Technically Speaking

Recently I was working on a project to get an application prepared for rollout. When I received the initial email about the process that needed to be followed, I called the vendor to find out if our usual server configuration would work or if different considerations would be needed. Specifically we are considering virtualization in the future using Windows Server 2008 R2 guest machines.

The response I received was that this application would support Windows Server 2008 but not Windows Server 2008 R2. I asked about plans to support R2 and was told that the application would not support Server 2008 R2 for some time. In other words they have no plans right now to support it.

My first thought was that this was a bit of an odd practice since Windows Server 2008 R2 is the current version of Server OS from Microsoft. Then I got to thinking about some of the considerations I might need to make to work this application. The only testing to be done is to ensure that the application, once installed, communicates to its supported devices over our network.

My plan is to set the application up using a Windows Server 2008 R2 Virtual Machine just to see if it will even run. If it doesn’t work, a 2008 VM will be tested, but since the functionality of the application is very limited in scope, I thought it was worth a shot. My goal is to spin up a 2008 R2 guest for this testing very soon (next week sometime).

I also started thinking about the difference between “not supported” and does not work. There are many applications that vendors no longer support and configurations they choose not to support that work just fine. Case in point, Windows 2000. Microsoft doesn’t support Windows 2000 anymore. But if I install it, it will run just like it was 1999.

If an application can run on an operating system one step (or half step) prior to current, there are few things that would make it unusable on the current OS. This to me, warrants giving it a shot. I believe that the requirements I got didn’t rule out x64 architecture, thus making it likely to work just fine on the current version of Windows Server. This way all of the servers in our upcoming environment will be consistent on the same OS (for a little while anyway). I also have to admit there are times when I like a challenge… and this is one of those times.

When considering supported applications, it is generally good to follow supported guidelines given by the manufacturer. When the application or vendor provides no technical reasoning or explanation for this choice, it might be worth a try. It comes down to the cost of your time and availability of your resources. If you have the time and resources to test, go for it. If not, well, convenience (and downgrade rights) say that following the stated guidelines is the easiest course.

Applications like VMware do not work on things outside their stated hardware compatibility list. Sure there are some who might be able to work on the edges of that list, but mostly it is definitely easier to work amongst the guidelines of the HCL. Being someone new to VMware, I am following the HCL for sure.

My advice here is dependent on your time and interest. If you are curious and have the resources, test it. If not, do not bother testing it. Being a bit of a geek, I rather enjoy the idea of testing things just for the sake of trying them out. It has helped me learn many different ways to do things as well as just learning about technology. Which I certainly encourage.

I head to Austin Tx for Tech Field Day 7 on Wednesday morning. Should be a good couple days of sessions and overall discussion. I am not sure at the moment who I am most looking forward to. I think all of the presenters have things that interest me.

The Presenters are:

Dell (Dell | @Dell_Storage)

SolarWinds (SolarWinds | @SolarWinds_Inc)

Symantec (Symantec | @Symantec)

Veeam (Veeam | @Veeam)

Some of them I have seen before, but there are new product releases since then and probably some new faces as well. I think the networking opportunity is what I like the best about Tech Field Day. In my neck of the weeds… er woods there aren’t many user groups so these events and the online stuff that tends to go with them are high on my list. Although the local tech stuff may be changing soon, but I cannot divulge that just yet.

I am looking forward to seeing some old friends again and definitely making some new ones. These events are busy, but in my past experiences they are enjoyable.

A bit of a thank you in advance to Stephen, Matt, and the rest of the TechFieldDay crew, without them, we wouldn’t be doing this. Oh and for the links above, I apologize as the editor I can access right now doesn’t seem to HTML friendly – will fix those soon. Update: Links Fixed… much better.

I finally got the data migrated to new storage at my organization. The information moved very quickly and went off without a hitch (and minimal yelling/frustration). The one area I found that was not so friendly is the Share Permissions on the destination storage.

I understand that the basic rule of permissions is least privilege, where the most restrictive setting wins. However I apparently missed this idea when configuring the shares where the data would land. As soon as the copy was completed, the email went out to alert the users that the new storage was all set and shortly thereafter, the emails came in that it wasn’t working.

Everyone had readonly access to the newly moved information. Read only is no good. And I proceeded to review all the NTFS permissions and look over all of the items that were copied because there was a problem with the NTFS permissions or how the copy was done (you know, the hard stuff has to be where the problem is).

After several looks at the completed project, and getting nowhere fast, I removed one of the shares using Share and storage manager. The removal was to prevent use of the share while I was troubleshooting the problem. When I decided that it was not the problem and that the read access was ok I rebuilt the share… In the wizard to read the share I found the options for Share permissions.

Then the light bulb went off…

If the Admins group has full control and everyone else has read only access to the share… the read only problem was right out front. The share was disallowing it. Changing these settings got the problem solved right away.

The lesson here is to think simple. Sure you need to think about the NTFS and more complex items as well, but most certainly do not leave out the easy upfront items because they are simple and likely shouldn’t be the problem. Many times these things will bring headaches that are not worth it… just check one more time. Had I looked into that one more time during prep, the entire migration would have been completed with the scheduled job… no weekend work required (by me at least).

Recently I started reading the Daily on the iPad, and today they had an interesting piece on storage. The piece discussed the findings of a college researcher discovering the amount of data stored on man made devices. The final tally, 295 Exabytes. Holy man thats a lot of data.

According to the article, this is a drop in the bucket to the amount of DNA data stored in just one human being. 90 Zettabytes or 90,000 Exabytes of DNA data per person.

It seems that even though we store more data, and multiple copies of the same files everyday, but we have quite a long way to go. This makes me wonder just what we are capable of. If there is that much information zipping around within each of us, when will we tap into it? And when we do, what then?

Storage and compute get faster and larger with smaller form factor all the time. I’m curious to know what we will witness in the next 15 to 20 years. If 256Gb of storage is coming soon to cheap commonly available storage what’s next? Terabytes of storage for $20? The Flux Capacitor? Who knows?

While I tried to provide the link for the article from The Daily, it is only available in the app at this time. If you have an iPad I encourage you to check out The Daily it is a great way to get the news and is new everyday. Plus, Verizon had been providing 2 weeks free.

Welcome to June.  Today Microsoft launched Bing, it’s new approach to search and so far, I think it is pretty slick.

Suggested links based on your query are placed along the side of the page, offering a list of additional items. 

For example, searching for Green Bay produced a list of popular Green Bay related sites as expected, but the list on the left provided other things I might like to know about Green Bay such as restaurants, weather, airport information and other things.

Figure A below shows some of the results returned for Green Bay.

Figure 1

The site also includes related search terms in the left column to help find other resources based on what is entered.

I have also noticed that Bing is location aware.  For example, when I searched for Star Trek, the movie listings for the area I am currently in appeared.  Helpful when travelling and looking for things near by for sure.  Figure B shows my current results for Star Trek.

Figure B

Surely I haven’t even begun to scratch the surface on the features brought out in Bing, but I will give it a shot and see if Microsoft can catch the competition.

So what does this have to do with IT Management?

The answer to that question depends on how you look at it.  Taylored results and additional suggestions, beyond sponsored links, can be very helpful.  It seems to me that the search engine is smarter in calculating results and delivers more useful content.

Imagine attending a conference for your company and being able to rely on your search engine to check flight status, get a cab, find reasonable dinner choices, and get the baseball scores for the game of the local baseball team.  Saving time in looking for local results based on your IP address.

Giving your users and staff a predictive search tool could be a huge benefit if the technology Microsoft is using is well maintained and stays afloat.  Predictive search results might be a boost to the productivity of employees because they will spend less time searching for results and more time actually using found information.

I am excited to give Bing! its due.  Check it out at http://www.bing.com and leave your thoughts or usage suggestions in the comments.

I know that there are still many IT Pros out there looking for work, or things to keep them up to date on the latest features, and even though the previous give away has ended, the Thrive Site is still going strong. It is packed with information to help you advance both your skills and your career.

The site contains webcasts of sessions to build your knowledge as well as links to valuable blogs and other sites that might be of value to you or those in your communities that are trying to grow in the Information Technology field.

Many statistics today focus on those who have been displaced from a career and are looking for work and thrive is moving this way at the present time as well, hopefully in the future some material or webcasts involving educational institutions and career offices to help those coming out of college find things in the IT field that will better their careers or skill sets.

I strongly encourage you to check out Thrive if you haven’t already. If you have been there, there are new links and resources coming every day to help broaden your skills and increase your career opportunities.

If anyone has any suggestions for things that might help improve the site or increase the resources available please post them in the comments and I will make sure to pass them along.

On Monday April 20 2009, Kevin Remde (of MS Technet and IT evangelism fame) hosted another Town Hall style live meeting covering how Microsoft does BI.

The topic of discussion was varied discussing how BI is used with data in a SQL Server and how other platforms, such as Oracle, DB2, Excel, and Sharepoint information could be gathered into one place for analysis.

I will update this post with the link to the on demand session as soon as it is available.

Be sure to register for the next Chat with Kevin, scheduled for Monday May 4 at 11 AM PDT, covering Service Oriented Architecture and Business Process Management.

Hope you can make it to the next session.

The first live chat, covering virtualization is in the books.  Overall it went quite well and was a great experience for me.  I hope that the chats continue and that the attendees were able to take something valuable away from the session.

For those of you who were not able to attend the session, the replay is available by clicking the link below:

IT Manager Community Chat with Kevin – Virtualization – 4/9/2009

Working on meetings and ensuring all of the parties and details are captured can be very tedious process.  Just arranging a time that works for everyone and getting into Outlook can be a hassle.

There are ways to take these meetings online, Microsoft’s Live Meeting, Citrix Goto Meeting, or Webex are three that spring to mind.

Note: Because these applications can be quite pricey, it is not my goal with this post to sell software for any of the vendors listed.

I wanted to look at the Microsoft solution, Live Meeting, not to try and get more shops to adopt the technology, although it is a great tool, but to suggest that IT staff take the time to attend some webinars sorry Live Meetings and get to know the application.

Meeting with vendors, customers, co-workers, and other groups or individuals via the web can save time for all involved.  It might even allow for IT Managers to send their staff to seminars, using web technology, to help them grow their skills.

If you go so far as to demo the technology to co-workers and management outside of IT, you may find savings in all kinds of places that might justify the cost of the application.

Note: I do not plan to review Live Meeting in this post, though I am considering doing so in the future. I wanted to get you thinking about meetings and how web technologies might remove the need for meetings or enable better use of meetings and the time spent in them.

Microsoft has tons of Live Meeting events, some public, some not, but they host tons of Live Meetings.  I would recommend looking around TechNet for a live meeting that might cover a topic that you or your staff struggle with or have questions about.  Or attend one of the IT Manager chats coming up as those will be done with Live Meeting.

Live Meeting has helped me tremendously in allowing travel to be reduced while keeping PowerPoint on the table.  It will not always replace a face to face meeting for many organizations, but in some it could as web cams can provide a visual experience.

From where I sit, Live Meeting makes conference calls more robust and more useful.  Making them a true alternative to face to face meetings.

So I encourage you to participate in the web chats for IT Managers or at least look into what Live Meeting might be able to offer your company, you might be surprised at the adoption and possibilities it brings.  I know I do.

I read an interesting post the other day about just being a Microsoft shop and that got me thinking. Thinking about where we, the IT community might be without companies like Microsoft.

Sure there are other technologies, phones, mainframes, UNIX, and others that would likely be around somehow, but I have had the benefit of being able to learn Microsoft products and technologies and use them to do my job or get my job and all of that. There have been times when I wasn’t sure that Microsoft was the right path for me to learn down but try as I might it seems Microsoft and related products keep me the most interested. And then came twitter, but that is another issue altogether.

The technology available from Microsoft has been steadily getting better, even Windows Vista has its strengths. I am glad for all of the experiences I have had and opportunities I have been given because of Microsoft. This seems to keep me coming back down the Microsoft path.

I am sure most shops, even Microsoft itself, have other technologies running on the network and this is a good thing because it keeps us as IT managers and Systems Administrators fresh. There is no way to know all of the technology that is out there, and likely no way to know all of the Microsoft stuff or the Sun stuff or the Apple stuff, but choosing the things that are most interesting to you will likely lead you a certain way.

Continually building skills that can help your taste for technology grow and at the same time aid your company in accomplishing its goals will be a popular path for a long time to come. In our currently tough economy technology might be pressed by management to show rapid ROI and have budgets reviewed and downsized, but taking the initiative on yourself (or with your team) to learn and keep growing will help you in the long run. Just keep somethings that are truly interesting on the front of your desk, this might help motivate you to keep pushing when the reading gets dry and the fun runs short.

Hopefully those of you that feel you just work in a Microsoft shop will step back and look at the technologies you do use. I wonder what the world would be like today if Microsoft had decided to produce seat cushions instead of software.