Not to brag, but we’ve been preaching this message since we were knee-high to a rack full of blades. It’s good though: the more this story gets out there, the more everyone who listens will win. Tech-Ed Keynote Highlights ‘Dynamic IT’ and Virtualization June 10, 2008 • by Kurt Mackie Microsoft’s Tech-Ed North America event…
Over my years as an IT consultant, it’s become clear that assessing a client’s infrastructure and systems is a time-consuming and tedious task. And, horror of horrors, what do you do if the client is not running any systems management software (read: SMS/SCCM, please!)? Well, you hunker down for some challenging work, and you pray…
Hot off the presses, System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 has had a critical update that will allow it to manage Hyper-V RC1 hosts (but, as a caveat, will not allow you to manage RC0 hosts…) [MSFT-BE] Arlindo’s Blog – IT Pro Evangelist : SCVMM 2008 Beta – Hotfix for Hyper-V RC1
By way of Brian Tucker’s excellent blog, Brian’s found a guy who knows a guy who has built some really cool right-click extensions for SCCM. These were a real cottage industry for SMS 2003, and administrators who were in the know never traveled anywhere without a USB key chock full of these little gems. Well,…
Windows Vista has been out for a while now and hardware and software vendors have had time to update their drivers, apps, interface, etc. to the new operating system. Nevertheless (and this happens all the time) some specialized application vendors still will not support Vista and as a result, Windows XP and 2000 will remain…
With 150 million licenses shipped in FY’2008 (see Steve Balmer’s report,) we are always looking for news on Vista adoption. A list of recently posted articles on the Microsoft site follows: The paper entitled “Windows Feature Comparison” compares the features and capabilities of Windows XP SP3 and Windows Vista SP1 based on five categories: Security,…
Just listened to an MP3, er, uh boss – I was working on the word doc you wanted me to update and was multi-tasking. Ya, that’s it. I was working and learning at the same time. Technet Radio has a soup-to-nuts coverage of SoftGrid and AppVirt and it’s best practice application for where it fits…
Last week we had the pleasure of spending time with Shanen Boettcher, General Manager of Windows Product Management for the enterprise at the Redmond stop of his week-long press tour.. It was great to see first hand how much has MDOP plays a strategic role in the Microsoft’s desktop stack… He told the press that…
In a recent survey done by Gartner of 260 enterprises, 90% of enterprises worldwide have remote workers, but 25% of those organizations don’t know exactly who those remote workers are. Again, according to the survey, the IT departments often have no idea who they’re providing remote access to. Are they executives, sales, engineering, etc. ?…
Now on Microsoft Connect, the beta of the excellent new SCVMM 2008. The sign up for the beta is easy and installation is simple and fast on Server 2008 (which I am way digging these days). What’s the coolest thing about SCVMM 2008? Probably the ability to manage non-Microsoft hypervisors (e.g. ESX.) Top 10 Features…
And it’s the Wild West out there with all of the different devices, the lack of control and every one of them wants into your network. Business factors demand choice and IT factors drive the need for security and supportability. Is there a compromise here?
The fine folks at bink.nu have pointed out that the downloads for Windows XP SP 3 are finally available. Ladies and Gentlemen, start your imagers! http://bink.nu/news/windows-xp-service-pack-3-officially-avaiable-to-all.aspx
Microsoft Server 2008 Core could be thought of ‘server lite’, but that wouldn’t be the whole story. Sure Core doesn’t have the GUI interface we’ve all come to rely on with Windows, but even though it’s all command line interface, it still gets the job done for those servers that do specific tasks like network…
AppVirt Enthusiasts, rejoice! At MMS this year, they announced that RC1 of Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.5 will be made available via Microsoft Connect in June.
Microsoft’s “Virtualization in Banking Survey 2008,” conducted by independent, Washington, D.C.-based research firm KRC gives some insight into virtualization findings for US and UK banking institutions: TMCnet had this to say about key finding from the survey: 53 percent of those implementing virtualization reported that it eases centralization of deployment and management of applications as…
The folks over at TechNet have published a very clear, very concise guide to proper and rational OU design. If you are approaching an Active Directory project, do yourself a favor and read this advice. It’s getting hard-bookmarked on my end. Designing OU Structures that Work by Ken St. Cyr
If you are struggling with trying to diagnose LUA, or Least-Privilege User Account bugs in your Vista, Server 2003 or XP environments, then Aaron Margosis has a tool for you. The tool is called LUA Buglight and, while it’s in beta, it still may be a useful tool for you developers and system administrators out…
In recent years the technology world has increasingly gone “virtual” in a number of areas. First we had virtual local area networks and server-based virtualization. This helped consolidate resources by allowing administrators to increase the density of servers per rack, and decrease the complexity of managing hundreds of servers. This is now a proven and…
What do the title topics and the actor Kevin Bacon have in common? I dunno – it just sounded funny after listing all of the topics in this posting. Who knows – Windows 7 could be his love child. I mean, really – where did Windows 7 come from? No one wants to talk about…
OVA is one component of the new Unified Messaging server role now included in this latest version of Microsoft’s email server. Unified messaging’s goal is to consolidate as many communication types as possible into a single inbox and Exchange does this by treating email, faxes, and voicemail as just another message which can be accessed through corporate Outlook, Outlook Anywhere (Formerly Outlook over the Internet), Outlook Web Access, Outlook Mobile Access and now using just using your phone while on the run.
Desktone (http://www.desktone.com/) and more pointedly the generic term DaaS or desktop as a service is being bandied about and will help (I say “help” in jest) to muddy the terminology waters and give us a new buzz word. Really, I think DaaS has legs and will see favorable acceptance with the “greening” of IT with…
I decided to take a chance on the possibility that I could get MAV 4.5 Beta running on Server 2008 before a demo I have to give in Dallas this week, so I spent a rainy Sunday putting it together in a Virtual PC VM. Well, after several hours and re-dos, I got it, and…
Seen on The Deployment Guys: An excellent video containing a walkthrough on how to set up SCCM 2007 OS Deployment and integrating Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2008. Download Video Here (51.28 MB) Great kick-start for those of you just getting into this.
From the Awesome Ideas Department, Brian Tucker has raised the idea of an SCCM Ranger training event that would encourage a team-based deep-dive into the management software, and would do so in a casual setting – a house on a beach, for example, rather than YACRIAMH (yet another conference room in a mediocre hotel.)
These are exciting times – when the humble world of HTML and JavaScript have been leveraged to the hilt, and AJAX applications now rival traditional executables in functionality and behavioral metaphors. Stoneware seems poised to deliver what many of us have dreamed about for as long as bandwidth has been increasing.
If you’re a user of Microsoft Deployment 1.x and upgrading to Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) 2008, then you’ll want to pop over to Michael Niehaus’ blog, where he’s posted instructions on this scenario. Seems they included BDD to MDT migration, but not MD to MDT migration. One thing of note from this posting (as we…
I certainly hope this is the last of the name thrashing on this product for awhile. For those of you just getting used to the name change from Business Desktop Deployment Solution Accelerator to Microsoft Deployment, the folks in Redmond have changed the name of this product again, and it’s now being referred to as…
Application Virtualization can benefit the entire enterprise as follows: Assists IT departments by reducing or eliminating the labor-intensive tasks involved with application lifecycle management. Enables the Business to operate more flexibly and efficiently. Reduces software, hardware, and support costs Application Virtualization is an advanced technology that contains or “abstracts” applications from the underlying operating…
There’s a lot of truth to the following video, put together by the brains at Intel’s Emerging Compute Model center. Watch through to the end. I have a feeling we’ll be referencing that last bit in our own AppVirt discussions. If that doesn’t work out, however, I look forward to maximizing my bitwise calculations per…
If you’re a sysadmin for a small shop and are letting desktops update on their own, or if you’re at home and running XP, you may be wondering how to get SP3 Release Candidate to come down the pipe through Windows Update. It turns out that you need to flip a registry bit to get…
For those of you who have jobs and can’t watch the Microsoft KB article feed, you may have missed a couple of Hotfix Rollups for SoftGrid 4.1 and 4.2. For the impatient, here are the links: SoftGrid 4.1 SP1 HFRU2 SoftGrid 4.2 HFRU 1 And here’s what’s new: SoftGrid 4.1 SP1 Hotfix Rollup Package 2…
Any of you that read Ben Hunter’s blog, have probably noticed that the posts have been a little light as of late. Well, he decided to give it up. However, never fear: in the spirit of “Ben Hunter is dead! Long live Ben Hunter!” he’s combined efforts with several other Microsoft Deployment folks, and has…
From the excellent 4sysops blog: Vista SP1 is officially only available for enterprise customers, but the reports about problems caused by this service pack are piling up. This post contains a list of all SP1 issues I am aware of. List of Issues with Vista SP1 (4sysops) Good to know, especially if you are managing…
Not to be left out of the Open Source buying frenzy, Sun has recently acquired an OS virtualization product called “VirtualBox” that looks to be a boon for developers and for IT Administrators looking for standalone lab environments. Sun already had a server consolidation virtualization product (datacenter grade) in xVM Server, but didn’t have a…
Is your company struggling with its migration plan to move to Microsoft Vista or Windows Server 2008? Does your IT Staff dread the thought of having to deploy new hardware in your enterprise environment? Do you still have technicians that run around with a handful of CD’s to deploy a new PC in a remote…
If you haven’t already heard of it, you will: The Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack, or MDOP for short, is an add-on subscription for customers with Microsoft Software Assurance (SA) coverage for their Windows desktops. The five core components of MDOP are SoftGrid Application Virtualization, System Center Desktop Error Monitoring, Asset Inventory Service, Diagnostics and Recovery…
The Secure Socket Tunnel Protocol is really an ingenious convergence of secure HTTP (HTTPS/SSL) and Point-to-Point Protocol technologies which allows you to connect to your corporate VPN from almost anywhere.
My colleagues and I have been hearing a lot about Windows Server 2008 and Terminal Services RemoteApps. Very cool stuff: it’s a great way to publish applications to your users (thin or thick clients) especially if you’re not ready to make a heavy Citrix investment. But, a few of us are refugees from the old…
If application virtualization wasn’t on your IT radar screen with the previous 4.x versions that were Softricity SoftGrid I’d strongly suggest your IT enterprise get a POC (proof of concept) or pilot in place with the most current production version of AppVirt. More on this later – see MDOP near the end of the article….
Special Operations Software has released a tool that combines Group Policy and PowerShell, allowing administrators to push PS scripts to all desktops in their organization. This has a lot of potential to standardize and simplify what we often see out in the marketplace: a Frankensteinian tangle of KiX, VBScript, and Batch scripts running at login and at other times during user startup and shutdown.
Buckle up AppVirt drivers! Microsoft has just released a set of “hands-on labs” for those of us that need to break something before we learn it. Good thing it’s virtual! Books, papers and PDF’s are great but if you’re looking for a way to check out many of the features and concepts through a set…
Things one should know about the new Exchange 2007 service pack with links to everything required to successfully upgrade your Exchange servers.
I attended a Microsoft TS2 event yesterday, and I’m currently preparing a report for my colleagues on what was announced and showcased. As I digest and remember everything from the event, I’ll post things of interest to the community here.
This has been reported widely across the blogosphere, but if you haven’t yet linked this page, and you use Microsoft Deployment, stop what you are doing, and go here now. The MS Deployment dev team has posted a Technical FAQ based on questions they have received via Support calls and email. Lots of amazing tidbits…
Best Practice Alert – did you folks in the app-virtusphere know that Office 2k7 was not initially designed for virtualization? I’m a bit bemused by the SoftGrid Blog team using that phrase “not designed.” I just wonder, with my tin-hat on, waiting for the black helicopters – did MS do this with intention? Will Biff…
A follow-up to my article on Microsoft Deployment: Michael Niehaus, BDD developer and all-around cool guy wrote a “from-the-horses-mouth” history of Microsoft Deployment, for those of you interested in its evolution: A Concise History of Microsoft Deployment
Microsoft recently updated and renamed its Business Desktop Deployment Solution Accelerator and as of a short time ago, Microsoft Deployment 1.0 was born. It’s now available for public download, and this article attempts to describe some of the major feature enhancements since BDD 2007.
While I’ve not finished parsing it, Tarry Singh’s article caught my eye. I don’t normally read all of the links that come in through the ITToolbox newsletter, but anything with “virtualization” in the title tends to give me pause. Tarry’s article provides a (rather dense and obviously knowledgeable) collection of predictions for the future of…
During a client-call yesterday, once again, we heard the “very many challenges” that data centers have with all of the issues that come with the incredible and never-ending demand for application services within enterprises. A solution that’s well-tested and well-vetted for these ever-increasing demands for applications is the propping of virtual infrastrucutres. Nothing new here:…
Doing some research this week, I ran into a website called www.jumpbox.com which is a company that provides server-based software installations using Virtualization technology… Essentially they do all of the hard configuration and settings work, and provide a Virtual snapshot of the application ready for it to be used… They have several open-source server-based applications…
VMWare has recently purchased Thinstall. This puts some heavy muscle behind one of SoftGrid/AppVirt’s competitors. One can only speculate what the San Francisco to Palo Alto move will mean for the product, but personally, I hope they invest heavily in bringing Thinstall’s feature set into parity or dramatic competition with AppVirt.
Doing some research this week, I ran into a website called www.jumpbox.com which is a company that provides server-based software installations using Virtualization technology… Essentially they do all of the hard configuration and settings work, and provide a Virtual snapshot of the application ready for it to be used… They have several open-source server based applications…
By Jorge Pereira and Rob West Originally published as a white paper for Kennedy Consulting on January 2007 Continuation of: A New Vision from Desktop Management Part 1 It’s a fact that Desktop Management has become increasingly complex today as compared to a decade ago. Before the introduction of the Internet and the Local Area…
By Jorge Pereira and Sean Kennedy, Kennedy Consulting Originally published as a white paper for Kennedy Consulting on December 2006 Desktop management has remained largely unchanged over the past few years. Application provisioning and management (delivery, installation, configuration, auditing, and updates) is at the core of the challenges associated with desktop management. In the past,…
Instant Messaging (IM) has quietly crept in behind the corporate firewall as employees responding to different pressures – personal or business – install popular IM clients to chat with colleagues, partners, and customers and even friends and family. Research shows that over 90% of enterprises have IM within the enterprise and employees are responsible for…
Just a small pause to reminisce about the future we are heading into…. During a client-call yesterday we heard the “very many challenges” that data centers have with all of the issues that come with the incredible and never ending demand for application services within enterprises… For a while I have mentioned to a few…
My goal with this article is to give a high-level overview of intranets: what they are, how they are used, and why they are deployed. Intranets are a highly-effective means for inter-departmental communication and collaboration. Challenges associated with intranet design, especially as they are adopted and begin to become part of the bedrock of an…
Most people I talk to want to implement Application Virtualization to improve internal operations. Refreshingly, the conversation has been shifting over the past few weeks to what application virtualization was originally intended to address: Software as a Service and, in particular, how independent software vendors can take advantage of this technology. In order to begin…
Thin is in again – but with a twist… You don’t have to be thin, just clean …. For a bit over 3 years now, I’ve been working on implementing application virtualization and streaming technology within the enterprise… In recent months I’ve noticed more emphasis on this technology that ever before… Products include SoftGrid, AppStream,…
