baeke.info

Windows 7: Integrating SharePoint Search

rastix — Fri, 22 May 2009 16:09:48 +0200

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}&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:

You will be asked if you want to add this search connection to Windows.
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.
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.

Microsoft BPOS: Using Outlook 2003 with Exchange Online Standard

rastix — Fri, 22 May 2009 15:37:30 +0200

During delivery of BPOS courses to Microsoft partners, I often get questions about supported e-mail clients. Sadly, I always had to say that only Outlook 2007 was supported and that Outlook 2003 was not. That will change however. From June, Microsoft will support Outlook 2003. This was announced on the Microsoft Online Services Team Blog: http://blogs.technet.com/msonline/archive/2009/05/22/exchange-online-adds-support-for-outlook-2003.aspx.

There are some caveats though:

No free/busy lookup
No offline address book

The reason for the above limitations is clear. Microsoft uses Exchange Server 2007 SP1 for the service without support for older clients like Outlook 2003. Those older clients use public folders for free/busy lookup and offline address books. Public folders are not available at all in Exchange Online Standard.

VMworld Europe 2009: Day 2 from the outside

rastix — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 23:04:48 +0100

Early this morning, I got an e-mail from John Troyer that I became a VMware vExpert. If you don’t know what that is, check the vExpert page on vmware.com. A big thanks to VMware and John and others to make this happen and congratulations to all the other vExperts out there.

It was difficult to follow real-time what was going on today as I was busy writing an offer for a virtualization and consolidation project with, you guessed it, VMware VI3.

The keynote promised to be interesting although it was expected to be not all too different from the keynote at VMworld Las Vegas 2008. Lots of people reported about the keynote and here’s just a few of them:

From virtualization.info: Live from VMworld Europe 2009: Day 2
From vinf.net: VMworld Europe Day 2; Keynote

I bet there are many more but by reading the two above you’ll get a good overview of the keynote in just a few minutes. Highlights from the keynote for me were the following:

By starting with the increased capabilities of the virtual hardware (256GB of RAM and eight vCPUs) and then switching to databases performance results that show how well things scale, Steve again hinted at the platform being ready to host almost any workload (as did Paul Maritz yesterday). The Exchange Server scaling example also showed that by breaking up the workload in multiple virtual machines, you can really host a lot of mailboxes on a single server. Of course, this increases the customer’s licensing cost but it shows how well the platform scales.
vStorage Thin Provisioning where VMware has a software implementation that you can leverage on any storage platform. They also provide APIs for storage vendors to use array-based thin provisioning. This article by Gabrie Van Zanten has some more details about thin provisioning. Good to hear that I can migrate to thin-provisioned disks by performing a migration. We will use this feature in our labs for sure!
Steve talked about the “Giant Computer”. Basically we’re going back to the mainframe in a way by combining all compute resources into one big pool of CPU, storage, network and memory resources with DRS, DPM and other components to optimize and tame this beast. Also see this article about the ‘software mainframe’.
The VMware PC-over-IP demo by Jerry Chen was interesting but maybe for the wrong reasons. Some two years ago (maybe a bit less) we evaluated a series of options for a customer of ours to implement a solution based on pc blades in the datacenter with thin clients at the user’s desk. Back then, Teradici was included in the study and that was what VMware actually demoed today. Brian Madden had an interesting commentary about it on his site. Indeed, what VMware showed today is possible for a while already and requires physical hardware from Teradici and Jerry clearly stated that. They had a physical desktop behind the scenes and Jerry accessed that with a thin client. Not exactly VDI but brokering the connection to such a physical desktop is what VMware View (and Citrix XenDesktop and Quest vWorkspace and HP SAM with RGS) can do.
Focus on vCenter on three levels:

Availability: vCenter Server Heartbeat to protect vCenter Server with failover to a standby vCenter Server if needed. Can’t wait to evaluate that!
Scalability: vCenter Server Linked Mode to link up to 10 vCenter Servers together and search for virtual machines across the whole infrastructure.
Automation: Host Profiles are a welcome addition because, at the moment, it’s a drag to have to manually update all your servers. Of course we automate this today with PowerShell or the Veeam product but it’s good to see this built in.

vCenter and all the solutions around it really show that managing, monitoring and automating the platform is where it’s at! Time to decrease the price of the basic stuff such as the hypervisor, VMotion and HA?
The mobile hypervisor demo on the Nokia internet tablet was interesting as well. It would be interesting to be able to do this on my company phone and have both Windows Mobile and Android for example. Of course the big question is: “What about the iPhone?”. Knowing Apple, I guess there’s not much hope for this to become a reality! ;-)
I am really interested to see how the complete roll-out of VMware View will work in 2009! Today, VMware View provides basic brokering functions with some advanced features such as linked clones. What’s missing today are the “last mile features” where competitors such as Citrix and Quest (vWorkspace) have quite a good solution. Citrix with its use of ICA and Quest with it’s EOP extensions to RDP. Steve promised “the best” experience over WAN, LAN and LOCAL connections (with local referring to the client hypervisor).

Other interesting (and some funny) articles and blog posts today:

Commentary on some unanswered questions about vSphere: VMworld attendees demand, but don’t get, vSphere details
VMworld day 2 – Random stuff and Data recovery from Yellow Bricks. Duncan has a good explanation of the new data recovery solution. Interesting to hear this thing does inline dedupe.
Desktops moving to the cloud? The cloud looks more and more like a black hole that sucks in every piece of IT infrastructure! ;-)
Snuggy gate! What is that? ;-)
Video on VMware FT and performance filmed by Mike Laverick. Very, very interesting! It’s actually a VMworld session but don’t tell anyone. ;-)

VMworld Europe 2009: Day 1 from the outside

rastix — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 23:20:24 +0100

During my preparation for our VDI seminars next week (only a few seats left), I am trying to keep up with the news coming from Cannes. Here’s a little overview of the news I thought was interesting.

My colleague Vincent Vlieghe has a good overview of the day.
VM /ETC posted a very good overview of Day 1 here. virtualization.info did live blogging as well. Both are reporting about the keynote delivered by Paul Maritz (VMware CEO) and Wolfgang Krips (Senior VP of SAP Managed Services). This keynote was not very technical because that is left to VMware’s CTO, Steve Herrod.
During the keynote, Paul claimed that from the first generation of the new vSphere platform there will be no reason to not virtualize 100% of your datacenter. A pretty bold statement underlining the fact that this is already happening in the trenches now. More and more customers ask us to virtualize their Exchange environment, SQL, SAP or Unified Communications platform. They are only held back by non-technical reasons such as support or technical reasons like dependency on specific hardware.
On Twitter, some were reporting that the SAP part of the keynote was pretty boring and that people were leaving the session. Why am I not surprised? ;-)
Interestingly, VMware talked about the partnership with Intel. VMware CVP (Client Virtualization Platform) will be part of the VMware View suite and is optimized for Intel CPUs with vPro technology. Intel has a similar agreement with Citrix for their “Project Independence”. To learn more about Project Independence and some comparisons with the VMware approach, there’s a good podcast over at dabcc.com with Simon Crosby. I am curious to find out more about the bare-metal client hypervisor implementation of VMware. With Citrix’s solution it is already clear that they are using the same approach as with Xen/Hyper-V: the hypervisor is loaded on the hardware, Windows (Vista?) is the parent partition which means broad hardware support and the corporate desktop is streamed/installed as a child partition. If VMware is using their typical approach by using something similar to ESX, they will have quite a hard time with hardware support on laptops and desktops.
Brian Madden also talked about both Intel partnerships here with some funny commentary.
VirtualLifestyle.nl reported about VMware vCenter Data Recovery with lots of screenshots. Note that these screenshots come from the hands-on labs with a pre-release version of the product.
Of course there was a lot of buzz around the vCloud stuff. Some reports and commentary can be found here, here and here. If the vCloud vision works out it will be pretty amazing. VMware faces tough competition though from open source Xen, XenServer, Hyper-V and others here. If you know what is possible on Amazon’s EC2 for example you know what I am talking about. Of course, VMware goes further here by providing integration between internal and external clouds and good partnerships.
Companies like IT Structures and Terremark were in the spotlight as well. IT Structures and Terremark were featured in Paul Maritz’s keynote. IT Structures released a press release announcing support for vCloud. Other vCloud partners can be found here.
Yesterday, I heard about the vShield Zones product for the first time. You can found more information about it here. The product will be available later in 2009.
It seems Neverfail’s software is the basis for VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat. Sounds logical. I wonder how well this will sell though! Anyway it’s good to have the option from VMware.

That’s all I have time for today. Looking forward to Steve Herrod’s keynote tomorrow!

VMworld Europe 2009: Partner Day

rastix — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 23:32:32 +0100

I am not at VMworld Europe this year but many of my colleagues are, including Geert Verbist and Vincent Vlieghe. I am staying home because, among other things, my colleague Tim Jacobs and myself are preparing our VDI seminars.

But these days, with Twitter and tools like Tweet Grid and Twitter Fall it’s possible to get a feel for what’s happening at the event realtime without being there.

So this being the day that Citrix officially announced free XenServer Enterprise, what was going on?

VMware launched Partner University. Only partners (VIP, VAC, …) can access this and it’s a virtual campus with, in my opinion, good information about learning paths for sales, pre-sales and post-sales professionals.
Microsoft is at VMworld, as they always have been. Maybe this time with a little less controversy than in Vegas?
Many bloggers reported about partner day. Here and here for example. Gabrie van Zanten has a good overview about partner day at Virtualization Pro.
Of course there is a strong focus on VDI with 2009 being touted as the year of client virtualization in all its aspects. There was a session about VDI with VMware View followed by a critical article by Brian Madden (he was in that session). Of course he’s right on the mark when he says that VMware should include TS/Citrix as an alternative and point at the pitfalls of application virtualization but you cannot blame VMware for focusing on VDI with the products they have (View/ThinApp and no TS/Citrix-like solution).
It was known already but more was said about vCenter Server Heartbeat. Technodrone has a good overview. VMguru.nl has a summary with some pricing info at the bottom of the post. Pretty pricey if you ask me.
VMware also talked about VMware vShield Zones, something they will provide more details about later this week. Session DC13 talks about it in more detail.
A good post about VMware’s strategy for the coming years and the products that will take center stage can be found at VMGuru.nl. Products like vCenter Chargeback, CapacityIQ, Orchestrator and ConfigControl are what customers expect from VMware to continue to take the lead in the virtualization space. Some VMware partners that make competing products might not like this expansion but in our experience, customers typically expect these solutions from VMware and not some 3rd party vendor. VMware will have to make sure that these new tools integrate well into the existing infrastructure.
There was a session about AppSpeed as well with more details and a general session coming this week.
Duncan Epping talked about VMware vCenter on Linux Technology Preview. This is VirtualCenter Server and not the VI Client on Linux.
Alex Barrett has an article on SearchServerVirtualization.com asking about the beef in VDC-OS. Indeed, the concept of VDC-OS is pretty good but the realization of this concept is still a way off. With the announcements coming this week however, we will be coming a few steps closer.
Veeam is one of the first with VMware Ready Optimized certification or status. Their management pack for VMware has the logo.
The Virtualization EcoShell Initiative will be launched. Eric Sloof reports about it here. If you are a PowerShell fan (like me), you will find this interesting.
As always, Eric Sloof has a collection of movies at his site ntpro.nl.

As today was partner day, the avalanche of announcements from both VMware and its partners will only really start coming down tomorrow. Some interesting sessions are coming up as well like TA03 about Chargeback, DC01 about Orchestrator, DC18 about ConfigControl and TA22 about CapacityIQ.

Hyper-V 2.0: Live Migration

rastix — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 18:14:46 +0100

Now that Windows Server 2008 R2 beta 1 is available, I decided to give it a spin. The installation of the Hyper-V role and the Failover Cluster feature is very similar to the current version and is not discussed in this article. This article does not discuss best practices. It merely illustrates the setup process that enables you to live migrate virtual machines with Hyper-V 2.0.

Overview of the steps:

Create a Failover Cluster.
Create a Cluster Shared Volume (CSV).
Create a virtual machine on the CSV.
Make the virtual machine highly available using the Failover Cluster Management tool.

Note: the above overview gives the impression that you need to use Cluster Shared Volumes to enable live migration. This is not the case as live migration works on traditional volumes as well. It is included here because it probably will be the volume type of choice in a cluster because of its additional advantages.

Hardware
I used a desktop with a Core 2 Quad and a laptop with a Core 2 Duo. The desktop has 8GB of RAM and the laptop 4G. These two systems just run Windows Server 2008 x64 R2 Beta 1 with the Hyper-V role. There is another system on the same network that acts as domain controller (domain is r2.local). It runs Windows Server 2008 R2 beta 1 as well and runs as a virtual machine in VMware Workstation 6. Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 run well under VMware Workstation and ESX.

Storage
As shared storage I used Lefthand Network’s VSA, the laptop version (running as a virtual machine in VMware Workstation). You can download the VSA from their website here: http://www.lefthandnetworks.com/eval_saniq.aspx. You can use their Quick Start Guide to get up to speed quickly. I created two volumes and they show up like this in the management console (or their CMC or centralized management console as they like to call it):

The quorum is 5GB and the virtual_machines volume is 50GB. The VSA does not provide 55GB of physical disk space but with thin provisioning you can create the size you want. In reality, the VSA provides 4,5GB physical space out of the box and that is enough to put a Windows XP virtual machine on the virtual_machines volume.

iSCSI
The Windows Server 2008 R2 hosts are connected to their volumes using iSCSI. I renamed the initiators to node1 and node2 and granted access to the volumes on the VSA using the initiator name (click the screenshot below):

The iSCSI configuration applet in Windows Server 2008 R2 has changed a bit but the process remains the same. Check the screenshot below for the new look (click to enlarge):

Failover Cluster
I created a cluster called r2clus. The Failover Cluster manager shows the following (click to enlarge):

Creating a cluster shared volume (CSV)
Before creating a CSV you need to enable the feature. Right click the cluster name in the Failover Cluster Manager and select Enable Cluster Shared Volumes… You will get the following warning:

Indeed, CSVs are only supported for use with Hyper-V 2.0. Other applications are not supported. When you accept the terms and click OK you will see the Cluster Shared Volumes node in the Failover Cluster Manager:

Before you can add a CSV you need to make sure the volume is listed as available storage in the Storage node (under Cluster Shared Volumes). Navigate to the storage node and click Add a Disk. If you presented the volume(s) correctly you will be able to select the volume and it will show up as available in the list of disks.

Now go to Cluster Shared Volumes and click Add storage. You should see something like:

After the storage has been added, it will show up in the list of Cluster Shared Volumes:

If you look closely at the above screenshot, you will see that the mount point for the volume is C:\ClusterStorage\Volume1. Indeed, CSVs are not given a drive letter. If your volume had a drive letter, it is removed. CSVs are accessible from any host in the cluster using the C:\ClusterStorage path. You will need to use this path when you later create a virtual machine that you want to live migrate.

Creating a virtual machine on the CSV
Now that the cluster is operational and the CSV is mounted, we can create a virtual machine on the shared storage. This is the same process as before so you use Hyper-V Manager and create a new virtual machine. When you create the virtual machine, always use the path to the CSV: C:\ClusterStorage\Volume#. Do this for the virtual machine configuration and the disk.

After installation we can make the virtual machine highly available from Failover Cluster Manager. Right click Services and Applications and select Configure a Service or Application… After following the wizard you end up with:

From now on you need to control the state of the virtual machine from Failover Cluster Manager. The task pane at the right provides all the options such as Turn Off, Shut Down, Save and so on.

Live Migration
When the virtual machine uses a CSV as shared storage you can use live migration to move it. The live migration option is in the task pane at the right:

During live migration you can track its progress:

Be aware that quick migration is still available. A quick migration is performed with the option Move virtual machine(s) to another node.

Conclusion
If you want live migration with Hyper-V 2.0 you need a Windows Server 2008 Failover Cluster with some form of shared storage. This is the same requirement as in the current version. Live migration is just an extra feature in an R2 cluster. I configured a Cluster Shared Volume but this is not a hard requirement. You probably will use CSVs because of the added benefits such as I/O redirection and the ability to live migrate individual virtual machines on a volume with several virtual machines running.

Note that live migration will be available in the free version as well (Hyper-V Server 2008 R2). That version is now in beta too and can be downloaded as well from here.

VMware: How to interpret esxtop statistics

rastix — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 14:50:06 +0100

Via ict-freak.nl (actually via twitter) I noticed the post on the VMware Communities about esxtop. Great stuff and definitely worth closer inspection. I immediately put it in my Evernote notebook for easy reference!

Tech-Ed EMEA 2008: Clustered Shared Volumes

rastix — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 16:14:33 +0100

If you have been reading up about the features of Hyper-V 2.0, you probably read about Clustered Shared Volumes or CSVs. Basically, CSVs are the main ingredient to the (not so) secret sauce that makes Live Migration work.

A clustered shared volume can be created from any existing volume in a failover cluster. If you have an existing volume formatted with NTFS, you can mark it as a CSV and it will show up in the Failover Cluster Manager as a CSV. Note that existing data on the NTFS volume is not touched in any way.

On the compatibility side you should know the following:

CSVs in Windows Server 2008 R2 only support Hyper-V
There are no special hardware requirements and you can use the same technologies as a standard cluster disk: iSCSI, FC, SAS
There is no limit on directory structure
No agents or other software needs to be installed
Not another file system – it is standard NTFS

Note that this is not a clustered file system like VMware VMFS of Sanbolic’s Melio FS. There is no distributed lock manager or anything like that. What CSVs deliver is a distributed access file system.

CSVs provide a single consistent file name space. This means that every node in the cluster has the same path to the volumes. You will see the CSVs under the %windir%\ClusterStorage directory. For example:

c:\ClusterStorage\Volume1\<root>
c:\ClusterStorage\Volume2\<root>

The only thing you need to do after adding the CSVs is to put VHDs on the clustered shared volume (using the paths shown above) and create the virtual machine using Hyper-V Manager making sure that you put the configuration files on the CSV as well. You can then use the Failover Cluster Manager console to make the virtual machine highly available just like how you do it now. Basically, the only thing that changes here is the creation of the CSV and making sure that you place your virtual machine on the CSV. All the other steps are exactly the same as how it currently works.

With the current implementation of Hyper-V, you need to put each virtual machine in its own LUN if you want the virtual machines to failover to different hosts or if you want to quick migrate the virtual machines independently from the others. CSVs in Windows Server 2008 R2 remove this limitation. This also results in less wasted storage space and basically a better storage management story.

From an architectural perspective you should know that only one node in the failover cluster still owns the CSV LUN. That node is called the coordinator and it basically manages how the disk access should work. There is one such coordinator for each shared volume. You do not have to worry about selecting a coordinator as that is taken care of automatically. When the coordinator fails, there is no impact on virtual machines that are not running on the coordinator itself.

Microsoft did not provide any clear information about how the access to disk is actually performed. Basically the answer to our questions was that the coordinator decides what the best path to the storage is: direct access or over the network. Yes, you read that right: access to the LUN from one node might be redirected over the network via SMB to another node that writes to the LUN. Again, I have no information about when that exactly happens.

We also learned that the implementation of CSVs is done with a mini file system driver called CSVfilter.sys. Being a new filter driver, there might be some impact on other components such as backup software. Microsoft is working with backup and storage vendors and its own DPM team to clear up these issues. What I can say is that there is a new VSS API call called PrepareVolumeForSnapshotSet and that this needs to be used by VSS Requesters. The node that initiates the VSS backup also needs to become the coordinator node (happens automatically) because it needs to manage exactly what happens with the CSV volumes. The CSV volumes stay online during the backup but there will be no direct I/O until the backup ends. I guess that means that access to the LUN from other nodes will go over the network to the coordinator and from there to the LUN.

What is my take on this? Well, it seems like an overly complex solution to make something like Live Migration and HA work for individual virtual machines on a single bigger LUN. I guess that results from the fact that Microsoft decided to work with the existing NTFS file system instead of creating a dedicated file system optimized for virtual machine storage. On the other hand it does deliver extra features such as SAN I/O redirection over the network when the storage path to the SAN array completely fails.

More information about CSVs can be found in the R2 reviewers guide.

Tech-Ed EMEA 2008: Windows Server 2008 R2 Overview

rastix — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 15:31:03 +0100

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!

Tech-Ed EMEA 2008: Branch Office Infrastructure with Windows Server 2008

rastix — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 00:29:39 +0100

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

Centralized
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:

Improve the protocols
Provide different features for servers in a branch (e.g. RODC)
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:

Distributed
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.

Tech-Ed EMEA 2008: Opening Keynote

rastix — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 01:36:39 +0100

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:

Unified and virtualized approach
Model driven
Service enabled (cloud or not)
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:

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

VMware: changing the certificate and customizations

rastix — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 22:05:31 +0100

This week, I had to change the VirtualCenter certificate in our test environment. Changing the certificate is not that straightforward but there is quite some information available on the net. I used the information in this post: http://lraikhman.blogsite.org/?p=41.

Basically, you use OpenSSL to generate a public/private key pair and a certificate request. You then pass the certificate request to a certificate authority. I used a Microsoft Enterprise CA running on Windows Server 2008. When you obtain the certificate from the CA, you create a pfx file with OpenSSL that contains the private key and the certificate. You can then copy the files to your VirtualCenter server.

Note that when you generate the pfx file with OpenSSL, you will be asked for a password. To use the pfx file, for example to extract the certificate or the private key, the password is needed.

Now if you follow the steps you will be unable to use your existing sysprep customizations in VirtualCenter because the administrator password that is encrypted in the customization file cannot be decrypted. You will see something like:

The reason for this error is quite simple: VirtualCenter cannot get to the data in the pfx file because the password you used to protect the pfx is not correct. It seems that the password you need to use for the pfx file is testpassword. I got that information from here.

To summarize: to change the VC certificate use the steps in http://lraikhman.blogsite.org/?p=41 but when you are asked for the password during pfx creation use testpassword.

Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite

rastix — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 21:55:51 +0200

On Thursday, I went to a Microsoft TTT course about BPOS in Schiphol, The Netherlands. The abbreviation TTT stands for “train the trainer”. It’s basically a course that tells you how to deliver the training yourself and as such it is targeted to Microsoft partners.

Microsoft BPOS or Business Productivity Online Suite is a collection of hosted services for customers that do not want to implement them on-premise. BPOS should be available for purchase in the United States in November. In Europe, the target date for general availability is the first half of 2009.

BPOS is available in several versions but the course only covered the standard version. The standard version basically uses a shared model and as such does not allow for a lot of customizations.

The following services were covered in the course:

Microsoft Exchange Online (including Microsoft Exchange Hosted Filtering)
Microsoft Office SharePoint Online
Microsoft Office LiveMeeting

The course did not cover Office Communications Online.

Let’s take a brief look at the services in the following sections. Note that I am writing here about the standard version of BPOS.

Microsoft Exchange Online
This service provides Exchange Server 2007 functionality to users. By default, every user gets a 1GB mailbox that they can access with Outlook 2007, Outlook Web Access or a mobile device that can handle Server ActiveSync (Windows Mobile, iPhone, …). Extra storage can be purchased at a relatively low price. The end-user functionality is the same as with regular on-premise Exchange because the same server and client software is used.

From an administration point of view however, Microsoft Exchange Online provides only basic features. As an administrator you can create contacts, distribution lists and rooms. You can configure multiple domain names and set one domain as the default. When you add domain names, you just need to modify your MX records in order to send all mail to Microsoft’s hosted filtering servers.

I should note here that it is possible to split your users in online users and on-premise users. This is handy in a transitioning scenario where you slowly move users to the cloud. To make this scenario work, Microsoft provides a synchronization tool and a mailbox migration tool. In this scenario, your mail should still go to your on-premise servers. Those servers will then process all mails and forward mails to online users if needed. Although this scenario provides mail routing coexistence, it does not provide free/busy time synchronization making the planning of meetings with online and on-premise users a hassle.

You cannot configure things such as ActiveSync policies, journal rules, transport rules, Send As and many others because these settings are not exposed in the management interface or are (for now) difficult to implement in a shared environment.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Online
This service provides MOSS 2007 (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server) functionality to users. Indeed, Microsoft uses MOSS instead of WSS but they do not expose the full set of features to users and administrators. You can create sites and everything else you create in a site such as document libraries and lists. You can customize the site using SharePoint Designer. You can, for example, create workflows with SharePoint Designer or add a data view web part. Note that customizations cannot include custom code. Interestingly, browser-based InfoPath forms are not supported. However, you can create and use InfoPath forms with the InfoPath client.

Note that today it is not possible to access SharePoint sites using a custom domain name. So something like https://sales.contonso.com is not possible. Instead, you need to access sites using the URL provided by Microsoft. Luckily, the sites you have access to are listed on the user’s home page. The user can access the home page using https://home.microsoftonline.com. Click the picture below to see a screenshot of the home page.

Microsoft Office LiveMeeting
The LiveMeeting service in BPOS is basically the same as the existing LiveMeeting online service. In fact, BPOS uses the same infrastructure. All users that are enabled in the BPOS management console can initiate a LiveMeeting session with up to 15 people. This is different from the full Microsoft Office LiveMeeting Online offering where a session can have over a 1000 people.

Conclusion
BPOS standard is an easy way to provide your users with an e-mail account and collaboration services without having to invest in infrastructure components such as servers and storage. The management is extremely simple when compared to the full on-premise solutions but you also have less features especially for SharePoint.

SCUG Belgium: A Technical Overview of DPM 2007

rastix — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 10:17:13 +0200

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.

Microsoft: Get Virtual Now

rastix — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 23:03:11 +0200

I just finished watching Microsoft's virtualization launch event keynote. A couple of things to note from the event and announcements:

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 (SCVMM) will be released within 30 days.
Hyper-V Server will be available as a free download within 30 days.
Windows Server 2008 R2 with the next version of Hyper-V wlll contain a live migration feature.

I am quite interested in the Hyper-V Server product. It is a stripped down version of Windows with just the Hyper-V role, meant to compete with VMware's ESXi product. It's like Server Core except even more stripped down with some extra commands to configure the server. To manage Hyper-V server, you will have to connect to it from a remote machine with the Hyper-V management console or the SCVMM Administration Console. Be aware of the fact that there is no clustering for this version of Hyper-V. In contrast, ESXi can be clustered but then you will have to pay for the appropriate licenses.

The keynote in itself was not very interesting because most of these things were known or could be expected.

Hyper-V: Virtual machine backup

rastix — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 21:47:28 +0200

A hot topic with any virtualization platform is virtual machine backup. Besides the traditional backup with a backup agent in the guest you can also backup the complete virtual machine as it sits on the file system on the virtualization host (in this case Windows Server 2008). Naturally, you will not want to shutdown your virtual machines just to take a backup so Hyper-V supports hot backups of running virtual machines with the Hyper-V VSS Writer.

Let's first see if the Hyper-V VSS Writer is available on the host. Issue the following command:

vssadmin list writers

In some instances, the Hyper-V VSS writer is not listed even though Hyper-V is installed on the host. This could be due to broken symbolic links in the following directory: C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Hyper-V\Virtual Machines. Remove the broken link files and issue the vssadmin list writers command again.

We will now perform a manual backup with the help of the Windows Server 2008 diskshadow.exe command. Open a command prompt and issue the diskshadow command. You will get a prompt inside diskshadow. Issue the following commands:

set context persistent

add volume <driveletter> alias <alias_you_choose>
(for example add volume s: alias svolume)

set verbose on

create

When you enter the create command, the VSS operation will create a new shadow copy. In the output you should see something like:

At the end of the output, you should see:

You can now enter the following command in diskshadow:

expose %alias% x:
(for example expose %svolume% x:)

The last command mounts the shadow copy on drive x: so that you have access to the backup. If you look at the contents of drive x:, it will be the contents of the volume you specified at the time the backup was taken. You can now copy the files from drive x: to some other location.

Note that the Hyper-V VSS writer will take care of the consistency of the virtual machines both outside and inside the vhd file. As long as you are using the integration components in the virtual machine (as you should), the virtual machine will stay running during the operation. If the volume contains virtual machines that do not have integration components, these virtual machines will be suspended to disk before the shadow copy is made and resumed afterwards. In that case, the shadow copy will contain the .bin and .vsv file with the state of the virtual machine at the time of the backup.

Inside the virtual machine that has the integration components you will see events in event viewer that indicate VSS activity:

A couple of notes on this process:

You can use add volume multiple times for different volumes. Naturally, for each volume a shadow copy will be created.
If you turn off the backup support of the integration components (can be done from Hyper-V manager or SCVMM 2008), the writer will suspend/resume the virtual machine.
You can integrate the Hyper-V VSS Writer with Windows Server 2008 Backup. See http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc895627.aspx for more information. By default, Windows Server Backup is not configured to use the Hyper-V VSS Writer.
Backup software vendors are working to include support for the Hyper-V VSS Writer. BackupExec for instance should have support in version 12.5.

A following post will discuss how to restore a virtual machine from the backup location.

Full backups of virtual machines and Windows VSS

rastix — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 14:03:53 +0200

My colleague, Tim Jacobs, has published a good article covering virtual machine backups and VSS integration. In my opinion, VSS clearly is the way to go because the VMware sync driver or other proprietary solutions just don't cut it. Microsoft already included VSS support in Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 and also has it in Hyper-V.

Check out the article on his blog.

SCVMM Beta: Multiple virtual machines on the same LUN in a cluster

rastix — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 10:28:36 +0200

In the previous post, I talked about creating highly available virtual machines on Hyper-V and the fact that SCVMM can only create virtual machines on unused storage. The standard tools such as Hyper-V Manager and Failover Cluster Manager do support multiple virtual machines on the same volume (with a hotfix). So what happens to SCVMM in that case? Have a look at the screenshot below:

The virtual machines are in an unsupported configuration and cannot be managed from SCVMM (no starting, stopping etc...). This will probably be fixed in the final release but if you are testing the product now you know what to expect.

Hyper-V: Creating highly available virtual machines

rastix — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 20:38:57 +0200

When you need to create a highly available virtual machine running on Microsoft's Hyper-V you need to do so on a Failover Cluster. In this post I will show you how to create a highly available virtual machine on a two-node Windows Server 2008 cluster. The cluster is using simple desktop machines with storage on an MSA2012i SAN (iSCSI).

There are two ways to create the virtual machine:

Use the Hyper-V Manager in conjunction with Failover Cluster Management.
Use System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 (SCVMM).

The first method is a bit clumsy because it involves two different consoles. That method, however, has more flexibility as you will see later. Let's take a look at the first method and see how you could create a virtual machine in the cluster on a shared volume.

Creating the virtual machine without SCVMM
Without SCVMM you need Hyper-V Manager and Failover Cluster Manager. To start, you need to have a volume available to the cluster. In my case, I had a volume with drive letter S: as available storage to the cluster as shown in the screenshot below.

Even a volume that is not part of a service or application (a resource group in old terminology) is owned by a particular host. In the screenshot you see that hyperv2 owns the disk.

The next step is to use Hyper-V Manager to create a virtual machine. It is important that you store both the virtual machine configuration and hard disk(s) on shared storage. To create the virtual machine, open Hyper-V Manager on the host that owns the disk and create a new virtual machine as shown below. This is the same as on a standalone host as this tool is not aware of the cluster.

A wizard will start to create the virtual machine. Just follow the wizard and make sure you use shared storage. We can now proceed to the next step and that is adding the machine to the cluster.

Now open Failover Cluster Management, right click Services and Applications and click Configure a Service or Application. A wizard will start. Follow the wizard until the screen below and select Virtual Machine (only available when Hyper-V is installed):

When you click Next, the wizard will enumerate the virtual machines on shared storage so that you can select them:

After the virtual machine has been selected, continue the wizard. The end result will be a new service called Virtual Machine with two resources (well, actually three): the virtual machine configuration, the virtual machine and the storage volume. The screenshot below illustrates what you see in the Failover Cluster Management console after running the wizard a few times to add other virtual machines on the same volume.

You can now start the virtual machine directly from Failover Cluster Management and install a guest operating system. If you need to attach an iso first, you will need to use Hyper-V Manager. The Failover Cluster Management tool provides an easy way to start Hyper-V Manager. Just right click the service (here called by default Virtual Machine).

From the moment the virtual machine is part of the cluster you will need to perform actions such as stopping, shutting down and saving state from Failover Cluster Management. If you use Hyper-V Manager to stop the virtual machine for example, the cluster will restart the virtual machine again (with the default resource settings).

Creating the virtual machine with SCVMM
SCVMM, being the 'single pane of glass' for virtualization management provides a way to create new virtual machines on both clusters and standalone Hyper-V hosts. Before you can create a virtual machine on a cluster you need to add the cluster to SCVMM. From the Actions pane, select Add Host as shown below:

In the Add Hosts wizard, type the cluster name in Host server name and press Enter. The cluster should be added to the list as shown below:

Now continue the wizard to deploy the SCVMM agent on each node in the cluster (=automatic). The cluster will be shown in SCVMM as shown below:

Adding a virtual machine is easy but the current beta of SCVMM has some limitations:

SCVMM only supports one virtual machine per cluster volume. This effectively means I need one LUN per virtual machine, something I need anyway if I want to 'Quick Migrate' individual virtual machines.
SCVMM only supports volumes with drive letters (no mount points).

Before you create the virtual machine, make sure there is available storage in the cluster that is not used by any other virtual machine. To create the virtual machine, just select New Virtual Machine from the Actions pane at the right to launch the wizard. The wizard is straightforward but you should not forget to configure the virtual machine as highly available. You do so from the Configure Hardware dialog in the wizard. Scroll to the bottom where there is an Availability section. When the wizard is finished, SCVMM will have created a new service in the cluster called SCVMM vmname Resources. You can now start the virtual machine from SCVMM and start installing a guest operating system.

Conclusion
Creating a highly available virtual machine is easy but as you have seen, there are several ways to do it. There are also some discrepancies between what you can do with and without SCVMM. The final version of SCVMM will have to solve this so that you can truly use it as your primary management tool for Hyper-V.

REMARK: I my setup I installed the following hotfix: http://support.microsoft.com/?id=951308. This hotfix provides more functionality and virtual machine control for Hyper-V in a failover cluster.

HP: Overview of MSA2012i Configuration

rastix — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 17:02:12 +0200

I got my hands on an HP MSA2012i and thought I'd share some of the configuration screens with you. Part of the HP StorageWorks 2000 Modular Smart Array family, this particular model is the iSCSI model with one controller (it is not meant for production so we did not need the 2nd controller). The MSA2012i has twelve SAS drive bays for 3.5 inch disks and we filled it with 146GB 15K disks. There are two other models: one fibre channel and one SAS.

Each controller has three ethernet ports, one for management and two for data access. I connected the management port to our network and pointed my browser to the IP address assigned by our DHCP server. After logging in with username manage and password !manage (defaults) the configuration can start.

The first thing to do is to configure the ethernet ports. To configure the data ports, go to General Config and then host port configuration:

The addresses above (port 0 and port 1) are used for the iSCSI discovery process and of course disk access as well. In the Microsoft iSCSI initiator for example, you would set one of these (or both) in the Discovery tab:

The MSA2000 works with the concept of vdisks and volumes. A vdisk is nothing more than a collection of physical disks configured with some protection level (RAID5, RAID10, ...) and optional spare disk(s). There are two ways to create a vdisk:

Automatic virtual disk creation (policy-based)
Manual virtual disk creation (detail-based)

The policy-based method just asks you for a fault tolerance level (none=RAID0, medium=RAID5 or high=RAID50), the size of the vdisk in GB and the number of volumes to create in the vdisk.

I will show manual disk creation to create a vdisk with 11 disks and one spare (no best practice or anything, just demo). The first screen asks for the vdisk name and the RAID level (RAID0, 1, 3, 5, 6, 10, 50):

The second screen asks for the disks and whether or not you want spare drives:

The third screen asks for the spare disk(s):

After clicking continue, a summary is shown with a button to create the vdisk:

After clicking Create Virtual Disk, the vdisk will be created and initialized. Initialization can take a long time but during that time volumes can already be created and used.

The next thing to do is to create volumes. Let's create a 100GB volume on the vdisk we just created. From the Volume Management section at the left there is the add volume option. In the screenshot below, a volume of 100GB is created without assigning a LUN number. When you assign a LUN number you present the LUN globally. If you do not want that you set LUN to NONE and assign the volume to a host from the volume mapping link.

After clicking Add Volume the volume is shown in the volume map of the vdisk:

To map the volume to a host:

Of course, hosts don't just magically appear in the above list. You can add hosts manually (there is a link somewhere in the menu at the left) or make them appear by using the iSCSI initiator on the host to connect to the MSA target. When the volume is mapped to the host it will appear if the iSCSI initiator was configured correctly:

As you can see, configuration is very simple although not as easy as an Equallogic box, a reference for configuration simplicity. I did notice one bug though and that is the fact that every other vdisk is owned by the second (in our case, non existent) controller. This might be solved by a more recent firmware though.

ThinApp 4.0: Application Link

rastix — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 14:26:54 +0200

Application link is a feature VMware added to the Thinstall product they acquired a while ago. As the feature name implies, it allows you to link ThinApp'ed applications. You could for example link a browser to a Flash plugin or a Java plugin. In this post I will show you the basics of application link. I will link Opera 9.5 to a Flash plugin. The steps to get this to work are as follows:

Create separate projects for Opera 9.5 and the Flash plugin.
Configure the package.ini of Opera 9.5 with the application link.
Deliver the packages to end-users taking into account the placement of the plugins.

This post does not discuss the first step. Check the two previous blog posts to see how to do that. When you create the project for the Flash plugin, download a standalone installer for Flash and use it during Setup Capture. I ended up with the following projects:

The second step, configuring the application link, is easy. In the package.ini of Opera 9.51 you will find the following line:

Just remove the ; in front of the highlighted line and build the project using build.bat. With this default configuration (plugins\*.exe) you need to put a plugins folder in the folder that contains Opera.exe:

The Flash project resulted in a file called NPSWF32_FlashUtil.exe and that file is put in the plugins folder. Because application link is configured with *.exe, the plugin will be picked up at runtime. It does not matter where the exe's are located. They can be put on the local workstation, a USB drive or a network share.

ThinApp 4.0: Building a project

rastix — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 22:49:16 +0200

In the previous post I showed you how to install ThinApp and run a Setup Capture. Unless you are completely new to the technology, those things are rather straightforward. Now we will take a look at some other aspects of the package building process.

Setup Capture generates a project that you can customize before the build process. The default project location is in C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware ThinApp\Captures\. As an example, I chose to virtualize Opera 9.5 and that resulted in this project folder: C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware ThinApp\Captures\Opera 9.51.

When you open the project folder you will get something like in the screenshot below.

One of the most important files is the package.ini file because it contains parameters that drive the build process. The VMware site has full details about the settings in package.ini here.

Some interesting parameters can be found in the general purpose parameters section:

SandboxName: the sandbox is the location where the user's application settings are stored. By default that is %appdata%\Thinstall\SANDBOXNAME. %appdata% is a directory in the user's profile that can be redirected to a network location using Group Policies. Note that VMware did not change Thinstall to ThinApp here.
PermittedGroups: to configure who is allowed to run the application
RemoveSandboxonExit: to clear the sandbox when the user quits the application, useful when you always want the user to start from the default settings in the package.
SandboxNetworkDrives: to allow or disallow access to network drives from the package. Access is allowed by default.
SandboxRemovableDisk: similar to the network drives setting but for removable disks.

Near the end of package.ini you will find the entry points to the application. In my case there is a section called [Opera.exe]. In some cases you will find other entry points that you don't need. In my case I had entry points called [cmd.exe], [regedit.exe] and [iexplore.exe]. Although you can disable these entry points during Setup Capture I usually remove them from package.ini afterwards as well.

Now that you know about package.ini, let's build the project. In the project folder there is a batch file called build.bat. Just run that file to start the build. It's that simple! You will get a new folder called bin. In my case there are two files:

You can just take the opera.exe application and run it on another computer. One of the strengths of ThinApp is the fact that it is agentless. It is agentless because the virtualization engine is actually included in each executable that is generated.

When you run a ThinApp'ed application you get the following in the right bottom corner of the screen:

The application then starts as if it was installed locally. In virtual Opera, I added my blog to the list of bookmarks. Since that is a user preference, it is saved in the sandbox at C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Application Data\Thinstall\Opera 9.51. You should note that by default, if you install add-ons like Flash, they are also installed to the sandbox. When you delete the sandbox directory and start the application again you start with default settings in the package. Talk about a simple way to reset the user environment on a per application basis.

The features described above are essentially the same as in Thinstall 3.0. VMware added some new features like Application Sync and Application Link but that is for another post.

ThinApp 4.0: Installation and Setup Capture

rastix — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 21:11:49 +0200

I just downloaded ThinApp 4.0 from the VMware website. The screens below show the installation screens and setup capture screens to have some idea about what the product looks like.

The installer is very small (around 7MB). I created a Windows XP virtual machine in VMware Workstation, installed ThinApp 4.0 and created a snapshot. The snapshot allows me to revert to it after creating a package in order to start with a clean machine whenever I create a package. Note that it is recommended to start the ThinApp setup capture process from a network share instead of installing it on your capture workstation.

First, let's start the installation.

You have to enter a serial number and license display name. You can get a trial key at www.vmware.com for 60 days. The trial includes VMware Workstation 6 as well if you don't have it yet.

After installation you get the following shortcuts in the Start Menu:

With ThinApp Setup Capture you capture the installation of a piece of software. When launched, you get the following screens:

Of course, you need to run setup capture on a clean computer. The next dialog tells you that but also allows you to set advanced settings.

The advanced settings:

You normally don't need to change anything in the Advanced settings. Continuing with the setup wizard, the prescan starts. Scanning is very fast.

When the prescan finishes you get the dialog below. Now it is time to start an installation. I installed Opera 9 (not shown).

After installation, you click Next in the dialog above. ThinApp can now start the postscan in order to determine the differences.

Now you can select the entry points. Multiple entry points are possible, for example when you virtualize Office with Excel, Word and PowerPoint.

You can configure the application so that only specific users can run it. AD groups are used for this purpose. The sandbox location is a location where ThinApp can store the user's settings. If the user sets favorites in Opera for example, they are stored in the sandbox.

The next dialog asks for the isolation mode. The explanations in the dialog speak for themselves.

You can accept the default location for the project. The MSI generation checkbox is not checked by default. It generates a standard MSI that can be deployed to user's desktops with tools such as Altiris or SCCM 2007.

The project is then created.

In the final screen you can browse the project and make changes or build the project. I will not do that and click Finish to end the capture.

Note that when you just click Finish, your virtualized application is not created. You need to actually build the project for that. A next post will show you how the build process works without using the Build Now button in the dialog above.

Microsoft: SCVMM 2008 Hotfix for Hyper-V RC1

rastix — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 20:05:14 +0200

From Arlindo's Blog I picked up that there is a hotfix to get SCVMM (System Center Virtual Machine Manager) 2008 to work with Hyper-V RC1. Now I can finally update my Hyper-V test system.

You can get the hotfix from http://connect.microsoft.com.

Microsoft: Windows Server 2008 RODC Compatibility Pack

rastix — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 17:02:14 +0200

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.

VMware: VDM 2.1 Reviewers Guide

rastix — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 16:53:20 +0200

Douglas Brown has written a reviewers guide for Virtual Desktop Manager 2.1. I am not sure if this guide is really needed as the VMware documentation is clear and the product is simple to install and use. However, if you are looking for one document that contains an overview from start to finish it is a very good read.

Get it here.

As a side remark it seems that Provision Networks VAS (Virtual Access Suite) still has the upper hand when you look at the features and the price of the product. They just need to put some extra work in their documentation, support site and troubleshooting FAQs because those leave a lot to be desired.

VMware VDM: Using Windows Mobile Devices

rastix — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 22:55:37 +0200

This week somebody asked me if it was possible to sync a Windows Mobile device using a VMware VDM virtual desktop. The following screenshots show how this is done. I am running VDM 2.1 and the virtual desktop is Windows XP SP2 with ActiveSync 4.5. The client is Windows Vista SP1 with the VMware VDM Client and my Windows Mobile SmartPhone is connected with a USB cable.

From the VDM Client, the user logs on to the desktop by double clicking it:

The remote desktop session is started but it is wrapped in the VMware VDM Client's user interface. The window's title bar contains a menu:

If the Windows Mobile device is connected on the client, it will show up in the Devices menu:

The user just needs to click the device to "connect" it to the virtual desktop. As soon as the device is redirected it can be used. In my case, I need to provide a password to the device first:

The device is now connected and ActiveSync in the Windows XP virtual desktop can work with it:

The mobile device also shows up in My Computer as expected.

A couple of things you should know here. USB device redirection like this requires the VDM agent in the virtual desktop and VMware VDM Client on the client.

Server Core: CoreConfigurator Updated

rastix — Tue, 20 May 2008 23:16:04 +0200

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.

Microsoft releases Hyper-V RC1

rastix — Tue, 20 May 2008 20:01:29 +0200

Hyper-V RC1 is available for download. More info can be found here. A couple of things to note:

Saved-state files and online snapshots are different so discard these before upgrading.
The current SCVMM 2008 Beta does not support RC1.
There is support for Windows 2000 SP4 guests.
Integration Components disk (iso) contain the binaries needed for all Windows guest operating systems including Windows Server 2008.
Static IPv4 migration when you create a virtual network bound to an adapter with an existing fixed IPv4 address.

While we are on the subject of Hyper-V, check out the Microsoft Virtualization Team Blog. It contains a couple of interesting posts including some more WMI examples.

SCVMM 2008: Quick Configuration Tips

rastix — Tue, 06 May 2008 21:03:15 +0200

I stumbled across two configuration issues with the beta of SCVMM 2008 (available on http://connect.microsoft.com). Here they are:

1. SCVMM does not like : in a path

I use local storage on my ESX server and ESX automatically gives that storage a label in the form of hostname:storage#. When I tried to deploy a virtual machine to ESX with SCVMM, it failed saying that the volume name was not recognized. Removing the : in the label solved the issue.

2. Issue with USB flash devices in Hyper-V host

When I added my Hyper-V host to SCVMM everything seemed to work fine except the Refresh-Host job. It turns out that in the beta, that job fails when you have USB flash devices in the system. Because I use an HP Desktop machine with built-in card readers, I had to disable them all in device manager. After disabling those devices, Refresh-Host completed without errors, making the Hyper-V host available for deployments.