Month: October 2009

The Band Is Back On The Road Again

The Microsoft Ireland community launch tour hits the road again on Monday.  I’ll be hooking up with the folks at lunchtime on Monday to head up to Belfast to set up for the Tuesday launch event.  I think there is an additional morning event for students which Wilbour Craddock will be presenting.  We do the usual business oriented Windows 7, Server 2008 R2 and Exchange 2010 event in the afternoon.  I’m going to add a couple of more wrinkles to my piece.  Then Wilbour does his solo again with the home oriented piece in the evening.

Wednesday sees us hit the M1 again to head back south to Dublin where we are presenting from Kevin Street DIT on Thursday.  It looks like the setup schedule will be challenging so I’m not looking forward to that.  There’s a morning event for the students and we do the usual afternoon and evening events.  Demand was huge so an additional Dublin day is being done on the Friday.  I think there’s a plan to record the Thursday event for those who couldn’t get a seat.

All the events are booked out.  I’ve seen some people say they’ll try to chance their way in.  Forget it!

I’m looking forward to next week.  I know I’ll be exhausted but these events are fun to do and it’s a chance to get out and talk to people about this stuff.  Hopefully I’ll meet some of yee out there.

IIS – It’s Just Keeps Getting Better

I keep getting more and more impressed with the work that is being done by the IIS teams in Microsoft.  The Web Platform Installer is belied by it’s tiny size.  Sure, it makes setting up a new IIS server quicker and easier.  But the big impact from it for me is how Microsoft has successfully worked with a number of partners to make the entire installation process easier … not just Server and IIS but the plug-ins from others who might be seen as competitors such as PHP.

And it keeps getting better.

There is a Web Deployment Tool to help with the installation and migration of new sites.  “The Web Deployment Tool simplifies the migration, management and deployment of IIS Web servers, Web applications and Web sites. Administrators can use command-line scripting with the Web Deployment Tool to synchronize IIS 6.0 and IIS 7.0 servers or to migrate an IIS 6.0 server to IIS 7.0. The Web Deployment Tool also enables administrators and delegated users to use IIS Manager to deploy ASP.NET and PHP applications to an IIS 7.0 server.” This features integration between Visual Studio 2010 and IIS 7.0.  Web admins can synchronise sites with it.  And web deployments can be converted into packages for easier deployment – this even allows you to add packages to the Microsoft Web Application Gallery.

IIS Advanced Logging appeared on the download site last night for X64 and X86.  “Advanced Logging provides rich, flexible data collection and real-time logging capabilities. Log any of the HTTP request/response headers, IIS server variables and client-side fields to track end-user engagement. Generate logs per IIS application, create custom logging for modules, or implement hierarchical logging. Set up a central log farm to collect client-side metrics and create multiple purpose-specific logs per request, with each log containing purpose-specific data”.

IIS Media Services 3.0 also made an appearance for X64 and X86.  “IIS Media Services 3.0 is a set of media-related extensions for Internet Information Services (IIS) 7. IIS Media Services provides an integrated HTTP-based media delivery platform, and includes:

  • Smooth Streaming, adaptive streaming of media over HTTP
  • Live Smooth Streaming, for live adaptive streaming of broadcast events
  • Bit Rate Throttling, meters the speed that media is delivered to a player
  • Web Playlists, secure sequencing of media content You can also download two additional IIS extensions related to IIS Media Services 3.0.
  • Advanced Logging, with real-time client- and server-side logging
  • Application Request Routing (ARR), providing HTTP proxying and caching”

There is also a smooth streaming deployment guide.  “Smooth Streaming is the Microsoft implementation of adaptive streaming technology, which is a form of Web-based media content delivery that uses standard HTTP. Instead of delivering media as full-file downloads, or as persistent (and thus stateful) streams, the content is delivered to clients as a series of MPEG-4 (MP4) fragments that can be cached at edge servers. Smooth Streaming-compatible clients use special heuristics to dynamically monitor current network and local PC conditions and seamlessly switch the video quality of the Smooth Streaming presentation that they receive. As a result, users experience the highest-quality playback available, with no interruptions in the stream. As a content producer, you can encode on-demand Smooth Streaming video using Microsoft Expression Encoder 3 (encoding of live Smooth Streams is currently not supported). As a content provider, you can use IIS Media Services to serve the encoded Smooth Streams. And as a content consumer, you can play the Smooth Streams using a Smooth Streaming-compatible client, such as Microsoft Silverlight. This document discusses the Microsoft implementation for delivering a full Smooth Streaming experience.”

Keep up up folks!  Combined with WebsiteSpark, this should tilt the Linux V Windows ratio a few ticks in MS’s favour.

New MTUG Website And A New Home – Running On Hyper-V.

Microsoft and the Microsoft Technology User Groups of Ireland (MTUG) have launched a new website on a new server hosted by C Infinity (for the sake of openness, my employers).  The server is running Windows Server with IIS and SQL 2007 on the C Infinity private cloud, powered by Microsoft Hyper-V, managed by Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 and monitored using Operations Manager 2007 R2.  It’s all located in our Tier IV data centre in Dublin.  It’s an example of Microsoft’s technology being used effectively by a hosting partner.

The website is the result of a lot of work, mainly by Darren Doyle, a placement student from Carlow IT who was working within the DPE team in Microsoft this year.  Various people have been involved including the various Irish user group leads, and a bunch of people from Microsoft Ireland: Enda Flynn, Dave Northey, Martha Rotter and Clare Dillon.  And of course, thanks to C Infinity for hosting the server!

Huge Interest in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Launch

Microsoft Ireland is halfway through the launch events for Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 and Exchange 2010.  There is HUGE interest.  For example, there are 350 seats available for the professional launch event in Dublin on the 15th.  Over 2,000 people applied for seats which were given out in a lottery – existing members of user groups were given a code to give them priority in the lottery.

Enda Flynn (who is in the DPE team, is the TechNet Ireland manager and is one of the organisers) is looking at doing another event on the 16th.  I’m one of the speakers and it’s in my calendar now.  If you’re one of the people who applied for a seat then keep an eye on your inbox.  I can’t say officially that the repeat event on the 16th is going to take place.  If it is, then notifications of a reserved seat will be sent out pretty quickly.

If you do get a seat, please do take advantage of it.  Not only are you getting €200+ worth of Windows 7 Ultimate for free but you get to see first hand some of the great new features of Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, the “better together” concept and Exchange 2010.

Upgraded From VMM 2008 to VMM 2008 R2

I upgraded the VMM 2008 server two days ago.  It turned out to be a relatively painless process.  Pop in the DVD (I copied the contents to the machine from the ISO), and upgrade each of the components.  I deployed the updated agents to the Hyper-V servers.  I then logged into the Operations Manager 2007 R2 RMS and upgraded the integration components.  That’s it.

That’s my first step in the upgrade of our Hyper-V hosts done.  Next up will be to start the actual OS upgrade of the host servers.  It’s a busy time coming up so that might have to wait a few weeks.  I’ll have to arrange a maintenance window so as to not affect customer service availability.

Building a Standard Image of Windows 7 Step-by-Step Guide

“This step-by-step guide explains how to install a custom image by using an operating system image that includes your customizations and applications. The guidance is designed specifically for small and medium business that may not have prior experience with Windows deployment or do not have an enterprise deployment infrastructure.”

BranchCache Deployment Guide

Customers running Windows 7 Ultimate or Enterprise in the branch office network might like BranchCache: cache downloaded web or file share files either on a P2P basis in the VLAN or on a Windows Server 2008 R2 machine in the entire branch office.  Microsoft has released a deployment guide for BranchCache.

“BranchCache is a wide area network (WAN) bandwidth optimization technology that is included in some editions of the Windows Server® 2008 R2 and Windows® 7 operating systems. To optimize WAN bandwidth, BranchCache copies content from your main office content servers and caches the content at branch office locations, allowing client computers at branch offices to access the content locally rather than over the WAN. This deployment guide provides instructions on deploying BranchCache in both distributed cache mode and hosted cache mode, and allows you to deploy Hypertext Transfer protocol (HHTP), Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS), and Server Message Block (SMB)-based content servers that are Web servers, application servers, and file servers, respectively.”