On VMware site there is an interesting white paper that describes how are the best practice to virtualize Exchange 2010 environment on vSphere architecture.
This document describes how to do a correct capacity planning, calibrate CPU and RAM that VM should use, and also storage consideration too.
Exchange 2010 have drastically increased memory utilization and reduced disk I/O load by 50 percent or more in many cases, addressing many of the shortcomings found in Exchange 2003 and 2007, the advances in Exchange Server 2010 and server hardware technology have coincided with advances in vSphere architecture and a real benchmark has demostrated that resource utilization on phisical HW are similar to VM resource utilization.

Well I suggest to read this white paper for all systems administrstors and messaging manage that will plan an Exchange 2010 architecture and have a Vsphere environment.

who are interested can download white paper HERE.... from VMware site

cheers

Alessandro

Hi all there is an interesting site that permit  compare of IT salary in Europe, you need to register and after you can compare you salary with a similar position in the rest of the sates in Europe.

This site is ActiveTechPros is a resource for IT professionals to compare their salary against their peers from different countries. Covering a total of 36 IT job functions across various countries, industries and company sizes, the aggregated data can be analysed to generate average annual salaries, top 10 most popular IT certifications and types of IT experience.

Last week, at its Symposium, Gartner made an interesting prediction,reported by PCMag: by 2013, only Microsoft and VMware will be perceived as leaders in both cloud computing and enterprise computing.
The authors of this prediction are David Cearley, Vice President, Distinguished Analyst & Gartner Fellow, and David Smith, Vice President of Research Fellow.

Of course the key word is “perceived”, as Gartner analysis is about the customers’ perception on their capability to execute in both private and public cloud computing.
Their analysis included Amazon, Cisco, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP and VMware.

read more…

Many thanks to virtualization.info for this post

All,

I'm sorry for a few publications in my blog recently, but demands of work are very intensive in this period.

I would to consider this nice post from Microsoft MED-V blog because now this product will be very interesting:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/medv/archive/2010/10/13/announcing-the-med-v-2-0-public-beta.aspx

cheers

Alex

I would remind all to Microsoft site, that explain which are the new features and Capabilities of Microsoft Office Communication 14, the heir of Microsoft Office Communication Server 2007 R2.

Hi all,

there are an interesting post on Microsoft APP-V Blog that explain this:

The Microsoft Office 2010 Deployment Kit for App-V is required for sequencing and deploying Office 2010 client products with Microsoft Application Virtualization (App-V). This kit includes the components required for Office license activation.[…]

This product must also be installed on the client machines to which virtualized Office 2010 client packages will be deployed. It can be configured to enable certain system components to interact with virtualized Office 2010, including:

• Fast search in virtualized Outlook 2010 using Windows Desktop Search
• Ability for virtualized Office 2010 applications to open, edit, and save Office files hosted with Windows SharePoint
• Search indexing support for Office file types
• URL protocol redirection to virtualized Outlook 2010
• Print to virtualized OneNote 2010

Mail control panel applet for virtualized Outlook 2010.....

read all here...

thanks Microsoft!

In the week before Easter Microsoft release  Service Pack 1 for Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (Med-v) 1.0, which as you know is  "enterprise" version of Windows XP mode.

SP1 of Med-v 1.0 introduces full support to Windows 7 (both 32-bit and 64-bit) as a guest operating system in which enable Med-v and Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system for the installation of server components of Med-v.

Unlike XP Mode Med-v enables you to create, manage and update centralized virtual machines used by users to run those legacy applications that cannot run natively in Windows 7.

For more information please refer to Microsoft Site here…

It was a bit of time I looking and thinking about how to install Windows 2008 Hyper-V to a USB bootable device. Fortunately I've read some post from Blog.technet.com/redpill (thanks to Simone) that have linked a web page that explain how to use Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 on USB Flash Drive.

Please read all article Here..... from Technet Site

The company also announced a new paper titled Virtual Hard Disk Performance.

 The 35-pages document describes a benchmark executed by Microsoft to compare I/O performance of files inside its Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) format (both fixed size and dynamically created) against files inside raw disks and files inside the NTFS file system.

Tests were executed on systems running a number of different workloads, including SQL and Exchange.
Microsoft explains that compared to previous implementations, VHD support is native inside Windows Server 2008 R2 and thus is not depending on the presence of Hyper-V:

…the impact of the Windows hypervisor is quite small based on past experimental results. This is mainly due to the fact that performance critical workloads are re-directed to synthetic VMBus channels instead of using the longer emulation path. To get the most accurate CPU utilization and to focus on native performance, the Windows hypervisor is turned on only during VHD performance measurement in Windows Server 2008 which is required to mount VHDs on a Windows Server 2008 machine while it remains off for all other performance testing scenarios…

Microsoft decided to use a server (the vendors is undisclosed) with two quad-core Intel Nehalem-EP processors, 6GB RAM with NUMA enabled, serving 64bit Windows Server Enterprise 2008 and Windows Server Enterprise 2008 R2, attached to a Dell PowerVault MD1000 DAS.

Here its possible do download a Microsoft White Paper….

Hi all,  

Today I’m wandering a strange thing on my VMware architecture on ESX 3.5 servers.  

After a BIOS upgrade of my hosts, that was necessary to do an upgrade of RAM, situation was good  with exclusion of one host, for this Host 1 month ago I had  to change motherboard after a hardware fault. When I’ve restored situation I’ve notice a strange issue… my host on tab “configuration > Healt Status" marks a warning (yellow light) on root of HW model (IBM X Series 3650). For me it was a strange issue because all HW components apparent are well.  

At this point I thought that this host probably was not aligned with the other one in my Cluster. After implementation and alignment of all hosts with VMware update, the warning issue was disappearance.

In conclusion if you want to do BIOS or FW update of yours Hosts remember to verify that all FIX and available update needs to do ready for ALL HOST in your Cluster. 

Introduction:

Application coexistence continues to be a significant issue for business customers.
The task of managing the portfolio of applications in a company is a very complex process, and few tools are available to assist in this process. Some of the challenges that occur when managing applications include accommodating multiple versions of the same application as well as updating application packages.  

Microsoft Application Virtualization (App-V) enables organizations to respond to the challenge by providing the capability to make applications available to end-user computers without having to install the applications directly on those computers.  

The purpose of this guide is to present a clear and concise workflow of the decisions and tasks required to implement App-V. This guide, when used in conjunction with product documentation, will enable companies to confidently plan their App-V infrastructures.
The Appendix includes a sample job aid for recording the decisions made during the design process.  

As a mentioned in my precedent post about MED-V you can download all guides from Microsoft site, but in this case I would to focus attention on virtualization technologies, in particular in this post in APP-V 4.6 that now support 64 Bit environment and application.

Virtualization Technoligies today have really changed approach in IT planning and Design and operation maintaining.  

NB: This guide will not cover the mechanics (such as step-by-step directions) of delivering virtualized application packages to desktops.

At the first I would present a document that highlight in MED-V (Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization^®) Design and Planning.

This guide is one in a series of planning and design guides that clarify and streamline the planning and design process for Microsoft infrastructure technologies.

From Microsoft site it's possible to download all this guides but, in this case, I would to begin with Virtualization Technology and in particular MED-V that in these days was released a new version with MDOP 2010.

You can download only document HERE...

Thanks Microsoft!

There are some interesting documents and guides from Microsoft® with regard the new technologies market and the new technologies that are available from Microsoft. They are downloadable from Microsoft site; also I would to dedicate a few words from Virtualization Technologies.  

Each guide in the series addresses a unique infrastructure technology or scenario.     

These guides include the following topics:      

·         Defining the technical decision flow (flow chart) through the planning process.     

·         Describing the decisions to be made and the commonly available options to consider in making the decisions

·         Relating the decisions and options to the business in terms of cost, complexity, and other characteristics

·         Framing the decision in terms of additional questions to the business to ensure a comprehensive understanding of the appropriate business landscape.

The guides in these series are intended to complement and augment the product documentation. 

I would to highlight the Virtualization Technologies in particular, because there are the very interesting methodologies and technique that can help IT PRO and IT Manager to do better their plan.     

There are several different forms of virtualization that need to be understood as a basis for making the right technology choice:      

·         Server hardware virtualization. Also known as a hypervisor, server hardware virtualization runs a very lightweight core operating system. The hypervisor can host independent virtual machines (VMs). This form of virtualization requires hardware that has embedded virtualization awareness capabilities. Since the hypervisor is very lightweight, there is little overhead in the system, which allows for more scalability in the VMs. 

·         Server software virtualization. An operating system, such as Windows Server® 2003 or Windows Server 2008 R2, runs an application that is able to host VMs. Each VM runs a completely separate operating system and application set. 

·         Session virtualization. Centralized systems host multiple user workloads, and all processing is done on those host systems. Only the presentation information (such as keyboard and mouse inputs and video updates) is sent between the client and the host systems. The client can be a full Windows-based workstation or a Windows-based terminal device. 

·          Application virtualization. An application is isolated from the underlying operating system by means of wrapper software that encapsulates it. This allows multiple applications that may have conflicting dynamic link libraries (DLLs) or other incompatibilities to run on the same machine without affecting each other. 

·         Virtualization on the desktop. This is similar to server software virtualization, but it runs on client systems such as Windows® 7 and Windows Vista®. The client operating system runs a virtualization application that hosts VMs. This is often used when a specific person needs to run one or a limited number of legacy applications on a legacy operating system.

On VMWare ESX3x, your VM has one or more VMDK files (*.vmdk) and one or more flat vmdk files (last characters are *.flat.vmdk )

In some cases, you may corrupt, lose or accidentally delete your VMDK files. Your VMDK’s contain metadata for your flat.vmdk files. Without your VMDK’s, you cannot load your flat.vmdk-files. Consequence: you cannot load the VM in your VirtualCenter and you cannot start the VM.

The following steps will guide you to recreate your vmdk files (.vmdk):

1.       Determine the hard disk sizes of your original VM (I call this VM from now on: VM A)

2.       Create a new VM (I call this VM from now on: VM B) with VirtualCenter with the same number of hard disks as your old VM, and the exact same sizes. So: if your original VM contained 2 harddisks from 8,00GB and 12,00GB, recreate these harddisks exactly the same in your new VM.

3.       After your VM B has been created, use Putty (or a similar tool) to navigate to your ESX server. Then navigate to the location / directory where your VM B is stored.

4.       Copy all VMDK’s (not the flat ones, but only the metadata files) to your VM A directory. The filesize of your META-data files should be a few KB.

5.       Navigate to your VM A directory. You just copied the *.VMDK files to this directory. Edit the VMDK’s with a text editor: You should replace the old filenames with the correct file names -> They refer to the new VM B, but they should refer to your old (original) VM A

6.       Save the files.

7.       Load the VM in your VirtualCenter. You should now be able to add th flat.vmdk to your VM.

Many thanks to http://www.itexperience.net/ for this nice post

In these days  was the release of the 2010 of the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) Edition.

Application Virtualization (APP-V) 4.6

One of the most important components of this edition is version 4.6 for Microsoft Application Virtualization (APP-V) now also supports 64-bit systems and which was available in beta since last August.

This 64-bit version was much waiting, in particular because support for 64-bit architectures allows:

the sequencing of 64-bit native applications and their run virtualized on 64-bit systems; the sequencing of 32-bit applications and their virtualized execution is on 32-bit on 64-bit; applications virtualized with APP-V in remote Desktop Services Windows Server environment using 2008 R2 (only on 64-bit) and Terminal Server in Windows Server 2008 (in the 64-bit Edition).

There is more information about this on Blog of MDOP Microsoft Team, it’s important to read this post because there is an interesting information about MED-V SP1 RC….

http://blogs.technet.com/mdop/archive/2010/02/19/app-v-4-6-and-med-v-1-0-sp1-rc-are-here.aspx

Hi all,

in the left pane there is an important information about Microsoft Enterprise Support with regards of Microsoft OS.

Read all from Microsoft site

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/enterprise/products/windows-7/end-of-support.aspx

As Microsoft has announced in 2008, support for Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) will end on July 13, 2010. Support for Windows 2000 will end on the same date. Support for Windows Vista Release to Manufacturing (RTM) will end on April 13, 2010.

Customers running an unsupported version of Windows or service pack will not be eligible for any of our support options. Updates, including security updates released with bulletins from the Microsoft Security Response Center, will be reviewed and built for the supported versions and service packs only. The most current service packs are available to organizations, and they are easily deployed via Windows Update, Windows Server Update Services/Microsoft System Center, and the Microsoft Download Center. To better understand the Microsoft Support Lifecycle Policy and your support options visit the Microsoft Support Lifecycle page

The organization that develops and promotes Internet standards have approved a change to the TLS protocol, to fix a dangerous security issue emerged last year
 - The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has approved the final draft of an amendment to the Transport Layer Security (TLS), a protocol used to protect the majority of online transactions, which should solve a serious security problem. This problem came to light several months ago, but was made public only last November.

Read more here…