Longneck Consulting

Being techno sheep geek that I am, twitter has become a regular part of existence, and of course the idea of being off the grid just sends shivers down my spine, so to feed my addiction, I have been accessing twitter using IE on my Windows Mobile smart phone, a HTC S630 (I would hyper link that but given that it was an unloved child for HTC, you can’t find any reference to it on their site now).

For me, I love the form factor with the full qwerty keyboard under the screen (think blackberry) but one of the downsides is a lack of a touch screen.  The other big issue I have had with twitter clients on it has been that the keyboard mapping becomes funky and they switch it over to numeric, so I don’t have the ability to enter letters.  As you can imagine, this does make it a little challenging to enter usernames and passwords.

So today as I was browsing m.twitter.com I saw the following tweet

aussienick@rtrgrrl and if you blog about it you can get a free license http://bit.ly/3mb1hv #smug

So i followed the link to http://twikini.com/Twikini/purchase2.aspx and discovered that if I wrote a blog post about twikini the nice folks at Trinket Software would give me a free copy.

Now free stuff is good, but it is even better if it is useful, and I have to say that Twikini actually does the job nicely.  The install was seemless, it was happy to work on my non touch screen device, I was able to enter my username and password and then up popped all my tweets!

The interface is pretty straightforward as you can see from this screenshot (the X in the corner is the give away that it is not from my phone, yes I do listen to Britney, but I don’t follow her on twitter … I may be a sheep, but it only goes so far)

There are some nice little usability features in it to.  Things like pushing to the right on the thumbpad will retweet something, pushing to the left will reply.

As far as configuring it goes, you can set how often it updates, how many tweets it grabs, how it displays names (proper names is the default as opposed to the twitter name) and a few other options.

The other plus for me is that it takes up about 400k of memory when it is running which is nice and light, so I have to give it a thumbs up.  Will definitely keep it on the phone.

So if you a looking for a good twitter client for your Windows Mobile Smart phone, head over to http://www.trinketsoftware.com/Twikini  and give it a try!

Last night saw the second meeting of the Sydney Windows Users Group or SWUG as it is affectionately known and the focus was on Windows 7 and all the new and improved support for media through both Windows Media Player and Windows Media Center.

As part of my presentation (here is the link to the slide deck), I did a number of demos of including setting up an XBOX 360 as a media extender and configuring Windows Media Player to stream media over the internet.  As normally happens anytime you try and do these things, they work flawlessly when you are not at  the event, but then things awry when you get to the event. So it was last night.

First up, this is what the basic setup looked like.

Now where it gets interesting is that the two Windows 7 Machines were run on one machine.  So the first machine was a X64 install, while the second one was a x86 install that was run as a virtual machine using Virtual PC 7

So it looked like this

As you can see, I have got the vodafone connect software loaded and it is reporting that there are no devices present, so using the USB virtualization functionality in Virtual PC, I was able to attach the 3G USB modem to the virtual machine by clicking on USB and selecting Attach

The Vodafone connect software now sees the device and detects the network

The next thing I needed to do was provide internet access to both the host machine and the XBOX360. 

This involved two steps, the first being to bind the physical network adapter on the host machine to the network adapter in the virtual machine.  This is done by clicking on Tools –> Settings, then selecting Networking and choosing the physical adapter from the drop down then clicking OK

Next up was to share the 3G connection using Internet Connection Sharing.  To do this I opened the properties for the 3G connection.  The quick way of doing this is to click on the connection icon next to the speaker icon in the system tray, then right click on the “Vodafone Mobile Connect” and select Properties.

Then you simply enable the Allow other network users to connect through this computer’s Internet connection checkbox

From there it was a simple matter of ensuring the host machine had DHCP enabled on its network adapter, plugging the network cable into the laptop and the XBOX360 and kicking off an address renewal and your done.

So there you have it, three machines, all with network and internet connectivity using 1 laptop, 1 network cable and 1 XBOX360.

Cool huh?

Yes yes, I know that the RC is now out and if you are playing with that you won’t get this error

But if you happen to be playing with the E14 beta and want to install in on to 2008R2 then you will as at the moment it is only supporting the 7000 build (i.e. the beta) so you may come across this error.

So how do you resolve it?  Well if you go and check out KB 961402 you will find a link to go and download a hotfix that resolves the issue.  The hotfix is free, you just need to enter your email address so they can email you a download link and a password to extract the contents of the archive.

Now it may come as a suprise to some of you that I have a couple of apple products that I use on a daily basis.  I did have a dalliance with Macs back in the day and I do actually have still have a Macintosh SE that I use on a daily basis.  Sure it is as a door stop, I just didn’t have the heart to gut it and turn it into a fish tank, but I do still use it on a daily basis.

As for the products that I do use in the manner in which they where intended, they are both bluetooth keyboards.  I have both the large and the small ones and I love them.  The large one has a great feel and lives on my desk, while the small one lives in the back pack and I use it when I am on the road. Actually the little one is not a happy beast at the moment as I think it didn’t appreciate the water that got spilt on it so I will be off to the apple store to purchase a new one.

Anyway, I digress.  I have just finished reinstalling the RC version of Windows 7 onto the main laptop I use and I needed to add the apple keyboard back in as a blue tooth device. While this should be a relatively straight forward task, there is a trick to it so I thought I would share.

So the first thing you need to do is fire up the Add a Bluetooth device wizard, and the easiest way to do this is to click on the windows button thingy (I really need to work out its official name) and type in Add a bluetooth and the search mojo in Win7 will find it for you, so just hit enter and it will launch.

With the wizard open you need to make sure your bluetooth keyboard is discoverable.  For the version 1 Apple wireless keyboard, it goes into this mode when you turn it on and you can tell as the little green LED next to the switch blinks.

Now this is where things get interesting.  If you select the keyboard and click next, after a minute or so you will get something like the following error.

Obviously not the desired result, so what you need to do is click try again, turn the keyboard off and on to put it into discovery mode, select the keyboard and then click next.

Now timing is everything here. On the keyboard, type in a 5 digit number sequence and hit enter. you should then get this screen.

Enter the same 5 digits in the wizard and click next. (obviously you will need to use a keyboard that is working at this point in time e.g. the laptop keyboard)

If you have done it right, then you should get this screen.

And you are now good to go!

With the Beta release of Exchange 14 or to give it its formal name, Exchange 2010, this week, Microsoft has lifted the covers off the next generation of its enterprise class messaging solution.  The new version continues many of the themes seen in Exchange 2007 and takes them to another level while also introducing a range of new features as well.  To get  an overview of the release, have a look at the Technet Edge video or the product overview.

For me one of the interesting parts of the release is the work that has been done concerning storage and high availability.  If you have a quick look at the storage overview page for the 2010 release you will see the following statement.

“The improvements made to Exchange Server 2010 storage add new options to the menu of Exchange storage choices, including the use of Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) hard disk drives and Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks (RAID)-less configurations.”

Storage design for Exchange has always been (and will continue to be) one of the most important elements of any Exchange deployment.  For many years the rule of thumb was lots of smaller drives as opposed to fewer larger drives.  The motivation for this was that Exchange lives and dies on IOPS or specifically the number of Input Output Operations Per Second.  At its heart, Exchange is a database application that generates a large number of small random transactions. A small transaction as a single operation is not going to tax your average storage device.  Requesting 20kb of data from a device that can transfer 50 – 100 MB per second is obviously not going to create a bottle neck, what is though is requesting hundreds or thousands of those small transactions and this is where the use of lots of smaller drives becomes desirable.  A single disk will sustain a given number of IOPS, think 50 as a round number, so in theory, if you have 2 disks you can sustain 100, 3 disks ~ 150 and so on. In reality you don’t get such a linear progression but for the sake of the argument it is not enough of a loss to discourage the practice.

Another reason for deploying multiple disks relates to the writing behavior for Exchange.  Putting it simply, when a change is made to the exchange database, the database page is read into memory, the change is written in memory, it is also written to a transaction log file in a sequential manner, and then shortly after it is written to the database on disk which is a non-sequential write. So each time something is changed in the database you get a sequential and a non-sequential write to different parts of the disk.  These contradicting writes don’t help with that sustained IOPS figure we are chasing as the disk has to spin its platters and move its heads in order get to the different data locations. The solution? use one disk for the database and another for the logs. As a side benefit this then provides some redundancy because if i lose one disk, i have a copy of the data on another disk which can be used to recover.

So to maximise performance what you want to do is have a bunch of disks handling your logs and a bunch of disks handling your database. Because of the non-sequential access to the database files, the recommendation was that you utilse a RAID solution that included striping so that you could maximise the IOPS, while for the logs you could use a mirrored solution. The RAID solution also provides you with additional redundancy as if you lose a disk, your server won’t go offline.

Next thing to think about is how many databases you are going to have.  Depending on the version you are using you can have upto 50 databases on your exchange server.  The advantage of having lots of smaller databases is that the amount of time taken to restore a single database in the event of a failure is reduced, this helps with meeting SLAs and also means that each failure affects fewer users. The downside though is that this means more disks. This is why you see large exchange servers that utilise hundreds of individual disks distributed across multiple arrays on a Storage Area Network (SAN).

Enough with the history lesson, what changes with Exchange 2010 then and why is it that Microsoft says I can use lower cost drives directly connected to my server?

I’m glad you asked. The first thing to be aware of is that the SATA/DAS/RAID-Less solution is only recommended for environments that have implemented the native High Availability features in Exchange 2010. The new release has a feature called a Database Availability Group or a DAG, now if you are from Australia, dag can have a couple of meanings, but in the Exchange world, a DAG is a collection of servers that maintain multiple copies of one or more databases. Under the covers DAG leverages the Windows Failover Cluster functionality and greatly simplifies the configuration of a high availability solution in Exchange.  DAG is the evolution of the continuous replication offerings from Exchange 2007. Previously there was the option of either maintaining a second copy of a database locally, on another node in a cluster or with SP1, on any other server in the org.  For 2010, the local copy has been removed (at this stage) and the cluster and remote options are now rolled into DAG functionality.

The simple translation then for the RAID-less statement is that provision of redundancy has been moved up the stack, so instead of relying on dedicated (expensive) hardware to maintain multiple copies of data, the application layer has its own intelligence and manages the redundancy for you.

The next part of the statement that is going to be jarring for those used to spending big dollars to buy storage arrays utilising enterprise class SAS & SCSI drives is the use of SATA drives. SAS & SCSI drives provided faster transfers, more IOPS per drive and better reliability when compared to SATA drives. The changes in Exchange 2010 that facilitate the move to cheaper disks are centered on the ESE database engine.  An increase in the page size from 8k in 2007 to 32k in 2010 is one of the most obvious elements that result in a 70% IO reduction when compared to Exchange 2007, what makes that even more impressive is that Exchange 2007 offered a 70% reduction over Exchange 2003. The other changes include optimization of the way pages are read and written, instead of grabbing a couple of smaller bits of data here and there, 2010 will do one larger read or write operation, so instead of a transaction requiring 3 or 4 IOs it only takes 1. So the net result is that the IO load on the disk is down 90% compared to an Exchange 2003 server.

Obviously it is early days for 2010, but even at this stage, it is an impressive release that is going to get exchange admins and architects changing the way they think about their storage administration and design.

Just saw that David Lowe posted this link to a new series called Ask Iain which is a little web video production with Iain McDonald who is the GM of Windows Server.  I have had the good fortune of having a drink with Iain, the last time being at the rooftop bar at the Standard in LA, but that is a story for another time.

Anyway, back to the video, he briefly talks about the new Windows Server 2008 Foundation edition and answers the question of why it exists. Now I will be honest and say that there is not a lot of meat in the video, but I think as far as an episode 1 goes it is pretty good and I am looking forward to seeing where they take it.

Just a quick one as I’m elbow deep in getting ready to head to the US for some Office Communications Server 2007 & Exchange 14 training, but I wanted draw some attention to fine efforts of Joey & Adam over at Technet Edge and a video they just put out called Social Networking in the real world

I’m currently sitting in a great little lounge that they have at the Incheon airport in Seoul, Korea, that is setup with a bunch of laptops as well as tables with lots of power and comfy chairs so you can plug in your own machine and surf for free.  The reason I am here is that Seoul was the third stop in a tour I did with Michael Cooper from Microsoft and Robin Brandl from Citrix that focused on the virtualization offerings from Microsoft and Citrix.

The core focus of the tour was VDI or Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, so we spent time looking at Hyper-V, System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008, Application Virtualization (App-V), RemoteApp and the Citrix XEN Desktop suite.

Before I started working on this project I had not seen the XEN Desktop offerings, and I have to say I am completely blown away by it.  My favourite component by far has to be the provisioning server. Once you have setup it up it allows you to stream a disk image to a machine across the network using a combination of PXE network booting and some custom Citrix protocols.  What this means is that you can rapidly provision machines with an operating system using a central image.  When you need to update the image, you do it once and the next time the machines boot that get the new image and you are up and running.  There is a great video that demonstrates 150 dell machines using the provisioning feature to boot and it is definitely worth checking out.

Within the VDI space, the provisioning server gives you the ability to deploy multiple virtual machines whilst minimizing the storage requirements for the host. So instead of needing 30gb of expensive server storage per VM, you now have a single copy of the image stored on the provisioning server, the VMs PXE boot and get their disk image streamed to them, and then your only additional storage requirements are for the write cache (300-500mb is recommended for a typical desktop user) for the vdisk which can be located on the provisioning server, in ram on the VM or even on a local disk on the VM.

For environments that utilise a standard operating environment (SOE) then the provisioning server is an ideal solution as you can also use it with physical machines (as per the video).  So the deployment process for a new machine then becomes you pull it out of the box, plug it into the network, provision its MAC address on the provisioning server and you boot it and 15 seconds later it is booted ready to go.

Part of the magic of the provisioning server as well is that it will inject custom data into each vdisk so that each client has a unique machine name and computer account on the domain so you don’t have any issues with name clashes.

I have to wrap this up though as my flight is being called, so go download an eval of XEN Desktop and have a play as it is seriously cool!

Browsing on the Microsoft site today I stumbled across some downloadable documents on Hyper-V Server 2008 R2.  One of the first that caught my eye was the Configuration Tool Guide. The screen shot below was taken from the doc and what makes it interesting is the additions to the configuration tool, specifically you can see the clustering configuration option.  Yep, Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 will be a free download and will support 16 node clustering. Why does this matter you ask?  Well clustering Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 boxes will then give you support for Live Migration. As part of this there is an overview & architecture doc available as well a step-by-step guide for using Live Migration with Hyper-V

For the full overview, have a look at this doc

Shameless promotion time.  A new batch of my How Do I videos have just been posted on the Technet site, this time they are focusing on Virtualization and some of the cool things you can do with System Center Virtual Machine 2008.

Two of my favourite features in SCVMM are P2V conversion and V2V migration. SCVMM almost turns the processes in to a trivial task, so in the two videos I show how you go about performing the operations, discuss the requirements and perform both operations, so go take a look and let me know your thoughts.

One of the hot topics from the Singapore course I am delivering on VDI is support for Hyper-V and Nic Teaming.

Michael Cooper mentioned that some whitepapers were in the pipeline for how to configure NIC teaming for Hyper-V, so the first couple have appeared from HP and can be found here and here. The first link is the 5 page how to guide for proliant servers and the second one is a 50 odd page discussion at a high and low level on the technology.

enjoy

Microsoft has started pumping out the docs on the next versions of Windows client & server and has made a couple of guides available as a download.

Download details: Windows 7 IT Pro Guides

I also recommend heading over to the windows server techcenter where you’ll find gems such as the migration guides that discuss the awesome new migration tools in 2008 R2.

As a side note, this is the first time since Windows 2000 that there has been a simultaneous client and server release for Windows, and when you start seeing the better together story you’ll completely understand why this is so cool.

I’m currently putting together some Technet How Do I videos on System Center Mobile Device Manager.  The first of these is going to focus on the prerequisites required to get it up and running and one of the issues I ran in to was that every time I tried to run a scan, i got an error stating that the scan failed.  Looking in the logs didn’t help and a cursory scan over the help files didn’t help either (if i had looked more closely I would have found the answer at the bottom of the help file) so I did what any self respecting IT Pro does and I fired up my search engine of choice and in the results I found a great series of posts over at mobilitydojo.net dealing specifically with setting up SCMDM so if your looking at setting it up i thoroughly recommend heading over and checking it out.

The answer to the BPA not running the scans lies in Powershell and the default execution policy which prevents the BPA scripts from running, so the solution is to open the powershell console and run the following command

Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned

Once that is done you should find the scans run.

System Center Mobile Device Manager 2008 - Install Guide (No Gateway) - Part 1 | MobilityDojo.net

One of the projects that I have mentioned a couple of times now is the Technet How Do I videos that I have been recording over the last couple of months.

For those not familiar with them, they started out over in the MSDN world and are designed to be short videos (5-20 minutes) that focus on a particular task or concept and show you how to do something.  They are not designed to be a marketing spiel, more like you have walked over to a co-workers cubicle and they have walked you through the process of doing something.

Obviously I am biased, but I do think they are worth checking out and given that this is the current list of topics

• Deployment
• Exchange
• Exchange Online
• Microsoft Online
• Office Communciations Server

• Script Center
• Security
• SharePoint Server
• SQL Server
• Virtualization

• Windows Client
• Windows Server 2008
• Windows Server Terminal Services
• Windows SharePoint Services

You are bound to find something of interest, so what are you waiting for? go on click here to see them all!

For those not familiar with it Microsoft's Hyper-V Server 2008 it is essentially a customised server core installation of Windows Server 2008 that only allows a limited number of features to be installed, includes no licenses for guests and needs to be managed via either via WMI scripts on the local machine or ideally through the Hyper-V management console from a full server installation.

This table lists the feature differences

And here is the output of a OCLIST showing the features that can be installed on a Hyper-V Server.

As you can see, Hyper-V server provides a great little platform for running virtual hosts especially in test and development environments.

This week I have been toiling away with Hyper-V as I was getting ready to record a "How do I" video for Technet and the one thing that kept causing me grief was the error you see in the screen shot below.

So what is the solution? It's quite simple really. Install KB 950050.  So for my demo environment I was installing Hyper-V server as a child VM on a full installation of Windows Server 2008 so I could then use Camtasia to capture the whole process.  I then joined it to the domain and went to another 2008 VM to try and manage it.  The other VM did not have the hotfix from the KB applied so as a result I kept getting the error you see.  Once the hotifix was applied then it was a simple matter of connecting to the server and it was all good. Of course if you have not joined the Hyper-V server to the domain then you need to do a little more work, well more than a little really but John Howard has simplified that with a great script that does all the heavy lifting for you.

One of my current projects had me looking for an extra box to work with so after a bit of looking I found an old Dell PowerEdge 2650 with Dual 2.4ghz Xeons, 6Gb of ram and a couple of 36Gb scsi drives.  The price of $255USD was OK, not great, but OK, so off I went and picked it up and then set about getting it up and running.

To cut a very long story short, I eventually got it running through a combination of Windows PE 2.0, a freeware PXE boot solution called TFTPD32 and a great blog post.

Some other little things that I learnt along the way

• The BIOS option of “Operating System Install” mode under the memory settings restricts the system to using 256Mb of ram.  This option is apparently directed at some *nix installations that spit the dummy if there is more than 256Mb of ram.
• Turning on the “operating System Install” mode when installing Windows Server 2008 will result in a memory error message that looks like a memory corruption, but is it actually complaining that it doesn’t have enough ram.
• Having a full synched WSUS server local saves ALOT of time.

With all the hype surrounding the release of the Beta for Windows 7 (psst … if you want to download load the beta, get in quick, its been announced that Feb 10 will be the last day to start the download … unless of course you have a Technet Plus or MSDN subscription) there has not been a huge focus on the corresponding server release.

So what’s the deal?  Well Windows 7 will be the client release and is the successor to Windows 7.  I have been running it for a while now and I am liking what I am seeing.  Be it the performance on my netbook or my “proper” laptops, it is looking great.  With the release of Vista and Windows Server 2008, one of the big stories was the unified code base.  So with the release of Windows 7 that means a new server is around the corner and it is great to see that the documentation is starting to flow.  One of the first questions most people ask is what is new? So if you head over to the Technet site you can find this great article that lists all the changes in functionality from 2008 to 2008 R2.  Now the document is written around the beta so it could change, but there is some really cool stuff on the horizon.

Some of my favourites are the AD Recycle Bin which I demoed at the recent MCT summit in Redmond, my good friend Joey Snow has also done a blog post on this topic which also includes links to his video on Technet Edge, I also think the idea behind the Branch Office Cache is pretty sweet too.  The basic idea is that one client in a branch transfers data (ie a file) using the SMB protocol, so basic file sharing, and then when someone else in the office wants it, they get it from the first person.  I need to dig into it a little further but I figure you combine a RODC with the Branch Office Cache and you wrap the whole thing in Bitlocker so even if someone walks off with your server, they are not going to be able to get access to the data on the drives.  The other thing that I am loving with Bitlocker is the support for using it on removable devices, and the ability to control that through group policies.  So that means you can setup a policy that says if any one wants to use a usb key on a machine that you manage, then it must be encrypted. nice stuff.

And I have to say that I like it.  I'm currently writing this on my Lenovo S10 Netbook using Windows Live Writer while the Zune software is playing music in the background and outlook is syncing my mailbox in the background and it is an entirely usable experience.

I was fortunate enough to have received one of the earlier builds and I did have some driver issues with that version but the latest public beta build installed without skipping a beat, it detected all the hardware including my wireless adapter and even prompted me for credentials to join my wireless network as part of the setup processs.

So if you would like to have a look at what is happening with the next version of Windows, head over here  to get the public beta, head here for the springboard site to learn all about it from an ITPro perspective and if you have any questions, be sure to head to the technet forums to post them.

Gordo

Anyone who has seen me at a console will know that if possible i like to use the keyboard.  I don’t have any real dislike of mice I just find it quicker to hit the windows key and R then type in dsa.msc to open ADUC or whatever than to dig through menus.  As a result I have a number of them memorised but there are some which i never remember so I have to dig through the menus to find them.

So while catching up on some RSS feeds today on the flight home from Perth today I found a great article from the guys at Activedir.org that lists all the consoles and their corresponding msc files. So in what can only be described as blatant plagiarism is known as repurposing content here is the list.

Active Directory Management  admgmt.msc
ADSI Edit  adsiedit.msc
Application Server  appsrv.msc
Authorization Manager  azman.msc
Certificates  certmgr.msc
Certificate Authority  certsrv.msc
Certificate Templates  certtmpl.msc
Indexing Service  ciadv.msc
Component Services  comexp.msc
Computer Management  compmgmt.msc
Default Domain Controller Security Settings  dcpol.msc
Device Manager  devmgmt.msc
Disk defragmenter  dfrg.msc
Distributed File System  dfsgui.msc
DHCP  dhcpmgmt.msc
Disk Management  diskmgmt.msc
DNS  dnsmgmt.msc
Active Directory Domains and Trusts  domain.msc
Default Domain Security Settings  dompol.msc
Active Directory Users and Computers  dsa.msc
Active Directory Sites and Services  dssite.msc
Event Viewer  eventvwr.msc
Exchange System Manager  Exchange System Manager.msc
File Server Management  filesvr.msc
Shared Folders  fsmgmt.msc
Microsoft Fax Service Manager  fxsadmin.msc
Group Policy  gpedit.msc
Group Policy Management  gpmc.msc
Internet Authentication Service  ias.msc
Internet Information Services  iis.msc
IP Address Management  ipaddrmgmt.msc
Local Users and Groups  lusrmgr.msc
.NET Configuration 1.1  mscorcfg.msc
Removable Storage  ntmsmgr.msc
Removable Storage Operator Requests  ntmsoprq.msc
Performance  perfmon.msc
Enterprise PKI  pkiview.msc
Public Key Management  pkmgmt.msc
Routing and Remote Access   rrasmgmt.msc
Remote Storage  rsadmin.msc
Resultant Set of Policy  rsop.msc
Active Directory Schema  schmmgmt.msc
Local Security Settings  secpol.msc
Services  services.msc
Sidwalk  sidwalk.msc
Telephony  tapimgmt.msc
Terminal Services Configuration/Connections  tscc.msc
Remote Desktops  tsmmc.msc
UDDI Services Console  uddi.msc
Active Directory Users and Computers (Exchange version)  users and computers.msc
WINS  winsmgmt.msc
Windows Management Infrastructure (WMI)  wmimgmt.msc

This week has seen me on the other side of the big island delivering the Microsoft Official Curriculum official offerings for Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 to a great bunch of guys at the Excom Education office there. 

As per usual I mentioned a couple of different URLs through the week so am posting them for the benefit of the guys in the class and any other interested parties.

www.microsoft.com/UC Home page for Microsoft’s Unified Communications offering and provides links to both the OCS and Exchange elements of the story. Its worth having a look at the customer stories here as well.

http://www.microsoft.com/communicationsserver/en/us/default.aspx OCS product home page with links to download trial software. Unfortunately there are no preconfigured VHDs available for download, but you can grab a trial copy of the OCS software and then load it on to a pre built 2003R2 VHD that you can join to the same domain as the Exchange 2007 SP1 pre built VHD and you are good to go.

communicationsserverteam.com Home page for the OCS team blog. This is a great resource for the latest updates and info on OCS direct from the product team. If you looking at integrating Cisco Call Manager and OCS be sure to check out the post from September 30  (The exchange team is also worth checking out too). 

www.ocspedia.com provides some great articles on OCS, Exchange UM and generally all things UC for Microsoft.

During one of the add-hoc labs we did in class we had some issues with the external url for content not being configured, so KB938288 provides guidance on using lcscmd and wbemtest to configure these settings.  I will also put up a video for this process soon as well.

For the course, one of the things we did was create a second BCD entry for server 2008 that had Hyper-V disabled and reference was made to Vista Boot Pro which provides a GUI for creating and managing the BCD in Vista and later OSs.

This is the link on virtualised offline Root Certificate authorities. Speaking of PKI, the windows PKI team also has there own blog too

So there were a couple of questions which I wanted to follow up on from the course, so these are the answers I’ve found so far.

Q. Will OCS 2007 R2 run on Windows Server 2008?
A. Apparently. There is not a whole lot of public material floating around at the moment, but expect that to change with the rapid approach of the official launch event on February 3 2009.

Q. Can you use SQL2008 with OCS 2007
A. The only reference to this I can find is a forum post which is inconclusive. Erring on the side of caution from a support point of view I would stick with SQL 2005. 

There are a couple of other questions I still need to follow up so I will update this post as I find the answers.

One of my favorite apps is little open source one called Synergy which allows you to use a single keyboard and mouse across multiple machines.  So the typical usage scenario for me is that I will be working on one laptop running virtual machines and then writing on a second one.  Before this would have involved changing keyboards and mice each time I wanted to use a different machine, with Synergy, I take the mouse the to the side of the screen and then it seamlessly starts working on the second machine.

The issue I have seen people have though is getting it up and running the first time, so I figured I would do a quick video on how to setup Synergy, so click the link below and see synergy in action.

Well there isn’t really, but a handy reference book in electronic form for free is hard to pass up!

Jeff Alexander, IT Pro Evangelist from Australia, has posted a link from the folks (give me a break, I have spent more time outside oz than in it this year) at MS Press who as part of their 25th anniversary are offering some of their publications for free as ebooks.  So head on over to Jeffa’s site and follow the link and register to get yours today!

Jeff Alexander's Weblog : Free Microsoft Press E-Book Offer!

For the multitude of RSS feeds I have I use Outlook 2007 to view them and occasionally a back log builds up so I sit down and go through the posts to see if there is anything I should be looking at, and so when I stumbled across a post named VMC to Hyper-V Import Tool Available  I had to go and check it out, and sure enough Matthijs ten Seldam has written a tool that will import a Virtual PC 2007 or Virtual Server 2005 R2 VMC file into Hyper-V. Very Cool!

I was recently fortunate enough to spend 3 weeks attending the Microsoft Certified Master : Active Directory course in Redmond and one of the instructors we had was Ned Pyle who seriously knows his stuff, anyway one of the discussions we had during the course was on the idea of lag sites when you are designing an AD implementation.  It made for quite and interesting discussion and I’m pleased to see that Ned has posted an entry written by Gary from the Directory Services team on the Directory Services team blog, so its definitely worth heading over there and giving it a read.

If you are thinking about using lag sites as a recovery strategy and have not investigated the snapshot functionality with Active Directory in Windows Server 2008 then I recommend you go and have a look at it. To get an idea of the functionality, head over to TechNet Edge and have a look the story they posted on Qbranch and their tool for restoring objects using snapshots and also be sure to have a look at the extreme tech blog post on AD snapshots and the MS tools that available as well.

I should also mention that Joey Snow is actually 6”6 as he told me today, but as any one who has seen Joey in full Vegas mode can attest to, he is larger than life, so I will blame it on that, he also mentioned that he has some cool postings planned for his blog over the coming weeks, so be sure to keep an eye on it!