Month: February 2010

Last Day Of #mvp10 MVP Summit 2010

Today is the last day of the MVP summit.  Over the last two days we had our breakout sessions with our expertise and interest groups.  Lots of stuff was covered and there were plenty of chances to chat with representatives from the groups.

The Redmond campus is huge.  For those of you in Ireland, imagine Sandyford Industrial Estate …. dozens of times bigger and with 4-6 lane highways instead of those tiny little streets.  I expected to find some sterile environment with giant tower blocks.  Instead it was lots of spread out office buildings with tree lined streets.  Transport was well organised with busses to ferry us everywhere.  You can see MS branded mini-buses on site as well as MS branded hybrid taxis.

Today’s sessions are general keynotes in the morning with some more specialist sessions outside of the product groups in the afternoon.

The forecast is pretty good.  Seeing as I’m over here with camera gear I’m going to take advantage of the opportunity and get out and about.  Myself and my roommate, Exchange MVP Nathan Winters from the UK, are heading up to Mount Rainier National Park in the Cascade mountains.  We’ll stay out there for a day and a half before returning to this area for our flights on Sunday.

I’d like to thank Ben, Mike, and all the others, who took the time to make us virtualisation MVP’s welcome in town this week.  We got to learn some cool things (which we cannot share so don’t bother asking) and our feedback was listened to and forwarded to the right people.  All I will say is that they are very aware of what the market wants and they are working hard to respond and to innovate.

Hopefully I’ll be able to come back next year.  Until then … Later!

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Multi-Site Live Migration Clustering Whitepaper By HP

I just saw a tweet by one of the Microsoft virtualisation feeds, announcing that HP had released a white paper on how to do Hyper-V Live Migration/clustering across multiple sites using the HP StorageWorks Cluster Extension.

“This paper briefly touches upon the Hyper-V and Cluster Extension (CLX) key features, functionality, best practices, and various use cases. It also objectively describes the various scenarios in which Hyper-V and CLX complement each other to achieve the highest level of disaster tolerance.

This paper concludes with the step-by-step details for creating a CLX solution in Hyper-V environment from scratch. There are many references also provided for referring to relevant technical details”.

HP StorageWorks VDS & VSS Hardware Providers

You can find this here on the HP site.  The EVA download for VDS and VSS is here.

HP StorageWorks Arrays support Microsoft Virtual Disk Services (VDS) and Volume Shadow Copy Services (VSS) for Windows Server 2003Services (VSS) for Windows Server 2003 / 2008 / 2008 R2 Enterprise and Data Center Editions.

VDS hardware providers enable volume and logical unit management of HP StorageWorks arrays from a central Windows Server Microsoft Management Console. Administrators can discover, configure and monitor supported HP storage devices from Windows Server operating environments.

VSS hardware providers enable point-in-time copies with nearly instant recovery of a single volume or multiple volumes. VSS providers are typically used in combination with a requestor application such as backup and recovery. Microsoft VSS services enable business applications to interface seamlessly with HP StorageWorks Arrays to perform point-in-time copies with nearly instant recovery.

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MS10-015 Blue Screen: Microsoft Confirms It Was Malware

As was first reported by people on SANS and the Microsoft Answers forum, the cause of the MS10-015 blue screens of death was actually malware called Alureon or TDSS, i.e. a root kit that was already on the machine and had damaged it.  The update legitimately updated the system and the root kit failed, causing a blue screen.

This highlights a few things:

  • Get your anti-malware installed and keep it up to date.  AVG has a free product.  Avast has a free product.  Best of all, Microsoft Security Essentials is also free.  Microsoft’s free anti virus would have protected those people who were impacted.  Their business product would have protected those business users.
  • 64-bit computers have a built in process that defends system files.  They were not affected.  Walk into a PC store and have a look at the Windows 7 PC’s.  I bet you all (not the netbooks maybe) are running a 64-bit edition of Windows 7.
  • This situation was a great story for Microsoft Answers, the forum aimed at supporting the consumer.  This was where consumers raised awareness of the problem, Microsoft responded with a workaround, and they could gather information to identify the cause.
  • Make sure your patches are kept up to date.  Configure Windows Updates on home/small office PC’s and use WSUS/ConfigMgr to manage updates in the business/enterprise.  Quite often, these malware attacks leverage vulnerabilities that MS would have released patches for quite some time before. 

By the way, Microsoft Windows lets you know of issues in the System Notification area (bottom right) with a red shield.  That allows you to quickly get at a tool to view your security setup where any update or configuration problems will be highlighted.

Microsoft have explained the issue in depth.  The long and short of this one was that people did not defend their PC’s adequately.  Free tools that were marketed and advertised would have protected those people.  Take the time now to check your PC and your security settings.

Irish President’s New Patriotic Website

The president of Ireland, Mary McAleese, has launched a new website to spur on patriotism and entrepreneurship in our small country.  The only problem is that she chose to host the website in England.  I’ve no problem with England but there’s plenty of fine Irish web hosting companies in Ireland where she could have spent the Irish tax payers money.

You’ll understand that I won’t link to the site.

First Day of #mvp10 Breakout Sessions Complete

We’re half way through the in-depth sessions at the 2010 MVP summit.  It’s all under super-duper top secret NDA (with a threat of being hunted down) so don’t bother asking me anything.  All I’ll say is I learned loads and got to interact with some cool people, both MVP’s and product people from MS.   If you gave me feedback last week then it has been given in.  Tomorrow is another deep dive day on the Redmond campus.  Hopefully there will be lots more of the same.

News of Third Party VHD/VMDK Optimisation Solution

I just read an article that reports on the launch of a new third party solution (beta) by Virsto Software to optimise the performance of VHD’s on Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V.  It will later be available for VMware’s VMDK’s.  It installs on the parent partition (host OS) and treats VHD’s like database files.  Instead of the VM writing directly to the VHD, it instead writes to a log file which is replayed back to the VHD.  This improves performance but also allows more VHD’s to be placed in a single LUN when I/O has become an issue (probably not channel related – more disk speed related).

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#mvp10 Don’t Tell Anyone This …

… I can’t share any of the content from the Microsoft MVP Summit 😉

We’ve been encouraged to let people know about the experience but all content, be it technical, strategy, marketing, jokes, etc are all under our MVP Non Disclosure Agreements (NDA) and MS went to great lengths yesterday to reinforce that.

Yesterday was a sort of introductory day to get the ball rolling.  We had some generic sessions and some keynotes.  I attended one session where senior managers from a division worked as a panel and MVP’s brought their own questions/feedback, and those from their employers, customers and colleagues.  I think it was educational for both sides of the conversation.  And as expected, MVP’s don’t have questions -  they have comments with question marks on the end.

At the end of the day there was a reception.  I was selected to be one of the MVP’s to video record a question for an executive keynote on Friday.  I cannot share anything about it, other than it’s a question I think everyone would have on their top 5 list.  It’ll be cool if it gets played and answered.

We might now be able to tell people now about what we learn (not even our employers) but we will be able to work better (without telling you why) and be in a better position to share information when MS releases us on those specifics.  We’re also bringing feedback that we have gathered, hopefully helping MS to give their customers a product that you want.

Another part of the summit is networking.  It was nice to meet some of my American fellow virtualisation MVP’s for the first time.  I also got to meet Mike Sterling, one of the guys behind Hyper-V, that you may know through blogging and Twitter.  He’s a cool guy and really got me excited about these next 2 days, giving us a hint of the hard work they’ve been doing to prepare.  I also got to meet up again with fellow STEP & TechEd Springboard booth staff members Justin Rodino and Miklos Cari.  There were lots of the familiar UK/Ireland MVP’s.  At least 5 of the Irish MVP’s are here in town covering virtualisation, unified communications, XNA and SQL.  And of course, there’s a good representation from the Minasi forum which has a unusually high number of MVP’s in the ranks.  We hung out at the reception last night and chatted about things from writing, books, the upcoming Minasi conference, and what we’ve been up to since we last met.

Later this morning we head out to the Redmond Campus and split up to meet the product teams in person.  These will be the deep-dive, uber-secret technical sessions that everyone wants to know about :)  I’m quite excited about these two days, because these two days of the year are the biggest of the benefits we get as MVP’s.  Not even our fellow MVP’s who couldn’t make it here this week get access to this information.  It’s an amazing privilege and one we have to take very seriously.

Starting from 7am, 1,400 MVP’s will be leaving 4 hotels and getting on the Microsoft shuttles to head out to a number of buildings in Redmond.  There we take on our role of playing secret agents once again, keeping secrets and hopefully representing you … but also hopefully having a lot of fun in the process.

Microsoft Whitepaper: How To Protect Hyper-V with DPM 2010

Microsoft has a white paper on how to backup and restore Hyper-V using System Center Data Protection Manager 2010 (currently in RC stage, might be RTM announced at MMS).  It includes:

  • Protection for Live Migration scenarios, including Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV)
  • Item level recovery (ILR) for restoring individual items from a host-based backup of a VM
  • Restoring VMs to different Hyper-V hosts than where they were backed up

I was chatting with Hans Vredevoort 2 days ago about DPM 2010.  He’s been working with it quite a lot and has some good contacts on the product.  He says you need to be very careful about how you schedule backups of VM’s on CSV and that the devil is in the details.  Read the paper once, twice and again.

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