My Digital Life

With all the recent virtualisation launches from MS (App-V 4.5 and Hyper-V Server 2008) I’ve been doing a bit more reading on the subject over the last few days.  I’ve always used various flavours of VMWare in the past so I thought I’d better catch up with whats going on on the MS side of the world.  There’s quite a bit of good info out there, but this caught my eye so I thought I’d pass it on.

Its a collection of four online elearning clinics on the the MS virualisation products.  Obviously they’re not at detailed as proper training courses, but they look like a decent overview to see what the products are all about.  Not bad for free :)

Included are:
Clinic 5935: Introducing Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008
Clinic 6334: Exploring Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008
Clinic 6335: Exploring Microsoft Application Virtualization
Clinic 6336: Exploring Terminal Services in Windows Server 2008

Link:
https://www.microsoftelearning.com/eLearning/offerDetail.aspx?offerPriceId=228501

I just found this pretty good video on the apple site describing - at a high level - Mac integration with Active Directory. 

http://seminars.apple.com/seminarsonline/activedir/apple/

For someone from a Windows background (like me) it’s worth a look.  It’s also interesting to see the difference in style between the Apple and MS.  Given the brand personas of the two companies you’d expect the styles to be reversed, with the more friendly informal stuff coming from Cupertino rather than Redmond.  But, you can’t fault the content.

Having just been thinking about what a next generation Microsoft OS might be like, I do wonder if they would keep the Windows name. 

It’s served MS well for decades, but it brings with it a heap of baggage.  A shiny new name would help give the platform the fresh start it might need.

(What a pointless post…  I apologise! :)  )

There’s been quite a lot of talk over the past few days about an project MS is running called Midori that may, or may not, be the makings of a new legacy free OS.

The prospect of an entirely new OS is quite an exciting one, the world has moved a long way since the WinNT code base that XP and Vista are based around was first written.  It’s probably fair to say that to some extent today’s hardware is held back by the legacy components that the OS are forced to include.

That said, as Ed Bott talks about on his blog, such a change is not something to be taken likely.  There are A LOT of existing Windows users and applications that would need to be supported in any change.  As I believe MS discovered with Vista, the cost of migrating applications to a new platform is a huge obstacle to business migration.

Or is it…

Virtualisation technology is advancing hugely, if not in overall functionality then in the ease with which it can be utilised.  Microsoft’s Hyper-V is part of the basic server OS, and as I understand it will be core to Windows 7.  Application virtualisation is maturing nicely as a tool and is, I believe, about to become mainstream.  Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) is now something that enterprises can realistically consider, again Windows 7 will drive this even further forward.

With all of these components in place, the release of a new OS should be much simpler than ever before.  Application compatibility, the big killer of migrations, should slowly become less of a challenge.  The toolset needed to run applications across multiple OS’s on the one system is pretty much all there.  Of course those apps won’t benefit from whatever advances Midori might bring, but as cover for a transition period that’s not so important.  As long as they work, both independently and with each other, that’s a huge problem out of the way.

I agree with Ed that any new OS is likely to live in parallel to a standard Windows product for some time, but I do think the migration will be quicker than we’ve seen before.

Yesterday I left a comment on a post over on istartedsomthing.  The post was about a job advert for developers to work on virtual hard disks, and it’s implications for Windows 7 functionality.

There seems to be quite a bit of focus on this line from the advert:

"Consider the simplicity of backup using a VHD, or the portability of a virtual disk backed by a single file."

Whilst that’s all very nice, for me the real interesting quote is this:

"Imagine being able to mount a VHD on any Windows machine, do some offline servicing and then boot from that same VHD. Or perhaps, taking an existing VHD you currently use within Virtual Server and boost performance by booting natively from it."

Specifically the last bit. 

If the intention is to include the ability to boot from a VHD, this implies that the platform will be built around, or at least support, a hypervisor like Hyper-V.

Of course this may be a focus for a future server version of Windows 7, but if included in the desktop as well it could make virtual desktops (VDI) and blade workstations a much more appealing prospect for the future. 

Imagine running an office full of desktop machines.  The low end requirements could be met using VM’s hosted on large servers, say 20-30 per server, presented to the user by a thin client.  If a user has a more complex requirement, you could simply move that VM to a dedicated blade workstation.  Hopefully that would use the same thin client and be pretty transparent to the end user - perhaps even VMotion style transparent.  If the user then needs to move office or go mobile just copy their VM to a remote server/blade, or to a standard desktop or laptop. 

It would need some good management tools but it could be quite a nice solution.

I was just catching up on what’s been happening on twitter this afternoon and I noticed that Jemima posted an article on the Guardian about Apple and its (non-)moves into the Enterprise space.

I’ll let you read the post yourself (Jemima’s stuff is always worth reading), but the gist of the story is that Apple are now moving into the enterprise without even trying.

For years Apple has deliberately ignored the corporate world.  The enterprise just isn’t where Big Steve wants the company to be.    He’s concentrated on home consumers and the education market.  That’s fair enough, I can see why.

The thing is… over the past few years Apple has pulled of something quite remarkable.  It changed the world.  It made computers, or more specifically it’s computers, cool.  Not just geeky cool, but mainstream cool. 

Combine this with Apples focus on education, offering cheap Macs to students and faculty, and the enterprise space is now seeing a huge influx of talent and skills that are expecting to find a Mac on their desk at the office.

Now I fully expect Steve to take credit for this master plan at some point, whether it was a plan or not who knows, only him I guess.  But what this means for me is that I need to start shifting IT infrastructure to a multi-platform model. 

Now I think this is fantastic.  After all, IS organisations are there to make the business more productive.  But For IT departments that have spent the last 10 years standardising and streamlining their platforms the prospect of adopting a whole new set of management systems isn’t that attractive.

It’s here that Apples indifference to the enterprise world begins to show.

Microsoft, for all its faults, gets Enterprise computing.  Really gets it.  It knows how IT works in big business and creates tools to help make IT organisations more effective.  So do a whole bunch of other companies who specialise in  deploying, managing, patching and securing large PC based environments. 

This ecosystem doesn’t really exist in the Mac world - or at least not to the same extent.  There are definitely tools out there, but for the most part they are pretty bespoke to Mac’s.  They need tools and skills that otherwise don’t exist in a PC environment.  Supporting both the Windows and Mac platforms therefore has the potential to increase overall costs. 

Help is at hand however, and we end up with a rather strange situation where the ecosystem that supports the current PC focused enterprise is possibly better placed to simplify the adoption of Mac than Apple is. 

You can already see this happening, people like Quest and other members of the SMSAlliance provide extensions for System Centre Configuration Manager and other management suites.  LANDesk and Altiris are continually adding to their own support for Macs.  Microsoft themselves recently released Messenger for Mac 7 that built in support for Office Communications Server. 

Hopefully with all this increased support enterprises can start to adopt Mac’s without having to drastically rework their internal systems and processes.  Big companies are already starting the move (here and here).  It’ll certainly make my life easier!  I wonder if Big Steve really did have a master plan?

An article on Techmeme is suggesting that Windows 7 might have moved forward a year and arrive sometime late in 09.  Whether this is true or not who knows, but from my perspective as an enterprise customer it would make some sense - and probably make my life easier in the long run! 

Selling a Vista migration to the people who will pay the bills is proving to be quite a task.  The business isn’t overly interested in what OS we choose to run, only that they have the applications they need, can use them where they are and that they’re nice and speedy.  This makes Vista rather a hard sell, especially considering the work needed to assess and fix Vista compatibility for application portfolio of some 1600 apps.  That’s not to say Vista isn’t a great product - I’d have migrated six months ago if it was up to me.

Bringing Windows 7 forwards would provide businesses with a renewed incentive to move away from XP.  It’d assume it’ll include a whole bunch of new functionality to further improve on Vista (mobile working, deployment etc), and I’d guess will also provide improved support for some MS’s S+S initiatives - something we’ll be looking at in a lot of detail this year.

The problem for MS is that a quicker release would be effectively writing off Vista for any big corporate’s who haven’t already started their Vista migration.  Certainly if the move is true I would doubt we would do much work towards a vista, we’d delay those projects by six months to include Windows 7.  Having said that, those same large corporates are going to have enterprise licensing so they’ll probably be paying for a ‘desktop’ not the version of windows that’s on it.  Interesting stuff…

I had an interesting conversation with a buddy of mine yesterday about his PC.  It started out as one of those ‘hey Tom, you know about computers, what should I…’ chats.  He’s basically filled up his hard disk at home and wanted to know how he should upgrade.  We were looking at the prices of hard drives, and then at new PC’s so he could turn his current one into a server, then I mentioned Windows Home Server, and so on…

We came to the conclusion that it didn’t really make sense for him to buy local disks any more.  He’s got a wireless router, so there’s network infrastructure.  He’s not doing anything that needs disk performance so speed isn’t an issue.  And the cost difference between him buying a couple of big disks to RAID and a Home Server was small enough that he’d rather go the Home Server route. 

I’ve done network storage at home for years, but that’s because I’m a geek and used those servers and an MSDN account to learn stuff.  With Home Servers and things like Skydrive now making networked/cloud storage a realistic option for people at home, thinner computers like the Macbook Air make more sense.