Alberto Ortega’s Blog

Year 2009 started with great news!! Yesterday Microsoft has awarded me with the MVP recognition for the year 2009. I was recognized as a Management Infrastructure technical leader and this makes me very proud as It was something I were pursuing for years in my professional career.

My commitment with the community is growing stronger every year and I am willing to participate as much as I can in Systems Management events during this 2009.

I would like to thank to all people involved in this recognition and specially to Southworks for letting me grow-up between most valuable professionals which led me to this huge milestone in my career.

I followed the steps provided by Bamboo Nation to deploy WSS 3.0 SP1 on my Windows Vista laptop and I got it running in 15 minutes! http://community.bamboosolutions.com/blogs/bambooteamblog/archive/2008/05/21/how-to-install-windows-sharepoint-services-3-0-sp1-on-vista-x64-x86.aspx

Great work guys!

Hope It help others too.

This Saturday 4th-Oct on the UAI (San Juan 983), myself and many other Southworks team mates will be present at this year edition of Microsoft CodeCamp

We will offer a track in the morning at 11:15 dedicated to IIS7, named IIS7 4×4 with Horacio Gonzales,

IIS7 4×4
Como configurar un IIS todo terreno, PHP, ASP, ASP.net, etc, como tunear IIS para ajustarlo de acuerdo a la aplicación a hostear, cuales son las diferentes opciones según el caso, Entendiendo CGI, Fast-CGI e ISAPI y cual es mejor según el caso.
Oradores: Alberto Ortega Y Horacio Gonzalez

Later on at 16:15 in the afternoon together with crazy Ezequiel Jadib we will talk about Heterogeneous Application Monitoring with System Center Operations Manager. He will 1st add specific WMI counter to a running application so me (a lazy IT Pro) can guarantee application availability and performance leveraging Operations Manager features for in-house application monitoring.

Monitoreo de aplicaciones heterogéneas
Como utilizar las herramientas que nos brinda System Center para monitorear aplicaciones desarrolladas in-house, como proporcionar a help desk de información necesaria para diagnosticar rápidamente que componente de la aplicación no se comporta como se espera.
Orador: Alberto Ortega Y Ezequiel Jadib

If you are wondering which others sessions to attend, let me recommend what other Southworks team mates will we exposing

Our flexible Johnny Halife and wonder boy Pablo Damiani will be showing a really flashy demo on Microsoft SQL Server Data Platform, we developed this demo for the TechEd keynote this year. Now you now it is worth

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 “Introducción a “Microsoft SQL Server Data Platforma”
Los tiempos están cambiando, las personas cada vez tiene más información y la problemática ahora esta puesta en entender como, donde y cuando guardamos nuestra información. Tenemos muchos dispositivos y muchos escenarios SQL Server tiene una alternativa para cada uno. Conoce lo que la plataforma de SQL Server 2008 tiene para ofrecer y las soluciones de arquitectura de datos más avanzandas.
Orador: Johnny Halife Y Pablo Damiani

Our Jedi Master Matias Woloski will be sharing worthy experience about Performance & Load Testing with  the PerfBoy Federico Boerr. You need to hear what this guys has to say about this dark science known as Performance Testing:

HowTo: Performance y load testing
Durante la exposición, se presentará una aplicación de ejemplo sobre la cual se llevarán a cabo pruebas performance y carga. Los siguientes conceptos serán tratados durante las pruebas: Definición de diferentes tipos de testing (perf, load, stress). Definición de objetivos de las pruebas, patrones de carga en las pruebas de performance. Detección de cuellos de botella (disco y procesador en éste caso) y detección de memory leaks.
Oradores: Matias Woloski Y Federico Boerr

Finally out IT ranger Augusto Alvarez will be exposing an ITPro view of IIS7 dealing with an Heterogenous environment, ideal for an Apache fan who want to know what’s there in IIS7 for him.

Windows Server 2008 + IIS 7
Como interoperar con Linux y Apache
Orador: Augusto Alvarez

Hope to see you there!

Next week Southworks SRL will take part of the SMSE (Systems Management Server Enterprise) event series on Microsoft Argentina, targeted for MS EPG customers. From Southworks we will be involved as expert in the System Center family Solutions. I will be a speaker on sessions about: System Center Operations Manager, System Center Configuration Manager, System Center Virtual Machine Manager, System Center Data Protection Manager and Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V sharing the stage with the great Alejandro Ponicke and Leandro Sgallari the magician

Sessions Details

The series will be:

• SMSE Live Day 1: Wednesday 27-Aug (9-13 Hs): Live Event – Clients by invitation only.
• SMSE Live Day 2: Thursday 28-Aug (9-13 Hs): Live Event – Clients by invitation only.
• SMSE WC Day 1: Thursday 28-Aug (14:30-16 Hs): Public webcast
  http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032383808&EventCategory=4&culture=es-AR&CountryCode=AR
• SMSE WC Day 1: Friday 29-Aug (14:30-16 Hs): Public webcast
  http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032383810&EventCategory=4&culture=es-AR&CountryCode=AR

The outline for the Live sessions is (still developing on our UNMG network!):

• SMSE Live Day 1
  • SCVMM: Platform showcase | Intro | Snapshots | Live Migration
  • SCOM: Intro | SUSE Monitoring | Service Level Dashboard | Custom MP
  • SCCM: Intro | Win2k8/Vista Mgmt | Asset Intelligence | Update Mgmt
  • SCDPM: Intro | DB recovery | End User File recovery
• SMSE Live Day 2
  
  • Intel: VPro (By Gabriela Gallardo, Intel)
  • SCVMM: Live Migration Drill-Down | Self Service Portal
  • SCCM + SCOM: Control Panel Advertisements | SCCM Monitoring | Desired Configuration Management | Internet based clients
  • SCDPM + SCCM + SCOM: VM backup | DPM Reporting | DPM Health with Ops Mgr | SCCM Recovery from DPM triggered by Ops Mgr

The agenda for the Webcasts sessions will be a sub-set of the above focused on SCVMM 2008 Beta and Hyper-V. Subscribe today using the above links so you will have a reminder on your calendar!

SMSE is a licensing model developed this year by Microsoft to encourage the adoption of System Center products on the Enterprise.

Windows Vista had a much lower adoption rate that Windows XP had, you will find many industry researchers (like Gartner, Forrester ir IDC) Whitepapers talking about the “ugly” side of windows vista and how it failed:

• Gartner: You may loathe Vista, but don’t try skipping it
• Windows Vista: Just skip the thing?
• Vista adoption off to a slow start
• Windows Vista: Finding alternatives

Microsoft tried many approaches to show the world how good Windows Vista is, but this is incredible. Discover the “experiment” Microsoft drove named the “Mojave Experiment” and see it by yourself: http://www.mojaveexperiment.com/

This sound to me like some kind of “IT Pepsi Challenge”, people telling “Ohhh this Cola drink is great!” and then they realized they just tasted a regular Pepsi.

Hope you like it!

Here at Southworks we deployed many times from scratch a fully virtualized infrastructure and we have many lessons learnt so far. Since 2006, the industry is betting hard to workloads virtualization as it will address the increasing complexity IT environments are facing improving agility on the datacenter. In this post I will share a snapshot of what happened last month on the Virtualization Industry. Later (next post) I will discuss common drawbacks when moving to a virtualized infrastructure.

Virtualization Short Take

VMWare 2.0 (free server from VMWare) has reached the RC1 stage (http://www.vmware.com/beta/server/), nowadays SW-IT has every workload in production virtualized over VMWare 1.0.6 and has proved stability but we suffered in terms of management. VMWare 2.0 RC1 top features are Volume Shadow Copy, SCSI pass-though disk, USB 2.0 devices, Web access management interface and more OS support (including Win2k8 x64).

VMWare ESX 3i is free as I mentioned on my previous post, this had an impact on the SMB market so if you want to drill-down: http://blogs.southworks.net/aortega/2008/07/30/vmware-esx-3i-for-free/

VMWare has joined last week The Linux Foundation as announced here: http://linux-foundation.org/weblogs/press/2008/08/06/vmware-joins-the-linux-foundation/, this is an strong bet from VMWare to empower the use of their virtualization platform on Linux systems.

Sun xVM VirtualBox 1.6.2 was released. VirtualBox is an absolutely free virtualization product for x86 and x64 platform (x64 support included in this 1.6.2 release) and can be used for server and desktop virtualization, a highlight of this virtualization platform is that it is compatible with VMWare VMs, however it will not load MS VHDs files as VMWare is supposed to do. I say “is supposed to do” as we failed many times in SW-IT when trying to boot a VHD disk over VMWare Player.

Hyper-V went to RTM! And is now available through Windows Update so all your Windows 2008 running Hyper-V will have the update available for install. Although Microsoft says the VMs are compatible from RC1 to RTM be careful as we experienced performance issues related with the Integration Tools (a.k.a VM Additions) when migrating. Together with this RTM a Powershell Management Toolkit (PSHyperV) was released by James O´Neill to automate Hyper-V many management tasks check it out at http://www.codeplex.com/PSHyperv

Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 Beta has now support for managing Hyper-V hosts (get it from http://connect.microsoft.com), moreover, SW-EE (Engineering Excellence Team) deployed this Beta version and successfully managed 8 Win2k8 hosts, so we will closely look how this solution evolves as we are early adopters.

Novell upgrades PlateSpin PowerConvert to v 7.0, PowerConvert is an enterprise-ready Virtualization Management solution that optimizes the data center by streaming server workloads over the network between physical servers, PlateSpin was acquired by Novell on March 2008 and will be a key components of Novell visions to the dynamic datacenter.

Finally the Xen Summit at Boston took place this June and many posts appeared in http://blog.xen.org regarding the tracks, Yoshi Tamura from the NTT Cyber Space Laboratories in Japan gave a very interesting presentation on Kemari. Kemari is a new approach to cluster systems that synchronize VMs for fault tolerance without modifying neither hardware nor applications, Kemari proposes a sync approach instead of a shared storage approach like VMWare’s VMotion or Hyper-V Live Migration.

References: How to be on top of Virtualization news?

If I had to choose only three vendor agnostic virtualization posts I recommend:

1. http://virtualization.com/: is a great aggregator of industry news  with short posts straight to the point.

2. http://blog.scottlowe.org/: Scott Lowe has a breath view of the virtualization and storage market and frequently posts on his “Virtualization Short Take” a snapshot of the virtualization industry.

3. http://www.virtualization.info/roadmap/: Virtualization Industry Roadmap logs every product release in a time-line style for the vendors that the Virtualization Congress has in its radar

References

o Novell upgrades PlateSpin PowerConvert to v7.0
http://virtualization.com/news/2008/06/24/novell-platespin-powerconvert-7.0/

o Desktop Virtualization Portal
http://www.desktop-virtualization.com/

o Xen Summit Highlights
http://blog.xen.org/index.php/2008/07/03/xen-summit-highlights-kemari-high-availability-20/

VMWare took the attention of the virtualization market last Friday with the announcement that VMware ESX 3i will be distributed for free. This Hypervisor is a new spin from the classic VMWare ESX product with an incredible small footprint of only 32MB.

To get introduced to VMWare ESX technologies I recommend the following post from Petri IT Knowledge base: How will VMware ESX Server 3i Change the future of Virtualization?

Later on you can download and test the RTM version of VMWare ESX 3i from here (only need to complete the VMWare registration process): https://www.vmware.com/tryvmware/login.php?eval=esxi&t=1

This movement from VMware will have an impact on the SMB market where most Microsoft strategies to gain market share with Hyper-V attacks the pricing proposed by VMWare. Mike D, a VMWare System Engineer, takes an in-depth look at how this announcement may impact Hyper-V proposed pricing: ESX 3.5i for Free and the Impact on Hyper-V and the SMB

I am willing to see how will Microsoft answer to this movement.

I want to share the status of the Identity and Access Management (Id&AM) Portfolio offered by Microsoft with you. First begin with “What is Id&AM for the enterprise?” The following approach is the one that Oracle proposes:

My first thoughts about this scope proposed by Oracle is that they do not consider a long term Strong User Authentication strategy moving from Password Auth to SmartCard Auth.

Which is the value proposition from Microsoft? The identity portfolio has grown significantly since FY06 (when only AD and MIIS where MS players) that now we have a value proposition based on 5 Identity Management Pillars which (besides they are are product-centric) covers many of the aspects that the industry considers in the scope of Id&AM:

1) Lifecycle management: Password Sync + Certificate Mgmt + Identity provisioning

2) Information Protection: Message Encrypting + Rights Management

3) Federated Identity: Web single-sign-on. Federated Identity.

4) Strong Auth: SmartCard based auth built upon a PKI Infrastructure.

5) Directory services: Central identity repository. Authentication and role-based authorization.

As a context, Microsoft is beginning to build his identity portfolio (More focused since FY06) and now is beginning to be considered a challenger in the identity industry.

Below the Gartner magic quadrants for Web Access Management and User Provisioning.

Today Microsoft Identity Portfolio has many flaws, which you need to cover with partners solutions to gain full coverage of the Identity management needs on the Enterprise. The main flaws are regarding reporting and having a true single-sign-on framework which (again) you can only gain taking profit of partners solutions (like Quest for example)

Source:

• http://www.oracle.com/dm/07h2field/4690_cst_pri_in_a_cmptve_iam_mrktplce_us.pdf
• http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/technologies/idm/default.mspx
• http://www.sun.com/software/products/access_mgr/2h07.pdf
• http://www.sun.com/software/products/identity/2h07.pdf

See you soon!

Are you willing to write your first set of SLAs and you are wondering which sections you should consider? Take a look at the templates at NextSLM.org. They helped me a lot:

http://www.nextslm.org/internalsla.html

Jeff Jane CTO on Novell shares a great post series with us about Novell´s vision about the next level the IT industry needs to reach in order to address the increasing complexity we are facing. They call this the Fossa project and it is intended to be finished by 2012.

So far we have 3 posts that are worth reading:

• Fossa, further continued
• Fossa, continued
• Fossa

Novell Key Technologies and Product lines related to Fossa are:

• Virtualization: Xen Virtualization
• Platform: SUSE Linux Enterprise
• Orchestration: ZENWorks Orchestrator
• Identity: Novell eDirectory
• Collaboration: GroupWise (They just bought SiteScape, an OpenSource Teaming + Collaboration suite)

I could not avoid linking this project to the DSI vision pushed by Microsoft. DSI is in its 4th year of development (This is a 10 years vision) and is mainly focused on how will systems management evolve. The Fossa project has a broader vision than only systems management as collaboration is not within DSI. However MS has another vision/campaign called “People Ready” with a pillar centered on Collaboration.

As you saw there are many differences between Fossa and DSI, there are two main concepts where both vision converges:

If you want to go deeper on DSI you could begin with this blog post: Deliver Managed Applications under the MS platform! Develop a custom Management Pack - Prologue and then move to the MS website: http://www.microsoft.com/business/dsi/default.mspx