Posts Tagged ‘Windows’

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Windows 8 Details

Tuesday, June 29th, 2010

Over the last few days it seems if a Microsoft Windows 8 presentation aimed at PC OEM’s has leaked out onto the net.  Of course no one has confirmed it’s real, but it looks much like the documents I saw during the Vista and 7 development cycles so I’ve no reason to think it’s not.

I’m not going to republish the slides here, as clearly they should be under NDA, but not this info is in the public domain I’ll discuss major points in general and my take on the implications.

So what’s new in there? 

Industry Trends
Whilst this isn’t exactly news, it’s interesting see what MS sees as the trends that are shaping their development of Win8.  Many of these are focused around the users interaction with computers.

They describe a market in 2012 providing a wide range of hardware form factors and offering users ubiquitous internet access.  In a world where connectivity is assumed MS will continue its ‘Software + Services’ push in Windows 8.  With the recent Windows Live Wave 4 releases already providing a pretty strong platform of local applications coupled with Internet services (Hotmail, Office Web Apps, Photo Gallery etc), they mention that Wave 5 release of these apps is pencilled in for release at around the same time as Win8.

MS are also keen to point out that peoples personal and business computing experiences are rapidly merging.  This is something that I’ve certainly encountered over the past few years, and it will be interesting to see how MS counter this.  The challenge is in keeping corporate applications and data secure, whilst also providing the flexibility people look for in personal computing from the same device.

Solutions out there in the market currently use a pretty heavy handed approach, using perhaps a separate OS instance though a VM or using ‘OS on a Stick’ solutions that effectively turn a personal computer into a thin client that then connects to a business desktop.

I suspect that MS could provide a slightly more elegant solution if they choose to build that abstraction into the OS.  Windows 7 already supports booting from a VDI virtual hard disk, and can use XP Mode or MED-V to provide applications that run from a separate local OS.  I wouldn’t be surprised to see both of these technologies advance further to present a single ‘desktop’ to the user that ties back to separate ‘personal’ and ‘business’ VM’s.  Presumably this may lead to a Client Hypervisor version of Hyper-V along the lines of Citrix’s XenClient.

Apple Envy
One slide that perhaps shows MS’s overall approach to Windows 8 is actually all about Apple.  MS have looked at Apple’s appeal and described a cycle that flows from Brand Promise > User Experience > User Confidence > Realised Value > High Satisfaction and then back to Brand Promise.  In other words if it just works, people like it, you look good and they’ll will return for more of the same.

I’d have hoped that was all a bit obvious to be honest, but it’s interesting to see that it’s a clear part their thinking and even state “This is something people will pay for!”.  Hopefully MS are learning lessons from Apples success, and in fairness their own successful Windows 7 release.

Windows Store
For some time now I’ve been quite critical of MS’s late arrival into the ‘app store’ space.  As far as I know only Windows Phone has an MS operated app delivery mechanism (and to a lesser extent XBox Live).  To my mind both Windows and XBox would benefit hugely from an app store and the ecosystem of developers that it would spawn.  Frankly the PC world is still pretty much in the age of having a choice between Freeware, Shareware or full retail software.  Apple style app stores completely change this by providing users will a trusted source of apps and developers with a permanent market and a method of getting paid for their work.

I’m therefore very happy to see MS outline plans for ‘Windows Store’, an iTunes equivalent.  It seems like I’m not the only one as the slides show feedback suggesting that it “can’t happen soon enough”! 

The concept seems fairly well advanced, the slides include a wireframe storyboard of the app browsing and purchasing experience, which looks quite Zune like – a good thing I reckon.  They also show that a users apps and settings will follow them across PC’s, presumably tied to a Live ID as with XBox Live.  The app store will also provide mechanisms for delivering updates or patches to installed apps.

For developers there will be a personalised portal to submit apps, track their progress through the approval process and view analytics around sales and usage.  One of the most interesting items shown in the portal is a tab for Telemetry.  This shows that developers will be able to monitor how the apps are used and receive crash dumps that are returned by faults.  As far as I know this is far in advance of any other systems out there and should help ensure that the quality of apps delivered through the system is kept high.

Something that isn’t covered is how the applications themselves will be delivered.  We’ve seen MS dabbling with streaming applications over the Internet with the Office 2010 beta, which I understand was a big success.  Given the current trend towards application virtualisation I could see Windows Store making use of App-V or a similar technology to deliver apps as discrete objects rather than the traditional MSI’s.  Given MS’s own desire to replicate Apple’s ‘It Just Works’ view of the world using virtualised apps would seem to be be a good route for Windows Store.  It would help minimising the errors and incompatibilities that can plague large app portfolios.

Personally I think Windows Store is an incredibly exciting development for users and developers.  What I’m curious about is how this might then relate to business use of Windows.  Presumably it wouldn’t be to hard to extent this model out into the Enterprise space.

There are already solutions out there that provide ‘shopping cart’ style interfaces into Microsoft’s Configuration Manager (SCCM) application delivery tools, but this sort of interface would certainly be a welcome addition for businesses.  I guess there would be a couple of approaches that could be adopted.

For one, Windows Store itself could provide a way for companies to allow users to buy software through it.  This would probably need an approval mechanism to ensure that spend was authorised, and also an alternative method for invoicing and payment.  It would also be desirable for companies to be able white-list or black-list apps. 

It’s a challenge for sure, but it’s not too hard to envision it happening.  With MS’s ability to federate it’s Online services with internal company Active Directories they could potentially access a primitive authorisation matrix through the ‘Manager’ information in AD.  And Group Policy would be a perfect way of switching the Store into a ‘business mode’ that doesn’t bill the users directly.

The second method might be to build a similar interface that can be hosted internally and used with SCCM.  Providing a similar user experience on company machines has obvious benefits to users and IT alike.  Indeed given the focus on bringing together people work and home experiences the ability to switch between them at will is probably worthwhile.

Identity and Authentication
There a couple of slides around Win8’s proposed methods of authentication and how it might handle user data.  The obvious flashy thing here is the proposed use of facial recognition for logon, the idea being that a webcam connected to the computer would recognise that you have say down in front of the computer, determine that it’s you and then log you on.

I’ve played with some tools for this before, and it’s a very nice user experience.  If MS can get it right and fix the false-positive issues that facial recognition systems can have (i.e. holding up a photo of the computers owner to logon…) it could be a very nice addition.

The other item of note was how Win8 will handle user profiles.  It seems that Windows user accounts will be ‘connected to the cloud’ so that user settings, and presumably documents, will follow them from PC to PC.  With Microsoft’s Mesh synchronisation technology now mature and forming part of Windows Live Wave 4, I suspect that this will also be the basis of continuously sync’ing user profiles with a Live back-end service.

I’ve wondered whether they’d do this for some time.  Indeed when Mesh was released I wondered whether having the ability to sync both document data and user personalisation info into the cloud might lead MS to presenting actual Windows desktops from it’s Azure platform.

 

There are plenty of other bit and pieces in the presentation.  But to my mind those are the main things to consider. 

Of the rest the Fast Startup looks good, it’s a hybrid system boot mechanism that uses the hibernate function to cut out some of the boot process and hugely reduce startup time.  It’s worth noting that this and Sleep will be the default startup and shutdown actions in Window 8.

So all in all it’s very positive stuff, I suspect that MS will be very unhappy it’s public.  It certainly gives the opposition something to aim at.  I have to say if I was MS rather than clamping down on the now public info I’d make the most of it – fill in the gaps on what’s already known and start the hype early.

For more info there’s good ccoverage over on Windows Kitchen.

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Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)

Monday, May 24th, 2010

It seems that these days pretty much every cold call I get from a vendor is about VDI.  If you’re an enterprise it seems that it’s pretty much anyone wants to talk to you about.  It’s clearly the topic of the day, but what does it actually mean?

At work I’ve been looking at options for VDI for a while, but to be honest I prefer to refer to the topic as Centralised Desktops.  For me ‘VDI’ implies a particular solution, whereas in fact if centralisation is something you want, you should be looking beyond simple virtualisation.

Virtualised Desktop Reference Architecture

So what it?  Well simply put, it’s about moving the execution of your desktop environment away from your users desks and into a managed central location, probably a data centre.  So no more desktop computers (well, probably… but we’ll come to that another time).

Instead, on each desk you put a Thin Client.  These are small, cheap, power efficient devices that really don’t do much more than receive the ‘screen’ from the newly centralised desktop and send the keyboard and mouse information back down down the wire.   The actual OS and applications are running in a far off data centre.  This is where is get interesting, as there are many platforms that these can run on. 

The solution most people think about with VDI is running the desktop OS and apps on a virtual machine.  In this scenario you’d typically have a server running a hypervisor such as VMWare, Hyper-V or Citrix’s Xen.  That server would host a number of desktop OS’s that can be presented out to the thin clients on peoples desks.

Now that’s a good approach for most people, but it’s not the only one.  For high end users, guys doing CAD or analysis work, a VM isn’t going to cut it.  A share of CPU time and memory might not be enough.   For these sorts of users something like HP’s Blade Workstations could be an answer.  These are basically high spec computers squeezed into a blade form factor.  If you’re familiar with blade servers they’re basically the same thing but with better graphics capability.

So using Blades you can give end users very high end computing capacity from a remote location.  But what about the other end of the spectrum, the people in your organisation who have very low computing requirements.  There’s a pretty good chance that for some people even a desktop VM is overspec’d.  For these guys more traditional Citrix/Terminal Services type solutions are still a very good fit. 

In that sort of scenario you’d have single server OS that many people would connect and logon to.  They can then share the OS and applications running on it as they are presented back to the thin client.  Of course in that instance each user is only getting a share of the server and OS resources, but the point is exactly that.  Each user consumes a share of a single server (and its costs) and a single OS (and its costs).  Per user its cheap!

So that’s what the two ends of the solution look like.  But how do you link them up?  First lets talk about how the ‘screen’ gets from the centralised desktop to the thin client (and of course the keyboard and mouse back the other way.

There are a number of protocols for achieving this.  For years Citrix has had ICA.  It’s tried and tested, I’d hazard a guess that most larger businesses are probably using it in some way or the other.   Microsoft has RDP, which has shipped with every version of windows since Win2000.  Again, it’s tried and tested, remote assistance uses it for example, and imagine pretty much every Windows server in the world uses it for management.  The problem with these protocols has been that whilst they’re great for running bog standard Windows and office apps, as soon as you throw anything complicated like graphics or media at them they start to choke.  They’ve improved a lot over the past few years, but there are still limitations.

In addition to the Citrix and Microsoft protocols there are more specialise alternatives that aim to improve the experience for media intensive applications, or users over long connections.  A good example of this is HP’s RGS protocol or Citrix’s HDX.  Last year we ran a proof of concept using RGS that saw people in our Bangalore office happily using AutoCAD on desktops hosted out of an office in Bristol.  It works very well indeed.

There are other solutions such Teradici’s PCoverIP which originally used hardware acceleration at both ends to improve performance, but is now being used by VMWare in a software only capacity as part of it View product.  On paper this looks very good, but I’ve not really had a chance to try it first hand yet.

What connects the thin client to the centralised desktop?  In the simplest of deployments you can actually hard code a thin client to talk to a specific desktop/server.  In essence this gives you a 1:1 connection.  That’s not necessarily the smartest route though.  Most solutions will now use a connection broker to negotiate the right central desktop for each thin client or user.  To my mind  good broker is where the intelligence come into the solution.

Personally I feel that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution for VDI.  Perhaps for some organisations that’s not true, but for many I think a blend of solutions will be the best choice.  A broker helps you do this.  Say you have a mix of virtual desktops and blade workstations.  How do you make sure your users get the right desktop?  Well a broker will look at the connection request, who it’s from or where, and connect the thin client to the right back end. 

What’s more, because this process is dynamic it doesn’t necessarily have to connect the user to the same desktop each time.  Say some of your central  desktops are down for maintenance, the broker would direct them to one that was working.  Even better, if you have say 10,000 people in your company, it’s a fair bet that maybe only 80/90% of them are working at any given time.  In that case why have 10,000 desktops computers and licenses?  Just have say 8,500 and let the broker make sure they are utilised.  Depending on the solution the broken can even go off and provision more VM’s should extra people show up.

Of course in truth it’s not quite that simple.  For one thing if your desktops aren’t going to be persistent, (i.e. not tied to a single user/thin client) you need to work out what to do with your users applications, ‘profile’ information and data.

Data is the easy one, just don’t have any of it local.  Put everything on network shares, in Sharepoint or in some other system.  If your desktops are in a data centre next to those storage systems they’ll get fast access to everything they need – faster than a traditional desktop would get.  Local data is pretty much always a bad idea anyway.  The one exception might be with Blade workstations, where demanding apps might need local storage to caching data etc.

Your users ‘profile’ information is slightly more tricky.  If they are effectively moving to a different computer every day, you need to make sure that they’re settings follow them across those different desktops.  One solution would be Windows Roaming Profiles.  These have been around for years and can work well.  Other solutions such as Appsense or RTO’s Virtual Profiles do things in a slightly different, more efficient way, but achieve the same goal.

Applications, now that’s the difficult one.  If you think of a normal PC, apps are almost always installed locally, either by CD/DVD or in business probably over the wire using something like SMS/SCCM.  That installation takes time, and it’s not something you can afford to do every time a user logs on to a centralised desktop to make sure they’ve got the right applications.

There are two answers to this.  Application Virtualisation and (once again) Terminal Services.   App Virtualisation has been around for a few years, but has only really taken off over the last year or so.  It’s a complex technology, but basically it separates the application from the OS,  allowing it to run in it’s own mini-virtual environment.  With the app separated from the OS, your not restricted to traditional installations.  Most app virtualisations technologies will allow you to ‘stream’ the application down to computer as and when it is needed.  Again, this is complex but for an end user is means that when they click on the icon, the technology downloads the application components as they are needed so there’s no long installation, just a small initial delay.

There are however some limitations to app virtualisation, which means that other solutions like terminal services may still have a place in a VDI environment.  say you have an app that just won’t work in App-V or XenApp or other virtualisation tools?  In that case you can install them natively on a Windows OS and present them out to the virtual desktops using terminal services.  it may sound a little convoluted, but it works.

So… that’s a real high level view of what VDI is.  Hopefully it all made sense.  I’m planning to to some follow up posts with some more detail, but for now here’s a quick diagram showing a reference architecture for a VDI implementation (the diagram above).   Again, it’s quite high level, but I think it shows how these things all fit together.

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Clients for Office Communications Server

Wednesday, May 6th, 2009

I’ve been doing a bit of work recently to figure out what would be needed to move from current Live Communications Server (LCS) setup to Office Communications Server (OCS).  Part of this has been to think about what clients are available for the various platforms people might be using.

I thought it might be useful to post up a quick summary of what I’ve found.

Windows

Windows is obviously the primary platform that OCS is designed to work with.  To that end it has the most feature rich clients.

Office Communicator 2007 R2
Office Communicator 2007 is the main client for OCS.  It is the most feature rich client available and includes support for the full range of OCS’s capabilities:

Instant Messaging
Presence
Enhanced Presence
Assess Levels
PIC Connectivity
File Transfer
1:1 Voice and Video
Multiparty Voice and Video
Live Meeting sessions
Call Management Features
Remote Call Control
VoIP
Office Integration
Calendar Free/Busy
Conversation History

Office Communicator 2005
Office Communicator 2005 is the original client for LCS.  Whilst most people will move to MOC 2007, if you’re migrating from LCS during the rollout it might be necessary to have some people using the older client. 

Whist MOC 2005 will work with OCS and OCS R2, there are some limitations.  If you enable Enhanced Presence for the MOC 2005 users in OCS then they won’t be able to connect – as I understand it this is also something that can’t be undone once the user has also logged into MOC 2007.  Also if you’re running OCS R2 you’ll also need to install the December 2008 hotfix package.

Once you have it working, you have access to most of OCS functionality, but updated features like enhanced presence aren’t available.

Apple Mac

Messenger for Mac 7.0.2
If you’re a Mac user, MS provide a pretty decent OCS client in the form of Messenger for Mac.  As well as supporting Live Messenger, this support various flavours of LCS and OCS, with the recent 7.0.2 version and later supporting OCS 2007 R2.

Messenger for Mac supports the majority of OCS and Office Communicator features, including things that were missing from previous versions such as audio and video conferencing, Enhanced Presence, GAL search, and support for federated users.  In fact the only major items not available are support for LiveMeeting sessions, VoIP support and Access Levels for presence.

One thing to note, is that once a user has been enabled for enhanced presence and has logged in using Messenger for Mac 7, they won’t then be able to use version 6 or earlier.

Macs can also use the Web Client described below.

Messenger for Mac can be found here:

Messenger for Mac site

and the product team have provided some good documentation for it here:

Messenger for Mac Deployment Guide

Web Client

Office Communicator Web Access
Communicator Web Access provides a web based interface into OCS for remote workers.  It provides the core functionality of IM and Presence, but OCS R2 extends that functionality significantly.

With R2, web users can use Desktop Sharing sessions.  If you are on a Windows computer then you can launch, view and control sessions, if you’re on a Mac or Linux based box then you’ll only be able to view and take control of a session.

What’s more, if you have telephony configured within your OCS environment, web users can also initiate, receive and control audio conferences.  By providing a the number of a telephone they can use, OCS dials in that phone and connects it to a conference hosted on the A/V Conferencing server.  If an incoming call is received whilst a users is connected to the web client they can use it to redirect the call to an alternative phone.

Another interesting new feature is the ability to provide a Web Client to people who aren’t part of your organisation so that they can join conferences/conversations.  There’s an ‘invite using email’ function that will send them a specific URL that will launch a web client session and join them into the converation.

There are a few other additions with R2 such as the ability to use distribution groups for messages, and support for customising the logon pages with company logos etc.

Windows Mobile

Communicator Mobile (CoMo)
For Windows Mobile MS is provided a pretty decent communicator client, and then improved it further with the R2 release.

CoMo supports all the usual IM and presence functionality, including communication with PIC contacts and distribution groups.  It provides access to the corporate address book, and lets the user initial phone calls to numbers held within it.

The R2 version has a number of improvements to the client, as well as some improvements in interaction with an R2 backend.

On the client side there are a few usability improvements like access to recent contacts and expanding distribution lists.  The R2 version is also a lot more efficient in terms of network usage which contributes to vastly improved battery life over the previous version.

One big advance is the on the voice integration with OCS.  When using the CoMo client to make calls, the client uses the OCS infrastructure to make calls, potentially saving call costs.  It also allows for single number reach, with calls to an OCS desk phone will ring the mobile and will be answerable on the mobile.

When working with an R2 backend presence is also a lot smarter for people using more than one client – for example people with a CoMo phone and OC on their computer.  OCS will determine the most recent activity and use the presence from that device.

CoMo can be downloaded from a Windows Mobile device here.

Apple iPhone

For while now I’ve been keeping an eye out for an OCS client for the Apple iPhone.  As yet I’ve not managed to find an equivalent to Windows Mobiles CoMo, but does appear to be a solution out there if you really have to have one.

WebMessenger seems to provide an iPhone version of their client, though it does looks like you need to install their WebMessenger Server Platform alongside OCS/LCS in order to use it.  So ultimately it’s not that useful.

It looks like the client supports IM, Presence and contact lists, but the information on the website doesn’t go into any detail.

Update:  Since originally writing this post, Modality Systems have released a full iPhone client for OCS.  I’ve written some more on this client here.

RIM Blackberry

Blackberry Client for OCS
If you use Blackberry’s in your organisation RIM has provided a client for OCS.  It provides presence and IM capabilities, though does not support any audio or video conferencing.  It does however integrate into the other Blackberry applications, so you can set your presence from the Home screen, and will show the presence of contract directly from the phones address book.  The client also used the phones spellchecker in IM messages and allows links and phone numbers in messages to be clicked and followed/dialled.

There is also an application that supports the older Live Communications Server.

The application is available here.

Mobile Phones

Office Communicator Mobile for Java
To provide OCS to a wider range of mobile devices the OCS team have now released a Java version of the CoMo client which supports the Nokia S40 and S60 and the Motorola RAZR V3 (though others may work).

The client provides much of the same functionality as the Windows Mobile client, including IM, Presence address book access and single number reach.

Further details can be found here and here, and you can download it onto you phone from getcomo.com.

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Federating Windows 7 Search with SharePoint

Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009

Ian over at WSSDemo has put up some sample code for federating your Windows 7 Search with SharePoint.  Given how quickly SharePoint is spreading throughout businesses I can see this being very useful indeed, especially as it includes file preview.

I’ve included the sample XML below, but please head over to Ian’s blog, there’s some good stuff over there.  You’ll have to excuse the dodgy code format – the blog doesn’t like displaying code!  Fortunately Ian’s hosting the .osdx file here.

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<OpenSearchDescription xmlns=”http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/” xmlns:ms-ose=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/opensearchext/2009/”>

<ShortName>WSSDemo Site</ShortName>

<Description>Search the Ian Morrish Sharepoint Demo site.</Description>

<Url type=”application/rss+xml” template=”http://www.wssdemo.com/search/_layouts/srchrss.aspx?k={searchTerms}&amp;start={startIndex}&amp;s=WSSDemo%20Content”/>

<Url type=”text/html” template=”http://www.wssdemo.com/search/Pages/Results.aspx?k={searchTerms}&amp;s=WSSDemo%20Content”/>

<!– Win7 M3 syntax –>
<ms-ose:locationProperties> 
<ms-ose:property name=”TreatLinkAsEnclosure”>-1</ms-ose:property>
</ms-ose:locationProperties>

<!– Win7 Beta syntax –>
<ms-ose:ResultsProcessing format=”application/rss+xml”>
<ms-ose:LinkIsFilePath>-1</ms-ose:LinkIsFilePath>
</ms-ose:ResultsProcessing>

</OpenSearchDescription>

The sample code point Windows 7 at WSSDemo.com, however you can change that to your own Sharepoint servers.  Head over to Ian’s blog for more info.

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Virtualisation eLearning

Tuesday, October 7th, 2008

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

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Apple Mac’s in Active Directory

Wednesday, July 16th, 2008

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.

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Bye-bye Windows?

Tuesday, July 8th, 2008

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! :)  )

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Microsoft Midori Speculation

Tuesday, July 8th, 2008

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.

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Windows 7 and Virtualisation

Sunday, May 25th, 2008

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.

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Enterprise Apples

Friday, May 2nd, 2008

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?

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