I just read this short story where resellers in the UK are being chased by MS for allegedly distributing software illegally.

Let me preface this by saying I am looking forward to the technologies coming in Windows 7.  Unfortunately, I'm not looking forward to how they will be packaged based on the plans we heard at this event.  I believe the packaging of new business features that could tempt customers to go to Windows 7 and enable them to overcome technology-caused business issues into Windows 7 Business Edition would be beneficial to both Microsoft and their customers.  I rarely see SA being bought.  I can see those large organisations that do buy it now triming their budgets to the essentials.

Microsoft Ireland’s partner team held an event today on Windows 7.  The speaker is Jelle Kooi from Microsoft Netherlands.

Really bad news and more mistakes from MS.  Windows 7 Enterprise (only available to SA customers) will have more features than Vista Enterprise did that won’t be in the Business edition. 

• Windows 7 UAC is silent except for low level code, e.g. AV, firewall, imaging, etc.
• Vista h/w will run Win7

Search Federation

Only in Windows 7 Enterprise.  BOO!

Note that Windows Enterprise Edition is only available to Software Assurance customers.

DirectAccess

Only in Windows 7 Enterprise.  BOO!

DirectAccess is one of the killer apps in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.  DA was one of the business reasons to go from XP to Windows 7 and Windows 2003 to Windows Server 2008 R2. 

This is the system that works with W2008 R2 for seamless access to the company network without a VPN client.

BranchCache

Only in Windows 7 Enterprise.  BOO!

Every one of of the killer apps in Win7 is hidden away from the majority of businesses.

BitLocker to Go

Ultimate and Enterprise only.  Ugh!

Encrypt USB devices and control using GPO.  It seems pretty simple.  GPO control makes this powerful.  It looks like the only one of the discussed Win7 features to be included in Ultimate.  Strange that!  Vista Ultimate included everything.

AppLocker

Enterprise only.  Oh come on!?!?!?

Force application control on the network.  This is different to Software Restriction Policies.  Uses digital signatures - different than the SRP hash rule approach which breaks apps when they get patched.  Depends on your s/w having a digital signature.  I’m thinking that might be a problem with some legitimate 3rd party business apps.  Managed using rules in GPO.

EDIT:

Thought a bit more about this later in the day.  This feature could be more significant than I originally thought.  A friend, Tim, is a big fan of white listing.  Is this where MS is going?  It takes work to get going but it protects the network big time.

Native VHD

Deploy your operating system as a VHD (virtual hard disk, the same format used by Virtual PC and Hyper-V) so your PC can boot from this VHD.  Your imaging solution options are opened up.

This uses some version of Hyper-V so it’s likely going to not support hibernation and BitLocker would be restricted to the contents of the VHD.

VDI

Still requires VECD (to be renamed) monthly lease licensing.  Improved printing experience – I would guess it’s XPS.  Regular readers know I love XPS printing in W2008 Terminal Services.

EDIT:

VECD (to be renamed as I had previously predicted) is still limited to a special SKU that you lease.  Didn’t catch if it is SA only.

PowerShell 2.0

This is installed by default.  I think a lot of companies will want to control access to this powerful environment via GPO.  It’s a built in avenue for attack – end users don’t need this power.  This will be loved by ConfigMgr admins who really take advantage of the power in their hands.

Deployment

The recommendation is to deploy MDOP (Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack) first, then Vista Enterprise and then Windows 7 Enterprise.  OK, agreed … if you (A) have Software Assurance and (B) can afford the extra licensing for MDOP.  MDOP offers a lot to simplify application ownership.  It’s a pity things like App-V (which was Softgrid) aren’t available to the open market as they used to be before MS bought them.

My Comments

I made my point to the speaker during the presentation: this hiding away of the new features bhind SA means that business reasons to upgrade from XP to Windows 7 aren’t there for most businesses now.  Most don't buy SA, they buy OEM or volume licensing without SA.  Think of BitLocker.  How many businesses use that?  Exactly!  I've never seen it in the wild. 

Quote from today “Customers with SA are happier with Windows than those who aren’t?”  It’s because they’ve gotten the complete solution.  So if MS wanted Windows Vista to be a success, why the hell did they restrict the number of happy customers they would have?  Stupid, stupid, stupid and I’ve given up trying to have this discussion with them because they are caught up in the circle of their own sales pitch and marketing like a politician.

For you sys admins and site engineers out there running legacy OS’s, I hope you’re happy with XP and Windows 2003 because I believe you’re going to be still working on those OS’s for a very long time unless MS changes their feature packing for Windows 7.

So there you have it.  Windows 7 will indeed be the next Windows Vista for most businesses and will offer no business reason to upgrade from whatever they’re running now.  That’s both bad news for them and bad news for partners who could have gotten work for OS deployments, not to mention the customers who could have used the features to resolve technology caused business issues.  What MS has done is left Windows stagnate with no new business features (pretty GUI’s and burning DVD’s don’t count) for the majority of customers and left a window open for Apple and Linux to catch up in the desktop space.

Come on MS!  You can do better than this!  We know you can change, e.g. the Hyper-V W2008 CAL issue and bringing back the SKU for unauthenticated Windows Server Standard in SPLA.  You’ve done the hard work by developing the features to make Windows 7 a product for all businesses.  Don’t confirm conspiracy theories that you only care for the Fortune 500’s.  e know you care about the little guys, e.g. BizSpark and DreamSpark.  Put these killer app features into Windows 7 Business Edition for everyone and satisfy 100% of your customers, not just the SA ones.  There's got to be a way to do this and give value in SA.

EDIT:

If you agree with me on this subject then contact your local MS office and let them know.  They will change this only if they get overwhelmingly negative feedback.  Don’t let a salesperson’s waffle ruin a good product.  Force them to pass it on back to Redmond.  MS is responsive to constructive feedback so give it to them if you feel strongly about the issue.

EDIT 2:

Oh yeah, the speaker was telling partners that they should get customers to upgrade from XP to Vista now and then upgrade customers to Windows 7.  I cannot agree with this.  Who is going to spend a tonne of money and time upgrading to Vista and then repeat the process 12 months later to upgrade to Windows 7 when there’s a global recession?  In times like these we need to avoid reenforcing the idea of IT geeks wanting to upgrade and spend.  We're more than a cost centre.  We need to be careful.  The idea of upgrading OS's more often than once every 3 years scares the hell out of people.  If we do an upgrade from W2K or XP (or older) then lets wait and jump to Windows 7, hopefully with DirectAccess and BranchCache *fingers crossed*

EDIT 3:

Been thinking about this.  I understand MS's desire to add value to Software Assurance.  If someone pays a lot of money for something then there should be a reward.  Personally, I thought having access to Windows Fundamentals (turn legacy PC's into terminals), training vouchers, support and the right to upgrade were invaluable when I was a SA customer in a large company.  In fact, those vouchers were excellent when I wanted to bring my team up to speed on some new stuff that came along and our support calls were converted into Essentials calls when we got that support contract.  Our EA was flexible and Desktop Core CAL's were a money saver.  But I came to think that SA on our desktops wasn't as valuable as it was for the servers.  I planned to upgrade to W2003 R2 upon release to use things like the Print Management Console, file server management and DFS-R.  But our desktops were stuck on WXP SP2 company wide, 1 year after the RTM of XP SP2 because LOB business applications didn't support SP2.  That would have surely prevented us from upgrading the OS, had Vista come along earlier, for a very long time, much more than the 2 or 3 years SA covers you for.  To me, upgrade rights are the big thing because you are paying a % of the original software cost.

But, I'm going to hold strong on my main theme here.  I love the new business features of Windows 7.  I don't love that most businesses won't get to use them.  I hope MS changes it's mind on the product packaging because it will make Win7 a bigger success if they do.

There’s always questions about virtualising SQL and Exchange servers.  We know that Hyper-V performs really well and the advice is that you should be concerned about virtualising something that needs too much CPU or disk I/O.  They’d be candidates for physical deployments.  Everyone’s idea of large and heavy is relative.  You might consider your SBS server to be heavy weight.  You might consider a 4 server Exchange 2007 server deployment to be heavy.  MS thinks of that as small!

The Exchange team has done a good post on virtualising Exchange 2007 and even give some sample architectures.  They give 3 interesting solutions too, from the “small” deployment, virtual DR and an office in a can.

I just read on Hypervoria that the PowerShell library on Codeplex was updated.  Everything in Hyper-V can be managed used PowerShell.  Everything VMM does is translated into Powershell (and the scripts can be saved to the library for later use or copied/pasted).

“At present there are 80 functions in the library, some of these are worker functions which are not expected to be called directly, the others are listed below

Finding a VM
Get-VM, Choose-VM , Get-VMHost

Connecting to a VM
New-VMConnectSession

Discovering and manipulating Machine states
Get-VMState , Set-VMState , Convert-VmState,
Ping-VM , Test-VMHeartBeat, Shutdown-VM , Start-VM, Stop-VM, Suspend-VM
Get-VMKVP, Add-KVP, Remove-KVP, Get-VMJPEG

Backing up, exporting and snapshotting VMs
Export-VM , Import-VM, Get-VMSnapshot, Choose-VMSnapshot , Apply-VMSnapshot , New-VMSnapshot ,Remove-VMSnapshot, Rename-VMSnapShot, Update-VMSnapshot, Get-VMSnapshotTree, Get-VmBackupScript

Adding and removing VMs, configuring motherboard settings.
New-VM , Remove-VM , Set-VM , Get-VMCPUCount, Set-VMCPUCount, Get-VMMemory, Set-VMMemory, Set-VMSerialPort

Manipulating Disk controllers, drives and disk images
Get-VMDiskController
Add-VMSCSIController , Remove-VMSCSIcontroller
Get-VMDriveByController , Add-VMDRIVE , Remove-VMdrive
Get-VMDiskByDrive, Add-VMDISK , Set-VMDisk, Get-VMDisk
Get-VMFloppyDisk , Add-VMFloppyDisk
Add-VMNewHardDisk

Manipluating Network Interface Cards
Get-VMNic , List-VMNic , Choose-VMNIC, Add-VMNIC, Remove-VMNIC , Set-VMNICAddress , Set-VMNICConnection , Get-VMNicport ,
Get-VMnicSwitch, Choose-VMSwitch, New-VMSwitchPort, Get-VMByMACaddress, Choose-VMExternalEthernet,
New-VMExternalSwitch, New-VMInternalSwitch,New-VmPrivateSwitch

Working with VHD files
Get-VHDDefaultPath, Get-VHDInfo, New-VHD, Compact-VHD, Test-VHD,Convert-VHD,Merge-VHD,Mount-VHD, Unmount-VHD”

I still use the Hyper-V console to do some stuff because I find it suits me from time to time, despite having VMM 2008.  One of these is disk management on the cluster because you can’t remotely manage files on a GUID drive.  I just did some work on a VHD and went back to VMM to add some SCSI disks.  However, my boot VHD, an IDE disk was gone, disappeared, vamoose!

I tried a few things (checking the file location in Hyper-V MMC, refreshing the host and migrating the VM) but the fix was to make a simple alteration to the VM configuration in VMM.  I added a SCSI controller and saved the changes.  The disk reappeared.  Note: The disk was there.  Starting the machine up may have popped it back in VMM (I was in the process of deploying and customising).  I know for certain that Hyper-V knew it was there and the machine would have booted OK.

Microsoft has published a guide or instructions on how to do Live Migration (or VMotion if you’re stuck on VMware lingo) with Hyper-V as found on Windows Server 2008 R2.

You can read about the architecture here.

Your architecture options for Hyper-V aren’t just limited to a single hosted server or a single site cluster.  They won’t cover you for DR.

There’s lots of options out there.  If you have huge budget and diskless hosts, you can replicate a SAN from site A to site B across dark fibre.  Initiating the DR site is easy.  Ensure site A is offline and power up site B.  Because the hosts are diskless, they store everything about themselves (operating system, identity, configuration, services and data) on the replicate SAN.  As long as the site B hardware is identical you can power it up and carry on working as before.

That sounds perfect, eh?  But dark fibre is expensive!  You might be able to get away with 1GB copper but that’s really pushing it for SAN replication.

More affordable is host based replication.  I just saw that Double-Take has a few solutions.  Note that HP customers can get HP rebranded Double-Take software.  You can replicate VM’s on a single host to another host using Double-Take for Windows.  Or you can use GeoCluster to get much more advanced solutions.

This also reminds me that you can use things like Double-Take or Replistor to do P2V DR of data (not operating systems and applications), e.g. you can have a production physical SQL box called SQL1 and replicate the SQL databases and log files to SQL2 which is an identically configured VM in the DR site.

An interesting way to do is to continually P2V your machine using an imaging solution that can handle drivers.  Acronis have a great reputation for driver substitution in their imaging solutions.  Their True Image Echo Enterprise Server solution allows continual P2V of physical machines to virtualised DR machines.  Invocation is a restoration of your stored images, something you can regularly test in Hyper-V with private networks.  That Acronis product supports lots of operating systems.  There’s a cheaper version for Windows.

I really don’t get this whole “storage is cheap” stuff.  Storage to stick in the back of your PC is cheap but server storage is far from cheap.  The cost of a 146GB disk may be a fraction of what it was 5 years ago but we need to use a heck of a lot more to do the same stuff now as we did back then, e.g. look at the size of a Windows boot drive now.  Someone has to pay for this, e.g. an ever decreasing IT budget (IT is a non-profit generating cost centre which isn’t so popular these days) or a customer (either internal or external) has to pay for it and we all know that customers don’t want to pay for something they don’t directly use, e.g. a VMM library.  Then ask yourself, why would you fill that library LUN with files that are 75% empty?

If you’ve been using VMware ESX then you know how efficient it is when it comes to storing template machines.  Unfortunately, VMM 2008 isn’t that intelligent.  I tried to have this conversation with one of the folks at TechEd but because of MS’s tendency to rename every industry accepted term he hadn’t a clue at what I was trying to say.

So here it is in VMware (sort of) lingo and then I’ll translate.  In Virtual Center, you can sysprep a machine (either via the GUI which I do not recommend because sysprep is both OS and service pack specific which VC cannot handle) or manually (which I do recommend).  When I covert that VM into a template it’s removed from the production VMFS LUN and placed into the library.  Part of this (if I remember correctly – it’s been a while) was that the disk is stored as a dynamically expanding disk instead of a fixed size one.  Why store 40GB of mostly empty virtual disk when you can store 8GB?  Imagine having lots of templates that you need to manage.  You could have a library that’s TB upon TB of wasted space.  When you deploy the template, the virtual disk is converted back to fixed size on the VMFS LUN.

So I asked about taking a template machine in VMM and doing the same.  Straight away said person got confused because MS decided template would refer to the simple file that describes the VM configuration and nothing else.  The conversation beyond that point could go nowhere.  So here’s what would be great.  Take a VM and sysprep it down.  The library storage process would take the VHD on the Hyper-V host and if it’s fixed it would convert (without an unnecessary copy taking up space) over the wire to a dynamically expanding VHD in the library.  A deployment of that VHD would ask if you want a fixed or dynamic disk.  If it’s fixed then the VHD would be converted, again over the wire without a wasteful copy, and a new fixed size VHD would appear in the destination LUN on the Hyper-V host.

Here’s What I Do

That’s not there now so I’m doing something slightly more manual.  I build a template (yeah I said “template” cos that’s what it is; Ask any OS deployment person) using a dynamically expanding VHD on my development host.  I then copy it into my library which is a compressed folder.  Sure it’s a slight bit slower but it’s worth the saved space.  For a VM deployment I deploy a VMM template (ICK – the machine configuration kind) to the Hyper-V host’s LUN for that VM.  I log into the host and then fire up the Hyper-V console.  Using the disk editor I browse to the VMM library and convert that disk to a fixed type whose location is the VM’s LUN. 

That manual process does everything that I’d like MS be able to do with VMM.  It might take me about 1 minute more to deploy a VM than it would otherwise but I’m saving a tonne of space on expensive disk.

This is the only thing that really bugs me with VMM.  But it really annoys me.  I’m guessing the mix between the restrictive Hyper-V security model and the inability to access GUID drives over the network have caused this.  The new cluster file system in Hyper-V R2 will give them an opportunity to sort this out.  Hopefully MS will sort it out. 

It's been a long time since I wrote anything outside of work.  Work projects really ate up a lot of time and pretty much exhausted me over the last 2 years.  I've just spent the last 2 hours planning and writing again for the first time in ages.  It might surprise some (not) to find out that the subject in question is Hyper-V.  There's no schedule and no contracts so I'll post the document when I post it.  I don't think this one will take me too long; I hope it won't because the old speaking schedule is stacking up.

EDIT (23:50 31st Jan 2009):

I've gotten 18 pages written so far over bits of 3 days.  Good progress so far.  Probably 50% done with this document.

You can get it here.  Remember that a Release Candidate is not a finished product and it likely to contain bugs.

I’ve just installed it.  It requires an update of Live if you’re using the Live Sign-In Assistant plug-in.  IE8 looks a little faster to me.  Live Messenger appears to have had a bit of a facelift.  Same goes for Windows Live Writer.

I just saw someone asking for help at removing Conficker from an NT4 server.  Extended support for that ended back in 2004 or thereabouts ... with a lot of notice.  That means no patches, no support and no security fixes for that operating system.

That made me think; When does extended support for W2K Server end?  I looked it up and found the date for termination of extended support is 13/July/2010.  That means MS will fix security issues until then.  Normal bug fixes ended back 2005 with the end of mainstream support.

So if you have Windows 2000 Servers you should get planning.  Talk to your application vendors and apply pressure for W2008 support.  You'll need new hardware or virtual machines because you cannot do an in-place upgrade.  If you don't upgrade then you face the risk of not only MS not supporting you but others as well, e.g. anti-malware or backup software vendors.  Imagine not having a security patch that every other OS has, not having protection of your system and/or data and catching something like Conficker.  That's a pricey gamble if you ask me.

Licensing Microsoft Server Products in Virtual Environments is an overview of Microsoft licensing models for the server operating system and server applications under virtual environments. Licensing Microsoft Windows Server 2008 to Run with Virtualization Technologies (Word file, 1.39 MB) describes how Windows Server 2008 and other Microsoft server products are licensed when they are used with other virtualization technologies. 

This spreadsheet lists the policy settings for computer and user configurations included in the administrative template files (admx/adml) delivered with Windows Internet Explorer 8. The policy settings included in this spreadsheet cover Internet Explorer 5, Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7 and Internet Explorer 8. These files are used to expose policy settings when you edit Group Policy objects (GPOs) using Group Policy Object Editor (also known as GPEdit).

Sick of trying trying to learn messy NETSH commands and the like and just want to do your job of deploying W2008 Core Installation servers?  Back when W2008 was first released a free tool call Core Configurator was released to the Net.  Using a very simple and lightwight GUI, it translated your clicks into commands.  This allowed you to configure your Windows Server 2008 Core Installation servers with the minimum of fuss.  Unfortunately, the author left his employers and they enacted a little used Intellectual Property clause in his employment contract.  The product disappeared off the download location but with a little hard work you could find it elsewhere.

Read your employment contract.  You'll see that it often has an IP clause saying that anything you generate, even outside of work on your own machines, is the property of your employer if you sign the contract.  Yeah, I know, it sucks.  I made sure my employers waived that one for the writing work that I've been involved with before I joined the company.  What I do in my own time is mine to do with what I want.

The owners of the IP rights to Core Configurator have released a new version.  It's free for non-commercial use and costs $99 for a site license - they included product activation GRRRR!

The Tolly group has written a new report (there was a previous one back in the pre-RTM days) on the performance of SMB2 in Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008.

If you didn't know, there's a serious amount of changes in the TCP stack and SMB2 to improve the performance of data and particularly file transfer between W2008 and Vista machines, e.g. W2008-Vista, Vista-Vista, W2008-W2008.  I've written a chapter in the Mark Minasi book, "Mastering Windows 2008: Essential Technologies", on the subject.  Between a new TCP stack that handles more data transfer with less overhead and a new SMB protocol to handle those greater loads as well as doing some meta data caching, things are much better over latent (e.g. WAN or Internet) links.

The benefits are seen across many scenarios.  Using a Vista client to use Outlook over HTTPS access of a W2008 hosted Exchange server over the Internet is faster.  Using Sharepoint over the WAN is faster.  Using a W2008 iSCSI based server is much faster.  I recently did a test when I was at TechEd EMEA in Barcelona with a proof-of-concept box that I had hosted in our data centre in Dublin.  It was running W2008 Server Std with WSS 3.0.  I used my vista laptop to browse and upload/download files.  It was almost like I was in the same building as the server.  I was very impressed.

I'm not saying that the improvements will be a cure-all for centralising all your servers out of the branch office.  But it's definitely an improvement and improves some services which are already suitable for consolidation and centralisation such as Exchange and SharePoint.  You might want to look at things like VDI, Terminal Services (and the TS based solutions) and web interfaces as end-user access technologies if you have other services to centralise or consolidate.

Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 are bringing things to another level.  I was chatting with Mark Minasi at TechEd after one of the presentations and he thought that these were the branch office solution releases.  I'd agree with that.  Windows Vista and W2008 gave us the foundation in the new TCP stack and W7 and W2008 R2 build on that to give us the solutions.

The most interesting of these is BranchCache.  The idea is pretty simple.  In a server-less office, when a Win7 client accesses a remote W2008R2 hosted file or HTTP service it can cache the files that are downloaded.  Each file is uniquely identified using a caching algorithm.  If another W7 client in the same office network requires files from a remote W2008R2 server it broadcasts on the network with the ID's (in synch with the server telling it what blocks make up the download).  If another W7 client has cached the data then it's transmitted from one W7 client to the other over the LAN - no unnecessary data transfer over the WAN.  Data security is maintained by ensuring the user/client accessing the data have rights on the download's ACL.  You can optimise this by using a W2008 server in the branch office to act as a caching server.  Instead of wasteful LAN broadcasts, the branch office client will just consult the caching server to see if it has the files and downloads from there (if it has permission based on the original hosting server).  This process is not used for saving changes.  That's not perfect but most cross latent network data transfers are read only anyway.

This has the potential to really change branch office infrastructure on a Windows network.  It will be interesting to see how cross WAN data transfers will compare between Windows 7-Windows Server 2008 R2 with BranchCache and Windows XP-Windows Server 2003.  If you've used Windows Server DFS-R with Cross File Replication and monitored the results then you'll have an idea of what to expect.  It hopefully won't be too dissimilar to the results from appliances provide by Riverbed and Citrix (although they optimise all unencrytped and unsigned TCP traffic; not just SMB and HTTP.  They also do it in both directions).

I got this alert from the SQL 2005 management pack this afternoon.  A quick google and I found some answers on the TechNet forums.  This alert will occur on SQL servers that don't have full text indexing installed.  An MS engineer posted that the SQL management pack mightn't be the cleanest of them.  True enough; I've overridden a few unnecessary alerts today.

Error: 0x8007007b

Details: The filename, directory name, or volume label syntax is incorrect.

One or more workflows were affected by this.

Workflow name: Microsoft.SQLServer.2005.DBEngine.FullTextSearchServiceMonitor

I previously talked about SCSI virtual disks in Hyper-V.  Yes, you can have them but you can't boot from them.  However, it's worth while using them for other volumes to improve performance and resource utilisation, e.g. place database log files and data files on SCSI disks.

How to add a virtual SCSI disk to a VM in VMM 2008 isn't immediately obvious.  Power down the VM.  Open the hardware configuration.  Now add a SCSI controller.  You now can add a disk.  At first it looks like you've just added another IDE disk.  It doesn't appear under the SCSI controller.  That's a bit confusing.  However, you can alter the properties of the disk so that the Channel is set to one of the available 64 SCSI ID's.  Now your data disk (not your OS disk because that won't boot from SCSI) is set up as a SCSI disk and it will perform better.

This guide contains best practices for securing Active Directory installations. The intended audience for this document is IT professionals who are responsible for maintaining the security of their Active Directory environment.

This guide contains recommendations for protecting domain controllers against known threats, establishing administrative policies and practices to maintain network security, and protecting Domain Name System (DNS) servers from unauthorized updates. It also provides guidelines for maintaining Active Directory security boundaries and securing Active Directory administration.

One of the benefits of adding VMM 2008 is that you can manage an ESX cluster from your MS network integrated management platform.  In fact, you can manage many Virtual Center servers from a single VMM 2008 console/server.  I've not tried it but based on the demo's I've seen, you can do pretty much everything in the day-day side of managing VI3.

There's a bug where this can happen.  You add an ESX cluster to VMM 2008 but you are no longer able to add VM's

Problem Description: Get this error:
VMM cannot find VirtualHardDisk object .
Ensure the library object is valid, and then try the operation again.
ID: 801

MS has published a hotfix for this ... but it's critical that you install this hotfix before adding ESX to VMM.  If you didn't and you get this bug then you should install the hotfix and run the script from the MS VMM blog.

Credit: MS VMM Blog.

Microsoft launched the BizSpark program last year to assist start up IT services businesses get off the ground.  The cost of buying development software, operating systems, applications and hosting services are substantial.  Every small business needs to focus it's time and budget on developing the product and marketing it's services.  Any distractions or drains on budget will reduce the chances of success.  A big part of that success is making the right contacts.  BizSpark helps there by making it possible to meet the right people and raising your market profile.

The Irish economy is on a downturn.  Heck, I'll say the "R Word", we're in a recession.  We had a Celtic Tiger economy and it was clearly mismanaged and was allowed to inflate by vested interests of a certain industry.  Between globalisation, the property bubble bursting and the global banking credit crisis we're seeing two things happen.  Foreign investment is moving east.  That's hammering the supporting businesses in those local economies because their client's have moved east.  We're seeing massive unemployment in the construction industry.  Domestic purchasing is falling and it's not being helped by an Irish government that's sucking money out of the economy and sending us up to Northern Ireland where we can make massive savings.  The credit crisis has hit the small business worst of all.  Between demand being down and not being able to get credit from their banks, small indigenous businesses are having a tough time.

Every time I listen to economic experts talking about Ireland I hear the same thing.  We can no longer rely on German or American investment.  We need to encourage Irish small businesses.  Those who are being made redundant from the likes of Dell will have to look at starting up businesses.  College graduates are stuck in a chicken and egg scenario where they need experience to get a job ... to get experience.  The advice for them is to find something unique that they can sell.  But who's going to give them credit?

Microsoft may not be giving them credit but it is willing to help.  If you own a small start-up business then you can enter the BizSpark program through a sponsor.  To qualify:

• Your business must be less than 3 years old.
• Must make less than $1,000,000 per year.
• Must be privately owned.
• Is looking to develop an IT product/service, e.g. a game or the next salesforce.com, on a Microsoft platform.

When you enter the program you get access to the following for 3 years and a cost of €100 (yes, one hundred Euros!) at the exit of the program:

• Free MSDN development software including Visual Studio.
• Free support from MS PSS.
• Free publicity and networking via the BizSpark portal.
• Free production software, e.g. MS Windows Server, SQL Server, and more.  This list is growing as the MS product teams see the benefits of entry into the program.
• Access to discounted hosting services from MS partners.

That's quite a lot for €100 ... when you exit the program.  The cost of a single Windows Server Standard license off the shelf is around €800 plus tax!  That's a huge leg-up for a business that's either starting up or has recently gotten off the ground.

The last benefit is a critical one.  The online presence is the shop window for businesses these days.  We all know that IT is changing.  If you're not in Software-as-a-Service very soon then you'll face the serious prospect of being irrelevant in 10 years time.  The folks who have the best chance of deploying a SaaS application are the start-ups because they have no baggage or existing systems to convert.  The iron is hot and this is the time to strike it.

That online presence is often misunderstood.  There's a lot of crap on the net about cloud computing and virtual private servers (VPS).  Hosting in Ireland is a minefield.  Whether it's people making claims about 100% SLA's (which their frequent outages obviously bring many things they say in to question), claims being made about tier IV data centres by ISP's that have awful 9-5 phone support, the quality of their staff (who were responsible for implementing the aforementioned "outage house"), or building and "infrastructure" on a platform of bailing twine and duct tape, you sometimes feel like you're tap dancing on landmines when talking to their sales people.  A quick tip ... do you ever get to talk to a techie during pre-sales?  If not, do you ever wonder why?  Simple answer ... salesmen don't exactly have a problem with "distorting" reality and techies are honest because they're the ones who have to live up to the promise.

Getting a stable, secure and managed online presence is key to your online business being well regarded.  If you're service uptime is unpredictable then customers will go elsewhere.  And here's something I learned in marketing classes in college (we had to take them in 3rd year to make sure we weren't 100% geeks).  If you have a happy customer they tell 3 people.  If you have an unhappy customer they tell 13 people.  OK, think about that for a moment.  That was before we had the Internet.  If I'm unhappy and post it in 13 online forums or review pages, just how many people will read that?  Forums tend to score very highly in Google search results.  Do you really need that negative SEO?  Just search outage and the name of an Irish hosting company and you'll see what I mean.

I don't like to do this on my blog because I feel I have to now.  If you are interested in BizSpark then contact my employers.  Not only are they partners but the run the most professional server hosting service in Ireland.  You deal with techies and with hardware, software and services that are legally purchase, installed and supported by the manufacturers with 4 hour response times.  Unlike others who make claims, we do have things like an MVP and a CCIE looking after things.  With a focus on business challenges and regulatory compliance, we've not cut any corners.  And BizSpark customers will get a nice welcome.