March 2009 - Posts
Operations Manager 2007 R2 introduces key new and enhanced functionality, including:
Enhanced application performance and availability across heterogeneous platforms
- Delivers monitoring across Windows, Linux and Unix servers-all through a single console
- Extends end to end monitoring of distributed applications to any workload running on Windows, Unix and Linux platforms
- Maximize availability of virtual workloads with integration with System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008
Improved management of applications in the data center
- Delivers on the scale requirements of URL monitoring of your business
- Meet agreed service levels with enhanced reporting showing application performance and availability
- More efficient problem identification and action to resolve issues
Microsoft announced today the availability of the Operations Manger 2007 R2 Release Candidate (RC) on Connect (http://connect.microsoft.com).
There are a number of enhancements over the beta released in November, including:
- New Power Management MP template (the monitored system must be either Windows Server 2008 R2 or Windows 7)
- Updated branding across all user interfaces, including a new skin
- Improved trace configuration tools to help support issues escalated to Customer Support (if applicable)
- Improved Run As Account Distribution Configuration
- Ability to run inline tasks for non-Microsoft servers
- Support for upgrade from…
Continue reading on our new blog - SCOM 2007 R2 Release Candidate (RC)
Microsoft’s Eitan Kirshenboim has kindly provided us more Windows 7 tips, check out this second issue:
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| Tip 1: Put a “Pin Up” of the Folders You Use Most. Tip 2: Double-Up Your Windows. Tip 3: Clear, Crisp Display—It’s In Your Control. Tip 4: Order and Reason for Your Taskbar. Tip 5: Taskbar Traversing. Tip 6: BitLocker To Go Protection. Tip 7: Your Own Personal Help Desk: Windows Troubleshooting Platform. 
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| Put a “Pin Up” of the Folders You Use Most. Windows® 7 allows you to “pin up” the folders you use most on your taskbar. Simply hold your mouse over the favorite folder, right click, and drag it onto the taskbar. Windows 7 automatically pins itself to the Explorer Jump List. To open the folder, right click on the Explorer icon and select the folder you want. 
Back To Top | ![clip_image002[1]](http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/dario/clip_image0021_thumb_16138535.gif "clip_image002[1]")
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| Double-Up Your Windows. When working within an application, sometimes you just want more of a good thing. To open another window of the same application (assuming the app can run more than one instance), simply hold Shift and click the taskbar icon. You can also middle-click your third mouse button for the same result. Back To Top | ![clip_image002[2]](http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/dario/clip_image0022_thumb_730313C4.gif "clip_image002[2]")
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| Clear, Crisp Display—It’s In Your Control. Windows 7 makes it easy for you to adjust your display settings, making text and images easier to view in all the various locations where you work on your computer. Your laptop display may look fine at work but a little dark at home. Adjust the text and image settings easily with two snappy applets: ClearType Text Tuning and Display Color Calibration. Run cttune.exe and dccw.exe, or look them up in the Control Panel. 
Back To Top
| ![clip_image002[3]](http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/dario/clip_image0023_thumb_33290772.gif "clip_image002[3]")
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| Order and Reason for Your Taskbar. You can decide the order that your icons show up in your taskbar by simply dragging them to the order you desire. And for the first five icons, you can launch them with a simple keystroke: Any of the first five icons can be opened by pressing  ®+1, ![clip_image009[1]](http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/dario/clip_image0091_thumb_47EADA25.jpg "clip_image009[1]") +2, etc. Back To Top | ![clip_image002[4]](http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/dario/clip_image0024_thumb_46A64146.gif "clip_image002[4]")
Continue reading on our new blog - Seven tips & tricks for Windows 7 (Issue #2) |
Microsoft’s Eitan Kirshenboim has kindly provided us with some cool Windows 7 tips, check out the first issue:
A new white paper has been published that compares the options to use multiple instances of SQL without Hyper-V with having multiple virtual machines with single instances of SQL Server. Not only it looks at the different pros and cons, but also provides interesting performance information.
Here's are the topics covered in this 26-page white paper:
- Executive Overview
- Introduction
- Considerations for Consolidation and Virtualization
- Identification of Underutilized Servers
- Server temperature
- Consolidation Approaches
- Virtualization Platform: WSRM vs. Hyper-V
- Implementation of the SQL Utility
- Service Offerings
- Identification of Candidates for Migration
- Attributes of System Quality
- Availability and Business Continuity
- Environmental Sustainability
- Manageability
- Performance
- Predictability and…
Continue reading on our new blog - Hyper-V & SQL consolidation at Microsoft IT
Samsung techies linked 24 of the company's 256GB SSD (Solid State Drives) together in a RAID configuration with the hopes of making the fast SSDs even faster.
The system actually reaches a whooping transfer speeds of 2GBps (!!). Amazing how disks become the real bottlenecks of today's computers.
Check out this video, you don’t see that kind of speed every day :)
You can now download VMM 2008 R2 Beta from https://connect.microsoft.com.
I’ve already tested it with Live Migration and it work great! (we had a demonstration for it at a Municipality Convention in Jerusalem recently) so take the time to play with it a little.
What's New in VMM 2008 R2 Beta
System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 (VMM) is a comprehensive management solution for managing virtualized infrastructure running on Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V, Virtual Server 2005 R2 and VMware ESX through Virtual Center. Recently, Windows Server 2008 R2 Beta was released which included significant feature improvements to Hyper-V-the underlying hypervisor platform. A corresponding beta version of VMM R2 - the next version of VMM - is due for release shortly. VMM R2 Beta leverages the new platform enhancements and extends the feature set of VMM 2008. This overview highlights the most important new and significantly enhanced features in the VMM 2008 R2 Beta:
Support for new features of Windows Server 2008 R2 Beta
- Live Migration: - Seen through the VMM console, this enables administrators to move virtual machines from one machine in a virtual host cluster to another with no downtime. This allows administrators greater flexibility in responding to planned or unplanned downtime, provides higher machine availability and more robust fault tolerance within virtualized infrastructure. The basic requirements for Live Migration are that all hosts must be part of a cluster and host processors must be from the same manufacturer. Additionally all hosts in the cluster must have access to shared storage. No changes are required to existing virtual machines, network, or storage devices in moving from Quick Migration to Live Migration other than upgrading to beta versions of Windows Server 2008 R2 and VMM 2008 R2.
- Hot addition/removal of VHDs: Allows the addition and removal of new virtual hard disks (VHDs) on a running virtual machine. This enables storage growth in virtual machines without downtime. Additionally, ‘live" VHD management allows administrators to take advantage of additional backup scenarios and readily use mission critical and storage-intense applications (eg: SQL Server and Exchange).
- New optimized networking technologies: VMM 2008 R2 Beta supports two new networking technologies - Virtual Machine Queue (VMQ) and TCP Chimney - providing increased network performance while demanding less CPU burden. NICS that support VMQ, create a unique virtual network queue for each virtual machine on a host that can pass network packets directly from the hypervisor to virtual machine. This speeds throughput as it bypasses much of the processing normally required by the virtualization stack. With TCP Chimney, TCP/IP traffic can be offloaded to a physical NIC on the host computer reducing CPU load and improving network performance.
Enhanced storage and cluster support
- Clustered Shared Volumes (CSV): Provides a single, consistent storage space that allows virtual hosts in a cluster to concurrently access virtual machine files on a single shared logical unit number (LUN). CSV eliminates the previous one LUN per virtual machine restriction and coordinates the use of storage with much greater efficiency and higher performance. CSV enables the Live Migration of virtual machines in and out of the shared…
Continue reading on our new blog - VMM 2008 R2 Beta is out
Hi guys,
A couple of important facts we learn from our DPM 2007 SP1 implementations:
if you are pushing an agent to a remote Windows 2008 machine that has its FW enabled, add the following path to the firewall outbound rules - “C:\Windows\Microsoft Data Protection Manager\DPM\Agents\AC\2.0.5820.0\dpmac.exe” so that the service that installs the DPM agent can communicate with the DPM server.
When configuring VSS backup for Virtual Machines running on Hyper-V, please install the following updates:
- An update is available for Windows Server 2008-based computers to address issues with backing up and restoring Hyper-V virtual machines
- Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V VSS writer is not used during a backup job because of corrupted or invalid virtual machine configuration files
Good luck!