Month: August 2014

Playing With A New Low Spec Windows Tablet

I visited my employer’s stands at the Retail Trade Show in Dublin this week. I already knew most of the stuff there, but I got to put my hands on one of the new ultra-low spec Windows 8.1 “Update 1” tablets. ICYMI, the April 2014 Update for Windows 8.1 enables OEMs to sell lower spec machinery.

For example, a Windows install is much smaller. That means you can sell a Windows tablet, and that’s x86 Windows, not Windows RT, with 16 GB of storage.

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And the machine can have just 1 GB RAM.

The machine I played with was a Win’Tab8. I don’t know who the manufacturer was (I think they were French) and I’m not in the office to find out more info. It was an 8” yellow tablet. Thin and light as one would expect. And I believe it was quite cheap (maybe sub €200).

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This tablet did have 16 GB storage, micro-SD expansion, an Intel Atom 4-core CPU, and 1 GB RAM. There was a micro USB port and a dedicated power socket (I like that!). I don’t know what the battery life is like. Just over 4 GB of the storage was free. The RAM was under pressure; while I’m OK with the small amount of storage for a consumption machine (I hope MSFT embraces expansion storage like on Android), I am not sold on tablets with less than 2 GB RAM. The demo machine was not logged in with a Microsoft ID so I couldn’t install something from the Store. But I played around and it seemed to perform pretty well.

Expect to see these kinds of low spec/price Windows tablets in retail stores in the coming months.

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An Old Post Of Mine On Ballmer That Makes Interesting Reading

I’ve just re-read a post I wrote in 2010 about the future of Steve Ballmer. My two topics of focus were Windows Phone 7 (released that day) and the lack of a Windows tablet at the time.

I thought WinPho would struggle behind iOS and Android, mainly because of apps. I was not wrong. Things have improved, but there’s still issues with app quality and availability.

We now know that Ballmer bought into the Sinofsky plan (sounds like some dodgy French plan to keep out invading forces, and we know how those tend to work out). Windows 8 came, Windows 8.1 came, Windows 8.1 Update 1 came, and still Microsoft struggles in the tablet market. I thought (and I was not along) that, despite everything, Microsoft should get WinPho working on tablet devices. Instead we got the confusing and failed Windows RT, which is now being killed off through a merger with Windows Phone for ARM devices.

Fun times!

Oh yeah, I completely underestimated the impact of smartphones and tablets on the consumer market.

Microsoft News Summary – 27 August 2014

The rumours on “Threshold” are swirling through the Ethernets. Take nothing seriously until you see it for yourself on your own monitor.

Windows Server

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System Center Operations Manager

Windows 9

Azure

How Lab At Work Is Configured At The Moment

As I share from time to time, here is a description of what the test lab I run at work looks like at the moment. It has grown a little bit since the last of these posts.

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There are 7 physical computers split into two AD domains:

Physical Network

  • There is an ADSL internet connection using a NetGear router.
  • We have a WatchGuard 2 series XTM. This provides me with my primary VPN route into the lab (SSL VPN client) and connects the on-premises lab with Microsoft Azure. I also use the built-in wireless hub to connect to the lab using my laptop while in the office.
  • There are 2 x dumb Netgear 24 port 1 GbE switches.
  • 1 x HP Procurve 10 GbE SFP+ switch that I hate. The only redeeming quality is that it is 10 GbE, allowing the iWARP cards to be plugged in.

Lab.Internal

This environment is pretty static, and enables me to get into the lab, and have enough fabric to rebuild the demo lab from scratch.

  • Lab-DC1: This is an old Sony laptop. I run AD on here for the lab domain. Here you can fund WSUS, and RRAS as one of my emergency backdoors in. This machine has just a 1 GbE network connection.
  • Lab-Storage1: This is a beefy HP DL370 G6 storage box with lots of capacity. I store all of my ISOs and images here. I have enabled Hyper-V and run the management pieces of the Demo.Internal domain on here, including AD and System Center. This machine has 1 GbE networking and 2 x iWARP (10 GbE RDMA) ports, each of which are connected to different virtual switches – I enable vRSS in VMs that run on this host and do SMB Multichannel in the guest OS. I’ve also done the unsupported Shared VHDX hack to enable Shared VHDX on local storage.

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Demo.Internal

The physical part of this environment is frequently built from scratch, using what is running/hosted in the Lab.Internal domain.

  • Virtual Management Stuff: You can see the range of things running in this domain that are hosted by Lab-Storage1.lab.internal. The most important of these is Demo-DC1, the DC for the demo domain. I run all of my demo System Center VMs as VMs on Lab-Storage1, and I also run demo PCs as VMs.
  • JBOD: I have a DataOn DNS-1640 with 8 x HDDs and there are currently 6 x SSDs in there too. Yes, that is a very weird breakdown for tiering and for column counts.
  • Demo-FS1 & Demo-FS2: These are HP DL360 G7 servers that are connected to the JBOD using 6 Gbps LSI 9207-8e SAS cards (8 = two interfaces/cables, each having 4 “ports” that run at 6 Gbps). These servers are clustered to make the SOFS. From time to time, I enable Hyper-V on them to have a second Hyper-V cluster. The servers have 4 x 1 GbE and 2 x iWARP for SMB 3.0 storage networking.
  • Demo-Host1 and Demo-Host2: Two Dell R420 servers that are my Hyper-V cluster. Each has 4 x 1 GbE and 4 x iWARP 🙂 That gives me lots of flexibility for SMB 3.0 designs. Normally VMs are stored on the SOFS, but you might have noticed that I also have an iSCSI target running as a VM on Lab-Storage1. My network design varies depending on what I’m trying to do.
  • Demo-Host3: This is a HP Elitebook 8740w. This “beast” was my work laptop until it was replaced by a Toshiba i5 KIRAbook – a portable lab is pretty useless for me now so I prefer a light presentation machine that I can VPN from. The mobile workstation is now in the lab where it runs as an additional host on 1 GbE networking. It gives me capacity for Hyper-V Replica, and quickly testing things without touching the Hyper-V cluster.

Azure

With a site-to-site connection into Azure, I have capacity to deploy additional things in the cloud, with integrated management via System Center.

The main changes over the past year have involved the addition of the XTM and Azure. My work has me spending a lot of time learning and teaching about Azure so that side of things will continue. Our DataOn business has been growing so we’ll see how things go there. Of course, I’ll have to stay up to date with the on-premises gear so we’ll see what changes might be driven by “Threshold” come TechEd Europe.

Microsoft News Summary – 26 August 2014

I know very few businesses deployed Windows 8, but any "upgrade" that requires a wipe & replace is not a service pack. However, that’s what Microsoft now thinks, and that’s had an impact on the Windows 8 support policy. Someone in Redmond needs a quick kick in the nether region, because coffee clearly won’t be strong enough.

And in other news on this slow morning, Steve Ballmer binged on a TV show featuring one of Hollyweird’s plastic surgery victims. Yeah; it’s always a slow period in the build up to big announcements.

Microsoft News Summary – 25 August 2014

Not much has happened since last Friday morning. VMworld is on this week in San Francisco – maybe it’s no coincidence that there have been earthquakes nearby?

Azure

  • AzureConf, free online Azure conference: On September 25th, 2014, Microsoft will be hosting AzureConf, another free event for the Azure community. This event will feature a keynote presentation by Scott Guthrie, along with numerous sessions executed by Azure community members.

PowerShell

Intune

  • The Windows Intune Team will be performing scheduled maintenance at the end of August: All service functions and operations are expected to perform normally during this maintenance window. Once the upgrade to the Windows Intune service is complete, a number of mandatory agent updates will be pushed out to all PC client machines connected to the service. In most cases, these updates will not require a reboot after being applied.

Office 365

  • Matter Centric Legal Document Management: MSFT has launched a limited pilot program for an industry vertical O365 solution to improve the way law firms and attorneys work together by making it easier to organize files by client and matter, review documents, and find information when needed without ever leaving Microsoft Word or Outlook. < I wonder, if like some other verticals, this only applies to the USA … try set the URL to be non-US.

My Ice Bucket Challenge Is Complete

Yesterday, I was challenged by the Editorial Director for the Petri IT Knowledgebase, Jeff James, to take up the Ice Bucket Challenge, to raise funds and raise awareness of Motor Neurone Disease (MND), also known as ALS. Today at lunch time, I took up that challenge after donating to the the Irish Motor Neurone Disease Association.

Here is my challenge …

Should I have warned you that the language was not safe for work? Sorry! 😀

I now challenge the following people:

  • Dave Northey, of Microsoft Ireland
  • Claire Smyth, Microsoft MVP lead for UK & Ireland
  • Sarah Cooley, the MVP lead PM for the Hyper-V team

Good luck folks!

BTW, that ice (yes, ice was in there) water felt like a kick in the chest, and I couldn’t breath for a few seconds.

Thanks to John for drowning me, and Michael for shooting the video, and the folks from MicroWarehouse for cheering me on!

Aidan Finn Set To Unveil Plans To Rule The World On September 30th

Aidan Finn is planning to unveil his plan to rule the world next month at a special press event. Sources familiar with Finn’s plans tell us that the benevolent one is tentatively planning his press event for September 30th to detail upcoming changes to world domination as part of a plan called “Overlord”. This date may change, but the Overlord plan is currently in development and Finn plans to release a preview version of what will likely be named “Oh Sh1t! This is Really Happening” to the world on September 30th or shortly afterwards.

The early preview will give the world a first look at how traffic problems will be solved in Overlord. Missile-equipped drones will patrol motorways and dual carriageways, scanning for drivers who rest their chin on the steering wheel, hog the overtaking lane, or wait until the last moment to change lanes for the M9 on the Kildare M7. Finn is also planning to have drones patrol near schools looking for cars that are stationary for more than 1 second, but it’s not clear if this particular feature will be made available as part of the preview.

While Overlord is likely to be named “Oh Sh1t! This is Really Happening”, it’s unlikely that the ever handsome Finn will name his upcoming plan at his press event. Instead, Finn is said to be planning an overview of key new features of the new regime, with a preview ready for offenders and innocents. Finn is also building a separate combined version of his plan for each continent, and the gentle one may take the time to detail his work during his press event. Either way, Finns plan to rule is nearing completion and the amazing one will be ready to talk more about it next month.

By MVP Marc Van Eijk
An Aidan Finn Clone Army courtesy of @_marcvaneijk

Oh, and the Verge is reporting some stuff about Windows 9.

Microsoft News Summary – 22 August 2014

Here’s the latest news from the Microsoft wires. More new services have popped up on Azure, mostly for devs, but the SQL AlwaysOn template should be a massive time saver.

Hyper-V

Azure

Security

OS Deployment

Office 365

I’ve Accepted The Ice Bucket Challenge

If you’ve not been hiding in a cave then you’ve heard of the Ice Bucket Challenge which is being used to raise funds for and awareness of ALS, known here as Motor Neurone Disease. The Editorial Director for the Petri IT Knowledgebase, Jeff James, took the bullet and has passed the challenge on to me.

Jeff, I accept your challenge. I’ll be doing it at work tomorrow at lunch time.

Maybe I’ve pissed you, the reader, off in some way. Maybe you’re one of the many vFanboys that I take fun in ridiculing? Or maybe you work in Microsoft and I’ve annoyed you one-too-many times. If you’d like to see me soaked and freezing my cajones off (it’s quite cold in Ireland lately) then please do me a favour, give generously to the Irish Motor Neurone Disease Association or a local version of that organisation that supports ALS or MND victims & families. Get your revenge, and dig deep!

Oh and be warned … I will be naming 3 people that I’ve already selected 🙂