In case you haven’t heard yet Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 have recently gone RTM i.e. they’re finished. See http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/windows7/archive/2009/07/22/windows-7-has-been-released-to-manufacturing.aspx and http://blogs.technet.com/windowsserver/archive/2009/07/22/windows-server-2008-r2-rtm.aspx respectively.
Last night, I attended the Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Event publicised by Jonathan below. I hadn’t attended any of the VBUG stuff before, thinking it probably wouldn’t be that relevant to my work and interests, being (as I had thought) aimed more at techie VB/Powershell developers. How wrong!
The talk was entirely relevant and I’m actually very glad I went because it made me realise that I’d made some incorrect assumptions about Windows 7. One item, in particular, set off some alarm bells…
XP Mode – the answer to all our prayers for running legacy Windows XP applications on Windows 7 on all our existing PCs – wrong! XP Mode requires Windows 7 Virtual PC which in turn requires hardware virtualisation support on the motherboard. Hardware virtualisation on machines older than 1 or 2 years is simply non-existent. Even some new laptops and PCs don’t come with hardware virtualisation and even when they do, it isn’t always possible to switch it on!
It is a shame that Microsoft have insisted on developing XP Mode to work only when hardware virtualisation is present as it seems to be in opposition to the purpose of XP Mode. Given that Windows 7 will run so well on older kit where Vista wouldn’t, and you can get away with much less memory, it just seems senseless that XP Mode needs brand new boxes in order to work. One can only get cynical about these things… and wonder about the Intel sales and marketing influence…
But the real message here is: if you want to run XP Mode make sure you’re buying machines that fully support hardware virtualisation.
There’s plenty of good news though. With improved deployment utilities for Windows 7, we are looking at a lot quicker turn around times for getting driver support into images. Bitlocker setup is a much more straight-forward process in Windows 7 and ‘Bitlocker To Go’ means USB pen drives can be easily encrypted with little technical know-how required. UAC is now fully working and is far less intrusive than in Vista. Allegedly the User State Migration Tools now work too… we’ll see.
All in all, last night’s talk was enjoyable and very informative, with an excellent and knowledgeable speaker, who really knew his stuff.
The VBUG group are taking a summer break but will be back in September to host some more events in conjunction with Microsoft Professionals. They are wanting ideas for topics to cover so please post your ideas on this blog.
If you want to get a Hotfix from Microsoft but they either say you need to ring up for it (boring :)) or even worse pay for it then you can get it for free using this useful web site. Just type in the KB number of the hotfix and away you go.
http://www.hotfixr.com/
Dave
Office 2007 Service Pack 2 has been released today, see http://blogs.technet.com/gray_knowlton/archive/2009/04/27/office-2007-service-pack-2-kiosk.aspx for a list of improvments. Something else to start testing on campus.
Dave
Useful blog with a tool to patch the terminal services DLL in Vista/Windows 7 to allow concurrent remote desktops. Works really well
http://deepxw.blogspot.com/
Dave
Windows 7 Release Candidate is coming to Technet and MSDN on 30th April and the general public on 5th May. See http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/windows7/archive/2009/04/24/windows-7-release-candidate-update.aspx We’ll download a local copy on 30th April for everyone to enjoy.
Time to rebuild my media center again!
Dave
We’re currently building an SQL 2008 server cluster which will use resilient SAN-attached storage. This will provide the University with a leading edge hosted SQL service on which to safely manage its databases as well as making available a whole host of new SQL 2008 Business Intelligence services. More news about that to follow in future blogs…
In order to decide upon the best RAID configuration for the new service (i.e. whether to configure the disks to get biggest capacity or best performance) I’ve had to gather some stats about the transactions per second (TPS) on the current (SQL 2000/2005) servers. To this end, I started monitoring with SQL Profiler in conjunction with Performance Monitor. Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever done this, but let me tell you, it is something of a black art and unless I’m very much mistaken, it does come under the category of Rocket Science if only because it makes you want to hurl your computer at the moon! Fortunately, all was not lost – to my rescue came MOM: Microsoft Operations Manager. You can Google for MOM and get all sorts of info but, for a quick overview of what it is, this covers it really:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Center_Operations_Manager (and yes they changed the name from MOM to SCOM but we all still call it MOM out of habit…)
So, how did MOM help in this case? The MOM servers run by the Windows Infrastructure Team have (amongst a lot of other things!) a MOM SQL Management Pack installed which means that when they connect to SQL servers, they are able gather SQL specific data in addition to the other more generic monitoring of disks, memory, network connectivity, etc. So, MOM has been quietly monitoring TPS and storing the data into MOM reports for some time. All I had to do was request the report and hey presto! Here’s a couple of examples:-
This image shows a top-level report which gives a broad view of various SQL-specific data over the last quarter of 2008 for a range of performance data on one of the SQL servers:-
And then… you can drill into, for example, the Transactions per Second data and obtain a more detailed view….
A lot prettier (in so many ways!) than Perfmon and Profiler. These are just 2 basic reports but there is a wealth of other information that can be got from MOM, and not just for SQL – and not just in retrospect. MOM carries out service-specific monitoring for Exchange, IIS, Terminal Services, ISA… in fact all of the Windows Server services run by our team, keeping an eye on services – 24/7 – and alerting us to any problems or errors as soon as they arise.
I find the following Vista sidebar gadget invaluable to keep track of the status of the integrated search database in Vista http://gallery.live.com/liveItemDetail.aspx?li=45c441a6-edbc-454d-9262-d264728d6a3a&bt=1&pl=1
Dave