Microsoft Serves Up Windows 7 To MSDN, TechNet

Microsoft Serves Up Windows 7 To MSDN, TechNet
August 12, 2009 Kevin McLaughlin, ChannelWeb

Read Original Article Here: http://www.crn.com/software/219100336;jsessionid=RBJMVRZGH3QWBQE1GHPSKH4ATMY32JVN

Microsoft Thursday reached an important milestone by making Windows 7 available to MSDN and TechNet subscribers, just over two weeks after releasing Windows 7 to manufacturing.

Microsoft's volume licensing customers -- i.e. businesses -- with Software Assurance subscriptions will be able to download the Windows 7 RTM on Friday through Microsoft's Volume License Service Center (VLSC), said Brandon LeBlanc, a communications manager on the Windows Client Communications Team, in a Thursday blog post.

Volume licensing customers without SA will have to wait until Sept. 1, and Microsoft Gold and Certified partners will be able to download it from the Microsoft Partner Network portal on Aug. 16. Consumers and smaller businesses will be able to get their hands on Windows 7 when Microsoft officially launches it on Oct. 22.

Now that hardware and software partners can get Windows 7, they'll be able to start working to meet the lofty projections that have been tied to the shiny new OS. IDC predicts that for every dollar of revenue that Microsoft gets from U.S. sales of Windows 7 until the end of 2010, partners will reap $18.51 in related products and services revenue. As a whole, Microsoft partners will generate about $110 billion in products and services around Windows 7, according to IDC.

Microsoft's channel partners are getting ready for Windows 7 by offering Windows 7 related services to customers. These include conducting reviews of customers' existing hardware and software infrastructure, as well as deeper evaluations that give customers detailed information on total cost of ownership for Windows 7.

From the beginning of Windows 7 development, Microsoft has focused on getting software and hardware partners involved in the process, which is something it failed to do with Windows Vista. As a result, Microsoft has been able to adhere to a predictable development schedule with Windows 7, and company executives have pointed to this as one of the main reasons why things have gone so smoothly.

Of course, Microsoft and its partners will have to contend with weakness in the PC market that has been hammering Microsoft's revenue for the past several quarters. Microsoft gets 80 percent of its Windows client revenue from new PC sales, but the sagging economy has led consumers and businesses to put off buying decisions. All of this means that many companies that skipped Vista and are still using XP will likely continue in a holding pattern until at least early next year.

Nonetheless, industry analysts expect companies to eventually make the leap to Windows 7. By the end of 2010, IDC predicts that more than 177 million copies of Windows 7 will be installed worldwide, with 60 million of those in the U.S. Windows 7 shipments will reach 272 million in 2013, according to IDC.

tech article - Windows 2003 GPO's and "tatooing"

Way back in the old days, Windows policy management was done with "poledit", it would "tatoo" the registry; I remember teaching that a lockdown policy for the regular users was a type of "poison", and you had to be very careful to create the perfect "antidote" to the "poison" you were creating; it was an un-lockdownpolicy, reversing everything the lockdown policy did, and applied to the administrator. Without it, deleting the policy wouldn't help, you would never get back in to the controls, and the solution was re-install.

Two of the CNS engineers this week remembered their Windows 2000 & 2003 MSCE training, and insisted that the "tatooing" of the registry ended in the NT4 / Windows 95 days. Two other engineers, embedded in troubleshooting hours still in the puzzle stage, insisted that it must be happening, right here in the year 2009.

A request had called for a change to a large business' Active Directory Group Policy for the Citrix Servers. Most of our Citrix implementations are powerfully locked down with a combination of Group Policy and Script Logic's "Desktop Authority" login scripts. An Active X control running on the SQL server had failed to load on the Citrix server's published desktop, when the users tried to print from a SQL reporting services web page. The Microsoft tech article told us we could load the dll's into the Citrix server manually, and declare the reporting server as a "trusted site", allow Active X from trusted sites, and we'd be all set. The change was made right away, and the test users - copies of typical user accounts, both admin and non-admin - started getting the print dialog box, as exepcted.

But when the customer opened the gates to let in the masses, for published application and desktop testing, there were several calling in to our help desk, disappointed with the error that they had seen all too many times before, telling them they would be unable to print, because the ActiveX control had failed to load.
Resultant Set of Policy said we were applying the same GPO's to the users who had it working, and the users who had the error. So of course we looked at the user accounts: what was special about them, why wasn't the GPO applying?

This is when a couple of engineers in the group suggested the concept of "tatooing" the registry, and two other engineers repeated their training, saying it couldn't happen.
Turns out everybody was right.

The users who had the issue all had roaming profiles. Not all users had roaming profiles, and those who didn't, did not have the issue. We tried renaming the profile to .OLD and having the user log in again. That worked every time.

So the GPO's did not tatoo the REGISTRY, in the sense that they did with Windows NT 4/95, but it apparently did tatoo the PROFILES. So either way, it's something else we all need to be aware of.

Microsoft Touts gloStream and gloEMR in HealthBlog

Dr. Bill Crounse (Senior Director of Worldwide Health at Microsoft) just posted a truly exceptional column about gloStream Electronic Medical Record application(EMR)on his HealthBlog.

Here is a link to the post: http://blogs.msdn.com/healthblog/

This is no ordinary post - it's an endorsement from Microsoft of gloStreams "unique" approach and flexible, customizable and intuitive software.

The top 5 things you could be doing with virtualization but aren't, and how to start

1) Resource Pools


Alot of people make it to the first step of the virtualization project on their own. They download ESX or ESXi, get it on a decent server-class box, they download VMware Converter and P-to-V a bunch of servers, or build and clone a bunch of test servers, and that's when we come in.

Production level virtualization is real, but the number one threat to the stability of the platform is lack of planning.

Resource utilization is usually the first unplanned issue that becomes obvious. Virtual Machines in a cluster are in the Wild West, as far as resource utilization goes, by default. The initial vm creation process does require from the administrator a "limit" for memory, and a number of vCPU's for the vm - 1,2, or 4. But each server also has a default "reservation", usually much lower, and once the host is overcommitted, that is the only amount of memory that the ESX host is providing, if it has to spend the resources elsewhere in a tough economy.

Resource pools are meant to be the law and order in virtual resource management. A parent pool is made up of all the resources in the cluster - all the memory, and all the gigahertz of the cpus times all the cores; but the parent pool is NOT where the virtual machines go. Rather, just like in a physical data center a few years ago, the resources are broken up into different silos, possibly by department, or by purpose within the company. In the physical data center, nobody would expect the backup servers to get up and take resources out of the production web servers across the data center, but by default in a VMware implementation, this could be what's happening.

The box we put ESX on has alot of resources -not infinite, but plentiful. They need to be documented and budgeted. It's like putting a bunch of families in a bunch of homes. You can't just go down the list of family names, and connect them to the list of addresses. If you do, you'd have the family of 9 crammed into the two bedroom apartment, and the single guy who's never home in the castle on the corner, taking all the resources in the neighborhood.


Instead, you'd have to go interview each family a little, find out not just how many members there are, but how much stuff they have, and how often they have how many guests over, or are likely to. You'd have to go see all the addresses on the list; some are nice big homes, some have yards, some have fences around the yards, some are dainty little museums, not appropriate for the big rowdy family.

The SQL or Exchange servers might be that big rowdy family; they ought to go in a back office "resource pool" that have all the resources the servers will realistically require allocated, and set aside from the rest of the data center.

The web servers for internal portals should be given realistic reservations - the minimum resources required on the host to run this vm - as well as realistic limits. They would go in their own, separate pool.

Administration servers might go in a third pool, and so on. Another decision to make on each child pool, is whether or not the pool is "expandable". It is expandable by default.

We deslect that in most cases. When all the resources the web servers could ever realistically need have been set aside in a resource pool, there is no need to leave it "expandable". We don't need to let the servers reach out and take more resources from the parent pool if they feel like it. Most of the back-end, well known and well-planned vm's end up in non-expandable memory pools; the less predictable production servers get the "expandable" check box left checked, so if the administration servers aren't really doing much because it's lunchtime, the public-facing production servers can take advantage of the resources. That puts the law and order into the default wild west.



parts 2,3,4, and 5 coming soon