Innovative Technology Weblog

Many sessions were dedicated to Cloud Computing topics last week at Tech Ed EMEA. Some highlights I wanted to post here.

First the Azure platform. Like Windows SharePoint Services (SharePoint Portal is build on top of it) Azure delivers a platform for applications that will become geographic independent. By this I mean that we will see many more applications that do not require a specific location to run. Geo independency is a major advantage with cloud computing. You can now create multiple instances of your application anywhere in the world! Or if you are more of a green fellow, wherever the coolest datacenter is.

Next federation. Microsoft is aiming to become a federation trusted party. It is like the TTP in certificate world. The federation platform v2 has codename Geneva. When this product evolve we will see websites where you automatically will become recognized. Just because your system admin and the web application developer were able to combine efforts. The result is stunning. As a consumer you get a personal experience, without noticing you have logged on through the federation trust *).

*) Technical note: a federation trust is one of the the basics of cloud computing. It is not a Active Directory trust. It is more like exchanging public certificates.

The very first application that will become available in the could (it actually already is) is EMAIL ! You didn’t see this coming, right? Then you are probably an Exchange administrator. Your work will shift towards provisioning. Cloud providers can deliver the exact same email experience at virtually no costs. Beat that. You cannot. Migration is easy and so is reversing the migration *).

*) Technical note: email is using a mature protocol. RPC over HTTPS is reliable, secure and open. It is geo independent. Your Outlook will not notice the difference. And your mailbox size will become 5 GB +.

Finally provisioning using ILM v2. The new policy engine is very powerful yet complex. My personal experience is that provisioning is not a technical challenge, We solve input issues with technical tricks, that’s for sure. So actually the problem is at the input processes. This maybe your register desks and user admins. Provisiong is a crucial activity.The true challenge is getting the technical and the business specialist to allign. Cloud computing will otherwise never be a successful hype.

Question: when do you plan to migrate to Microsoft Live Mail , Google Apps Mail of like?

- Paul

Hi there,

Yesterday TechED EMEA 2008 started with the keynote by Brad Anderson (general manager of the Management and Solutions Division at Microsoft Corp.) Unfortunatly this is the last TechED in Barcelona, but next year we will be in Berlin, so bye Tapas and Hello Bratwurst

The keynote was all about Dynamic IT, this was also the topic @ MMS 2008, so it is something Microsoft is realy into these days. Microsoft started with some trends/priorities they see in the current market:
Virtualization
Green IT
Anywhere Access
Business Intelligence
Compliance
Cloud Computing

For your convienience I’ve put the slidedeck on our fotolog, so you can have a look.
Keynote slidedeck

During the keynote the following announcements were made:
Windows Server 2008R2 M3 is ready and will support Live Migration in Hyper-V
Microsoft Hyper-V is RTW and can be downloaded for free (this was allready announced last month)
SC Virtual Machine Manager 2008 is RTM
APP-V 4.5 (formaly known as Softgrid) is RTM and available for MDOP customers.
Microsoft Assesment & Planning toolkit 3.2 is RTM
SC Opperations Manager 2007R2 beta is available and will support SLA dashboards (see the great screenshot in the slidedeck)
Identity Lifecycle Manager 2 is RC
Intelligent Application Gateway 2007 SP2 is available.

Besides the announcements Microsoft also gave a demo of Server 2008R2 branche caching, witch was realy impressive. Using Branch Caching it is possible to have a great user experience using files and sites at HQ while working at a branche office. The first user that opens a file will have to download that file from HQ to the branche office, but the 2nd user that opens that file will open it from the cache that resides in the branche office.

Well it’s time now to have some other great sessions, so TTYL

Erik Luppes

We from BUIT.org have arrived at the Barcelona event of 2008. We will bring you the latest info and innovative technology updates (almost) live from TechEd IT Professionals 2008.

- Paul

Last tuesday, October 14th 2008, Getronics delivered an impromptu musical to commuters in the main central trainstation Utrecht CS in The Netherlands. Travelers were astonished, then positively surprised with this latest marketing stunt from the newly revitalized IT company.

Watch the video on YouTube

As you might have noticed, my colleague Jeroen is totally wild on Groove… he kinda started the same enthousiasm in me….

So….as I was playing around a bit with the Sharepoint files tool (which unfortunately doesnt work with earlier versions of WindowsSharepointServices) I tried to add an Office Liveworkspace (discussed earlier) as a repository for storing files used in groove…

whilst trying to add a sps2003 document library causes a nasty error; trying to add a Live workspace to the sharepoint files tool just returns the message ‘not implemented…’

interesting….

Although it might be too early to jump to any conclusions, it must be noted that the possibilities to use Groove in conjunction with Live workspaces have clearly been left open… or at least not closed for good….

i’ll keep watching !

Martijn

Last month me and some collegues went to MMS2008 in Las Vegas were I saw a cool demo of Group Police Preferences. The name Group Policy Preferences did ring a bell with me and suddenly I remembered. A few weeks before MMS I saw a Windows Update that was called Group Policy Preferences Client Side Extensions, but I did’nt know what it was.

So now that I’m a few weeks back home I finaly had some time to play with it on my Demo Domain that I setup last week using CoreConfigurator. To use Group Policy Preferences you must have a few things in place:

• A Windows Server 2008 or Windows Vista SP1 machine (only needed for managing Group Policy Preferences)
• RSAT Installed on the management machine
• Deployed the Group Policy Preferences Client Side Extensions to your Desktops/Servers (XP SP2 or higher)
• Active Directory

Note : You don’t need a 2008 DC or Windows Vista SP1 client to use Group Policy Preferences !!

On the left screenshot you can see all the different options that can be managed using Group Policy Preferences. There ar too much settings to show them all on this blog, but I realy like to show you some nice things. I made some screenshots of some common things you normaly do in loginscripts or kix scripts, but that are now possible in Group Policy. (click on the images to see it full size)

With Group Policy Preferences it is easy to map networkdrives. Not only you can map a drive for all users in a generic user policy, but it is also  possible to target this mapping to no more then 27 targeting rules. (Image on the right)

Most common is to map a network share based on group membership or IP subnet. This way way it is possible to map a share witf for example application data to a server that is on the same geographical location as the user without the need of using DFS or site loginscripts.

An other example is setting up how users (or administrators) see their files in Windows Explorer. In this screenshot I set it up so that the user will see the file extentions for known files and also shows hidden & system files, this is a setting that most admins will set if they logon to a new machine. This is also the power of Group Policy Preferences, the most settings an administrator will have to manualy do if he is building a new image for deployment can be managed by Group Policy Preferences.

As you can imagine there are hundreds or maybe thousends of possibilities that you use in solving those anoying problems you usely have to solve using scripts or other tools.

Next thing I have to do is migrating my loginscript at home to Group Policy Preferences.

Have fun with it.

Erik Luppes

2 Years after we’ve put Buit.org online, it was needed that we do a complete makeover.
In the 2 years we have upgraded Buit.org to the most current version of WordPress, but never updated our look and feel of the site.

Now that WordPress has a complete new engine using AJAX and other Web 2.0 technology it was needed that we upgraded the ’skin’ of Buit.org so we can use those new technologies. One of the biggest improvements for me as the site admin is that we now finaly kan use capcha in the comments forms. This is used for unregistred users that want to leave comments. If they want to leave a comment they have to read an image that is hard (but not impossible) to read by a spambot.

It looks that this works well, cause yesterday we had 120 spam comments within the hour and after enabling captcha (18 hours ago) we did’nt receive a single spam message

An other great thing is that we have better stats so we can track our favorite articles and anticipate on this by writing more articles on the subjects you like.

Please leave your toughts on this new look in our comments and if you are reading this in a RSS reader, please click visit our site to see what we have accomplished.

Grtz,

Erik

A few months ago I’ve wrote a post about Exchange SP1 for the lazy Admin. Now I found something on the web for the same admins but that is usefull in setting up Windows Server 2008 Core.

As you should know by now in Server Core there is no GUI (well there are exeptions like notepad and time settings) so Administrators have to know the CLI commands to setup their servers. The last 2 years I have worked on my Linux skills and can say that finaly I can remember the commands that I use on a daily/weekly basis. But how many times a day or week do you setup a new Domain Controller ? I say not offtenly enough to remember the commands without mistakes.

Last week I was looking on the web for the commandlines to setup a DC but found a tool that was called “CoreConfigurator”

As you can see you can do the basic tasks that you normaly would do if you setup a new server, but still using a GUI. For example if you want to setup the Windows Firewall (only the basic stuff) you normaly have to use the netsh command and that command alone has hundreds of options that you have to know.

Using this tool I was able to setup my Demo domain within 5 minutes with only one CLI Command : C:\Program Files\CoreConfigurator\CoreConfigurator.exe

So the rest of the evening I have spend on drinking beer and eating some chips while watching the 5th season of 24 (the terrorists have stolen some Sentox-nervegas, but I think that Jack Bauer will save the day within 24 hours )

To download CoreConfigurator Click Here

@ MMS 2008 there was a session about Licensing for the System Center Suite. Normally Licensing looks like University Math but they made it easier. When you are using SMS and MOM 2005 your would pay for each product and per managed client, were for MOM de clients could be Standard OML or Enterprise OML and for SMS the client and server license would vary as well. With this wide variety of possibilities the calculations for the complete license investment could take quite a while and some checking and cross check the different client and server roles.

But now with the Server Management Suite Enterprise (SMSE) licensing model things are made easy. Normally easier is more expansive and in this case it sometimes is. When your just going to buy SCOM or SCCM licenses and your using standard OML for SCOM you still have to make a good calculation before going to the SMSE license type. 

When you want to use SCCM, SCOM and are on or building a virtual infrastructure the SMSE license will make it cheaper and you can start using Data protection Manager for only the license management server costs.

One of the shown license advantages in a Microsoft client environment was the following monitoring scenarios:

In this case the 100 virtual machines are license covered by the SMSE and your only paying for the hosts not for the virtual machines. according to the Microsoft the System Center Virtual Machine Manager will be added to the SMSE as well so a complete and easy to calculate Server Management platform license can be used.

Microsoft definition of SMSE: Comprehensive solution for end-to-end management of physical and virtual server environments that includes the Enterprise Server management licenses for Operations Manager 2007, Configuration Manager 2007, and Data Protection Manager 2007; the license for Virtual Machine Manager 2007; and, rights to manage an unlimited number of operating system environments on a single server.

Not mentioned in this article are the required Server 200X Standard, Enterprise and Data center licenses. But when your are running a lot of VM’s take al look at the Data center value proposition with the unlimited amount Virtual Machine options!!!

So, a small recap to see if SMSE is the licensing for your organization:

• Your running a big number of virtual machines and want SCOM for monitoring
• Your using SCOM and SCCM to manage your complete environment, running some virtual machines
• Your using SCOM and SCCM to manage your complete environment and want to use DPM or VMM
• Your using DPM and SCCM, SCOM or VMM running some virtual machines
• You want to use SCOM and VMM

For more information visit the Microsoft System Center License Site and save yourselves some money.

Regards,
Walter Eikenboom
http://weblogwally.spaces.live.com

Wiebe i’ve got the beta bits!!!!!, before I left for MMS my colleague heard about the possibilities to manage virtual environments like ESX, Virtual Server and hyper-V with Virtual Machine Manager 2008 and he spammed me like crazy to get the beta bits at MMS. The search wasn’t that hard, when I attended the introduction to Vitalization VNext session they where handing the beta out and I got an extra copy for Wiebe.

For starters here is a summary of the Server 2008 Hyper-V features:

• Extendable guest support
  • Multi processor (up to 4)
  • Large Memory (64 GB)
  • 64-bit support
• Virtual Switch support with VLAN
• Quick migration with intelligent placement
• WMI interface
• Support for XEN -enabled Linux guests

Virtual Machine Manager 2008 has the same look and feel as the VMM 2007 but under the hood the are some technical improvements. Microsoft made it possible to discover and connect to your VMWare ESX environment. With this connection you can, almost, completely manage your ESX environment. Vmotion to move server to an other ESX server with intelligent placement. Live migrating from Virtual Server 2005 to Hyper-V Host Cluster. These options are supported for Windows XP, Windows Vista, Server 2003 and Server 2008. There is the possibilities of migrating Windows 2000 but this only can be done offline so no live migration there. The support for Windows XP and Vista makes a full VDI solution only near future.

The intelligent placement of server is based on CPU, memory, disk I/O and network availability this data is collected from the host machines to give the star rating. So why isn’t this data available in the SCOM 2007 environment? We will see what the future will bring!

The overall architecture of VMM 2008 has the most added value when integrated with Operations manager 2007 and the knowledge driven way they work together where the pro tips are a real cool feature. Microsoft is currently working hard with a lot of third party venders to extend this to feature and make hardware and (virtual)software tips really get the best out of your environment.  

Pro tips noticed by Operations Manager 2007 and integrated in VMM 2008:

In my previous article about SCSM I described the integration of the Service Manager database with the OpsMgr database, just imagine what the will happen when de Configurations Manager database will join this integration and the pro tip will advice you for desired state or and updates where the performance will be increased. It just a look in the possible future.  

Regards,
Walter Eikenboom
http://weblogwally.spaces.live.com