Month: August 2010

Thinktank Airport Acceleration V2

Meet my baby:

That’s a Canon EF 500mm L IS lens.  It’s a big puppy and I use it for wildlife photography.  I bought it a short while ago with the intention on travelling with it by flight.  There is no way I was going to check it in.  It would come with me as carry on baggage.  I spent ages trying to find a bag that would comply with Ryanairs carry on baggage allowance (55*40*20 centimetres) and fit the lens.  I found many that came close but were always slightly too big.  Eventually my buddy Jimi (a pro photographer also in the IT business) told me to go to the Thinktank website. 

There I found the Airport Accelerator V2.  It would take my big lens, a camera, another lens (the EF 100-400 L IS), my two TCons, my image tank and my GPS.  It also has a pocket for a laptop but that puts it beyond 20CM in depth.  It comes with a huge array of spare padded inserts so you can configure the bag as required, and a 15″ laptop sleeve.

I flew to Scotland for the weekend with Ryanair.  For the uninitiated, Ryanair is a budget airline that makes  profits from catching people out.  For example, they have measurement frames at the gates for carry on baggage.  If your bag doesn’t fit then it goes into the baggage hold for an additional charge.   I check my bag at the airport … it fit, even with all the load in it.

It’s a really great bag.  There is a water proof cover inside.  There are nice thick backpack straps that tuck away under velcro flaps.  The back straps have elasticated pockets which are just the right size for a mobile phone.  There is a transparent pocket at the top for a business card.  There is another pocket under that that is the right size for a wallet and passport.  These bags are clearly designed by travelling professionals.  There’s even a cabled combination lock that is built into the bag so you can secure it to something solid.

Thinktank have a range of bags, not just for photographers, but for travelling professionals.  Check them out if you are in the market for baggage and are struggling with carry on baggage.

Passed the 70-401 Exam

I passed the 70-401 (System Center Configuration Manager 2007, Configuring) exam this morning.  I found most of the questions to be pretty simple.  My advice: know the logs on the client, know the site roles (points), pay attention to software update deployment, and you are storted.  Also pay attention to the various pieces of work you do to prep an evironment for installing ConfigMgr.  I was surprised to see how the OS deployment questions seemed to only look at PXE and DHCP.  There were a couple of questions that I marked for review.  It was merely a matter of working out which answers were clearly wrong, leaving the right answers for you to tick.

That’s 3 exams in just over a week.  I’ll probably have a lash at 70-659 next, before focusing on upgrading my MCSE to an MCITP.

Multi-Site Clustering and Virtualisation

I’ve been doing a little research on this topic lately.  Sure, it was from the Hyper-V perspective but watching a video on VMware’s site about SRM confirmed they facts were similar with ESX.  If you want to create a multi-site cluster for DR/business continuity then you have two big and expensive considerations:

Storage

The replication will probably be performed by your storage system.  These SANs do not come cheap.  The one that looks most interesting to me is the HP LeftHand.  I can’t see any features on the Dell site.  Dell does suck when it comes to educating the market about their products – they provide private briefings only.  Strangely higher end systems like EVA/EMC don’t have CSV (and probably VMFS) support yet in this scenario because the LUN can only be active in one site at one time (preventing granular VM migration across the WAN).  NetApp appear to use a snapshot feature for replication and this could complicate a multi-site cluster design IMO.  Admittedly, I have failed to follow up with opportunities to hook up with them to learn more about their system – apologies if I have things wrong there.

The WAN

The good news is that you will get a very nice lunch/dinner/weekend away from your WAN service provider because of the need to have huge bandwidth.  From the Hyper-V perspective, you need 2*1GBPS lines between the primary and secondary site for Live Migration between the sites.  You may also need less than 2MS latency on the line for the storage synchronous replication that can support this.  You can do Quick Migration (it’s still there luckily) for DR invocation across 100MBPS lines.  Quick migration is fine for that emergency scenario.  It’s not ideal but this is a bandwidth thing – VM memory needs to transfer quickly.

Software Solutions

A number of them are out there.  Some are point solutions for creating failover clusters (using Windows feature) between two hosts in different sites (Steeleye).  Some simulate the processes and controls of a Windows Failover Cluster without using the Windows feature (DoubleTake).  I’ve seen one solution (can’t remember product name) that installs a service on servers with disk and creates an iSCSI SAN with features similar to that of a HP LeftHand.

Advice

Get your accountants ready to sign some big cheques.  No matter what you do, you’re going to need to put in some big bandwidth and that’s going to be a big recurring cost.  The benefit is simple: a single fault tolerant solution for disaster recovery that will work when the company is under the stress of a disaster.

The specifics of your design will be totally dependent on the hardware and software you use.  Make sure you work with a vendor who really knows this stuff.  Look for references.  Don’t just use Honest Bob’s PC Sales because the IT manager is having it off with Bob (I’ve seen that one happen and it ended badly).

Passed 70-635 Exam

I sat and passed the 70-635 (MDT 2008) exam today.  I know it’s old; but it’s required for a some MS partner stuff and a more modern replacement hasn’t been announced as a requirements replacement.  The exam was particularly easy considering that I had done work with Vista, WAIK (Vista and Windows 7), WinPE, MDT 2010, WDS (2003 SP2, 2008, 2008 R2), and ConfigMgr 2007.  It also goes into some Office 2007 deployment stuff which is easy enough and some SMS 2003 stuff.  The answers to the SMS questions centred around SP3 and the OSD feature pack with everything else being similar to ConfigMgr.

What I did not like was how some of the questions are written as trick questions rather than as tests of knowledge or experience.  That’s quite unfair.  I didn’t bother commenting on the questions; I have my doubts about the comments being used and I had places to be and things to do.

Next up (once the Prometric site lets me book an exam from my voucher) is 70-401: System Center Configuration Manager, Configuring.

Office Migration Planning Manager (OMPM) 2010

You will want to learn about this toolset if you are planning on doing any Windows 7/Office 2010 deployment projects. I know it (previous version) is a minor element in the Vista/MDT 2008 deployment exam.

“The Office Migration Planning Manager (OMPM) 2010 is a group of tools designed to help administrators during the planning and testing phases of a Microsoft Office 2010 deployment.

OMPM assists administrators in the discovery and compatibility assessment of existing Office documents for migration from the binary document formats (.doc, .xls, etc.) to OpenXML formats (.docx, .xlsx, etc.). Additionally, OMPM 2010 adds features to assess macro compatibility with Office 2010 and 64 bit Office compatibility. The toolkit also contains the Office File Converter (OFC), which enables bulk document conversions from binary to OpenXML formats, and a Version Extraction Tool (VET) to extract saved file versions.

The goal of the tool set is to help administrators understand the number and types of Microsoft Office files in their environment and effectively plan for a smooth rollout of the new version of Microsoft Office.

Refer to the Office Migration Planning Manager reference for further information”.

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How to Backup Hyper-V with DPM 2010

There is a chapter in my book (by my co-author) on it so I won’t dwell too much time on this subject.  Microsoft released a brochure for Data Protection Manager 2010 and how to use it to backup Hyper-V.  Here’s the readers digest version:

  • You can install an agent in the VM, like you would with a physical box.  That’s a good idea for selective backup of things like SharePoint, SQL, Exchange, etc, where you want to do granular backup/recovery of applications.
  • You should backup at the storage level.  Don’t think of it as the host level.
  • For non-clustered hosts, you install an agent on the host and it backs up at the storage level using VSS.
  • For a cluster, you use a storage VSS provider (choose your storage wisely) and it backs up the CSV(s) using VSS … that triggers VSS in the VM’s and the VSS writers in the VM’s guest operating system for a nice clean backup.
  • It’s best to install DPM 2010 on a physical box.  This means you can enable the Hyper-V role.  This reveals DLLs that allow DPM to access the contents of a protected VHD and perform item level recovery from it.
  • Only use passthrough disks for DPM storage if you install it on a VM.