  • 10GB networking
  • Chimney support is added.
  • VMQ (virtual machine queue) offloads processing of network traffic from the parent partition to the network card processor.
  • Storage: Cluster Shared Volume, i.e. many hosts in a cluster sharing a single volume for storing many VM’s.
  • Dynamically expanding VHD’s now reach 87% of the performance of the underlying physical disk.  Fixed size is at 94% as before and is still the recommended solution where you want VHD features and performance.
  • You can hot add/remove virtual machine storage.
  • New IC’s are on the way (currently RC2) to offer complete support from MS for “SLES 10 and 11 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.2 and 5.3 for both x86 and x64”.
  • Core Parking reduces power utilisation by powering down unused physical cores in the host server.
  • Drum roll please: Live Migration is here. You can move a VM from host A to host B with no noticeable downtime .. it’s just a few milliseconds, less than any network protocol will notice.
  • Processor compatibility mode allows VM’s to migrate between hosts with physical processors of different generations.  You’re still bounded to either all AMD or all Intel.  That’s done by tuning back functionality.
  • With other W2008 R2 functionality you get a all MS VDI solution.
  • A new version of Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 with CSV and Live Migration support.
  • If you do want to go Core Installation then there’s the SCONFIG tool to rapidly configure the host.

Coming soon?

  • Microsoft released 20,000 lines of GPLv2 licensed code to update the kernel of Linux distributions.  If all goes well, all future Linux distros will be Hyper-V enlightened out of the box.
  • There is a new version of VMM 2008 R2 coming.  It will offer support for all of the new Hyper-V features.  It also brings in Quick Storage Migration to quickly move VM’s from one location to another with minimum downtime, e.g. move a VM from a per-LUN installation to CSV with 1 minute downtime VS 1 hour.  There’s also a new maintenance mode for hosts and some cool SAN integration.

Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 Released to Manufacturing

Windows 7 has RTM’d.  It’s official.  The build number is 7600. 

Windows Server 2009 R2 also RTM’d. 

Check my previous post for when you can expect to get your hands on them (legitimately).

Well done MS!

EDIT#1:

Here’s the official sign-off:

     

Here’s the original announcement by Steve Ballmer and Steven Sinofsky:

 
Windows 7 Sneak-Peak from MGX

Microsoft Security Essentials

Finally, someone gets it.  Antivirus should be small, simple and not try to be all things to all people.  It’s when this software gets bloated that it becomes a hindrance.  I’ve installed Microsoft Security Essentials (test version) on my Windows 7 RC laptop.  It’s small and light; I barely know it’s there.  It’s aimed at the home market but the SOHO’s are just as likely to use it.  It’s very simple and small, accomplishing what Forefront Client Security tried to do … until it bundled/required MOM 2005 so the management server became huge. 

Combined with Windows Firewall (firewall, obviously) and Windows Defender (spyware) you have a nice free solution for Internet security without having to buy dodgy yellow-pack software (you know who I mean) on a subscription basis.

The beta is currently restricted to United States, Israel (English only), People’s Republic of China (Simplified Chinese only) and Brazil (Brazilian Portuguese only).  19 markets are to be added to the beta in the coming months.  There is a leaked copy out there but I’m not recommending anyone use it.

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A nice simple summary that anyone can understand.  You get the usual context menus in Explorer so you can also kick off a manual scan.

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I can quickly trigger manual updates.  Automatic updates will be via Windows Updates, i.e. silent.  I’ve read that updates could be as often as 3 times a day.  Updates to the program will also be via Windows Update; maybe once a month.

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Here I can see things that have been detected.

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Here’s an alert I got when I downloaded Eicar, the test virus.

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And here’s the result of a clean task.

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My history was updated.  This is what it deleted: file:C:UsersAFinnAppDataLocalMicrosoftWindowsTemporary Internet FilesLowContent.IE51E60T29Beicar[1].com.  The file I was downloading never made it to the desktop where I was saving it to.

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My laptop will do a scan in the morning while I’m having breakfast 🙂

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These are the actions when a threat is found.

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Real-time protection is set up nicely by default.

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You can exclude specific paths from the scan.

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I’ve added VM disk file extensions from the scan to improve their performance.

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You can exclude certain processes, e.g. if you were running an MSDE.

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Here’s the advanced settings.  I’ve added the option to scan removable drives: I use USB drives quite a bit for photo storage and project work.  I’ve seen some people commenting that an infeaction clean is slow.  Yes, because it is preceded by a snapshot.  This gives us a rollback in case of a false positive.  For example, remember when a certain yellow-pack AV started removing Excel spreadsheets late one Friday night a few years ago?  Imagine if it had taken a snapshot first … people wouldn’t have lost files.  They could have restored them quite simply.

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Finally this is how you feed back security information for MS to analyse.

All in all, this is a very simple product.  Notice that there aren’t dozens of menu items with settings hidden all over the place?  Notice it doesn’t try to be my Net Nanny?  Notice that some 3rd party firewall hasn’t broken my home network?  Sweet.

Dodgy PC/Laptop Repair Investigation

It must be a slow news day in the UK.  The main story on Sky News is an investigation they did into laptop and PC repair shops.  The loosened a memory board and sent in a researcher to several shops for repair.  There was activity tracking software installed and it also used the web cam to record.  A number of shops faked faults and copied personal information from the laptop.  The video is here and the report is here.

If you are bringing a machine to one of these places then put in a blank disk and install something on it.  That’ll keep your data safe.  However it won’t do anything for claims of other repairs being necessary.