After our beloved (smell the sarcasm there?) leading government party decided to increases taxes last year the likes of Biffo and Brainless Lenihan called on us to be patriotic and not shop in Northern Ireland where we weren’t being ripped off.  So people like me who saved 30% on my recent camera bag purchase or those saving 50% on their food shopping are “Un-Irish” and hate our country eh?

The Irish times reported that Fianna Fáil’s new website is hosted in the USA.  What??? The party in government that’s telling us to buy in Ireland is spending a reported €12,000 a year outside of Europe while there are a number of perfectly capable 100% native hosting companies in Ireland.  Wouldn’t that be unpatriotic considering the above call by Brainless?  Is Biffo talking out of his backside?

Anyone who continues to excuse these people deserves everything they get.  I just wish they’d take the Greens (I’ve no time for a taxation party with no real solutions to offer) and Fianna Fail with them off to some God-forsaken island off the west coast and stay there while the rest of us try to bail ourselves out of the mess that Bertie and Biffo put us in.

Biffo and Brainless could look to Microsoft Ireland down in Sandyford for inspiration.  They’re actually doing a lot to help native Irish business get off the ground and running.  It sure beats saying one thing, doing another and looking after your buddies in the corrupt banking system.

Google has launched a new program called Google Ventures to invest funds in start-ups “including consumer Internet, software, hardware, clean-tech, bio-tech, health care and others”.  They say they are interested in “entrepreneurs who are tackling problems in creative and innovative ways. As a venture fund, however, we're also looking for investments with the potential for significant financial return”.

It looks like this is an investment fund rather than an assistance program like Microsoft’s BizSpark.  There is room for both and I can see people trying to avail of both.  I hope both parties play nice with each other because they have a lot to offer.  I’ve seen first hand how BizSpark is helping people get businesses of the ground.  I’ve also seen how BizCamp programs are educating people.  New innovations tend to come from small companies.  Ireland in particular is relying on the emergence of some of these startups to reinvigorate our economy and bring about lasting employment.  Hopefully these programs will continue to help.

Citrix XenServer, their machine virtualisation platform, is free to download from 250 websites in 50 countries according to Citrix.  I tried some of those 250 websites and didn’t see a single download link.  You can still buy it on the Citrix site.

I did find this free XenServer download application page after a quick Google.  Strange that I didn’t see any links to this on the Citrix site.

Brian Madden (virtualisation commentator) has posted a blog entry where he discusses Microsoft’s position on client hypervisors.

I have to say, I would have liked a Windows 7 Hyper-V because I could ditch VMware Workstation.  Workstation dominates the client market and rightly so.  Virtual PC cannot come close in terms of functionality.  My only problem with Workstation is that it can screw up the complicated Windows Vista/7 networking setup from time to time – the restoration point feature comes in handy.

I’m wondering if Microsoft even cares about virtualisation on the client.  Their strategy for rapid provisioning of a “canned” client is Native VHD.  Windows 7 has a tiny hidden boot partition and the usual C: drive.  The default installation is that the OS goes into C: as usual.  With Native VHD, you can leave the C: drive empty and deploy a VHD (virtual hard disk – the same type used with Hyper-V) manually or using WDS.  You can then configure the boot partition to surface (mount) the VHD and boot from it.  It’s virtualisation in a way but you’re limited to booting up into that one VM, one at a time.

I’d love to see a version of Hyper-V for the client that would allow us to boot up a limited installation, e.g. 8GB RAM of VM’s or 6 VM’s or whatever.  Or maybe alter Virtual PC to make it compete with VMware Workstation which it trails by a long way right now.

The VMM team has posted 2 articles for VMM 2008:

KB969164: “On a computer that is running System Center Virtual Machine Manger 2008, a Virtual Server or Hyper-V host may have a status of "Not Responding" or "Needs Attention."

When you view the jobs tab, the refresh host job has failed with the following error message:
Error (2927)
A Hardware Management error has occurred trying to contact server servername.domainname.com.
(Unknown error (0x80338104))”.

KB969269: “The admin console crashes multiple times per day or perhaps the customer is unable to open the admin console. Sometimes the error displayed is 1612 (lost connectivity) or 1700 (during a refresh). These are only symptoms and not the underlying problem.

In the VMManager.evtx the following events are logged each time the crash occurs:

• Error   Virtual Machine Manager 19999 None
• Error   Virtual Machine Manager 1 None”

I recently talked about a recent batch of patching I did on a Virtual Machine Manager controlled Hyper-V cluster.  When I patched and rebooted a host, all of the VM’s on the cluster became unmanageable via the VMM 2008 console with a status of “Unsupported Cluster Configuration”.  I logged a call to Microsoft through IT Pro Momentum (thanks Dave!).  Initially I was told the issue would be resolved in R2 but I suggested that wouldn’t help anyone who has no budget to go to R2 and that it is a rather painful issue.  I’ve been told that a patch is in the works .. in fact I have access to a test version of the patch.  I have no cluster I can test it on but I’m told a RTM version of the update will be released in the coming weeks, possibly in around 3-4 weeks if there are no issues.

That’s the IT Pro Momentum program in action.  Thanks to Dave for enrolling me and thanks to Michelle, the engineer I’ve been working with, for listening and doing a bit of digging internally.  It’s these sorts of programs and actions that make my experience working with Microsoft much more enjoyable.

I’ve done a little speaking about this subject over the last while and after listening to a recent radio conversation I thought I’d post something too.  The story was about a revolutionary online gaming system, the idea being that instead of buying a DVD with the game, you’d play it online and it would stream to your PC or console.  One of the expert commentators finally made the point I was waiting to hear.  The service provider has their servers in the USA.  This means that the games players in North America would be close to the servers.  Until there was a European presence, games players here should probably steer clear because the interaction would be slow. 

Why not just get a “faster” Internet connection?  That’s our usual answer to these problems.  Think about a business that has a head office with a SharePoint server and a branch office where users use that server over the WAN.  When enough users call into the helpdesk to complain about slow downloads, what do we do?  We usually go out and buy a bigger WAN link.  That is the wrong thing to do without considering what’s really going on.

Definitions

There’s two things to measure when it comes to a network link.

• Bandwidth: This is how much data we can transfer at once, i.e. in one packet, from the source to the destination.  We measure this in KBPS, MBPS or even GBPS if you have lots of money.
• Latency: This is how long a packet takes to travel from the source to the destination.  This is limited by the laws of physics.  An electron can only travel at 1 speed on a copper wire.  Increasing bandwidth has no affect on this.  A photon on a fibre link can only travel at the speed of light.  Even if we could increase this speed, Einstein tells us that this would negatively affect the latency!  Finally, devices that process the data at various hops, e.g. routers, switches and firewalls, also add to latency.  So, the further apart a client and server are, the longer a transmission takes.  Adding in more network devices, e.g. transmissions between different ISP’s, worsens this.

There is a conversation between the server and the client when any data or a file is transferred over the network.  The file is broken up into packets.  Headers and control flags wrap each of those packets up to increase the amount of data.  Then a conversation takes place.  At a very high level, here’s how it goes:

• Server: Here’s packet 1
• Client: Acknowledged
• Server: Here’s packet 2
• Client: Acknowledged
• Server: Here’s packet 3
• Client: Not Acknowledged
• Server: Here’s packet 3 again
• Client: Acknowledged
• Server: Here’s packet 4
• Client: Acknowledged
• Server: Here’s packet 5
• Client: Acknowledged
• Server: Here’s packet 6
• Client: Acknowledged

And so it goes until all of the packets that make up the entire file are transmitted.  Bandwidth affects the time for transmission by reducing how much data we can put into a packet.  Note that the TCP stack in the operating system can also limit this.  Bandwidth also causes problems when we try to put too many simultaneous conversations onto a pipe.  We can monitor bandwidth by measuring link utilisation.

Latency is best explained as follows.  If it takes 1 millisecond to transmit a packet between the client and server then the above file copy would take 14 milliseconds.  If we move the client to a remove location then latency goes up, perhaps to 100 milliseconds.  Now the file copy takes 100 times longer: 1400 milliseconds.  Realistically, a file transfer requires exponentially more packets.  An intercontinental latency measurement (use PING) might be 300 milliseconds or more!

Let’s go back to the above examples and see how latency and bandwidth affected them:

• The European Online games player: Games playing requires timely interaction with the game.  The slower the game player’s responses, the worse they play.  If a European players responses are 30 times longer than those of an American, how can they have the same gaming experience?  The European is hit by bandwidth.
• By throwing bandwidth at the SharePoint server, we allow many more users in the branch office to have the same slow experience.  Latency causes the packets that make up the file transmission to be slow.

Basic Networking Solutions

Networking wise, there’s a few solutions we can look at:

• Place the servers closer to the clients.  For a “cloud computing” service provider, that’s possible by having the service closer to the consumers.  For a corporate, that might mean having servers in the branch office, something we want to steer clear of doing if at all possible to reduce costs and complexity.
• Reduce the hops between the servers and clients: For a company, this means strategically subscribing to ISP services.  For an online service provider you can only do this so much, e.g. use a major service provider.  But there’s always going to be clients who many hops away.

We still have issues here.  So we want to get more data on the pipe and once and send fewer packets so that latency plays less of a role.

Advanced Networking Solutions

Both Riverbed (Steelhead) and Citrix (WanScaler) have appliances that can be placed in both the head office and the branch office.  A PC in the branch office will look to copy a file from the HQ server.  All the usual file locking and security stuff takes place (as it will throughout this process).  The server breaks the file up into packets and starts the transfer.  The appliance in the HQ sits silently between the server and the WAN connection.  It listens to the stream and uses a hashing algorithm to break down the data transmission into blocks which are stored on the appliance according to a set of predefined rules. 

The data travels over the WAN to the branch office.  The branch office appliance also listens to the new data and does and identical breakdown and hashing algorithm ID of the blocks before caching them.  The data stream continues to the client.  At this point, no speed increase has taken place.

The process will go as follows if this client or any other in the same branch office goes to transfer this file again.  The second client does the usual file lock and security stuff.  The server believes it is talking to the client.  Instead it talks to the HQ appliance.  The appliance breaks down the blocks and ID’s them using the hashing algorithm.  Any previously cached packets don’t need to be transmitted.  Instead, the HQ appliance works with the branch office appliance.  The branch office appliance receives the block’s hash ID and then sends that packet to the client over the LAN. 

The effect?  Previously transmitted blocks are not sent over the WAN.  This reduces bandwidth utilisation.  By removing the need to send data at all, we remove latency from the equation.  Other than some security and file locking procedures, a file transfer can be local only at the branch office, i.e. between the appliance and the client.

Because the system works by using blocks the optimisation can even work for files that haven’t even been requested over the WAN before, as long as they are made up of blocks similar to previously transmitted files.

The process I’ve talked about here has been simplified.

The appliances work at a TCP level.  This means that WAN optimisation can improve way more than just file copies, e.g. Exchange, Oracle, SQL, Lotus Notes, etc.  The basic requirements are that the data is not signed and not encrypted.  You also need to turn off SMB data signing in Group Policy.  That’s because the appliances are in-a-way performing a man-in-the-middle attack.

These appliances are very expensive so they are not widespread.  I’ve done some work with low spec devices from Riverbed back in 2006 and they really did work very well.

The Next Generation TCP Stack

Microsoft included a new TCP stack in Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008.  It is also in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.  The Next Generation TCP Stack isn’t the complete WAN solution but it does improve things.

Compound TCP aims to reduce the effect of latency.  The server in the previous example of the file transfer will send many packets before waiting for an acknowledgement:

• Server: Here’s packet 1
• Server: Here’s packet 2
• Server: Here’s packet 3
• Server: Here’s packet 4
• Server: Here’s packet 5
• Server: Here’s packet 6
• Client: Give me packet 3 again
• Server: Here’s packet 3
• Client: Acknowledged

As I said before, this is a tiny example of what is going on under the covers.  If our latency was 100 milliseconds before then the first example took 1400 milliseconds.  With compound TCP, the copy will take 900 milliseconds.

Vista and Windows Server 2008 also gave us an Auto-Scaling Receive Side Window.  The client and server work together to calculate how much bandwidth there is, i.e. how big a packet can be or how much data can be placed in the pipe at one time.  In legacy operating systems such as XP and Windows Server 2003, this is a static definition for both LAN and WAN transfers and usually shouldn’t be manually altered.  With this auto scaling receive side window, our file copy will increase the size of the data portion of the packets and may look like this:

Microsoft has posted a guide for securing Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V.  There’s 3 chapters:

• Hardening the W2008 parent partition
• Delegating administrative rights using System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) 2008 or Authorization Manager (AzMan)
• Securing the virtual machines or child partitions

Dave Northey has posted a video where he builds a Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V failover cluster with Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV), deploys a virtual machine and uses Live Migration to move the VM from one host to another.  What makes this different is the whole thing is set to music!

This is the demo Dave was doing at the TechDays events around Ireland.

Dell launched their new 11g server range in London.  There’s a video on the linked page.  There’s more detail here.

I wonder how many people in Ireland, especially in the southwest, will buying Dell from now on? ;-)

Edwin Yuen (MS Senior Program Manager for Integrated Virtualisation) is hosting a chat aimed at virtualising Exchange.  It will be on tomorrow at 11:00-15:00 PST.

Microsoft released a news update on Conficker.D.  This is a new variant and appears to only be able to target machines that were vulnerable to older variants.  If you have MS08-067 on your systems along with up to date and functional AV then you’re protected.

Microsoft has released a document that gives the reader an executive overview of the new networking functionality that is included in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.

They also released a document on the enterprise networking technologies.

Mental note to self: must read these thoroughly.

I’ve just shared the latest document I’ve written on Hyper-V.  This one is aimed at helping you with architecting your machine virtualisation infrastructure.  I cover the hardware sizing, choosing the right licensing, networking, using VLAN’s with Hyper-V and various other subjects.  There’s a huge number of variations on how you can put this together so I’ve done my best to get you going.  I’ve added a few practical examples at the end to illustrate how I’m using the content of the document.  Give it a read and let me know how you get along with it.

I’ve just booked my hotel for Minasi Forum 2009.  It’s being hosted by Mark Minasi in Virginia Beach from April 19-22.  Mark will, of course, be talking about what’s coming in the Windows World.  Often in the past, he has debuted his presentations at this conference for the new “season”, e.g. TechEd North America.  There’s lots of other notable names and MVP’s speaking about a range of topics that are relevant to those of us that work in Microsoft-based IT infrastructure.  I’ll also be talking about Hyper-V:

• The architecture and what we can do now
• What’s coming in R2
• What the long term strategy appears to be

I’m looking forward to it.  It’ll be great to meet up with some friends from all over the place again, not to mention spending a few days in the warmth and maybe getting out with the camera gear for a while.  I bought a new Computrekker AW bag while I was up in Belfast (saved about 33% over buying it in the Republic) so I can bring the essential camera gear and my laptop.

Attached is the presentation that I did with Dave Northey from Microsoft Ireland at the recent "TechDays for IT Pro's" events around Ireland.  I was presenting from the slide deck and Dave was bravely doing demonstrations of BranchCache using pre-beta builds of Windows and Hyper-V "R2".  Dave got really brave in Dublin/Belfast and even built the Hyper-V cluster from scratch live in front of the crowd on his portable lab of 3 laptops.

I opened the presentation by stating that there was no way we could mention every new feature or even get into detail on all of the highlight features.  So the aim of the presentation was to list the "better together" features that would add value to a business that will deploy Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.  We then went into some detail on and did demos of BranchCache and Hyper-V "R2".  The Windows User Group (Ireland) will be following this up on April 30th with a deep dive session on Hyper-V.

This presentation originally had animations but they are stripped out by SlideShare.  The TechNet Ireland crew will likely be sharing the originals pretty soon.

This is a hotfix to resolve an issue you can experience when using Performance Monitor on a Windows 2003 server to monitor a Windows 2008 server with the Hyper-V role enabled.  Counters may be missing or displaying incorrect information.  You will apply this patch to the W22008 Hyper-V server.

Rhonda Layfield for NCPA.CPL.  Don’t you just hate how long it takes to get to the window where you can adjust your NIC properties in Windows Vista or Windows 7?  It’s these little things that potentially turns IT pro’s against a product.  Rhonda has a great shortcut: just run NCPA.CPL from “Start – Run” and you’re brought right there.  Even create a shortcut if you need to get in there often enough.

Microsoft has released a new management pack for OpsMgr 2007 monitoring of Office Communications Server 2007 R2.  Here’s what they have to say about it:

“The Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Management Pack monitors Standard and Enterprise Edition of Office Communications Server 2007 R2. This release also incorporates the Quality of Experience (QoE) MP which was previously a separate Management Pack. Monitored types are event log entries, performance counters, as well as stateful monitoring of QoE. Note that this version of the Management Pack only monitors Office Communications Server 2007 R2, and cannot be used to monitor Office Communications Server 2007”

Microsoft has released a bunch of tools or utilities for integrating with or migrating to their online services, e.g. BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite):

• Sign-In: A client application to allow a user to access the services such as SharePoint, LiveMeeting or Online Mail.  it can also configure your Outlook (if it’s the same as the trial edition I’ve used).
• Migration Tools for Exchange (x86 and x64): Migrate users to the hosted Exchange service.
• Active Directory Integration: Integrate your corporate AD with the hosted service for a branch office!