Desktop Virtualization – Is it time?

Today is opening day of VMWorld in San Francisco! Nortec has several of our Senior Consultants attending. http://www.vmworld2009.com/

I read an interesting article on Desktop Virtualization in Tech Republic. Server virtualization has taken off and there is more and more buzz around desktop virtualization. Is it time to for virtualization on the desktop? Tech Republic asked their CIO Jury, “Is your IT department strongly considering a deployment of virtual desktops?” - Out of 12 CIOs , 9 gave no votes and 3 gave yes votes. However, some yes votes were very enthusiastic yes so are these CIOs the early adopters or are they the minority?

Virtualization on the desktop is driven primarily by cost. This savings is mostly the cost to manage the desktop not the actual physical cost for hardware. In this current economy driving costs lower is a priority for most CIOs. The challenge is that the virtualized desktops still come up short for many applications and around multi-media. When it comes to simple desktops with minimal applications virtual desktops make tremendous sense but as the complexity goes up sometimes it cannot be done. Citrix does continue to lead in the desktop virtualization space with more and more capability around multimedia and providing the complete desktop experience users are looking for so this helps with the adoption.

I think that those implementing desktop virtualization today are early adopters, but desktop virtualization will not eliminate the desktop. Over the next 3 - 7 years there will be a slow shift to about even - 50% desktops and 50% terminals as virtual desktops.

After that well………….

Applications are moving to the internet and “cloud computing” so as this happens the virtual desktop will continue to make more sense. Provided the internet bandwidth can get ahead of the desktop demands we will eventually only need a web browser. However, as rapidly as technology is changing, it will still take time.

Link to Tech Republic Article:
http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/hiner/?p=2607

The Hypervisor Battle

There is an interesting article regarding VMWare’s battle to hold market share in the hypervisor market in Network World, “VMware plows ahead in face of controversy, increased competition”.

The article discusses a survey showing VMWare and Microsoft with very close hypervisor penetration! However, they point out that VMWare is used by 100% of the Fortune 100 and 150,000 companies worldwide. VMWare does seem to have the majority of clients and is very strong in enterprise clients.

This will be a very interesting year for the “Hypervisor Battle”. Microsoft has commoditized the hypervisor by bundling it with Windows Server 2008. Microsoft is taking share and starting in the mid-market clients. They are offering to manage both Microsoft Hyper-V and V-Sphere with System Center Virtual Machine Manager as they recognize that they will need to co-exist with VMWare.

Microsoft has been successful at taking down some large competitors and continues to battle with many. One thing for sure is that Microsoft will stay in the battle and will not give up easy - as Steve Ballmer said at Microsoft World Wide Partner Conference 2009: “long term, long term, long term…. Is Microsoft going to go home? We don’t go home!”

Network World Article - “VMware plows ahead in face of controversy, increased competition”:

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/082609-vmware-vmworld-preview.html?hpg1=bn

Microsoft Exchange 2010

Microsoft Exchange 2010 release will follow closely behind Windows 7 and there is plenty to be excited about. Windows 7 is looking fast and rock solid and Exchange 2010 has some great new features.

Microsoft is a leader when it comes to a vision around Unified Communications. Specifically I really like the voice mail to text feature that allows someone to receive their voice mail in text within an email. This will allow you to read your voice mails in loud places or when you are at a seminar and do not want to have to get up and step outside to retrieve a voice mail. Here is a summary of other Exchange 2010 features listed by Microsoft:

Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 enables you to achieve new levels of reliability and performance by delivering features that simplify your administration, help protect your communications.

Exchange Server 2010 gives you the flexibility to tailor your deployment based on your unique needs and a simplified way to help keep e-mail continuously available for your users.

Exchange 2010 mailbox database will allow you up to a 50% reduction in disk IOPS (Input/Output Per Second) over Exchange Server 2007, as well as greater resiliency against data corruption.

Building on previous investments in Continuous Replication technologies in Exchange 2007, a simplified approach to high availability and disaster recovery coupled with enhanced maintenance tools, will help you achieve new levels of reliability and reduce the complexity of delivering business continuity.

Exchange Server 2010 helps your users get more done by giving them the freedom to securely access all of their communications – e-mail, voice mail, instant messaging, and more – from virtually any platform, Web-browser, or device through industry standard protocols. Your users live their business lives in their inboxes every day. For so many organizations, Exchange has been the foundation of a universal inbox.

Exchange 2010 adds new productivity features that can help your users more easily organize and prioritize the communications in their inboxes.

In today's increasingly regulated environment, it has become critical to efficiently preserve business records. This includes e-mail which has quickly become the principle source of data in legal discovery and other compliance-related investigations.
But managing e-mail for compliance has become particularly challenging for most organizations. The problem is that, as e-mail volume grows beyond inbox storage limits, users are often forced to move this mail off e-mail servers and onto PCs and laptops as PST (personal storage) files. This isolates e-mail, making it more difficult to manage and search in a way that meets compliance requirements.

To address this PST problem and ease the compliance burden, Exchange 2010 delivers new, integrated e-mail archiving and retention functionality–including granular multi-mailbox search and immediate legal hold. When you combine this with the flexibility provided by the Exchange storage architecture, you can take better control of your corporate information, while providing your users with a streamlined experience that does not disrupt the way they manage their inboxes every day.

Despite all your best efforts, users make innocent mistakes handling sensitive corporate information every day. At the same time, there is always the threat of unauthorized users getting access to unprotected sensitive data. The issue has grown even more urgent in the face of increasing regulations governing customers’ and employees’ personal information.
Exchange 2010 makes it easy to better protect your company’s communications and e-mail through centrally managed information control capabilities. This includes the ability to intercept, moderate, encrypt and block e-mail more effectively. Together, this functionality provides you with a flexible range of protection and control options, whether you want to automatically enforce controls or empower users to implement their own data protection.

Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 Features

Microsoft Released Windows Server 2008 R2 in July and this comes with Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2. This new version of Hyper-V changes the game when considering virtualization solutions. Realistically businesses will need to look at this option particularly in the current economy where IT needs to do more with less. Much needed Live Migration has been added and customers get increased availability with support for planned and unplanned downtime scenarios.

· Available as a free download: http://tinyurl.com/5plkqa
· Support for live migration for “zero downtime” planned migrations
· Support for host clustering for unplanned downtime protection
· Improved scalability with support for 1 TB host memory and up to 8 sockets

Live Migration
#1 Customer Requested Feature
Processor Compatibility Mode

New Processor Support
Improved Performance
Lower Power Costs

Enhanced Scalability (4x Improvement)
Support for 64 Logical Processors
Support for up to 384 Running VMs or up to 512 virtual processors
Greater VM Density
Lower TCO

Networking Enhancements
Improved Network Performance
10 Gb/E Ready

Dynamic Virtual Machine Capabilities
Live Migration
Hot Add/Remove Virtual Storage

Boot From Flash

Usability Enhancements
SCONFIG Enhancements

Management of Virtualized Infrastructure

Virtualization breaks the historical methods of measuring performance and troubleshooting problems. Applications running on virtual machines move across physical platforms and this is one reason why virtualization creates new issues that must be addressed differently than in the past. Knowing what container is running slow is not always enough to solve a performance issue.

Management and management software is crucial to running a successful virtualized environment. There are several management products directly from VMWare and Microsoft. If you are in a homogeneous environment these may be all you need. If you are looking at a heterogeneous environment or something more complex you may want to look at some of the third party products. There are products that range from virtual planning and management to troubleshooting and you can usually try them out for free!

Here are three virtualization management products:

VMWare VCenter Appspeed:
http://www.vmware.com/products/vcenter-appspeed/

Blue Stripe:
http://bluestripe.com/products/

Akkori
http://www.akorri.com/products-overview.htm

Disaster Recovery Planning in Virtualized Environment

Virtualization is a driver for disaster recovery. Companies that previously could not have a disaster recovery solution are able to implement one using virtualization technology.

Here are the high level steps to creating your plan:
1. Make sure you have executive sponsorship – no point putting a lot of effort into a plan that will never get off the ground
2. Store less with deduplication
3. Plan your Recovery Time Objective (RTO) - How fast will you be back up and running?
4. Plan your Recovery Point Objective (RPO) - How far back will you be capable of recovering?
5. Utilize image level backups
6. Document the plan and implement
7. Test, test, test

You can create a plan for very high availability, extremely fast recovery that goes back a very long way but this all costs money so it is important to really analyze the business requirements and what is acceptable. The old saying is with enough money you can accomplish anything!

Plan before, after and then continuously!

Quote of the Day

This Quote came from the Netfix Corporate Culture Presentation:

Why high performance is so important:
1. In procedural work the best are 2X better and in creative work the best are 10X better!
2. A great work place is one with stunning colleagues

Microsoft Security Bulletin MS09-034 - Critical

Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer (972260)
Published: July 28, 2009 Updated: August 04, 2009
Version: 2.0
General Information
Executive Summary

This security update is being released out of band in conjunction with Microsoft Security Bulletin MS09-035, which describes vulnerabilities in those components and controls that have been developed using vulnerable versions of the Microsoft Active Template Library (ATL). As a defense-in-depth measure, this Internet Explorer security update helps mitigate known attack vectors within Internet Explorer for those components and controls that have been developed with vulnerable versions of ATL as described in Microsoft Security Advisory (973882) and Microsoft Security Bulletin MS09-035.

This security update also resolves three privately reported vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer. These vulnerabilities could allow remote code execution if a user views a specially crafted Web page using Internet Explorer. Users whose accounts are configured to have fewer user rights on the system could be less impacted than users who operate with administrative user rights.

This security update is rated Critical for Internet Explorer 5.01 and Internet Explorer 6 Service Pack 1, running on supported editions of Microsoft Windows 2000; Critical for Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7, and Internet Explorer 8 running on supported editions of Windows XP; Critical for Internet Explorer 7 and Internet Explorer 8 running on supported editions of Windows Vista; Moderate for Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7, and Internet Explorer 8 running on supported editions of Windows Server 2003; and Moderate for Internet Explorer 7 and Internet Explorer 8 running on supported editions of Windows Server 2008. For more information, see the subsection, Affected and Non-Affected Software, in this section.
The security update addresses these vulnerabilities by modifying the way that Internet Explorer handles objects in memory and table operations. For more information about the vulnerabilities, see the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) subsection under the next section, Vulnerability Information.

Recommendation. The majority of customers have automatic updating enabled and will not need to take any action because this security update will be downloaded and installed automatically. Customers who have not enabled automatic updating need to check for updates and install this update manually. For information about specific configuration options in automatic updating, see Microsoft Knowledge Base Article 294871.
For administrators and enterprise installations, or end users who want to install this security update manually, Microsoft recommends that customers apply the update immediately using update management software, or by checking for updates using the Microsoft Update service.

See also the section, Detection and Deployment Tools and Guidance, later in this bulletin.

Known Issues. Microsoft Knowledge Base Article 972260 documents the currently known issues that customers may experience when installing this security update. The article also documents recommended solutions for these issues.

Complete Bulletin:
MS09-034
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/ms09-034.mspx

Microsoft Security Response Center
http://blogs.technet.com/msrc/pages/security-bulletin-webcast-q-a-oob-july-2009.aspx

Technet Webcast
https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032422342&EventCategory=5&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US

Microsoft Security Bulletin Summary for July 2009
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/ms09-jul-ans.mspx

“Who’s Your City” by Richard Florida on Authors@ Google

I recently watched Richard Florida author of “Who’s Your City” on Youtube, Authors@Google. The presentation is about cities and how your choice is important. I think the presentation is interesting and worth watching. Mr. Florida discusses what he found makes people have an overall feeling of well being or happiness -it is not money provided you are above the poverty level. There are basically three factors:

1. Job that you love that challenges you
2. Social connections – A “Scary Stat” is that on average people have one close confidant!
3. Your surroundings – “Who’s Your City”

He found through surveys that what makes people happy with where they live is:
1. Safe and Secure
2. Economic and Social Opportunity
3. Good Government and Business Leadership
4. High diversity environment – accepting of multi-culture, economic, and religions
5. Quality of the place physical characteristics – Parks, trails, architecture

So I will stretch this with no real supporting data to a business environment! I believe people are looking for the same things:

1. Safe work environment physical as well as information technology
2. Successful company
3. Good managers in a positive environment
4. Diverse culture on business teams has been proven to be more effective
5. Work in good physical conditions

Look at your business for the gaps and try to fill them in.

Richard Florida on youtube, Authors@Google Link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khQ9BaXZAjM

There is No Silver Bullet

I have heard the expression “There is no silver bullet” many times … so much so, that it is a cliché. It is however, true and this is a fundamental concept when managing a team or business. Since there is no one thing, the alternative is to piece together all the key elements. Management leaders need to be constantly seeking out new ideas. These concepts, principles and processes need to be implemented to incrementally improve yourself, your team and your business.

When I graduated from college I read "Dress for Success" and this is a classic must read, but clearly one small piece of what is involved in a successful career. John T. Malloy, the author, did a great scientific job of analyzing business attire and what works. Companies like IBM and EDS incorporated the concepts very successfully to the point of coining the “IBM Blue Suit”. The book as many since present as if this is the silver bullet! It is more like a tool in the toolkit.

I have read many business books and often I come across the same concepts. However, I am amazed that just as often I find new information and ideas. I read new thinking on technology, management and business practices. So I will seek new information and at the same time revisit the best of what I have read and learned in the past. Take the best principles and concepts and incorporate them. The goal is small 10% improvements. Over a long period of time these small improvements add up!