Month: January 2010

My First Book Hitting The Shelves Soon

It’s taken quite some time and amount of work but my first book is hitting the shelves soon.  When I say “my” I should clarify that I’m just one of the many contributors, with me having 4 chapters to my name.

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I got an email from the publishers (Sybex) to say that “Mastering Windows Server 2008 R2” was shipping from the warehouses this week.  I’m told that it will be available from retail outlets within the next month.  Localised versions (if there will be any) will take longer.  I’m supposed to be getting my 2 free copies this week.  Of course, being a good mama’s boy the first one will be going down home.

It was expected to be 1200 pages.  We tried to include W2008 and W2008 R2.  That was because we didn’t produce a W2008 book as planned originally.  That was the original project I was working on in 2007/2008.  There would be 3 W2008 books, the first being very basic, the second covering the 80% of stuff that we all need to know and the third covering the advanced stuff.  Things happened and there were delays.  Eventually it became a pointless task because R2 was coming and it was probably going to have a bigger place in the market than the original Windows Server 2008, thanks to things like Hyper-V and “better together”.  It was decided to focus on W2008 R2 in a single book but also draw in W2008 because it is still out there.  R2 brought us so much new material that the pages kept flowing.  Eventually 1200 pages became 1500 pages.

You should start seeing it on the shelves soon in all good book stores and a few rubbish ones too.  If you have ordered from Amazon then your poor postman will be dragging it to your door quite soon.  I’ve read that Sybex are now selling soft versions of their books rather than “treeware” so that might be an option for you mobility aware folks.

Vodafone Update – Post ComReg

I got a call from John in Vodafone Ireland data services.  He took my issues and promised to go through them.  We looked at my router diagnostics to confirm the readings there were seeing on my line matched what my router saw.  I was promised a call back.  In the meantime, there might be outages in my service as they did work.

20 or so minutes later John rang back.  Vodafone “changed my profile”.  I tested it out and it seems like my 7MB line is now behaving like a 7MB line.  For now.  I’m not saying this is resolved.  I know what some service companies can be like and something can be returned to its broken state as quickly as it was fixed.

I am promised a resolution of the daily 3-5 minutes outages caused by Vodafone’s 24 hour DHCP lease renewal.  I am also promised a resolution to sites not being accessible.  We’ll see.  My breath is not held.

Why, oh why does it take screaming your lungs out to get any service from Vodafone Ireland?  It seems to me that a service request now takes 3 telephone calls:

  1. Call customer service and some eejit tells you he can do nothing or puts you on hold to get a paper form (yeah right) – it’s to get rid of you because there are no paper forms and they take long enough to go make the paper from timber they’re going to cut in the Amazon.  You’ll be promised a supervisor call back but that never happens.  That’s to get rid of you.  Wouldn’t that make Vodafone Ireland a company of liars?
  2. Call ComReg to get a case opened and a reference number.
  3. Call back to Vodafone Ireland with your instructions from ComReg to get a complaint opened so that your original request can be dealt with.

I work in the service industry; IT infrastructure to be precise.  If I behaved this way with customers I would be … well I wouldn’t be working in IT any more.  I’d probably be making minimum wage answering phones for Vodafone Ireland.

Me & COMREG Versus Vodafone Ireland

I called COMREG (the government commissioner for telecommunications in Ireland with authority to penalise a licensed company) immediately after being dismissed by Vodafone Ireland Customer “Care” (Emmet) this morning.  COMREG took a listing on my complaints and went through my options, including some very severe steps.  I was given a case reference number and instructed to call Customer “Care”.  My first lines were to:

  1. As for the customer care agent’s name
  2. Inform the person that I was “filing a formal complaint following the instructions of COMREG and that I had a case open with them”.  I supplied the COMREG reference number.

I listed my complaints:

  1. Vodafone fixed line home broadband has a daily outage for every customer in Ireland, including myself.  This is due to an unusual design of the DHCP lease process by Vodafone Ireland.  Contrary to their claims, this is unusual and I have never had this happen with either BT Ireland nor Digiweb in the past.
  2. The performance I have experienced of Vodafone Ireland fixed line home broadband has been awful.  Any site containing images either takes an age to load or the images fail to load.  This causes me issues because (a) most sites have lots of images and (b) I’m into photography. I know the sites in question are fine because they work OK from our data centre.
  3. I cannot access some sites via Vodafone Ireland fixed line home broadband.  I know the sites are operational but I cannot access them.  This appears to be random.  I know the sites in question are fine because they work OK from our data centre.
  4. I have tried to open cases with Customer Care on the home broadband issues but the agent couldn’t do anything beyond the 2 steps (reset router, change DNS) and refused to escalate the call.
  5. I had a crank call last night and I called to get Customer Care to block the number from calling me again.  The customer care agent would not cooperate and put me on call to get rid of me.  The agent handling this formal complaint, “Peter”, did at least call someone internally to dig up the number that dialled me last night and have it added to my case.  That should have been the first action of “Emmet” this morning, instead of saying “Vodafone Ireland does not block numbers”.

It took some time to get all this recorded with “Peter”.  I was promised a supervisor call back!  Hah, as Emmet told me this morning, those happen if a supervisor feels like it.  But I do have a requirement from COMREG: it is the duty of Vodafone Ireland to respond to my complaints in this case within 10 working days or they face penalties from COMREG.

COMREG have also offered a way to smoothly transition from Vodafone Ireland home broadband without a disconnect, event though I have some 9 months left in the contract if Vodafone Ireland cannot provide the service required.

The Complete Awful Vodafone Ireland Experience

I cannot believe the contempt that your company has for its customers.

Here’s some reading for you:

And let’s just add to that litany:

Last night I got a nuisance call at 00:15.  This morning I called customer "care" to file a complaint.  The agent, Emmit, didn’t want to do a thing.  He refused to cooperate.  I was told I could ask for a supervisor call back.  Based on the above experience I know that never happens – it’s just a way to get the caller off of the line.  When pushed, Emmit, said that supervisors only call back when they feel like it.  Oh what an admission!!!  I asked to file a formal complaint.  I was told he;d have to put me on hold "while he gets a form".  Uhuh!  5 minutes later I’m still listening to Extreme playing an awful 90’s song.  How long does it take to load an application on a PC?  What, was he pressing a sheet of paper from pulp or something?  Your company is shocking.  You’re a shame to this country.

Todd Lammle – Where Have All The Addresses Gone?

Todd Lammle is a consultant, trainer and author on Cisco networking.  If you have a Cisco certification there’s a good chance you read one of his books.  The first time I saw him speak was at the second Minasi conference in Virginia Beach.  He frightened the **** out of a room full of experienced IT pro’s telling us about the death of IPv4 and the emergence of IPv6.  He came back the following year and didn’t scare us as much.

Todd has recently written some blog entries:

It’s a good, short digestible read that reinforces the need to get to grips with IPv6.  If only the Irish ISP’s would do this!!!

By the way, Todd is to be speaking at the fifth Minasi conference in Virginia Beach this year.  It’s going to be economic and I’m led to believe (not official yet) there is a good chance he’ll be doing a half day pre-con training session on Cisco equipment configuration.  Todd is an energetic and entertaining speaker and well worth checking out.

BTW, if you do read this, Todd … we’re IRISH, not Scottish, ya Mexican 😉

Thinking About HP and Microsoft’s Announcement

You’ve probably already read about the announcement where HP and Microsoft are aligning their technologies on the virtualisation, management, storage and deployment front.  Slap-bang in the middle of this is Hyper-V.

This was interesting.  Even up to last month, HP in Ireland was pretending Hyper-V didn’t exist.  Every bit of their marketing was 100% around VMware.  Their biggest enterprise storage/server reseller only started to play with Hyper-V for the very first time in December, only to see if it was something they wanted to sell or not.

Now we read that HP considers Hyper-V to be their primary virtualisation platform.  I’d wonder if that’s something to do with EMC and VMware cosying up to each other.  HP would prefer their LeftHand, EVA and XP SAN to be in that position, I’m sure.  If they’d hung around then I’m sure Dell would have taken a strong position with Microsoft on this front.  They’re equally as capable with their server, storage and System Center integration – which you could argue is as good, if not better, than HP’s.  And there is the NetApp alliance with MS on the Hyper-V front.  Talking with HP people from time to time and reading HP blogs, they really do not like NetApp!

I’m a HP Blade, EVA, Hyper-V and System Center customer so the HP/MS announcement is good for me.  I’d guess we won’t see anything of substance this year.  I’d hope whatever comes won’t just be some paid for bolt on in the HP catalog.  I’d expect to see developments on EVA CLX to give us CSV between EVA SAN’s in different sites (only support per LUN VM deployments at the moment) and a solution for the XP.  There’ll probably be some Hyper-V branded LeftHand as well – HP are really pushing LeftHand iSCSI storage and I can see why.  It’s an attractive looking package.

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BackupAssist: Hyper-V Host Level Backup & Guest File Retrieval

This is something that is the ideal.  Consider the typical host level backup with DPM (Data Protection Manager).  It uses VSS (Volume Shadow Copy Service) to bring the VM into a state where everything can be backed up at the VHD level without service interruption or inside VM corruption.  The problem with this is that you are backing up the state of the VM and a restore means you have to restore the entire VM.  Yes, you can restore that 100GB VHD, mount the VHD and get the file(s).  But that’s time consuming and slow.  It’s also manual.

That means you are typically putting backup agents on the host and in the VM.  The host level one is good for DR and the VM level one is good for operational backup/recovery.  The problem is the time to set it up, potentially the licensing costs (with 3rd party solutions), the amount of storage required and the amount of time/traffic required for a backup window.

A company called BackupAssist seems to get this.  I’ve never heard of them before and I cannot vouch for their product or their company.  But they are pointing the way forward.  The have a solution called BackupAssist v5 that will backup at the host level.  You can then restore any file from within the backed up VHD’s.  On the face of it, it appears they are doing this VHD mounting process through a GUI.  It also looks quite cheap.  If I was a SME looking for a backup solution for my Hyper-V servers, I’d definitely have to give their demo a good test.

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MS Partner Event: Application Platform University

This is a business intelligence “road show” funded by MS Europe, presented in the Dublin office.  The speaker is Tibbs Pereira, hosted by Barry McMahon.  Barry is a good guy; I’ve worked with him in a previous job and he was great at sharing info and helping us out.

They do something interesting to start out.  There’s around 20 visitors in the room.  The speakers have asked each visitor to introduce themselves, say what they want to get out of the day and list objections/fears from the field about MS BI technology.

The Business Imperatives

  • Business intelligence – usable information
  • The web – availability
  • Business applications – processing data to get information and using it to get results
  • Application lifecycle management – continuous development/improvement of functions and features

Traditional business solutions often include the user using multiple styles of non-integrated applications: green screen, installed and web.  We should try to have a unified application platform: one style of integrated interface, even if it’s multiple applications and systems at the back end.  That makes data easier to access and information easier to use.

Using an integrated backend, not a mix of all the platforms (SAP, Oracle, SQL, MySQL, etc) makes application development easier and data more reliable.  Otherwise you’re fudging data through translation services and hoping it stays consistent.  35% planning this convergence.  41% currently have this convergence underway.  24% aren’t going to converge.  According to Forrester Research in 2007.

Underlying this is the optimised infrastructure (well designed and managed).  Ideally it’ll be dynamic too, e.g. automation, and flexible, e.g. self service in VMM.

Benefits of the MS Platform

Innovation Benefits

  • Better time to value
  • Respond quickly to organisation change via flexibility
  • User experience is familiar
  • Largest partner ecosystem for packaged and customised solutions

Operations Benefits

  • High performance, scalability and reliability
  • Solutions have common management skills and tools, e.g. System Center, clustering, etc.
  • Technology investments work well with each other, MS integration, Active Directory for authorisation/authentication
  • Consistent security standards for increased compliance: take advantage of Configuration Manager to audit those policies.

An interesting point is brought up here.  Lots of MS customers already have the licensing for much of this.  For example, a desktop core CAL may include SharePoint CAL’s.  All that remains is the server licensing which is a comparatively small cost.

Customer Thinking

Customers have typically deployed lots of solutions with no standardisation.  “Legacy systems are forever”.  There’s some movement to standardisation.  Oracle, Microsoft and IBM are emerging as the 3 remaining pillars.  Customers now considering standardisation on one of these 3.  SME typically are standardised on Microsoft already because of price and availability.  Larger enterprises have the heterogeneous application platform.  The won’t ditch legacy stuff but they will integrate into a single application platform for data availability and information access and usage.

Business intelligence is the number one spend in IT.  It was in 2009 (4th year in a row, Gartner) and will be in 2010.  It’s “recession proof”, because information is more important now to understand the pains and losses.  Future compliance solutions, as a result of the recession causes, will continue this drive.

Microsoft SWOT

  • Strengths: Office, roadmap
  • Opportunity: CAL up-sell and deployment
  • Weaknesses: brand perceptions
  • Threats: Oracle

Approaches

These are the motivations of customers in BI:

  • Application Led: (SAP and Oracle) point application approach.  I need XYZ and these vendors do this
  • Infrastructure led: (IBM, Microsoft) this is a broader, integrated approach.  The idea is a store of data and access systems are built and applications are built on it.

Business Productivity Infrastructure

  • Unified Communications and collaboration
  • Business intelligence
  • Enterprise content management

These sit on:

  • Worflow
  • Search
  • Business data catalog
  • Extensible UI
  • Open XML file formats
  • Website and secure framework

In other words, think of the big picture, not just the point application.  Reports are produced but how are they stored, shared, accessed, secured, used by other solutions, etc.

And all of this needs to run on a secure, reliable, flexible, scalable and well managed IT infrastructure.  If that foundation is week then the business productivity infrastructure is weak => the business is weak.

Model

  • SQL is the data storage engine
  • SharePoint is the thin client access system
  • Office is the thick client access method.

The Next Wave of MS Products

Both SharePoint 2010 and SQL 2008 R2 are focused on business intelligence.  SP will be RTM before July.  SQL this year.  We get a demo of Excel pulling data from SQL, produces an application (a report based on pivot tables and slices) and publishes it to SharePoint so anyone can access it.  The lesson is that BI is something to sell to and use by the business, not IT. 

This is data access/sharing done by non-IT people using data managed by IT.  It’s ad-hoc self-service where the business doesn’t have to wait on IT, and IT doesn’t get distracted from engineering projects and maintenance.  IT can monitor this.  Then we go back to basic MIS and systems analysis classes from college.  IT should take over important or highly used applications to standardise them and to do QA on them.  Critical applications should be managed.

Excel 2007 can now load hundreds of millions of rows from SQL.  In the demo, the 110,000,000 rows consumed approximately 64KB of data, therefore not hammering the network.

Scalability

RyanAir booking systems runs on SQL 2005.  It was SQL 2000 until recently.  It has 54,000,000 transactions per annum.  Permanent TSB online banking runs on SQL.  Department of family and social affairs runs on SQL.  NASDQ uses it, Citibank uses it, Hotmail, MSN, etc.  So the questions about SQL scalability from the typical 300 user CIO are laughable.  Gartner counts MS SQL as one of the big 3 enterprise database systems.

SQL Reporting Services

The sales phrase being used for SQL is “beyond relational”, i.e. there’s more to MS SQL than storing data: e.g. analysis, integration and reporting.

Competing Against Oracle

Don’t try to tell them to dump Oracle.  Say it’s fine for point applications but MS stack is data/information for the masses.  Chances are, most of the infrastructure and client access licensing are already in place for the MS stack.  You’re likely looking at hybrid solutions where you sell services to merge data into a data warehouse(s) for user access.

Selling SQL Server Advanced Solutions

In BI, MS never talks about the Standard or less editions of SQL.  They always talk about Enterprise.  The same goes when comparing against Oracle. 

There is a new things called the SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Data Warehouse.  It’ll be sold by hardware vendors exclusively.  The idea is that you can scale out a singe data warehouse database across cheaper hardware instead of buying some big gigantic pricey piece of equipment.

There is a new Datacenter SKU as well.  This will be per processor.  Supports up to 256 physical cores.  Unlimited free virtualization on a licesned host.  Unlimited RAM.  Unlimited managed instances. 

Standard price going up by 25%.  Enterprise is going up by 15%.  Now only 4 free VM’s on a licensed host.  Max 2TB RAM.  Up to 25 managed instances.

Standard: 64Gb RAM, 4 physical processors, 1 free VM license. 

Existing Enterprise covered by Software Assurance will be upgraded to Datacenter.

*Hmm, I’d be concerned that these higher costs will further swing SME’s on the online market to MySQL.  It’s probably got over 60% of that market.

BizTalk

This was briefly talked about.  It’s the application and business integration solution from MS, based on XML translation.  Often a possibility to sell with SharePoint.

If you are in Ireland then check out the SharePoint user group and the SQL user group.

How Unprofessional Is Vodafone Ireland?

You can probably guess what my answer will be to that after I previously asked How Bad Is Vodafone Ireland Home Broadband?

Yesterday afternoon I was called by an engineering team leader by the name of Graham Jenkins.  I was in the car and couldn’t talk so I let the call go to voice mail.  I called him back this morning and left a voice mail for him.  At 16:16 today, Graham called me back.  He promised an engineer would call me at either 18:00 or 19:00 this evening to investigate the issues I’ve encountered, and that many others have told me or posted on Facebook and the Vodafone forums that they’ve also encountered.

18:00 rolls by and there’s no call.  19:00 rolls by and there’s no call.  Maybe the Vodafone Ireland phone network is broken now?  No, it’s the unprofessional behaviour I’ve come to expect from Vodafone Ireland.  It took over a week before a previous promised engineer call took place.

I guess what’ll happen next is some disgruntled engineer that can barely speak the local language will call me and say everything is fine on their network and my PC must be broken.

Yeah, sure … along with the other 2 and the second router.  Let’s see what they try next.

By the way, my public speaking schedule for the year is filling up nicely.

Hyper-V: Can I Virtualise Everything: Domain Controllers?

I’ve seen this one a few times on forums and I’ve been asked it at sessions I’ve presented at.  People are deploying Hyper-V in medium and large businesses and they are wondering if they should virtualise absolutely everything in their data centre.

The answer is no. 

Let’s start with the obvious.  Some applications or operating systems may not have vendor support for virtualisation.  If that’s the case then you shouldn’t virtualise them.  However, many still do and they get by with no negative impacts.  Okey dokey.

Some servers just require too many resources to consider for virtualisation.  Consider a data warehouse application.  If you virtualise it, it might require a 1 VM per host deployment.  For the vast majority of us that’s a bad idea.  However some might like it because it means the machine is abstracted from the hardware.  But remember that you can only have a maximum of 4 virtual processors in a Windows Server VM on Hyper-V.  That likely won’t be enough for any machine that needs 32GB or 64GB RAM.

Then there’s domain controllers.  You can virtualise domain controllers but you have to be very careful.  Basically you have to treat them as you would physical domain controllers.  Checkpoints/saved states and host level backup is a bad idea for domain controllers because of the risks of AD corruption, e.g. USN rollback.  Microsoft takes the idea of virtual domain controllers very seriously and has a very long support article on it.

Should you virtualise all of your domain controllers?  Typically I will say no to this.  There’s a few exceptions, e.g. virtualised SBS running on a workgroup member Hyper-V host.  But take a Hyper-V cluster.  The presence of AD is a requirement of a Hyper-V cluster.  What happens if you need to power down your entire cluster for maintenance or power suddenly cuts out.  These things happen.  Electricians might need to work on power board or a UPS/generator might fail to kick in.  I’ve seen both take place in the past.  What happens to that cluster if all of the DC’s are virtualised on the cluster?  The cluster relies on AD for authentication/authorization.  Things will fail.  It’s a chicken and egg scenario.

Microsoft recently blogged about this.  The workaround solution is to find the LUN where the VHD(s)  for a DC with DNS role installed and configured is located, copy that to a temporary workgroup Hyper-V server and set it up to boot up.  Now you can power up the cluster.  But you have to be really careful and make sure that original DC VM doesn’t start up and cause a mess.

The advice is to have at least one physical DC.  When I did my ESX 3.X training a few years ago the advice was the same when running Virtual Center.  I recommend having 2: Murphy tends to like to mess up plans and wouldn’t it be a bad day if both the cluster powered down and your lone physical DC wouldn’t start up?  Alternatively you can run those DC’s on a separate workgroup host but that just complicates things in terms of virtualisation management.  I like to keep things simple so I’d go the 2 physical DC route.  Then you can safely virtualise other DC’s while sticking to Microsoft’s advice on the subject.