Month: April 2010

HP G7 Servers

HP has announced the G7 generation of servers.  There seems to be 3 models to start with, all Opteron based.  I’m looking at a video for the DL 385 G7.  Wow!  It takes up to 2 * 12 Core Opteron processors, 12MB L3 cache, with 4 channels of DDR3 memory.  You get double the RAM capacity and 66% throughput compared to the same G6 machine.  24 Dimms with 256GB total capacity.  You have the choice of the usual ECC RAM, cheaper unbuffered RAM and low power RAM.  There are 4 NIC’s built into it – aimed squarely at, but hardly limited to, virtualisation.

The cheaper RAM might be an option for clustered virtualisation were power reduction isn’t the primary goal.  Board fails?  OK – the VM fails over to another host.

New storage controllers with battery and flash backed caches are included.  There is an extra PCIx slot giving you 6 generation 2 slots.

An SD card reader is built in, handy for OEM provided ESXi or Hyper-V Server installations that boot from a card.  Interesting – HP always used to use Compact Flash.

ILO3 promises much better (3 times faster) remote administration.  The big flaw in ILO2 was remote media.  That’s improved now.  You can script power usage for low power (UPS) scenarios.  There is also a power measurement feature now.

There are 8 built in SFF slots.  You can add another cage to have a total of 16.  Instead of 8 SFF, you can use 6 LFF disks (larger capacities).

That’s a very impressive 2U server!

A DL165 G7 (1U) and SL165z G7 were also announced.  The DL165 G7 has 4 NIC’s and 24 DIMM slots for traditional and virtualization server computing.  Some of the other metrics are the same as above.  The SL165z G7 is for extreme scale out computing and constrained spaces.  It’s a cross between rack and blade servers.  It appears to be of a similar spec to the DL165 G7.

MMS 2010 Keynotes on Tuesday/Wednesday

The Microsoft Management Summit has the reputation of being the MS conference to go to if you can only go to one of them.  It’s aimed at the techies and has techie content.  This year will be an interesting one.

  • Somewhere behind the scenes, ConfigMgr v.Next is taking shape.  We got a sneak peak at TechEd last November.  There’s probably more detail available now.
  • ConfigMgr 2007 R3 should be ready by now.  It was due around the end of Q1.  We’re beyond that.  It wouldn’t surprise me if the announcement was made on Monday, in line with the conference for System Center junkies.
  • DPM 2010 is also due around now.  Don’t be shocked to hear a lot about it next week.
  • We’re about half way through the current release life of OpsMgr 2007 R2.  I wonder if there’s going to be some talk about OpsMgr v.Next?
  • There’s lots of other stuff that if you forced me to guess, I’d say will be happen on Monday too.
  • Attendees will probably start to get some meat on the bones of the new Opalis acquisition.  Everything I’ve read so far seems like it was written by Citrix Marketing: all fur, no meat.  There will allegedly be integrations into other System Center products at the end of the year.

According to a tweet I saw a couple of days ago, the keynotes will be streamed live.  Tuesday will focus on servers.  Wednesday will focus on clients.  I’ll be trying to tune in if it isn’t at some crazy hour locally.

EDIT:

Here are the details of the keynotes:

  • Tuesday, April 20, 8:30 – 9:45 AM PST:  Managing Systems from the Datacenter to the Cloud,  Bob Muglia, president, Microsoft Server and Tools
  • Wednesday, April 21, 8:30 – 9:45 AM PST:  User Centric Client Management, Brad Anderson, corporate vice president, Management and Services Division

The Simple Pleasures in Life

I had what I would describe as a rotten day today with a few nice little bits thrown in here and there to keep me sane.  I went over to the shops at the end of the day to pick up some food for the rest of the week.  As I was returning I got a call and was chatting away while driving through an area in central Ireland called the Curragh (where the horse racing track is) Plains.  Since I started doing wildlife photography my eyes have sharpened up to notice little things.

Zooming along at (the speed limit, officer) a quick pace I see this flash of brown sitting on the fence.  I park at the end of the plains and finish the call.

I knew it was a bird of prey.  A small one, falcon shaped.  There are no Peregrines here because a mound of clay breaks the horizons in these parts.  It was not bulky enough for a Buzzard, which is a hawk.  And it was too small for one of the wandering Red Kites.  It was too big for a Hobby or a Merlin.  That left me with one remaining option.  I grabbed my binoculars from the car boot, regretting that my camera gear wasn’t there.  “Ah”, I thought, “It’ll be long gone by now”.

I wandered over and scanned as I walked.  I saw the little blob on the concrete fence in the distance.  I moved closer, a bit at a time as I took a close look through the glasses.  Eventually I found myself within 15 metres of her.  She was a Kestrel, perched with her brown back to the sun, watching the cars zip by within 8 feet of her.  Occasionally she’d face me, her yellow-rimmed eyes catching the light.  Now I really was gutted I hadn’t got my camera with me.  I sat down, just to relax.  She was chilled out so why shouldn’t I be?

10 minutes of chilling with this little fantastic “wind hover” (they hover to scan for small prey beneath them) and the real world crept back in.  I have a chapter to submit on Sunday and a concurrent one to complete.  I stood back up and started backing away.  I was a bit worried that maybe she’d been hit and stunned by a car.  It was OK, she took off and flew about 50 yards away to park again on the fence.

10 minutes of chilling out with one of the wonders of nature was a nice way to cap today off.

Configuration Manager 2007 Dashboard

The ConfigMgr 2007 Dashboard is a recently released free add-on from MS to allow you to quickly view the status of the most important items in your deployment.  The listed benefits are:

  • Actionable information out of the box. The dashboard comes with a wide range of valuable, built-in reports that IT managers can access without using the Configuration Manager console.
  • Centralized, near-real-time access to key information. The graphical dashboard lets customers view any Configuration Manager data set in near-real time—without leaving their desk.
  • Easy to build and configure. The dashboard’s wizard-based tools let customers easily create new dashboards in minutes.
  • Easy to customize. The dashboard can easily be customized to meet the needs of different departments and other groups. Any data set in the Configuration Manager database can be presented on the dashboard, in chart, gauge, and table formats.
  • Flexible & interactive. Users can easily filter data and create ad hoc, custom views. Filters allow users to quickly drill down from high-level to more specific data.

It had been a long time since I’d done any ConfigMgr work.  But recent lab work using a couple of deployments got me hooked with this uber powerful system.  It’s huge, can put it’s fingers (at your control) into everything, and puts you firmly in control.  Pair it with OpsMgr and the network is tamed like a wild horse.  The Dashboard will give you a customisable at-a-glimpse view of what is going on in ConfigMgr, just like you already can do with dashboards in OpsMgr.

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What Would The Interest Be In a Training Day?

I’m just thinking aloud here.  If I was to do a training day on deploying Hyper-V in an enterprise, what would the interest be? 

  • It would probably be in Dublin, hopefully near the airport – making it possible for people to get cheap flights in that morning and fly home that night.
  • The session would be 1 day long.
  • The cost would be around €200 per person. 
  • It would include everything in the project, from assessment through to backup and recovery of the system.
  • The latest developments would be included – there are always new developments in the Hyper-V world.  It is far from boring.

No promises – and it’s certainly not happening before August.  I’m just curious what people think.

Some Useful Hyper-V Posts From the Last While

I’ve been going through my unread feeds from the last month or so (it’s been busy) and I’m posting links to the interesting ones here:

My New Epson R2880 and My Photo Printing Process

As a sys admin, the one thing that would always make my skin crawl was printers.  I haven’t been an internal sys admin for years.  But I am a serious amateur photographer.  I enter competitions, I’m seeking higher accreditation/certification than I have already, and I’m probably going to start selling some framed stuff soon.  I’ve owned the same A4 HP Photosmart 7150 since late 2001.  It certainly was not up to the task. 

For serious stuff, I would always use something like Photobox.  A little while ago, a buddy started 360 DPI in Dublin and I’d get him to print stuff.  The problem was that what I was seeing wasn’t what was coming out on paper.  That wasn’t any fault of the service provider; the issue was at my end.

First thing is the screen.  It must be calibrated.  No 2 screens are the same.  Brightness, contrast and colour vary.  When you edit you must have a calibrated screen so that red really is red, green is green and blue is blue.  Brightness, white balance and contrast must be set to a uniform level.  That means what you see on the screen is what you send to the printer … sort of.

I bought a Spyder II Express for around €80 around 2 years ago.  It’s a dongle with a driver/software package.  The software asks you to plug in the dongle and hang it on your screen in a specific location (you are given a visual guide).  The software sends through various colours on screen and the dongle measures them.  Variations allow it to calculate how to profile your screen.  That is then saved to Windows (or Mac) and is loaded when you log in.  You are meant to repeat this process and do it in your typical working light. 

You really do notice the difference when the profile is loaded.  My Dell E6500 seems to be quite cold in terms of white balance and gets warmed up by the profile.  My Sony Vaio screen is very bright and is darkened.  Now I can see the actual colours, contrast and brightness when I edit in Photoshop.  But I still make mistakes – usually with the curves tool.  I noticed that I sometimes make the mid tones a little too dark.

That’s a problem if you send a set of shots of to be printed and only see the issue when the prints come back 3-7 days later and you have a deadline.  You can do nothing about it and you have to pay for the prints.  If you are lucky you have time to edit and reprint.  But you have to pay for a second set.

That forced me into buying a printer.  I decided on the Epson Stylus R2880.  This 8 ink cartridge A3+ printer has an awesome reputation in the amateur photography scene.  I’d seen lots of prints from this model over the last few years.  Black and whites are tint free (blue or green cast is a common problem with digital printing) and colour reaches out and smacks you for its attention.  I ordered it last week and picked up a few Epson A4 Premium Glossy sheets.  The larger models like the R3880 are more expensive to buy but more cost effective per page printed.  However, you really need to print a lot to recoup that initial spend.

The printer arrived today.  My office needed a bit of a sorting out and I got that finished tonight.  The printer was set up to my PC and laptop – yup it has 2 USB 2.0 sockets in the back.  It accepts paper roll which is more economic, allows for big panoramic prints but does require cutting.  It also has a CD/DVD printing tray.  I did the printing from Photoshop. 

As usual I resized the image and sharpened according using USM.  I set up the page to A4 borderless high quality, etc.  In the print window I set Photoshop to control the print and I selected the ICC profile (more on that in a sec) for the printer and paper I was using.  A few minutes later I had a colour and a black and white print.  It’s safe to say I am a happy customer.  The b/w is especially amazing.  The contrast, the sheen, the retention of black and white graduations are all up to par.  Both images printed exactly as on the screen.  Result!

I’ve got some Permajet Gloss and Oyster (matte paper is better for framing behind glass) paper on order.  The Epson printer driver only has ICC profiles for their paper.  An ICC profile tells the printer how to apply a known ink (official ink from the manufacturer) to a known paper (the paper developer usually creates a profile to match the paper with the ink).  This ensures that the image shown on a calibrated screen should end up being what ends up on paper.  So you end up then with complete control through the process.  If an ICC profile isn’t available for your paper/ink/printer combination then you can pay to get one made.

Now I’m itching to get the A3+ paper in the door.  I am really looking forward to producing some large prints and seeing the quality I get then.

MS Ireland SQL 2008 R2, Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 “Launch”

Today sees the the technical preview road show of Office 2010, Sharepoint 2010 and SQL 2008 R2 by Microsoft Ireland.  I’m attending the Dublin event and blogging the highlights.  You can still register for the Belfast, Cork and Galway events so make sure you attend if you can.  I’ll update this post as the afternoon moves along so come back later if you want to read more.

The event kicks off with Enda Flynn (Technical Audience Manager in the DPE team).  Enda tells us that the software will be available on volume licensing on May 12th and on the shelves in June.  The Office 2010 beta is stiff available and a Zune HD draw is running for people in Ireland.  Information about this is available when you download (check the site).

Office 2010

Patrick Herlihy is a partner technical specialist in MS Ireland focusing on the UC and BI stuff and will be up next.  The focus on his presentation is management, security and cost effectiveness.

Deployment Options

Lots of ways:

  • Install
  • Terminal services
  • App streaming
  • Web streaming

Server Integration:

Just a few examples:

  • Presence: Office Communication Server
  • Security: AD Rights Management Services
  • On premises hosting with SharePoint

Groove

This is now called SharePoint Workspace.  Very useful for sharing data with people outside of the office.  Has offline access.  I’ve used Groove once before on a collaboration project.  It’s a little different but it works well.

Services More Discoverable to End Users

  • End users can see services offered by IT through Office Backstage.
  • End users can also create their own applications in Excel and publish them to SharePoint.

PowerPoint

There is online webcasting available.  Video is easier.

Outlook

Lots of new stuff.  Mail tips, e.g. a warning if you try to send an email to all staff.  Conversation view is enabled by default.  Better integration with OCS.

Office Web Apps

You can use online versions of Office 2010.  You host this on premises with SharePoint.  It supports non-MS browsers.

Backstage

Think of this as an expanded File menu that is better presented for end users.  Things are easier to find, whether it be the ability to save in another format or save to the SharePoint server – the latter was always an issue in the past.

SharePoint Workspace Offline

This will work with Office on Windows Mobile 6.5 or higher (or whatever it is called this week).  So now you can have docs on SharePoint, sync them to your laptop for home use, or even sync them to your phone for completely mobile use.  They’ll all sync with SharePoint.  The office, the firewall, and the organisation (forest membership) are no longer boundaries to secure data access.

Security

The trend of attacks is that attacks is that they are increasingly attacking applications more than anything else.  The network and OS transport layers are at the bottom, i.e. least attacked.  Between them and applications are the core OS libraries.

Office 2010 has “increased security” – you’ll probably need to search to get the details.  All of this is manageable using GPO.  An example is Protected View.  Office 2010 can detect documents that are sourced from elsewhere and protect you from them.  You have to verify that the doc expected/OK before it has full functionality.

Document Inspector can be controlled using GPO.  It will run every time a doc is saved.

Accessibility Checker is exposed by Backstage.  This can run against documents (by policy) to ensure a document is accessible compliant.

Deployment

Disk requirements go up by just 1.5GB from Office 2010.  All other requirements are the same.  There are native 32bit and 64bit versions.  Watch out for plugins on 64bit editions.  There is still a problem there.  32bit is still recommended.

It stats up very fast – event the old CTP does.

You can install using GPO startup scripts.  You cannot install using traditional MSI/transform via GPO like you could with XP/2003.  So it’s the same as with Office 2007.  Can install using ConfigMgr or App-V.  You will need App-V 4.6 (the latest version) if you want to do app virtualization for Office 2010.

As usual, there will be an extensive GPO management options.

Licensing

Office now has the same licensing as Windows.  You use either a MAK or a KMS key.  *wait for you reaction here*

Deployment Planning

  • Use MAP v5.0 (still a beta on Connect) to assess readiness for Office 2010.
  • Office Environment Assessment Tool (OEAT) – checks 3rd party add-ins for compatibility.  It uses an online library to warn you.  It’s kind of a similar model as with ACT.
  • Office Compatibility Code Inspector (OCCI) – will inspect custom code that is written.
  • Office Migration Planning Manager – Identify macro issues, migrate office files to OpenXML

Training

There is a pre-packaged “productivity hub” SharePoint site library with training content for end users. You can load it on SharePoint 2010 to teach users how to use SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010.

Office Ribbon Here is a new plug-in.  It’s a game of some sort to challenge and  teach users how to use the ribbon.  We have a few laughs here when Patrick shows us how little he uses MS Word for formatting :)  MS folks do live in Outlook after all.

SharePoint 2010

Aidan Nolan (they keep saying Aidan is up next and I keep double taking thinking WTF!!! I’m not presenting today!) from MS Ireland is up next.

Sales Pitch

  • Connect and empower people
  • Cut costs with a unified infrastructure
  • Rapidly respond to business needs

Gains for the IT Pros

IT productivity

  • Streamlined central admin
  • Management & health monitoring
  • PSH support

Scalable unified infrastructure:

  • Manage and control server resources – large list management
  • Improve data management and availability – high availability
  • Scalable services architecture

Flexible deployment:

  • Quick and simple installation and configuration – configuration wizards
  • Smooth and predictable upgrade – visual upgrade
  • Manage and control custom code – sandboxed solutions
  • Improved features – group policy block and AD marker

We now get a demo of functionality in SharePoint 2010.  Simple things like the ability to stretch an image, context sensitive ribbon, are big wins here, making it much more end user friendly.  The ribbon in SharePoint is just like an Office ribbon.  There is a theme gallery where you can easily update Office themes (templates).  Popups aren’t hidden away like previous versions of SharePoint.  The interface is much more responsive to mouse movement.  Fast Search brings back previews.  You can select the type of content you want to see, e.g. PowerPoint documents, people, etc.  There is a preview where the content can be browsed inline in the search results.  It also links to duplicate content.

Central administration is completely redesigned.  Health is front and centre.  You can see detected faults along with proposed resolution steps. 

Requirements

  • 64 bit only – that’s the entire farm.  Dual CPU
  • 8GB minimum for a role
  • 80 GB disk minimum
  • SQL 2005 x64 SP 2 with CU 12, SP3 with CU 2
  • SQL 2008 x64 Std SP1 + KB970315
  • X64 W2008 SP2 Standard or W2008 R2 Std
  • There’s a crap load of s/w pre-requisites.  There is a pre-requisite tool to do all the detection work for you.  It will download and install all the bits required.  Nice time saver.

Process

  • Prerequisites
  • Install the binaries
  • Configuration Wizard
  • Server Farm Configuration Wizard – a new tool to create new site collection and set up service accounts.

Client

  • Silverlight 2
  • Level 1 browser like IE7.  Includes specified versions of Safari and FireFox.

Upgrade Path

  • In place upgrade: supposed to be next – next – next.  A restart of the process is possible.  All timeouts are removed – reported as a big problem before.  Sites are unavailable during upgrade and retain the URL after the upgrade.  Farm settings are inherited.  Customizations are retained.  Entire farm is offline for some time.
  • Database attach: Can attach content, SSP and Project.  Cannot attach Configuration or Search DB’s.  What you do is install an entirely new farm and attach to existing databases.  Can upgrade many content DB’s at once.  Can consolidate farms.  You lose settings and customizations from old farm(s).  It requires lots of engineering time and bandwidth.  You need direct access to the DB servers – problem in huge organizations where there are DBA teams/depts.
  • Hybrid: Do a bit of both in-place and attach.  Maintain settings and customizations.  Multiple content DB’s at once.  Requires time and direct access.

Gradual upgrade is not supported.  Note that you cannot upgrade from 32bit to 64bit.  That requires a migration.

Normally an upgrade retains the 2007 appearance.  You can do a visual appearance upgrade too.  It is a one way operation.

Introducing PowerPivot for Excel/SharePoint

By Bob Duffy MVP (SQL) and DB architect (not MS).  Bob is one of those guys with a big brain that makes you feel sick with jealousy.  Nice guy too.

The first bit is that you can bring in data into Excel 2010 from any source that you can get a data driver for.  It also can run MUCH more rows and data than previous versions.  The demo example has 1.4 million rows.  Data can be cleansed at the entry point into Excel.  Very useful because BI data can be a bit rough around the edges at times.  You can filter out unwanted fields too.  Bob runs through a demo and shows how flexible PowerPivot is for BI work with large volumes of data.  The demo is very, very cool.  Bob pulls in data from SQL, does graphing, slicing, selections and calculations (using macro) and then pulling in data from an RSS atom feed to join it.

You can save locally or save to SharePoint to share with others.  MIS will want to get involved here to assure that a BI application is valid.  And that’s possible thanks to the PowerPivot Gallery.  Admins can manage PP’s here.  And users can subscribe to them.

Bob went on to demonstrating the reporting capabilities of integrating with SQL 2008 R2.  He put together with (what seemed like) a few mouse clicks a map that subscribed to the PP data from the gallery.  It could even overlay a map from Bing.  Then he pulled data from an RSS atom feed from elsewhere and joined it to compare and contrast how one metric affected another.

EDC and Lanuages

The end of the day was with two guys from the EDC in Dublin.  One showed how you could integrate new languages into the Office hints.  The other showed a video of using SharePoint 2010 MUI’s.  An admin would install and enable a language.  Each user could then select the language of their choice in SharePoint.  That could be displayed on the fly in the interface, including the dialog boxes.

And that was the end of the session.  The evening was all aimed at developers so I skipped that.

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So … What Exactly Am I Writing?

You can tell I’m pretty busy because my usual high rate of blogging has dropped significantly in the last month.  Apologies for that.  The blogging has become writing.  I am involved in 2 book projects.  I’ve just seen on Twitter that details on one of those has just gone public.  I actually just saw the tweet seconds after I sent off a chapter I just finished.

Earlier this year I proposed an idea for a Windows Server 2008 R2 virtualization book to Wiley Publishing/Sybex.  It took quite a bit of work to tune the proposal.  It requires an understanding of the subject matter, the audience, and ideas on how it can be marketed.  You could think that a brief overview on the subject matter would be enough.  But no, the publisher needs much more detail.  You pretty much have to provide a detailed project plan for every heading (3 levels deep), page estimates and time estimates.  The proposal evolved over the weeks and eventually went through a couple of reviews.  I then got the news: an ISBN number was assigned and contracts were on the way – I was going to be a lead author on my own book for the very first time!!!!  I did get drunk that night – I think.

The deadlines are very tight.  I was considering seeking help.  My contact in Sybex advised that I outsource some of the chapters to a co-author.  I knew the person I wanted to bring in.  Wilbour Craddock is a technical specialist in the partner team with Microsoft Ireland.  Will (Irish folks will know him as the crazy Canadian who is always wearing shorts) is also a former SBS MVP.  His job has him spending a lot of time working with Hyper-V and Microsoft System Center, making him a perfect co-author to work with on this project.  Thankfully, Will agreed to hop on board the crazy train of book writing.

Another MVP (I won’t say who yet because I don’t have permission to name him) is the technical editor under the employment of Sybex.  He’s an ace at this stuff and will make sure everything we do is up to scratch.

The book is called Mastering Hyper-V Deployment.  I won’t go into the details of it yet.  But you can bet that it is based on our collective experience and knowledge of the product set involved in a Hyper-V deployment.  I saw a gap in the market and figured I could probably write (or a good chunk of) the book to fill it.  The estimated release is in November 19th of this year.  That means we need to finish writing in July.  It has started to appear on some sites for pre-order.

I’m two chapters in a the moment.  I’m really pushing my hardware at home to its limits and am “this close” to buying more.  Will is ahead of schedule and has one chapter nearly done.

I am also working on another book project as a co-author for a friend’s book.  It’s another on-subject book that is turning out to be a good experience.  I’ve one chapter done on that and am 50% through the other.  I’ll talk more about that when the time is right.

As you may have read in my previous posts about my chapters in Mastering Windows Server 2008 R2, the original draft edit is just the very start of the process.  There are numerous technical, language, layout and copy edits for each and every chapter.  It’s a lot of work but it’s a great experience.  And I can’t wait for the buzz to see my name as the lead author of a book in a book shop.  I had to really try when I saw Mastering Windows Server 2008 R2 in Barnes & Noble over in Belleview WA back in February.