I am running Windows 7 for a while now on my HP 2730p tablet and it is working great. I had some issues with the display driver in the beginning but an update to the driver that came with Windows Update fixed that.

One of the new features of Windows 7 is Federated Search. Federated Search supports the connection of external sources to Windows using the OpenSearch protocol. You can initiate the search from within Windows Explorer and view the results (including previews) in Windows Explorer as well. The screenshot below shows an example of a SharePoint site search (click to enlarge):

The only thing I had to do was to create an .OSDX file and double click it. The contents of the .OSDX file is below (for MOSS 2007):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<OpenSearchDescription xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/" xmlns:ms-ose="http://schemas.microsoft.com/opensearchext/2009/">
<ShortName>Xylos Intranet</ShortName>
<Description>Search the Xylos Intranet.</Description>
<Url type="application/rss+xml" template="https://<sharepoint fqdn>/searchcenter/_layouts/srchrss.aspx?k={searchTerms}&amp;start={startIndex}"/>
<Url type="text/html" template="https://<sharepoint fqdn>/searchcenter/Pages/Results.aspx?k={searchTerms}"/>
<ms-ose:ResultsProcessing format="application/rss+xml">
<ms-ose:LinkIsFilePath>-1</ms-ose:LinkIsFilePath>
</ms-ose:ResultsProcessing>
</OpenSearchDescription>

When you save the above as a file with the extension .osdx and double click it, a couple of things will happen:

1. You will be asked if you want to add this search connection to Windows.
2. When you answer yes to the question above, a Search Connector file is created in your profile’s Searches folder. The file will have an extension of .searchConnector-ms.
3. In addition to the Search Connector file, a link to the Search Connector will be made in Windows Explorer’s favorites. If you don’t see that link, just use Windows key-E and drag the .searchConnector-ms file to the Favorites section.

This really is a great feature of Windows 7 and it makes the search experience on our Intranet so much better.

As the name implies, this session presented an overview of all the new features of Windows Server 2008 R2 without going too much in the details.

Server Core

When compared to the full version of Windows Server 2008, Server Core has a 40% reduction in patches. Although the initial release of Server Core works well, the lack of .NET support was kind of an issue. In R2, a subset of .NET is supported. In addition, a subset of ASP.NET is supported as well. PowerShell 2.0 is also supported and a demo showed how to use the new PowerShell graphical editor to issue a remote PowerShell command to a Server Core box.

Virtualization

Again, Live Migration with Hyper-V 2.0 was discussed with the recommendation to trigger Live Migration with SCVMM 2008. They briefly mentioned CSVs (Clustered Shared Volumes) but I will follow another session to get a clearer picture of that technology. Hyper-V will support 32 logical CPUs and SLAT (Second Level Address Translation) that takes advantage of the support in newer CPUs for hardware memory management (Intel EPT, AMD RVI).

They then switched to Terminal Services that is now renamed to Remote Desktop Services although not much more was said. Note that R2 will have support for VDI where the TS Session Broker (now called RDS Session Broker) will be able to direct a user to a session on a desktop instead of a terminal server. You can find some more detailed information here.

Management

At last there will be a remotable Server Manager, although that really should have been a part of the first release. PowerShell 2.0 seems interesting because there will be cmdlets to explicitly manage Windows Server 2008 R2. This is the case for Failover Clustering for example, where the cluster.exe tool will be replaced by PowerShell cmdlets. In R2, cluster.exe will still be available though.

Active Directory

The new Active Directory Admin Center looks promising as does the new recycle bin feature. There is a new domain mode for R2 that will activate this recycle bin feature.

Better together with Windows 7

The two main features here are DirectAccess and BranchCache. DirectAccess provides a way for Windows 7 clients to seamlessly access the corporate network using either SSTP or IPSec.

I already discussed BranchCache here and you can find other information on Kurt Roggen’s blog as well.

Some extra features worth mentioning are enhanced GPOs (more settings) and BitLocker on removable drives.

IIS 7

IIS 7 will have support for ASP.NET on Server Core. From the management point of view, there will be PowerShell cmdlets that run on Server Core as well. As expected, FTP 7 will be included in R2. Now, this is a separate download.

Conclusion

The session provided a basic overview of many of the new features the most notable ones being Hyper-V 2.0 with clustered shared volumes (CSV) and Live Migration!

This was an interesting session that started with the different models that customers are following when it comes to branch offices:

1. Centralized
2. Distributed

With the centralized model, one of the biggest issues is performance across the WAN with high latency and typically still a high price. When customers follow the distributed model, they usually place infrastructure roles (print, DNS, DHCP, domain controllers) and LOB apps in the branch.

Microsoft has a commitment to improve the branch office deployment scenarios and does this on three levels:

1. Improve the protocols
2. Provide different features for servers in a branch (e.g. RODC)
3. WAN optimization

The protocols were already improved in Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 with the new TCP/IP stack and features such as the auto-tuned TCP Receive Window Size. They actually made the protocols aware of the underlying network conditions to adjust the behavior accordingly.

On the application level (and here that means SMB or CIFS) we have SMB 2.0 for a while now. SMB v2.0 performs less roundtrips, puts multiple commands in a single packet and makes parallel requests to improve performance.

Functionality on top of the application level will be improved in Windows 7 with a new mode for Offline Files called “Usually Offline”. In this mode, your offline files are transparently synchronized in the background at fixed intervals. These intervals can be configured by the administrator.

The most interesting feature that was discussed was actually BranchCache. BranchCache is a Windows 7 / Windows Server 2008 R2 feature that caches files that are retrieved over the WAN for speedier retrieval afterwards. BranchCache has two modes:

1. Distributed
2. Hosted Cache

In the distributed mode, clients running Windows 7 work together. When a client gets a file from the main office across the WAN, the client stores this file on its file system and a unique ID is returned. When a second client tries to get the file from the main office, that client gets the unique ID from the server and multicasts that ID on the local subnet to check if other clients have that same file in their cache. If they have, they retrieve the file from a local client.

Note that for this to work, the clients need to be in the same subnet. The clients still have to go across the WAN to issue a request in order to retrieve the unique file ID from the remote server and to make sure that the user retrieving the file is authorized.

With the hosted cache mode, you actually have a server in the branch office that caches the content instead of have the cache distributed among clients in the branch.

Note that BranchCache works with file server and HTTP/HTTPS content.

The session went on with a couple of other new features in Windows Server 2008 R2:

• ReadOnly DFS replicas: to prevent accidental deletes of files and complete directories at a branch
• Server Core: .NET support for Server Core to run applications and things like SCCM distribution points.

To end, they discussed WAN Optimization Controllers from Citrix and Cisco that run Windows Server and also provide things such as DNS, DHCP, RODC, print, etc… This actually makes a hybrid scenario possible where LOB apps are centralized but access is accelerated using these controllers. At the same time, the controllers provide infrastructure services that are still useful in the branch.

It was an interesting session that provided useful information, especially about the new BranchCache feature.

The keynote was presented by Brad Anderson and immediately started with the IT priorities of this day and age such as cloud computing, green IT, business intelligence and compliance. The key point here was that businesses need to drive down costs and expand business capabilities at the same time and that this is something you can do with Microsoft’s solutions. Everything can be turned into an advantage and it is not the first time I hear that you can take advantage of an economic downturn like this.

Then Brad talked about Dynamic IT that makes IT less of a cost center and more of an asset to the business. Microsoft focuses on four areas to make that happen:

1. Unified and virtualized approach
2. Model driven
3. Service enabled (cloud or not)
4. Focused on the user

These things are not new and were also discussed during last year’s keynote.

The focus then shifted to virtualization that you have to see as a strategy and not as a bunch of products. They demoed Hyper-V 2.0 that is a part of Windows Server 2008 R2. Of course, the demo showed the Live Migration feature but also focused on the importance of managing both your physical and virtual infrastructure with SCOM 2007. And of course, SCOM 2007 integrates nicely with System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM 2008) with the PRO tips. Essentially, SCOM delivers these tips to SCVMM where they can be implemented by the administrator or where they can be automatically implemented. This is especially useful when combined with Live Migration to optimize running workloads during business hours based on application knowledge from SCOM.

Microsoft of course uses virtualization from the datacenter to the desktop and with tools such as the acquired technology from Kidaro (now called MED-V) this becomes more and more clear. Brad also talked about the fast adoption of MDOP (Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack) that includes App-V.

Then the presentation went on about datacenters and the fact that Microsoft are building several new and large datacenters with a big focus on green IT. Microsoft needs those datacenters to provide cloud-based services such as those announced last week (Azure) but also offerings such as Exchange Online and SharePoint Online. Brad stressed that they are actually learning from these implementations to improve their management products and that they are moving closer and closer to the Dynamic Datacenter where technologies such as hardware virtualization and software virtualization are combined. In fact, they are working to extend App-V features to server applications to make it possible to assemble a solution by combining operating system images with application images.

Then the focus shifted to Operations Manager 2007 R2 where they will extend management capabilities to Linux and Solaris. They actually make use of things such as OpenPegasus and OpenWSManagement to make this work. A new feature called ProblemPath was demonstrated. ProblemPath actually highlights the path to a problem in Diagram View to clearly show where the problem is situated. The beta of R2 will be available shortly.

The next section dealt with Windows Server 2008 R2 where they focused on the four main areas of improvements:

1. Virtualization: Hyper-V 2.0 with Live Migration, improved Terminal Services and VDI
2. Management: PowerShell 2.0 and a bunch of cmdlets to manage Windows
3. Windows 7 and R2 better together:: DirectAccess, BitLocker To Go and BranchCache
4. Web improvements

They they actually demoed BranchCache where you can actually configure a file server to cache content from a location over the WAN to improve access times. It’s good too see technology like that making its way to Windows as an out of the box solution.

Next, they talked about the next version of SQL 2008 called Kilimanjaro. Interesting in that release are the self-service BI features. They will make it easier for end-users to perform analysis, create reports and share their work with their co-workers. The demo was actually quite interesting and it is something I need to take a better look at in the coming months.

Of course, no keynote these days can be complete without saying something about cloud computing and this one was no different. Microsoft wants to offer choice to the customer when it comes to using their products. A customer can run the products on-premise, partner hosted or Microsoft hosted. In any case, users use the tools they know to work with these services. They then demonstrated Exchange Online by synchronizing Active Directory with the online service, enabling users for an online mailbox and migrating the mailbox from the customer’s server to the Microsoft servers. I already talked about this in a previous post and it is pretty easy to set these things up. Note however that passwords are not synchronized and that for now, there is no free/busy synchronization available.

To summarize it was a decent keynote that mainly put extra emphasis on things we knew already. Microsoft is clearly going forward in the virtualization and management space with a set of products that integrate well and are able to manage the physical and virtual world with the same toolset.

The System Center User Group Belgium organizes their second event on Tuesday Oct 14th. Karandeep Anand, a Senior Program Manager on Data Protection Manager will be the speaker.

The event is held at Microsoft. For full details and registration, head over to the SCUG Events page.

From Jorge's Quest For Knowledge I learned that there is a compatibility pack for Windows Server 2003 and XP clients that are deployed in conjunction with Read-Only Domain Controllers (RODCs). Because an RODC is read-only, several functions might not work as expected and those are described in KB article 944043.

CoreConfigurator is a great tool to easily configure Windows Server Core using a simple GUI. The CoreConfigurator tool has now been updated with a couple of new functions:

• Windows Update configuration
• Windows Server Backup performance setting: full or incremental backups

Download the new version here.

After redirecting the Favorites folder on Vista to a different location I could not save a link in my favorites. It turns out you have to run the following command:

icacls "path_to_new_favorites_folder" /setintegritylevel (OI)(CI)low

This has something to do with IE in protected mode and the integrity levels that were introduced in Vista.

I also found out that I could not print a web page. To solve that I had to create a directory called low under my temp folder and also set the integritylevel with the icacls command.

Check out PowerTerm WebConnect for WS08 if you want some extra features for Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services for free:

• Ability to publish multiple applications from multiple terminal servers in one step.
• Ability to publish applications to specific users and groups.
• A web interface with single sign-on that only shows your published applications (and not all of them like in Windows Server 2008)

Note that WebConnect is not completely free. When you download the installation package you actually install the full version. After 30 days, only the free features remain with some limitations. More information about these limitations can be found here.

• Microsoft released the Microsoft Remote Server Administration Tools for Windows Vista with SP1. Download the correct version for your operating system: x86 | x64
• They also released an update to enable remote management of Hyper-V RC0: x86 | x64
• If you did not take a look at Hyper-V yet, now is a good time. The release candidate works a lot better than the beta. I installed it on a quad core box with 8GB of RAM and it is quite fast. And with support for Vista SP1 and Windows XP SP3 it is much more useful especially as a test environment.
• You don't like to configure Windows Server 2008 Server Core using the command line? Then this is something for you: CoreConfigurator.
• If you want to setup your own ESX 3.5 (or 3i) server, take a look at the ASUS P5BV-SAS motherboard. It comes with an LSI Logic 1068 RAID controller, built-in VGA and supported network cards (2x 1Gb). I plugged in a quad core Intel CPU, 8GB of RAM and 4 500GB SATA disks. ESX installs perfectly on this box and the performance is quite good!

Check out the following blog: The things that are better left unspoken. Lots of good Server Core info about IP configuration, page files, remote desktop and more.

Go check it out already!

If you are testing Windows Server 2008 in a virtual environment you probably get tired of answering setup prompts after each new template gets deployed. Although you can use sysprep as with Windows Server 2003, the answer file for sysprep has changed quite a bit.

The answer file is now an XML file instead of an INF file. In the past, you could generate the answer file with setupmgr.exe but that cannot be done with Windows Server 2008. Instead, you will need to use Windows System Image Manager to create the XML file. Windows System Image Manager is part of WAIK and can be downloaded here. Although much more powerful, Windows System Image Manager is not as easy to use as setupmgr.exe.

The XML file I generated with Windows System Image Manager is very basic but enough to do the job of automating sysprep. Here it is for x86 and nl-be regional settings:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<unattend xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:unattend">
    <settings pass="specialize">
        <component name="Microsoft-Windows-Shell-Setup" processorArchitecture="x86" publicKeyToken="31bf3856ad364e35" language="neutral" versionScope="nonSxS" xmlns:wcm="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WMIConfig/2002/State" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
            <ComputerName>*</ComputerName>
            <ProductKey>AAAAA-BBBBB-CCCCC-DDDDD-EEEEE</ProductKey>
            <RegisteredOrganization>Org</RegisteredOrganization>
            <RegisteredOwner>Org</RegisteredOwner>
            <ShowWindowsLive>false</ShowWindowsLive>
        </component>
        <component name="Microsoft-Windows-Security-Licensing-SLC-UX" processorArchitecture="x86" publicKeyToken="31bf3856ad364e35" language="neutral" versionScope="nonSxS" xmlns:wcm="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WMIConfig/2002/State" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
            <SkipAutoActivation>true</SkipAutoActivation>
        </component>
    </settings>
    <settings pass="oobeSystem">
        <component name="Microsoft-Windows-International-Core" processorArchitecture="x86" publicKeyToken="31bf3856ad364e35" language="neutral" versionScope="nonSxS" xmlns:wcm="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WMIConfig/2002/State" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
            <InputLocale>nl-be</InputLocale>
            <SystemLocale>nl-be</SystemLocale>
            <UILanguage>en-us</UILanguage>
            <UserLocale>nl-be</UserLocale>
        </component>
        <component name="Microsoft-Windows-Shell-Setup" processorArchitecture="x86" publicKeyToken="31bf3856ad364e35" language="neutral" versionScope="nonSxS" xmlns:wcm="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WMIConfig/2002/State" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
            <OOBE>
                <HideEULAPage>true</HideEULAPage>
                <NetworkLocation>Work</NetworkLocation>
                <ProtectYourPC>1</ProtectYourPC>
                <SkipUserOOBE>true</SkipUserOOBE>
            </OOBE>
            <RegisteredOrganization>Org</RegisteredOrganization>
            <RegisteredOwner>Org</RegisteredOwner>
        </component>
    </settings>
</unattend>

To actually use this XML file, you copy it to your template. I copied mine as sysprep.xml to c:\windows\system32\sysprep. That is the folder on a Windows Server 2008 system where sysprep.exe is located by default. From that location, you execute the following command:

sysprep /generalize /oobe /shutdown /unattend:sysprep.xml

The system will shut down. The next time you start this system (or better a copy of it), it will ask you nothing and install with the settings in the XML file. The computername will be automatically generated.

Update: if you want to use this unattend file on an x64 system, replace x86 with amd64.

Windows Integrity Levels (or WIC) is a system that can label an object with an integrity level. There are six such levels:

1. Trusted Installer
2. System
3. High
4. Medium
5. Low
6. Untrusted

WIC is available on Vista and Windows Server 2008.

Mark Minasi has an interesting article about it and a tool that allows you to work with these levels. The tool, chml, has more options than the built-in icacls.exe command. Check out the article here.

Microsoft have released XP SP3 Release Candidate (RC) and Windows Server 2008 RC1. You can download both from MSDN and Technet.

Windows XP SP3 contains mainly bugfixes and a lot of previously released enhancements for XP like MMC 3.0, MSXML 6, BITS 2.5 and WPA2. There are some new features as well:

• Network Access Protection (NAP): also available in Vista and enforced using Windows Server 2008 infrastructure such as DHCP and NAP.
• Windows Product Activation: it is not necessary to provide a product key during installation of a full, integrated installation of Windows XP SP3.

More information can be found here.

A feature that is not available is SSTP or Secure Socket Tunneling Protocol. Next to PPTP and LT2P/IPSec it is a VPN protocol but all traffic is tunneled through an SSL connection over port 443. Windows Server 2008 RRAS provides the server-side of SSTP tunneling and Vista SP1 contains the SSTP client portion. But XP SP3 does not seem to contain this feature yet.

Windows Server 2008 RC1 has one big new feature called Group Policy Preferences. Kurt Roggen has already blogged about it here and his blogpost clearly shows what the feature can do. Other info can be found on the Windows Server Division Weblog.

I am at IT Forum Barcelona this week where today's sessions have just finished. It started with the keynote by Bob Kelly where a couple of things were announced and talked about. Of course, virtualization is still a big thing and an announcement was made that Windows Server Virtualization will be called Hyper-V. The role will be named like that but it will also be a separate product "Hyper-V Server". Not many details right now though.

Microsoft is really trying to focus on different levels of virtualization and they are repeating it in all sessions about it. The focus is on 4 levels of virtualization:

• Server Virtualization (Virtual Server and Hyper-V)
• Application Virtualization (SoftGrid or now to be called Microsoft Application Virtualization with the 4.5 beta)
• Presentation Virtualization (TS, TS RemoteApp, TS Gateway)
• Desktop Virtualization (Virtual PC; to solve app-to-os issues)

But the big thing according to Microsoft is of course managing the virtualized environment with their System Center products. During the keynote, but also during another session (Virtualization 360), System Center Virtual Machine Manager was demoed. They already have a build where the Hyper-V name is used and they also had a couple of ESX 3i servers in the Hosts pane. According to Microsoft, somewhere next year, you will be able to manage your VMware servers as you do with VirtualCenter, including live migrations and so on.

Microsoft needs to focus on the bigger picture because they are still behind when it comes to server virtualization. We have Windows Server Virtualization running in our labs and it really is not that great yet. So focussing on management issues and other virtualization technologies is what keeps them going for now.

Some other things that were shown during the keynote were SQL Sever 2008 and SCCM (System Center Configuration Manager 2007). A new November CTP of SQL 2008 will be available with almost all features. Some of the nicer features are the resource governor, policy-based management (can be tied into SCOM 2007) and a revamped report designer tool.

The SSCM demo mainly focussed on server deployment with add-on tools from Dell to change things like BIOS settings with just a few clicks.

The last part of the keynote showed another great enterprise technology, Windows Home Server ;-). It looks ok but really targetted to the average consumer that wants a home server with some backup capabilities.