Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 will be the next version of the Windows Server operating system from Microsoft. Building on the features and capabilities of the current Windows Server 2008 release version, Windows Server 2008 R2 allows you to create solutions that are easier to plan, deploy, and manage than previous versions of Windows Server.
Check out what's new for this release (Hyper-V Live Migration, Direct Access, Branch caching, Cluster Shared Volumes, VDI Features, Improved power consumption, ...)
The reviewers guide can be found here : http://download.microsoft.com/download/6/E/3/6E3E4529-27E3-48EC-B7E7-1A93242D3AE1/Windows_Server_2008_R2_Reviewers_Guide_(BETA).doc
Download the bits here : http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=85CFE4C9-34DE-477C-B5CA-75EDAE3D57C5&displaylang=en
Businesses have never been under more pressure to reduce costs and operate more efficiently. Virtualization is one of the most effective means for making this happen. It provides powerful, tangible ways to streamline many traditionally time-consuming processes and minimize the resources needed to deploy and manage IT resources.
This white paper examines how Microsoft customers are using virtualization technology to simplify their IT infrastructure, IT processes, and save money. It begins by discussing the core savings inherent in using virtualization to consolidate servers and accelerate desktop deployment and, as a result, how this helps organizations gain significant time, space and power savings, as well as environmental benefits. We then look at additional savings customers are achieving due to the unique way that Microsoft built virtualization technologies into our server, desktop and management platforms. Finally, we show how Microsoft enables even further savings through innovative pricing and licensing, which lower both acquisition and ongoing ownership costs.
Download now:
This UG-evening will start with an introduction of the basics of index design (the heap,clustered/non clustered indexes and covering of a query by an index). Later we will discuss how the optimizer works, why it can be wrong (statistics, procedure cache) and how to correct this. Another part of the session will be some advanced features of indexing like partitioning, locking and filtered indexes. We will of course not forget indexed views and computed column indexes. If there is some time left we can also look at spatial indexes and xml indexes
Marc Mertens is trainer at Global Knowledge .
Agenda:
18:00 - 18:30 Registration and welcome with a drink & sandwich
18:30 - 20:00 Part 1 of the session
20:00 - 20:30 pause
20:30 - 22:00 Part 2 of the session
22:00 - ... Networking with your peers
This event is sponsored by and takes place in the offices of Global Knowledge in Mechelen. We want to remind that registration is obligatory. You can register here.
Looking forward to see you on January 29th
Windows 7 is designed to make everyday tasks faster and easier, and make new things possible for end users. When released to the market, Windows 7 delivers the fundamental performance, reliability and security features that people expect — and it is designed to be compatible with the same hardware, applications and device drivers as Windows Vista. Windows 7 will have improved navigation, a new taskbar and a streamlined user interface that puts commonly used resources within easy reach. Windows 7 will also make it easier to use home audio-video systems and other networked media devices to play music, watch videos and display photos that reside on Windows-based PCs. And Windows 7 will offer more options than ever to customize and personalize Windows-based PCs with styles that match the user’s personality.
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Accelerators for Securing your IT environment
If you want to secure your network environment quickly and proactively, check out Security Solution Accelerators-a suite of free tools and guidance to help you stay ahead of your security challenges.
Microsoft Operations Framework 4.0
Microsoft® Operations Framework (MOF) 4.0 delivers practical guidance for everyday IT practices and activities, helping users establish and implement reliable, cost-effective IT services.
Accelerators for Microsoft On-Line Services
Solution Accelerators for Microsoft On-line Services includes 3 accelerators that automate discovery, assess requirements for migration, and provide you with the guidance and operations framework to deploy new services faster and more efficiently.
Microsoft Assessment and Planning v3.2
The Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit 3.2 quickly and automatically conducts network-wide desktop and server assessments that help you assess your network, upgrade readiness, and virtualization candiidates quickly and automatically.
Microsoft Deployment 2008 toolkit
The Microsoft Deployment 2008 Toolkit gives you the ability to install desktop and server operating systems faster and more reliably.
Security Compliance Management Toolkit
The Security Compliance Management toolkit gives you the ability to effectively monitor the compliance state of the recommended security baselines for Windows Vista, Windows XP SP2, and Windows Server 2003 SP2
IT Compliance Guide
The IT Compliance Management guide can help you shift your governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) efforts from people to technology. Use its configuration guidance to help you efficiently address your organization's GRC objectives.
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Accelerators for Virtualization
If you're interested in the growing trend towards virtualization, check out our new Virtualization Solution Accelerators -- a suite of free tools and guidance to help you with each stage of your virtualization IT project.
Forefront Integration Kit for Network Access Protection
This kit helps you strengthen your malware defense strategy. With it you can help protect your network infrastructure by configuring a compliance health policy, monitoring the operational health of Forefront Client Security in real time, and remediating problems that arise.
Infrastructure Planning and Design Guides
The Infrastructure Planning and Design (IPD) Guides help you plan and design your infrastructure for Microsoft technologies.
Sharepoint Monitoring Toolkit
The Sharepoint Monitoring Toolkit for System Center Operations Manager 2007 helps you monitor and manage your Microsoft Office SharePoint environments, including Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.
Service Level Dashboard Management Pack
The Service Level Dashboard Management Pack helps you monitor monitor business application performance end-to-end -- from the user's side and the server side.
Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool
The Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool for System Center Virtual Machine Manager enables you to bring groups of virtual machines online just long enough to receive updates without exposing them to security risks.
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Find out more at : http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/dataprotectionmanager/en/us/whats-new.aspx
What can I say more : Whether it is a server or a client, a physical machine of Virtual, OS or application .... SCDPM is your back-up solution.
With Windows Server 2008, everything needed to support database server virtualization is available as an integral part of the operating system – Windows Server 2008 Hyper-v. This whitepaper demonstrates the performance capabilities of Oracle 10g on Hyper-v. It also has provides several best practices and resources essential to virtualization of Oracle database workloads.
Oracle 10g Database on Hyper-v Performance
I usually don't blog in this kind of topics but I'm glad to make an exception on this. It's really giving an extra dimension on BOT's.
The Microsoft Translator team is excited to announce the new translation bot for Windows Live Messenger! This Messenger bot does translations for you. Just add mtbot@hotmail.com to your contacts and start chatting. You can have one-on-one conversations with the bot, or you can invite a friend and chat in different languages with the bot translating for you. As usual, remember that machine translation isn’t perfect – slang especially will give the engine trouble.
You can also access Windows Live Messenger on your smartphone to use the bot to translate simple sentences while you’re traveling to other countries!
The translator bot is localized into all of the languages for which we have translation support on www.windowslivetranslator.com:
- English to/from:
- Arabic
- Chinese Simplified
- Chinese Traditional
- Dutch
- French
- German
- Italian
- Japanese
- Korean
- Portuguese
- Russian (RUS->ENU only)
- Spanish
- Chinese Simplified <-> Chinese Traditional
More languages will be rolled out over the next several months. Start using the bot and let us know your feedback! FYI - at any time while you’re chatting with the bot, just type “TBot ?” to get a list of commands that the bot understands:
The Microsoft Security Intelligence Report (SIR) provides an in-depth perspective on the changing threat landscape including software vulnerability disclosures and exploits, malicious software (malware), and potentially unwanted software. Using data derived from hundreds of millions of Windows users, and some of the busiest online services on the Internet, this report also provides a detailed analysis of the threat landscape and the changing face of threats and countermeasures and includes updated data on privacy and breach notifications. The fifth volume of the report is now available: SIR Volume 5 (January through June 2008) and Key Findings Summary
The total number of unique vulnerability disclosures across the industry again decreased during the first half of 2008, down 4% from the second half of 2007 and down 19% from the first half of 2007.
In contrast to the decrease in total disclosures, vulnerabilities rated as High severity increased 13% with respect to the second half of 2007, with roughly 48% of all vulnerabilities receiving a rating of High severity. This is still a 28% decline from the first half of 2007.
Some remarkable facts : (see the report for more details)
· Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services blocked more than 90 percent of messages received over the Internet in 1H08, similar to the trend observed in 2H07.
· The percentage of vulnerabilities affecting core OS components has decreased significantly over the past five years and appears to have recently stabilized between 6 and 8 percent.
· 3% of All Disclosures are Microsoft Disclosures
· Comparing the latest service packs for each version, the infection rate of Windows Vista SP1 is 48.8 percent less than that of Windows XP SP3.
· Comparing the n-1 service packs for each version, the infection rate of the release to manufacturing (RTM) version of Windows Vista is 56.2 percent less than that of Windows XP SP2.
· Comparing the RTM versions of these operating systems, the infection rate of the RTM version of Windows Vista is 85.4 percent less than that of the RTM version of Windows XP.
Microsoft offers free prescriptive guides created by the Solution Accelerators – Security and Compliance team for IT professionals, in addition to security guidance organized by topic, product, and technology: ttp://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/guidance/default.mspx.
The main goal of the resource toolkit is to enable IT administrators to unlock the full potential of the recently released App-V 4.5.
This release consists of the following tools:
· App-V Application Listing Tool - http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=5DA48313-CF6D-445D-AF97-594F194AC759&displaylang=en.
The App-V Application Listing Tool (ListVApps) is a tool which lists all the virtual processes that are running at a specific time on a specific computer. You can use the tool to get information about the priority and owner of each process, the size of its virtual memory, its session identifier and processing time. More info can be found at http://blogs.technet.com/softgrid/archive/2008/11/07/app-v-4-5-resource-kit-app-v-application-listing-tool.aspx
· Application Virtualization SFT Parser Tool - http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=E5A7DB27-304B-4CD1-9C80-7BA5FDAEA97F&displaylang=en
You can use the Application Virtualization SFT Info utility to extract the following information from SFT files:
- Validation of SFT files—Process corrupted SFT files, and recover information from corrupted SFT files.
- XML export of contents of SFT—Export the contents of an existing SFT file. You can evaluate SFT segments or SFT metadata and construct a textual tree view of all file information SFT file.
- Listing of all of the files in the SFT—Identify and print the files contained in the SFT with their full paths. This is a good method to quickly identify the contents of a package.
- Statistics about properties of the SFT metadata—Identify statistical information, such the largest file contained in a package. This can be very useful for identifying packages that are too large in size and are causing issues loading on the client.
- Get relevant information on a file in the package—Display size, timestamps, attributes, and version information associated with the package.
- Ability to skip processing of file data if using functionality that requires only the metadata—Allows working with very large packages quickly.
More info can be found at http://blogs.technet.com/softgrid/archive/2008/11/05/app-v-4-5-resource-kit-application-virtualization-sft-parser-tool.aspx
· Application Virtualization Client Log Parser Utility - http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=72876C60-3A87-4705-B722-F73EB56219BF&displaylang=en
You can use the fields and values contained in the output file to filter information obtained from the log files. The output file generated by the application log parser utility contains the following fields: System, OS, Build, Date, Time, Module, Log Level, hApp, App, User, Thread, and Message. The information contained in the output file can also be imported into Microsoft Excel for subsequent evaluation. This log parser simplifies the task of looking through log files, being able to filter by log level, build report, launch failures, mini-dumps, minimum disconnected operation mode entries and more. Afterwards, the appropriate party can import the data for analysis and/or utilization.
· Application Virtualization Cache Resizing Tool - http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=5E7089FA-C6AB-4150-8562-3B5BC14CD881&displaylang=en
The App-V client cache tool (AppVCacheSize) allows administrators to increase the Microsoft Application Virtualization client cache size through a scriptable command line interface. AppVCacheSize uses the specified parameters to configure the desired cache size, as well as toggle between using a free disk space threshold or set a maximum cache size. More info can be found at http://blogs.technet.com/softgrid/archive/2008/11/04/app-v-4-5-resource-kit-application-virtualization-cache-resizing-tool.aspx
· Application Virtualization Dynamic Suite Composition Tool - http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=DAA898DF-455F-438A-AA2A-421F05894098&displaylang=en
Dynamic suite composition is a Microsoft Application Virtualization (App-V) feature that enables applications to be sequenced separately from the plug-ins and middleware applications they rely on, while still being able to utilize the virtual resources such as file system and registry settings, in the virtual environment. The packages will run and interact with one another as if they were all installed locally on a computer. The primary package will also assume the secondary packages entire virtual environment, including the virtual file system. More info can be found at http://blogs.technet.com/softgrid/archive/2008/11/03/application-virtualization-dynamic-suite-composition-tool.aspx
Not only microsoft is publishing tools to facilitate the administrators. A tool called the “App-V Ping tool” is available as a free download at http://www.immidio.com/. Look for the Immidio Resourse Kit if you can’t find it. The tool can be used to check if an Microsoft Application Virtualization Management and/or Streaming server is available from a Client-Side perspective.
The Belgian SQL Server User Group (SQLUG.BE vzw), Microsoft and our partners decided to join efforts to celebrate the availability of SQL Server 2008 in the market and organize the very first Belgian SQL Server Day.
SQL Server Day 2008 is the biggest event focused exclusively on SQL Server in Belgium and Luxembourg and takes place Thursday December 4th, 2008 in Utopolis Mechelen.
Register Now to join more than 250 of your peers and harness the energy of SQL Server 2008, get answers to your questions and connect with the SQL Server Community.
We are very happy to announce Ian MacDonald as the Keynote speaker. Ian MacDonald is Business Lead at Microsoft for the Business Intelligence and Performance Management Solutions and a passionate and gifted speaker.
In addition SQL Server Day 2008 brings you 6 technical sessions tailored to your needs as a SQL Server and Microsoft Business Intelligence Professional. A taste of some of the topics :
· Enhancements in T-SQL
· Geospatial Data
· Policy Based Management
· Consolidate data services monitoring with Performance Data warehouse
· Multi Server Management
· Data warehouse enhancements
· Scalability enhancements
· Implement enterprise-scale Reporting Services solutions
· Build flexible and effective reports
· Datamining
· … and so much more
The closing keynote is brought to you by Gunther Beersaerts and Wesley Backelant from Microsoft Belgium and Luxembourg. Gunther and Wesley will provide an insight on the future of SQL Server and the Microsoft Data Platform.
Full details for the event and registration can be found on www.sqlserverday.be.
Looking forward to see you on December 4th,
SQL Server Day Team
As you've probably noticed I stopped blogging about a year ago as I've changed roles within Microsoft. But if there is a time to stop there probably is a time to start again & seen the rollercoaster period that's coming in 2009 I think it makes sence to start blogging again to insure that all the info we need to distribute to the Belgian Microsoft Partner community can be distributed in a nice & easy way. As you will see 2009 will be a year where we will prepare & launch a whole set of products and distribute that information to our partners. After 5 months working with partners I also see the need for information transfer mechanisms towards this community. Have Fun reading the posts that will be published.
Abstract:
In this session we will provide an overview of the next release of SQL Server, SQL Server 2008, codenamed "Katmai". The session will cover the core value-proposition, major themes and scenarios, and the specific engine improvements, including the new Management Framework, datatypes (spatial,…), new Reporting Engine, FileStream, etc. We also cover the new development processes being used to build this release, the release timeline and the disclosure calendar.
Level: 200 – 300
Depending on the audience, we'll remain high-level (management / decision maker audience) or go more deeper (DBA, Developer or technical BI audience).
Speaker:
Gunther Beersaerts is a Senior Technical Specialist at Microsoft Belgium & Luxembourg.
Agenda:
18:00 - 18:30 Welcome
18:30 - 21:00 Session with pause
21:00 - 22:00 Drink
Full details and free registration can be found here.
Thu Nov 22 by Marc Mertens
Reporting Services is Microsoft's server based reporting solution that is delivered together with SQL Server 2005. In this session you will learn how to create a report, deploy and manage it. Also covered is how you can use Reporting Services to control the load on your source system when running a report. If there is time left we will shown how to write custom extensions for your reports.
Prepare yourself for a long night. First we have the session, afterwards we are offered a guided tour in "Huis van de Toekomst". Doors will be closed far after 22:00 hour.
The starting hour will be 18:30, doors open from 18:00 hour.
The event will take place in Huis van de Toekomst
Indringingsweg 1
B-1800 Vilvoorde
Registration is needed. You can register here.
Registration is open.
August 14, 2007
Exchange 2007 Service Pack Preview Ships
By Stuart J. Johnston
Microsoft announced Tuesday that it is shipping Beta 2 of the first service pack for Exchange Server 2007. With this beta, which is also being called a community technology preview or CTP, Service Pack 1 (SP1) is now feature complete, according to company officials.
Exchange Server 2007 shipped last December.
Among the new capabilities coming in SP1 is support for Windows Server 2008 -- which is set for official launch on February 27, 2008 -- as well as support for Windows Vista. That means Exchange Server 2007 SP1 will be able to take advantage of Windows Server 2008's support for geographically-dispersed clusters. SP1 will also run Exchange Server 2007's management tools on both Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008
The service pack will also feature increased support for the company's unified communications initiative, including the ability to retrieve voice mails from Microsoft Office Communicator.
New high-availability features include "standby continuous replication," wherein mailbox data is constantly replicated to a standby server. If the main server or the data center it resides in goes offline, the standby server is automatically started, according to Microsoft (Quote) statements.
"[That will provide] a hot standby server that's always up to date," Ray Mohrman, group product manager in Microsoft's Unified Communications group, told internetnews.com.
On the security front, SP1 adds support for new ActiveSync policies for synchronization, authentication, and encryption to let administrators better manage Exchange ActiveSync-enabled devices.
"[For instance,] you might not want cameras to be on, or you might want all e-mails encrypted," Mohrman added.
Additionally, Exchange 2007 SP1 will integrate with Microsoft Forefront Security Server SP1 for Exchange Server. The update of Forefront Security Server for Exchange will provide additional content filtering and scanning performance, as well as support for Windows Server 2008, according to the company.
Exchange Server 2007 SP1 -- as well as Forefront Security SP1 for Exchange Server -- is scheduled for release by the end of the year. SP1 Beta 2 is available to all MSDN and Microsoft TechNet subscribers.
