We have a number of Windows Server 2003 machines that were installed by an IBM partner back before I joined the company.  This company is marketed as “experts” in servers, storage and virtualisation in Ireland.  The first thing I did when I joined was audit the systems to see what I needed to do to make them fit for management … and then ft for purpose.  Unsurprisingly, I found the C: drives were too small at 10GB.  Once you do things like add in service packs, security updates, etc, that just won’t do.  That was one of around a dozen major faults I found with that company’s work, most of which I spent some time sorting out last year.  I’ve been slowly working through the disk sizing issue. 

I’ve been quick to “un-recommend” this IBM partner to people when talking to them in person.  Strangely, IBM Ireland is very quick to recommend them for major infrastructure projects.  I found them to be amateurs, e.g. the TCP DNS settings on domain controllers pointing to IOL’s public DNS!

By the way, I make C: to be a minimum of 40GB now on all servers.  I used to go for 30GB but W2008 requires a 40Gb partition.  W2008 only takes somewhere around 10GB but I think MS are leaving plenty of space for service packs and security updates; a wise move I believe.

We purchased Acronis Disk Director Server to resize the C: partitions on this small set of servers.  I’d used it years before and it worked a treat.  I installed it a while back on the first of the servers.  Yesterday I ran a job to expand the C: volume.  SQL 2005 was installed on the next volume, G:.  I shrunk G: (it’s a tiny database) and expanded C:.  I committed the operation and rebooted.  I was remotely located (but a short spin in the car from the servers).

The servers rebooted twice and were back online.  Voila!  The C: drive was now 40GB.  The OpsMgr agent came out of maintenance mode and then a series of alerts came in.  Oops!  Acronis has renamed the G: volume to D:.  SQL had failed to start and a series of application services followed suit.  I renamed the volume back to G: and things were OK.  OpsMgr didn’t alert anything after that and an inspection by the application’s manager showed everything was working OK.

That was the backup drive in the application “cluster” (not a Windows cluster but an application cluster).  I’ll be hitting the primary machine in a couple of weeks once I’m sure the dust has settled OK.

Acronis seems to be one of those companies that you think should have a bigger name.  I like their disk management stuff.  I know their cloning solution is loved by people who use it, e.g. I’m told it’s proven to be a fine P2V and V2P solution when native VMware or MS products can’t do the job.  Their products are pretty economic when you consider the time for engineering alternative solutions so give them a look to see what they can do for you.

Alex Yushchenko Terminal Services MVP (yes, he’s back in the fold) is busy once again organising PubForum.  The next event will be 5-7 June, 2009 in Dublin. 

Here’s what the event offers:

“18 Experts to Experts Sessions on Topic's delivered by World recognized Experts, Microsoft MVP's, Citrix CTP, Citrix internal SE's,

• Citrix & Microsoft Evangelists
• Citrix XenApp 5 & Feature Pack, XenServer, XenDesktop 2.x & 3 - Troubleshooting, Planning, Infrastructure, Optimizations, Tools,
• Upgrade and Printing
• Citrix Virtualization, Citrix Workflow Studio, Citrix EdgeSite
• Citrix Essentials for XenApp and Microsoft Hyper-V
• Citrix NetScaler & Access Gateway
• Microsoft Remote Desktop Services Planning, Upgrading & Infrastructure with Windows Server 2008 and 2008 R2
• Microsoft Virtualization with Windows Server 2008 and 2008 R2 Hyper – V
• Project Plannng
• & more

Master Classes on ( 1- 3 Trainers per Class / 4 - 5 hours / just 30 EUR each) delivered by World recognized Experts, Microsoft MVP's, Citrix CTP, Citrix internal SE's, Citrix & Microsoft Evangelists

• Microsoft Remote Desktop Services & VDI & Windows Server 2008 R2
• Microsoft Virtualization
• RES
• AppSense
• XenApp & XenServer
• XenDesktop
• & more

1 Night out for Networking and socializing with other experts”

Attendance for this is just €99 (!!!!) if you book before March 5th.  I was there last year.  Lots of big names present and tonnes to be learned.  Considering the price, that’s a heck of a lot you can learn and it’s fantastic value.

I know, it’s a very sad situation.  Take a few moments to compose yourself before continuing to read on :-)

Silicon Republic says that Eircom experienced “a 42pc decline in DSL numbers and the loss of 41,000 retail customers have all led to a €3m drop in revenue for the second quarter at Eircom, resulting in revenues of €517m at the end of December”. 

Undoubtedly a good bit of that is people trying to save money by going offline.  But go an compare what you get from Eircom compared to what you get from the others.  Eircom is easily more expensive.  I got a flier in the door today from them offering me a 1MB ADSL line for €50.15 per month.  That’s the more expensive than my 3MB line from BT Ireland.  Eircom is a landline phone business so they throw in landline calls and all that jazz.  But Ireland is the land of the mobile phone.  I use my landline to order pizza once a week!  How about offering us a service without the free landlines and bringing the costs down?  Nah, that makes too much sense I guess.

Maybe if Eircom does the following thy might be able to make some money:

• Put decent customer support in place
• Stops acting like the are doing you a favour
• Put together product bundles we want
• Price it to be competitive

There’s a post on MSDN about the changes coming in the release candidate for Windows 7.  Yes, it said “the Release Candidate for Windows 7”.  Maybe it will be RTM earlier than expected?

MS TechNet has some documentation up on Virtual Machine Manager 2008.  It’s pretty light on information at the moment but I guess they’ll fill it out as time goes by.

I just read a couple of announcements that I missed.

A customer technical preview release (CTP1 – a pre-beta build) of SQL 2008 Service Pack 1 was released.

Smooth Streaming for IIS7 is available as a beta release for x86 and x64 and as a Web Platform Installer.  There’s more information here and here.  The idea is simple enough: provide a “media experience that starts up instantly, seeks instantly, and delivers the best quality that network and CPU conditions allow for”.  It sounds like some of the functions that Silverlight can do with media that local developer evangelist, Martha Rotter, has been talking about.

I just read this:

“The increasing move to a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) could result in the disappearance of traditional 2nd line IT support  and force 3rd line teams … to embrace an increasingly customer-centric environment”.

I spoke about VDI last night and the impact it would have on IT.  I agree that VDI will have an impact but I’m not sure I agree that we’ll see 3rd line IT becoming more customer facing.  If you’re in 3rd line you do have a role to play when calls get escalated but I think we’ll see less IT involvement with the desktop and less of 3rd line interacting with the customer.

If we do things right then we’re trying to take IT out of the equation.  We’re that “delaying” factor in the business getting on with things.  That’s why I like SharePoint.  We can delegate admin rights to business (site and/or data) owners so they can decide who has what access.  Gone is the hassle with file shares where IT is left to decide who has what access (and we’re the worst people for that) or to try get someone to fill in paperwork (or InfoPath forms).

Take some like App-V on VDI.  You can automatically deploy new VM’s to new users.  Users sign in and go to a portal to request non-standard software.  The budget owner (non-IT) says “yay” or “nay” and the user gets their software.  If something breaks in the s/w the usual 1st line is called in.

I really think we’ll see users interacting with IT even less.  When they do have a problem they’ll deal with that 1st line.  The 2nd line probably be merged into the 1st line and have less work to do thanks to the automation.  I don’t see the 3rd line doing anything more than it was.

But this is all assuming people adopt automation.  I had to leave an interesting discussion on that subject last night to catch the last train home.  Ireland is pretty weird because IT automation just has not taken off here.  Some businesses deploy the software but never get much further than that.  I’ve seen systems like Unicenter and SMS just gather dust, wasting away while IT departments struggle with the problems that the systems would fix.  I suspect part of it is down to training, part of it is down to lack of interest by individuals and a good deal down to how the business undervalues IT and hires unsuitable skills for advanced engineering.

At the Windows User Group last night, one of the MS Ireland guys had an Acer “Atom” net book with 1GB RAM.  It was running Windows 7 pretty well.  I’d probably still recommend 2GB RAM but it did appear pretty good.

Dave Northey from MS Ireland showed BranchCache working with a pre-beta build.  His normal demo laptop died earlier that day and despite running on sub standard h/w he go the point across.  It isn’t actually block based like I had thought.  It is file based.  It will still improve things drastically but leaves a window open for alternative branch office solutions.

Service Pack two is a Release Candidate (RC) for Windows Server 2008 and Vista.  There will be two images, one for x86 and one for x64.  Either installation will work for both Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista because they have the same underlying system; that’s why W2008 is Windows Server 2008 Service Pack 1 already is you check it in WINVER.  It’s available on MSDN and TechNet now to will be available to the general public next week. 

This is not a RTM release (just a test) so don’t install it on production systems.

You can learn more about the changes here.  The big one is that the RTM release of Hyper-V is included.  I guess we’ll get Windows Vista with SP2 and Windows Server with SP2 media not long after RTM to simplify new builds if you are in a license scheme.  There’s also some better power management features.

There is a problem with the prerequisites for the Operations Manager IIS7 (for Windows Server 2008) management pack.  MS has removed it from the download site.

Please read their post to get more information.  There’s more here.  Basically, the KB957123 update may cause the SDK and Config service to become disabled.

Russ Slaten posted an interesting entry on the System Center blog on how to monitor the Operations Manager Root Management Server (RMS) using an agent.  It’s a good read.

Dell takes integration with Microsoft System Center very seriously.  Proof of that is their MVP’s on staff.  They’ve released the Dell Deployment Pack to assist with deploying your Dell systems with Configuration Manager 2007 SP1.  It’s a GUI tool so less confusing command line magic is required.  According to the site:

“Overview of Dell Deployment Pack Features

Using the ConfigMgr Task Sequence Editor, you can do the following with the Dell Deployment Pack:

• Configure your system's Baseboard Management Controller (BMC), Dell Remote Access Controller (DRAC), Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID), and BIOS. You can configure BIOS and RAID using .ini files. You can configure your system settings using the GUI or command-line interface (CLI) options. You can also configure RAID using the Array Builder wizard.
• Create a Dell-specific boot image that will be used in the OS deployment.
• Create and apply driver installation packages for specific Dell systems.

System Requirements

• Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager with Service Pack 1 or newer
• At least 1 GB of free disk space on the same drive that contains the ConfigMgr installation files
• A configured Network Access Account for ConfigMgr site(s).

Supported Hardware Systems

The Dell Deployment Pack 1.0 supports the following Dell PowerEdge™ systems:
PowerEdge 800, 830, 840, 850, 860, 1850, 1855, 2800, 2850, 6800, 6850, 1900, 1950, 1955, 2900, 2970, 6950, SC1435, 2950, T105, R200, R900, R805, M600, M605, T605, R300, T300, R805, PV0100, PV0500, PV0600, NX1950, M805, M905, and R905.

Supported Operating Systems

• Microsoft Windows Server® 2003, Small Business Server (SP2, R2)
• Microsoft Windows Server 2003 x86, x86_64 Edition SP2 and SP2 R2
• Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Standard and Enterprise Editions (x86) and (x86_64)
• Microsoft Windows® Small Business Server 2008 x64 (64 bit Edition)
• Microsoft Windows Essential Business Server 2008 x64 (64 bit Edition)”

I spend a lot of time talking to customers about complex IT infrastructure.  They’re usually developers so I’m talking black magic to them, just like .NET is to me.  So we’ve found the best way to explain something is to show it. 

VMM 2008 is one of those things.  So the good folks at MS have done a few webcasts to show it in action:

• Introduction to System Center Virtual Machine Manager: Edwin Yuen (VMM bigwig) using VMM to manage Hyper-V, Virtual Server and ESX.
• Building on Your Existing Virtual Environment (Level 300): How to manage Hyper-V using VMM.
• Consolidation and Rapid Provisioning (Level 300): Using self-service and doing a P2V conversion.

It’s officially been confirmed by the Windows Server team that a new edition will join the Windows Server family in the R2 release.  It will be referred to as “Foundation” and is described as an “entry-level server”.  Paul Thurrot reported on it a while ago.  The name does indeed imply that it will be targeted at emerging markets as is the plan for Windows 7.

NeoWin is reporting that IE8 has been RTM within Microsoft.  It’ll allegedly be released to the public on Feb on the web after a TechNet/MSDN release.  No signs of any dates being mentioned yet.  I suspect there’ll be a major ramp up to prepare for the bandwidth hit.  I also suspect there will be automatic installation blockers released for those who want to prevent IE8 from being downloaded by automatic updates.  This has been done in the past.

I’ve been using IE8 RC1 on Vista SP1 and on Windows 7 Beta 1.  I like that each tab is now a separate executable.  If a tab crashes then it automatically restarts.  It’s noticeable that a lot of sites aren’t IE compatible and you have to enable the “compatibility view” to make them render properly, e.g. GMail.

If you are downloading and running these Operations Manager 2007 management packs then it’s critical that you read the included documentation.  There’s not as much tweaking as in the MOM 2005 days.  But if you run Windows Server 2008 agents then you will have some patching to do, either before you deploy the agent or after you deploy it.  Some of these updates prevent memory leaks.  Some of them prevent false alerts.

If you have ConfigMgr then you can do this automatically.  Create collections that target the criteria, e.g. “All Windows Server 2008 servers with IIS7 and the OpsMgr Health Service” and target that collection with a package(s) containing the appropriate update.

I’ve read through the documentation for the clustering and IIS7 management packs that include W2008 support.  There’s a number of updates that I’ve had to download and will need to be deployed before/after agent installation.

There’s lots of announcements from VMware in the IT press.  Things like partnerships with Intel, etc.  I have a hard time thinking that VMware weren’t already working tightly with Intel for the last decade.

There’s been rumours of turmoil at the executive level for a while now.  I’ve no idea if that is true or not.  But there certainly are lots of announcement at the same time there’s lots of hype about Citrix and Microsoft’s next offerings.

What I do know is there is a lot of excitement in the VMware consumer base about where VMware is going next with HA and storage VMotion.  It looks very interesting and I’ll have to get to some demo at some point.

I’m at a MS BizSpark sponsored event on starting and growing a start-up business on behalf of work to mingle.  There’s a great attendance here, much better than any of the other BizSpark events I’ve been to.  The developer platform folks at MS Ireland who worked on it deserve a lot of credit.

There’s a huge buzz in the rooms between the sessions.  There’s a great belief that small Irish businesses will be what provide the spark for our ailing economy.  MS, to their credit, are doing a lot to help the tech dependant start-ups:

• Free MSDN
• Free PSS support
• Free production licenses
• Access to BizSpark hosting partners
• Networking events to meet other businesses and organisations/investors who can help

I’ll be here all day and am staying for the networking event in the evening.  I’m the short fat bald guy with black pants and blue shirt so come say hello if you are here.