Month: August 2011

It’s A Quiet Time For Hyper-V News – So I’m Planning My Build Participation

You may have noticed that little is happening in the Hyper-V world in terms of news at the moment.  We are all waiting on information to start flowing from the Build conference.  So with that, I am announcing how I will be participating at Build:

Untitled

I will be outside the main entrance until Security chase me away Smile with tongue out Somewhere right now, there are panicked emails being written and phone calls being made.

BTW, I will be offline for most of the coming week, trying to find a few square miles of land in Ireland where it isn’t raining.

The Reports Of My Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated –The PC

I was listening to the Guardian Tech Weekly podcast this morning while driving to the office after a meeting.  I don’t know why I listen to this show any more; the commentators on it are complete dimwits and they make me angrier than news of further banking bailouts.

Anyway … The commentators were proclaiming the death of the PC in favour of the tablet.  Hmm, if the likes of these commentators, the Irish Independent, and various other hype fiends were to be believed then it must be so.  But the facts would contradict this.

Global PC sales every year are in excess of 300 million.  In fact, the Guardian reported that Gartner expected a slow down in growth from 10.5% to 9.3% with just 385 million PCs being sold in 2011.  The Guardian says IDC tends to be more conservative with predictions, estimating the figure will be 361.6 million PCs sold in 2011.  Oh poor old Microsoft; how will they survive!?!?! 

On the tablet front, we all know that Apple rules the roost.  Marketwatch reported that Gartner estimates 19.5 million tablets would be sold in 2011.  For Apple, that’s absolutely monstrous.  But it’s still only 5% of the market, using Gartner figures.

Have PC sales slumped?  Dell issued a warning.  HP is selling/spinning off their PC division but that’s because they make little margin, not because of it being a loser (they are number one overall in this space).  Yes, PC sales are down.  But there is always talk of a slump before a Windows release. 

We’re facing a Windows 8 release in 2012.  People and businesses are not going to buy new Windows 7 PCs now – many of them license using OEM rather than VL or off the shelf.  This expected slump is why you heard “the best path to Windows 7 is Windows Vista” from Microsoft a few years ago, and why you’re hearing “the best path to Windows 8 is Windows 7” from them now.

The PC is not dead.  Will the shape change?  Yes, to some extent.  But lets get real.  Think about ergonomics; who wants to use a foot-wide tablet on their desk, 8 hours a day, 220 days a year?  The big screen, keyboard, and mouse have lasted so long because they work.  The tablet plays an additional role and it is very good at it (I do use an iPad), but you wouldn’t see me wanting to use it in the office all day long. 

The PC is dead!  Long live the PC!

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4,585,000 Chinese People Can’t Be Wrong – Hyper-Veeeeeeeee!

News broke over the last 24 hours that the PLA (People’s Liberation Army – military of People’s Republic of China) has decided to adopt Hyper-V to virtualise their NeoKylin Linux distro, with the assistance of Microsoft.  I have a few thoughts on this:

  1. I seriously don’t think that the PLA would adopt a virtualisation solution that wasn’t stable, scalable, or enterprise ready.  How do you like them apples, vFanboys?
  2. Can you imagine the size of the deployment that this will be?  Dear Mr. Hu Jintao, can I play with this Hyper-V deployment?  I promise I won’t break it.  Honest!
  3. I wonder if Sybex has printed my book Mastering Hyper-V Deployment in Mandarin?
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What Hardware Would I Buy in 2011/2012?

In the past I’ve always said that I pick manufacturers based on:

  1. Support for System Center (Operations Manager management packs, Configuration Manager/SCE plug-ins, PRO management packs, etc)
  2. Price/quality/met requirements/etc

HP and Dell always top the chart there, and I’ve tended to prefer HP because:

  1. I know their stuff
  2. The build quality and SupportPack support are excellent

IBM is always bottom of my hardware charts Smile

Ask me last week what servers and storage I’d recommend and I’d have said HP ProLiant rack/blade servers and either P4000 or EVA storage.  Now that has changed.

The announcements of last week leave me thinking that HP is a headless chicken.  They are the number 1 PC maker and they’re getting out of the market.  The morons on the board spent over $1 billion on Palm so they could spend billions more on a tablet that they pulled after 1.5 months of sales, and a phone that was “on sale” (or in warehouses) in Europe for less than a week.  I’d hate to invest in server and/or storage system from HP to find that suddenly they decided to focus on the manufacturing on ice cream – I wouldn’t put it past the former CEO of SAP to do this:

  • SAP effectively fired him by not renewing his contract according to the BBC
  • When you say SAP to me I think of over priced, overrun, and failed projects – funnily enough, HP went through this in 2003 when it was taking up to 6 months just to get a monitor from them, allegedly thanks to a new SAP installation

So now I look to Dell.  I’m not a fan of their build quality compared to HP desktops/laptops.  Storage-wise, the Compellent has been getting great reviews.  The R-series servers are mature – and in the end they use the same NICs, CPUs, and memory as everyone else.  And Dell are “all in” on System Center.

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KB2568088 – Hyper-V VM Won’t Start on AMD CPU with AVX

I just noticed a new patch was added to the list on the TechNet wiki for Hyper-V on Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 (W2008 R2 SP1).  There are 2 scenarios:

Issue 1

  • You have an AMD CPU that supports the Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX) feature on a computer that is running Windows Server 2008 R2 RTM.
    Note AMD introduced support for the AVX feature in Bulldozer-based multicore processors.
  • You install the Hyper-V server role on the computer.
  • You create a virtual machine on the computer, and then you try to start the virtual machine.

In this scenario, the virtual machine does not start, and you receive an error message that resembles the following:`

<Virtual machine name> could not initialize.

This issue occurs because Windows Server 2008 R2 RTM does not support the AVX feature.

Issue 2

  • You have an AMD CPU that supports the AVX feature on a computer that is running Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 (SP1). 
    Note AMD introduced support for the AVX feature in Bulldozer-based multicore processors.
  • You install the Hyper-V server role on the computer.
  • You create a virtual machine on the computer, and then you try to start the virtual machine.

In this scenario, the virtual machine does not start, and you receive the following error message:

Virtual machine could not start because the hypervisor is not running.

Additionally, the following event is added to the Microsoft-Windows-Hyper-V-Worker-Admin log:

Source: Microsoft-Windows-Hyper-V-Worker
Event ID: 3112
Level: Error
Description:
The virtual machine could not be started because the hypervisor is not running

This issue occurs because Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 does not support the AVX feature on AMD processors.

You can download the hotfix to resolve this issue.

Do the HP & RIM Tablet Failures Impact on Windows 8?

Considering the failure of HP’s WebOS powered TouchPad, and RIM’s Blackberry tablet, one could consider that there is no space for other contenders behind Apple’s iPad and Google’s Android OS.  I’m not sure that I agree.

The executives of HP and RIM were naive at best, and plain stupid at worst.

RIM’s tablet could do basic functions like email and calendar without being paired with a Blackberry phone.  That shrunk the market radically.  Version 2 would be better was the promise, then why the hell did you release version 1?  I listened to The Guardian’s Tech Weekly webcast last week and a RIM executive was being hammered by a fairly mild journalist.  Even RIM’s employees are rebelling against the morons who are drunkenly steering that ship.

Then over in HP land we have a who other class of maroon.  HP went and bought WebOS, the successor to PalmOS and declared to the world that it would be their tablet and phone OS.  Hello?  Is anyone there in 1996?  Is the Macarena still number 1 in the music charts back there?  WebOS went on “sale” and it turns out that no one wanted it.  The Pre3 phone was unwanted by any of the networks, and went on sale this week in Europe with no announcements.  Sales were so bad that HP terminated WebOS operations last night.

Where did it go wrong?  Both HP and RIM were convinced that they could use their corporate and government market penetration to drive huge sales.  There’s 2 issues with that.

Consumerisation of IT

The IT department is not driving the sale of tablets in the business.  IT admins hate supporting them because they don’t fit in with anything.  The end consumer is driving the use of the iPad at work; they want something friendly, light, and an experience that they can share with their friends/family.  Some stodgy business tool is not in their buying plans.

Applications

Imagine you bought a PC and could not run any applications.  How would doing business with Notepad work for you?  Not well, I’d expect.  But HP and RIM expected you to use their platforms with no app ecosystem.  They didn’t encourage an app developer community.  That impacts things generally.  But let’s dig deeper.

Are Microsoft Discouraged?

Hell no!  If anything, this proves something:  if the business is going to embrace tablet technology then they want an application platform, and they want it to be hardware agnostic.  If I develop and use some app on a Toshiba tablet, I want to make sure that my colleague in Paris that has a Sony tablet can work with me.  If I use a Toshiba OS and they use a Sony OS, then we cannot collaborate.  Sure there’s “the cloud” and web based apps, but we no that things aren’t really that simple; they should be but they aren’t.  And the PC isn’t dead; I sure don’t want to use a tablet 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.  If I run a PC then I also want to use the same apps.

Windows 8 accomplishes this.  It will be hardware manufacturer agnostic.  It will give us the same HTML5 and Javascript OS platform across laptop, PC, tablet, and even netbook.  Wave 15 (Office and SharePoint vNext) even will support HTML5 and Javascript.

I think (this morning) that true tablet PCs will go through an evolution process.  Evolution looks unkindly at specialists.  When the environment changes, the specialist dies out.  Windows is like a fox; it is a true generalist, found almost everywhere, always able to adapt because it runs on so many vendors hardware and platforms, and suits the needs of so many.

RIM’s and HP’s tablets were true evolutionary mistakes.  What I do find surprising it that the executives or designers of either corporation were deluded, drunk or stoned enough to think that either of these tablets had a snowball’s chance in hell to succeed.  If I was a shareholder, I’d be considering suing them for negligence and demanding my money back.

EDIT:

I should have wrapped this up.  I believe that if Microsoft doesn’t screw up Windows 8 on ARM, in other words, if it is good enough to keep users happy, then it’s manageability and it’s shared application platform with the PC will make it the winner in the business that HP and RIM desired and failed to achieve with their Dodos.

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HP WebOS Going Away (Already) and Trying to Sell PC Biz

HP have decided that Google have had too much news headlines this week.

WebOS

Fresh on the awful news of sales for their WebOS (Palm) TouchPad tablets, it’s just been announced by HP that they are ending operations of WebOS.  And that’s a day or two after they started selling their Pre3 WebOS powered phone in Europe! 

The news of tablet sales were awful.  It didn’t have a chance.  Apple dominates.  Business is waiting for Windows 8.  Android tablets (an open OS) aren’t selling that well.  RIM proved that a new closed device with no app environment would have the lifespan of a fat Turkey in December.  And HP fattened up and walked straight into the butcher shop.

Bye bye HP WebOS!

PC/Consumber Division

HP has announced that they are looking to “spin off” the PC business.  That’s business and consumer stuff on the desk.  Personally speaking, I prefer HP desktops/laptops because of their build quality and ease of management in relation to software and drivers in the business.  I hate Lenovo (quite poor here compared to what I hear from American friends), and although Dell has a good business, I think the build quality of PC’s’/laptops isn’t as good – which is important for devices that users are bashing about. 

On TWiT Windows Weekly, Mary-Jo Foley suggested that maybe Samsung would buy the division.  Maybe.  And maybe it’ll be spun off/IPO’d as a new Compaq.

Oh – HP are also buying some UK software company called Autonomy.  I guess they want to be the next IBM.  Eeek!

EDIT:

Last year there were rumours about HP’s tablet plans.  Originally, the tablet was to run Windows.  Then HP “knew better” and went exclusively with WebOS.  Well, Windows 7 tablets … you know my opinion on that – wait for 8.  But investion millions/billions of dollars on WebOS, a no app OS, I think everyone knew that had no future.  Shareholders should be furious.

And as for HP in the phone market … oh come on!  I evaluated one of those back around 2004.  We had to clip a keyboard onto the bottom of it to use a “keyboard” Smile  We ended up buying XDA (remember them?) III’s instead.

Why I Think Windows 8 Will RTM Before July 2012

You’ll soon see that this is not based on any inside information … so make of it what you want.

We all know that Mary-Jo Foley reported a little while ago that Windows 8 could RTM as soon as April 2012.  I have 2 reasons to think that she might not be far off.

The first is a little bit more sensible than the second.

Timing

The Build conference is being held earlier than PDC used to be.  That makes me think that we’re working on a schedule with earlier milestones.  RTM for Windows 7 was early Summer with launches later in the year.  So maybe we’ll see a Windows 8 RTM in Spring with launches in the summer time frame?

Microsoft is Superstitious

Yes, a 100,000 employee corporate giant is afraid of the number 13.  Was there an Office 13?  Was there an Exchange 13?  No; they skipped a version number and went from 12 to 14 (“Wave 15” is on the way).

Microsoft’s financial years are from July to June.  For example, Microsoft is currently in financial year 2012.  Come July 2012, Microsoft will be in financial year 2013.  They name their products like EA Sports.  If Microsoft releases Windows Server “8” in June, it could be called Windows Server 2012.  But come July, it’ll more likely (not necessarily) be called Windows Server 2013.

Remember that they hate black cats, walking under ladders, spilling salt (or is it throwing it?), and the number 13.  I bet the next version of Server is called Windows Server 2012 … and therefore they will aim to RTM it before July of 2012.  Launches will probably be in September … that’s because MSFT is a mess in July with FY planning, and everyone is away on vacation in August.

That’s my 2 cents, not exactly based on science Winking smile

E2E London 2011, Virtualisation Conference

Once again, experts in all kinds of virtualisation technologies will be gathering to share their knowledge at E2E London 2011, a super-economic mini-conference, formerly known as PubForum.  I’ll be talking Hyper-V as usual with a 45 minute and a 900 seconds session.  Some other MVPs and Microsoft virtualisation experts from around Europe will be there presenting.  And as usual, there will be LOTS of Citrix, VMware and common virtualisation technology sessions.

Monitoring the Hybrid Microsoft Cloud

The Microsoft Hybrid cloud, as it stands currently, is a mixture of a Hyper-V private cloud with an Azure public cloud, managed by System Center App Controller (formerly Concero).  One of the key pieces of the Microsoft solution is monitoring the health of the application (that the business really cares about) using System Center Operations Manager (OpsMgr).

Management packs make monitoring of Hyper-V, Windows, SQL, Exchange, CRM, hardware, storage, etc, easy.  You can put together end user perspective monitoring from the basic ping test to the advanced synthetic transaction, build service-centric distributed application models, and provide SLA monitoring of the LOB applications.  That’s got the private cloud covered.

There is also a management pack for Azure.  This allows you to monitor the availability, health, and performance of your public cloud services.  Let’s face it – even if Microsoft does/did provide a monitoring solution within Azure – can you really use a monitoring solution that is a part of the thing you are monitoring, i.e. the Microsoft public cloud?  I say no – and that’s the first reason why you should use OpsMgr and this management pack.  The second reason is that it allows you to integrate your monitoring of public and private clouds, giving you that mythical single pane of glass for monitoring.

  • The features of this management pack are:
  • Discovers Windows Azure applications.
  • Provides status of each role instance.
  • Collects and monitors performance information.
  • Collects and monitors Windows events.
  • Collects and monitors the .NET Framework trace messages from each role instance.
  • Grooms performance, event, and the .NET Framework trace data from Windows Azure storage account.
  • Changes the number of role instances via a task.

The prerequisites of it are:

  • The management group must be running Operations Manager 2007 R2 Cumulative Update 3.
  • The Windows Azure role must be published with full trust level. For more information about Windows Azure trust levels, see Windows Azure Partial Trust Policy Reference.
  • Windows Azure Diagnostics must be enabled. For more information about Windows Azure Diagnostics, see Implementing Windows Azure Diagnostics.
  • Windows Azure Diagnostics must be configured to forward diagnostic data to a Windows Azure storage account. For more information about configuring Windows Azure Diagnostics, see Transferring Diagnostic Data to Windows Azure Storage.
  • Microsoft .NET Framework version 2.0 or newer must be installed on the computer that you designate as the proxy agent when you configure the Monitoring Pack for Windows Azure Applications.