Windows User Group - Ireland

Well done to SharePoint MVP, Stephen Cummins for getting a user group set up to help people get to grips with the collaboration solution.  They have their first event on November 17th at the MS Atrium building in Sandyford.  They'll be talking about setting up your first MOSS server.

Aidan Finn will be blogging from TechEd IT Pro EMEA 2008 in Barcelona over the next week.  The available set of materials over the 5 days is huge and will feature plenty of Windows Server, System Center, security, online services and System Center.

I was contacted by Alessandro Perilli, the founder of Virtualisation Congress 2008.  This conference is running in London in October from 14th to the 16th.  It will feature a wide array of speakers from across the virtualisation industry ... "bringing together the industry's biggest selection of virtualization players, from the recognized leaders to the newest start-ups.

The conference, to be held at London's ExCel, 14th-16th October, 2008, presents an ideal opportunity for current and prospective users of virtualization technologies to hear directly from the companies at the cutting edge of their development; at the same time, in the same place for the first time ever."

The keynote speaker is Mark Russinovich, formerly of SysInternals and now one of the "Technical Fellows" (or big brains) at Microsoft talks about his keynote on the site.  He'll discuss Hyper-V (obviously), application virtualisation and what Windows is doing to support virtualisation in the enterprise.  In case you don't know, Mark knew more about the source code of Windows than some (if not most) of the MS folks before he even joined MS!

There's a discount code that members of our user group can use to get a 25% discount on the registration.  I've emailed this to current members.  Please send in a mail if you've just joined or if you've lost the email and I'll get it out to you ASAP.

Last night we had our event on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V (Machine Virtualisation) and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008.  We had 12 attendees who heard:

• Dave Northey (Microsoft Ireland) discuss Hyper-V and clustering with Hyper-V.
• Aidan Finn (C Infinity) on some of the more detailed design and troubleshooting details you would need to know when deploying Hyper-V.
• Mark Gibson (Microsoft Ireland) talked about Microsoft's management solution for Hyper-V, including Virtual Machine Manager 2008.

The power point slide decks are available for download:

• Dave Northey
• Aidan Finn
• Mark Gibson

• Windows 2008 Terminal Services what's new
• RDP Client
• TS Gateway
• TS Session Broker
• TS Easy Print
• TS Remote App's
• TS WebAccess
• TS & Windows System Resource Manager
• Terminal Services Licensing
• Troubleshooting Terminal Services
• Terminal Services with 64 Bit - benefits & design
• Profile and User management
• TS & Softgrid 4.5 Virtualization
• Get the best out of it with Free Tools
• And More!

Prerequisites

This is a "Level 200" event so some knowledge of Terminal Services on Windows 2000/2003 is required.

Where and When

• Dave Northey (Microsoft): Hyper-V - we can get a little deeper on this topic now that the product has been released.
• Aidan Finn (C Infinity): Lessons I've learned about Hyper-V - Aidan will share his experiences with the product and things you should be aware of when setting up a lab or production environment.
• Mark Gibson (Microsoft): Virtual Machine Manager 2008 - System Center VMM2008 is due to be released in Q3 2008.  It is Microsoft's answer to VMware's Virtual Center and will be an essential tool for managing production Hyper-V deployments.

The event is free to attend for members of the Windows Server 2008 user group.  Simply join the group by sending us a mail and we'll send you out and invite.  We've got 20 places so book while they're available.  If you have accepted an invite but cannot attend, please let us know so we can let someone else take your place.

Thanks to Microsoft for booking the room and to Dave and Mark for offering their services.  Thanks also to C Infinity for letting Aidan speak about his experience in deploying Hyper-V.

Microsoft has released the first of the management packs for Windows Server 2008 monitoring using Operations Manager 2007.  No sign of official support for running the agent on the operating system yet.

This is worth reading to see what the directions of Hyper-V R2 and Windows Server 2008 R2 are going in.

Credit: Bink.

Microsoft has released an x86 and an x64 feature pack for Data Protection Manager 2007 to add support for Windows Server 2008 and SQL 2008.

"The DPM 2007 Update Rollup is a feature pack that includes previously released hotfixes alongside several new features aimed to enhance overall applicability and usability of DPM. Added features include: System state for Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 support, enhanced support for sharing tape libraries with other DPM servers, and support for better utilization of tape capacity by sharing tapes between multiple protection groups media co-location on tapes.

This Data Protection Manager Update Package consists of three separate updates. Note: Depending on your configuration, some updates may not apply. Please see “Installation Instructions” for details.

Feature Bullet Summary:
Issues Fixed:

• 946647 Description of the Data Protection Manager 2007 hotfix package: January 9, 2008
• 948373 The backup image may be corrupted if you use System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 to perform an online backup of a virtual machine that is running in Virtual Server 2005
• 950082 Description of the Data Protection Manager 2007 hotfix package rollup 2
• 948936 When synchronization runs in Data Protection Manager 2007, the DPM service may unexpectedly crash
• 951557 getKB -Data Protection Manager 2007 - Hotfix

• Support for backing up virtual machines on clustered Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 hosts
• Support for sharing tape libraries between multiple DPM servers
• Better tape utilization of tape capacity by co-locating data from multiple protection groups with similar retention range
• System state protection for Windows Server 2008

I just found this roadmap diagram that details when we will see management packs and support for SCOM 2007 on Windows Server 2008.  It looks like Q3 for a series of management packs, including Hyper-V.

It's kinda funny that a 30MB download is probably the best thing that MS has done this year!  OK, W2008 is required and it is pretty excellent - but Hyper-V is a real time and money saver.

You've probably heard that Microsoft "eats their own dog food".  This means that they run their own products in production before they hit the market.  This allows them to stress test, bug test and develop best practices.  For Hyper-V, Microsoft decided to run parts of probably one of the largest websites in the world on Hyper-V, namely TechNet and MSDN.  You couldn't ask for bigger loads ... those sites are constantly servicing huge downloads.  These were some beefy VM's having 4 virtual processors and 30GB RAM each! 

They've published the results.  There is also a more detailed document that illustrates the architecture and compares physical with virtual performance.

Now that Hyper-V is RTM you might want to download the x86 or the x64 editions.  You can also download the Vista SP1 Remote Administration tools for x86 and x64. 

John Howard has written up a pretty complete blog entry on the downloads, upgrading from RC1 and installing a clean Hyper-V host.

Credit: John Howard.

EDIT:

You will need to apply a patch if you are using the beta of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008.

Bink is reporting that Hyper-V has been released to manufacturing.  You can expect it to be available as a download and via Windows Updates.  There should be a smooth migration from the RC1 release to RTM.

Credit: Bink.

EDIT:

This has been confirmed.

Credit: Willem Kasdorp.

EDIT

The Hyper-V team has released some details.  The update will be available via Windows Updates on July 8th.  The direct download will be available from sometime later today (probably midday Seattle time or 20:00pm GMT).

Anthony Crotty has been doing a lot of work on Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V, interestingly with Linux.  Anthony has also been working with the beta of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008.  He's been updating his blog with his findings.

Aidan Finn has been doing a good bit of testing work with Hyper-V RC1 on a HP DL380 G5 recently.  He's been keeping a diary on his experiences, troubleshooting, etc.

There is an update available to allow you to run native Windows Server 2008 FTP.  This update is available for X86 and X64.  It also features FTPS, aka SSL FTP.

This update completely replaces the IIS6 version of FTP that is included on the RTM release of W2008.

Nathan Winters (Exchange MVP) was kind enough to give me a few photos from the recent Mark Minasi event.  I've updated the event page with them.

Credit: Nathan Winters.

Adding to the ever growing list of Windows Server 2008 variants is Windows HPC Server 2008.  Microsoft has just published an overview to this compute cluster solution.

Daniel Petri has written a quick guide on how to shrink a volume in Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 to a smaller than original size.  he shows how to do it using the GUI and from command prompt.

Credit: Daniel Petri.

Microsoft has released a whitepaper that details how Windows Server 2008 can save on your power bill.  I've recently been looking at the costs behind owning a server.  Wow!  The initial purchase is only a tiny fraction of the first year of ownership.  It's even less if you're like a normal firm that spreads the cost of depreciation over 3 years.  By far the biggest cost was electricity.  Human costs might be a big one for a lot of firms, but no so if you have built an optimised infrastructure.

Electricity is only going to get more and more expensive, especially here in Ireland where we depend on oil imports for power generation.  Carbon taxes will eventually come in and they'll hit the business first. 

Windows Server 2008 makes it possible to reduce power several ways.  Firstly, you can optimise when the server is consuming power.  Next, you can reduce the server footprint.  That can be thanks to increased performance (e.g. IIS7, x64, etc), machine virtualisation (Hyper-V) or server consolidation, e.g. branch office infrastructure de-deployment thanks to DFS-R, the new TCP stack or desktop virtualisation (Terminal Services or VDI).

Kurt Roggen has posted an interesting diagram comparing the features of all the different editions and installations of Windows Server 2008.

You can view it here.