Dave Glover "Down Under (Oz)" : Virtual PC/Server

Western Australian 2009 Daylight Saving Changes Updated 28 September 2009

dglover — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 02:19:32 GMT

original posting at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-au/bb821275.aspx

On 16 May, Western Australians rejected by referendum a proposal to extend their trial of daylight savings. As a result there will be no daylight savings in WA this year or for the foreseeable future.

This change will affect Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office Outlook and other Microsoft, third party and custom applications, which are currently programmed to adjust their clocks on 25 October 2009. However, we have taken important steps to help you proactively address the issue.

The Australia 2009 Daylight Saving Planning Guide provides detailed guidance on preparing Microsoft solutions in complex environments for changes in daylight saving. Click on the links below to download the document in your preferred format:

What is the impact of Daylight Savings changes?
Effects can range from the incorrect time display on the clock, to calendaring problems, to changes in business critical services that are time dependent.

What is affected?

All Microsoft Windows PC, server and mobile devices in the affected time zones must be updated to ensure accuracy of internal time zone tables and correct operation of the system clock.
Microsoft Office Outlook calendars may need to be adjusted. Client and Server-based tools are available to automate this service.
Microsoft, third party and custom applications which schedule events at future dates should be reviewed to ensure they will operate correctly from 25 October onwards. Previously scheduled events may also need to be adjusted.

What do I need to do?
Thorough planning and testing for these changes is critical to ensure the change results in minimal user impact, so to help customers prepare Microsoft has developed the Australia 2009 Daylight Saving Planning document which details the nature and impact of the DST changes, along with planning guidance to avoid user impact.

What if the systems have been previously patched?
Where servers, workstations and mobile devices have been added to the infrastructure, organisations will need to audit their environment to ensure all systems are updated according to the organisation's Daylight Savings Plan.

Where the environment does not have a consistent Daylight Savings Time (DST) update level, appointments may have been created with a mix of correct and incorrect DST transition dates.

Windows 7 "Remote Server Administration Tools" including Hyper-V Management

dglover — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 05:13:00 GMT

IMHO, one the of the coolest technologies to be released last year was Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, the virtualisation just rocks, it's fast, solid and reliable. I run Windows Server Core 2008 (ie no GUI) so I manage the Hyper-V Role from Windows Vista Sp1 with Hyper-V Manager, so was a tad disappointed to find the Hyper-V management wouldn't install on Windows 7.

Anyways, fear no more, you can download the updated tools from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=7d2f6ad7-656b-4313-a005-4e344e43997d&displaylang=en, once installed:-

Go to Control Panel.
In the Programs and Features area, click Turn Windows features on or off.
If you are prompted by User Account Control to enable the Windows Features dialog box to open, click Continue.
In the Windows Features dialog box, expand Remote Server Administration Tools.

The download link contains more information on setup.

Yes, you still need to enable the firewall and allow anonymous DCOM call backs if you manage a Hyper-V Server that is in it's own workgroup or domain. For more info on this then check out http://blogs.technet.com/jhoward/archive/2008/11/14/configure-hyper-v-remote-management-in-seconds.aspx

Cheers Dave

Windows and Dell have joined (RED) to help eliminate AIDS in Africa

dglover — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 05:36:29 GMT

Just spotted this in twitterverse (thanks aussienick) If you are looking for a new PC this Christmas then maybe this is a great place to start – and help fight AIDS in Africa. Cheers Dave

Check out http://www.microsoft.com/australia/windows/products/windowsvista/joinred/home.aspx

Windows and Dell have joined (RED) to help eliminate AIDS in Africa. When you buy a Dell (PRODUCT) RED PC with Windows Vista Ultimate (PRODUCT) RED, Windows and Dell will jointly contribute the equivalent of US$50 to the equivalent of US$80, depending on the product, to The Global Fund. With Windows Vista Ultimate (PRODUCT) RED, these aren’t just the ultimate PCs, they’re a powerful way to improve lives.

Microsoft Hyper-V Server Now Available (Hyper-V role only Server)

dglover — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 05:36:16 GMT

In case you missed this, but of couple of days ago we released Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008, it is designed to minimize host resources, it’s a free of charge but it does NOT contain any guest licenses, essentially it Windows Server Core 2008 with just the Hyper-V Role and some simple command line config tools…

Hyper-V absolutely rocks – spotted this recent case study - PacLib performs VMware analysis but chooses Microsoft

For more on Hyper-V Server and installation then check out Ben’s (Virtual PC Guy) Blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2008/10/01/hyper-v-server-now-available.aspx

Cheers and have a great day, Dave

Microsoft migrates MSDN and TechNet on Hyper-V virtual machines

dglover — Tue, 27 May 2008 04:44:20 GMT

As mentioned at my ADNUG Hyper-V session we are hosting MSDN and TechNet sites on Hyper-V - cool!!

Check out Microsoft migrates MSDN and TechNet on Hyper-V virtual machines for more info!!

Cheers Dave

What to undertstand a bit more about Windows Server “Longhorn” Virtualisation?

dglover — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 03:30:00 GMT

In this demo you will see:

- Windows Server Virtualization running on a Server Core installation managed remotely from another Windows Server Longhorn box

- 64-bit and 32-bit virtual machines running concurrently

- SUSE Linux 10 running in a virtual machine

- An 8-core virtual machine

- System Center Virtual Machine Manager

o Interface and Operations

- System Center Operations Manager

o Monitoring the VMs on the Server Core box

o Fire off a PowerShell script to hot-add another NIC to a SQL VHD Image

Send them HERE: http://soapbox.msn.com/video.aspx?vid=5119240c-6579-4827-8338-7f5539930402

Cheers, Dave

Building Web Forms with Office InfoPath Forms Services (ADNUG)

dglover — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 05:28:00 GMT

For whatever reason InfoPath 2007 and Office Forms Server 2007 didn't hit my radar till recently and given the show of hands last night then there's a reasonable chance you've missed it as well.

I reckon it has to be one of the coolest bits of Office System Server 2007, Form filling isn't going away anytime soon and this is a great web based solution that you can extend with Windows Workflow to automate a business processes.

You build a form with InfoPath 2007, publish it and then you access the form via an internet browser, the generated web forms implement AJAX, look great, operate smoothly and there is excellent fidelity between what you design in InfoPath and what you see in a browser!! If you have InfoPath Installed then it will load the form by default (a default that can be overridden).

There is a great range of desktop browsers supported including Internet Explorer, Mozilla/FireFox, Mac/Safari etc and mobile device browsers which must support HTML, xHTML, or cHTML which covers your Pocket PCs, SmartPhones, Palms, Berries etc and you can even embed a form using the FormsControl in to your own desktop or ASP.NET application. So gone are the days when InfoPath forms only worked with InfoPath installed on the desktop.

InfoPath Forms Services ships as part of Office SharePoint Server 2007 or separately as Office Forms Server 2007 – available on MSDN Subscription Download or you can download an eval copy of Office SharePoint Server 2007 from here.

Here is a collection of useful links:-

InfoPath Team Blog
Microsoft Office Forms Server 2007
InfoPath Developer Portal -
- Check out the linked Creating Browser Enabled Forms With InfoPath 2007 Channel 9 screencast.
- And the Creating Custom Workflows with the SharePoint Designer 2007 Channel 9 screencast
InfoPath 2007: Designing Form Templates With The New Features Of InfoPath - Scott Roberts and Hagen Green
Integrate InfoPath 2007 and Visual Studio 2005 - See how the InfoPath 2007 form template design environment is integrated into the Visual Studio 2005 IDE in the 2007 Office System.
InfoPath

What you need to load up Server side - I ran in a VPC and if you load Office Forms Server (not the full SharePoint Server) then you'll get away with allocating 512MB to the VPC.

Windows Server 2003
Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 – hmmm, interesting just spotted this article for "Side by side support of SharePoint Services 2.0 and 3.0" – a must for Small Business Server Users or on a system with TFS...
I loaded Office Forms Server 2007 or you can load up the eval of Office SharePoint Server 2007

Client Side

InfoPath 2007 – be sure to include the .NET Programming install options including Visual Studio Tools for Applications
You can also optionally install the released version of Visual Studio Tools for Office

I've attached the very simple InfoPath Visual Studio code sample that Ben from SDM sent me – thanks Ben!!

Cheers and great to see you all last night, Dave

Virtual PC Additions for Vista June and July CTPs now available

dglover — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 02:40:00 GMT

Looking good, check out http://blogs.msdn.com/mikekol/archive/2006/07/25/676977.aspx for the link to the latest VPC Additions!!

PS, if you want to set up Virtual Server 2005 R2 on Vista then check out http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2006/06/05/618547.aspx.

I personally ended up doing the manual install of the IIS 7 components, which in itself was interesting as I discovered where all the install pieces for Dev are on IIS7. Anyway your mileage may vary and the script install may work for you.

Once installed the thing to remember is to start IE using "Run as Administrator" and then link to the Virtual Server admin site... If you don’t do this your admin credentials don’t get passed to VS Admin and you'll not be able to administer your virtual machines.

It works well!!

Cheers Dave

My Experience running Windows Vista Beta 2 in a Virtual PC

dglover — Mon, 17 Jul 2006 09:24:00 GMT

Great to see you all at the Adelaide Innovation 2006 Windows Vista and Office 2007 event last week, that plus 2 User Groups and 1 ACS meeting then I think I handed out some 300 copies of Windows Vista and Office last week:-)

Hmmm, now I'm sure you wouldn't leave your copies of Vista to languish unloved on a shelf somewhere would you!! But I also appreciated having a spare machine that you can flatten to load Vista may be a big ask (though you can dual boot XP and Vista). If this is the case and your main machine is reasonably well speced then how about loading Vista up in to a Virtual PC!! It now works surprisingly well!!

Yup, up till now running Windows Vista in a Virtual PC has been a painful experience and not really worth the effort. But we've now released Windows Vista Beta 2 Optimized Virtual PC Additions and the experience is on par with running Windows XP or Server 2003 in a Virtual PC.

It's obviously not as good as the real thing, you don’t get to see the sexed up desktop in all its glassy glory but hopefully by now you'll have figured that the enhancements in Windows Vista are more than just skin deep and there are a stack of things for you to explore, test and give feedback on!!

Two things happened with Virtual PC over the last month or so

Virtual PC is now freely (no charge) available – click here for more info and to download
Windows Vista B2 Virtual PC Additions were released on to http://connect.microsoft.com. Get yourself logged in to the site, select "Available Connections", scroll to the bottom on the page, click on "Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 Beta" and off that link you will find the Windows Vista Beta 2 Virtual PC/Server Additions.

To get Windows Vista up and running in a Virtual PC you'll need the following

512 MB of memory that you can allocate to a Virtual PC - obviously the more the better!!
Approx 8 gig of free disk space - but more to install Office 2007 and Visual Studio 2005, Windows SDK, Expression etc...
a CPU with a reasonable amount of grunt, I'm running my Vista Virtual PC happily on a 3gig P4 laptop

To create your Virtual PC do the following

Create your Virtual PC from the Virtual PC Manager ensuring you allocate a minimum of 512MB of memory to the image.
Load up your Vista DVD (if loading from an ISO image then follow the instructions here as the ISO image is bigger than 2.2 gig)
Follow the Windows Vista install options, enter the product key and leave it to churn away - it'll take awhile ( a good hour or so depending on your host system config)
When the install has completed you'll need to load in the Virtual PC Additions. Until you do this, the Windows Vista Virtual PC will hammer all your CPU resources and disk IO will be painfully slow
On your host machine (not the guest) run the Vista B2 Virtual PC Additions MSI file that you downloaded from http://connect.microsoft.com. This will unpack the "VMAdditionsforVistaB2.iso" file by default in to the "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Virtual Machine Additions" directory.
Log on to the Windows Vista Virtual PC and wait for it to settle down - but CPU will still be burning 100%!!
From the Virtual PC Guest menu, select "CD" and then "Capture ISO Image" and select the ISO image you unpacked in to the "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Virtual Machine Additions" directory.
The Virtual PC additions installation program should auto start in the Guest machine and just follow the install prompts.
Reboot and now you'll have a well behaved Windows Vista Beta 2 installation that doesn't chew all your CPU and with reasonable disk IO performance:-)
As per Performance Optimisation Guidelines for Virtual PC guests, I disabled "Enable write-caching on the disk" in the Vista guest machine, otherwise no other changes.

Other stuff I loaded on to this image

Office 2007 Beta 2
Visual Studio 2005
Windows SDK for Windows Vista Beta 2
Orcas addin for VS 2005
Expression Interactive Designer
VSTO (Visual Studio Tools for Office) 3 June CTP - using this hack - http://blogs.msdn.com/tq/archive/2006/06/06/620048.aspx

Stuff I tried

Created a simple .NET Framework 3 (WinFx) Windows Communication Service and a Windows Client to consume the service - pushed allocated memory to 528MB - see screen shot here.
Started up Expression Interactive Designer (May CTP) and opened the "Fabrikam Catalog Special Effects" demo and pressed F5 to run - pushed allocated memory to 544MB - see screen shot

Summary

Running Vista against a real PC will always be better!!
512MB is a min of ram you can get away with (actually it's an install minimum as well), the system will start over allocating memory pretty quickly and performance will drop back a lot, I found allocating 768MB to the Virtual PC was not a bad compromise.
You'll see the Vista desktop in fall back mode given the graphics driver in the VPC is only a 8MB S3 emulation, but that still leaves lots to explore
Check out Windows Foundation labs at http://www.netfx3.com/
1. The Windows Presentation Foundation Labs are at http://wpf.netfx3.com/files/folders/labs/default.aspx
2. The Windows Communication Foundation Labs are at http://wcf.netfx3.com/content/resources.aspx
3. The Windows Workflow samples are at http://wf.netfx3.com/files/13/default.aspx

Other stuff

Want to run Virtual Server 2005 R2 on a Vista Client? Then check out Ben's blog entry here
Want to keep tabs on what is happening with Virtualisation and Vista then add the Ben's and Mike's blogs to your RSS reader (which by now could be Outlook 2007:-))
1. Ben's Virtual PC Guy is at http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy
2. Mike's Virtually Vista is at http://blogs.msdn.com/mikekol

Cheers, Dave

How to Optimize Virtual PC Performance

dglover — Thu, 08 Sep 2005 04:35:00 GMT

For a useful support article on optimising performance of Virtual PC environments then check out this link.

Microsoft's Virtualisation Roadmap and just what is a Hypervisor

dglover — Thu, 11 Aug 2005 17:59:00 GMT

An email caught my eye this evening, it was sent out by Jeff Woolsey, Lead Program Manager for Virtualization about our future directions for Virtualisation. It's public domain info and kinda interesting so I thought I'd do some digging around to understand more as I find virtualisation technologies 1) darn useful for application dev, testing, consolidation and 2) a bit like the proverbial dancing bear; not so much how well it dances but that it dances at all.

In the Virtualisation world the term "Hypervisor" gets banded around a lot and I found a great overview of the technology, it's history, various competing projects and future directions including x86 at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypervisor.

As a quick summary, today x86 (and others) only delivers partial CPU virtualisation, the focus has been multi tasking efficiencies and protected user level memory address spaces (Ring 3). Products like Virtual PC/Server enable full virtualisation by intercepting and managing kernel (Ring 0) level instructions issued by the guest OS and arbitrating access to low level resources such as hardware interrupts and IO channels (all with an associated performance cost). User level instructions issued by the guest OS and guest applications continue to execute as normal with no performance overhead at user level (Ring 3). This is probably best understood by checking out the virtualisation architecture slides in the WinHEC slides referenced below.

Intel and AMD are both working on providing full Hypervisor support at the CPU level, introducing a new CPU Ring (-1), with respective project codenames "Vanderpool" and "Pacifica". A thin layer of Windows virtualization technology will move to execute at Hypervisor CPU Ring -1 to take full advantage of hardware innovations from Intel and AMD.

We can expect to see greater performance and stability for our virtualised environments as resource arbitration for guest OSs will occur at the hardware level with the assistance of the thin Hypervisor software layer running at CPU Ring -1. Guest OS kernel instructions will execute at Ring 0 as per normal rather than being holstered up to run at Ring 1 as done with current virtualisation technologies that intercept guest kernel instructions. Check out the slide deck below as this will make it clearer:-)

There is an interesting 10 minute slot on our commitment to virtualisation in the "2005 Microsoft Management Summit" webcast, jump to about 50 minutes into the Steve Balmer session, plus a demo of Linux support in Virtual Server 2005 SP1 and MOM.

Also worth checking out is the Virtualisation PPT from WinHEC from http://download.microsoft.com/download/9/8/f/98f3fe47-dfc3-4e74-92a3-088782200fe7/TWSE05008_WinHEC05.ppt.

Key points in this deck are:

Virtualization is going into the OS in the Longhorn Server wave.
Windows virtualization will be hypervisor based and take full advantage of hardware innovations from Intel and AMD in the forms of VT and Pacifica, respectively.
Windows virtualization will provide 32-bit and 64-bit guests.
We will have a smooth migration from path from Virtual Server to Windows virtualization.
…and plenty more so check out the deck…

LOL, like lots of things in life, we want it now and there will be some real benefits with full Hypervisor support in the CPU, but in the mean time Virtual PC and Server are here today and waiting to server!!

Dave.

Virtual PC 2004 on Hyper-Threading Systems and an Intermittent Freezing or Pausing Issue

dglover — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 01:54:00 GMT

If you are running Virtual PC 2004 SP1 on a Hyper-Threaded system (though this is not a universal problem) then you may experience an issue where the guest OS periodically freezes or halts, may be for a couple of seconds every few minutes or so – somewhat frustrating on that blazingly fast new HT system you just unpacked with more passion than a child on Christmas morningJ.

Well there is a hot fix available that should cure the issue, alas for the moment this is not directly available on the web so you will need to call your local Microsoft PSS (Product Support) and ask them to send you the patch - the qfe number you need to quote is qfe889677 - there are two patches available - one if you did an integrated VPC 2004 SP1 install and the other if you did a VPC 2004 RTM install and then applied SP1.

This was just released internally a week or two ago and I applied it to my Dell Inspiron 5150 and the Guest OSs now run as expected and life is good, lol, ok life is pretty good either wayJ

Virtual PC 2004 and DVD ISO Image Limitations

dglover — Fri, 04 Mar 2005 02:03:00 GMT

May be it's an age thing but gone are the days when I was willing to try that little bit of beta software that looked oh so tempting only to find it has trashed my system and then to be faced with hours rebuilding my system.

So if are anything like me then you love Virtual PC 2004 for trying out new bits in safety but you might have also spotted a rather irritating limitation for loading up large DVD ISO Images (for example Visual Studio 2005 CTP ISOs), Virtual PC 2004 (and Virtual Server) doesn't support ISO images greater than 2.2 GB, grrrr.

Fortunately there are some easy work arounds which work by loading up the large ISO image using a Virtual CD/DVD driver on your host system and then connecting to that drive from within your host system via Virtual PCs Shared Folder support, ahhh:-)

Check out http://www.robertmoir.co.uk/win/vpcfaq/VPCFAQ7-KnownIssueswithVP.html for a good description of some of the work around solutions...

I dug out my licence of Nero 5.x and spotted Nero DriveImage, now this is seriously a cool piece of stable software and I now just install software from ISO with DriveImage (VPC or not). Well pleased...