Virtualization, Cloud, Infrastructure and all that stuff in-between

Penultimate day at TechEd, still get the feeling its scaled down this year, but still some good content and some of the best sessions so far today. It was a slightly earlier start and late finish due to the 2pm finish tomorrow, today’s hilights as follows.

Note to Microsoft – early start following the country drinks probably not the wisest move 🙂 1st sessions were pretty quiet this morning 🙂

First session was Migrating and co-existence with Microsoft Online; looking at the steps involved with integrating with Microsoft hosted Exchange services which were shown on Monday’s keynote

Key points for me were;

• This is for Microsoft’s hosted Exchange service only, other providers of managed Exchange like Fasthosts and 1&1 don’t have the same facilities
• Tools support import from a variety of sources, Exchange 200x, Domino, POP3/IMAP, Yahoo mail etc.
• Migration & co-existence tools and documentation are downloadable from the online configuration pages, the tools provided are modified versions of the Exchange Transporter/Migration suite.
• Push-based Dirsync to Microsoft online via dirsync tool which is a packaged up version of the ILM product.
• Co-existence is supported through the use of alias domains, disabled target objects and alternative recipients; basically the same method as the Quest tools use to do a cross-forest migration.
• Don’t have to move all  – can operate a mix of local and hosted mailboxes.
• Because co-existence is basically cross-forest free/busy and delegation do not work across the internal/hosted boundary – Microsoft are hoping to address this; but it’s an inherent issue with this type of co-existence.
• Mailbox ACL’s delegates and rules and RSS feeds are not migrated – user will need to re-create.
• Passwords are not migrated/sync’d so users will need to create a new password via online sign-on wizard.
• Can choose to migrate all or a rule based subset of the mailbox contents
• Clients are not automatically redirected once it’s migrated – need to follow sign-on wizard via Microsoft online service which downloads a new MAPI profile to Outlook

Next up was a journey to the centre of a terminal server; a level 400 technical session on the internals of terminal server logons and processes; there was far too much technical information for me to blog so I’ll provide some links.

• Terminal services has now officially been renamed to Remote Desktop Services see here
• A comprehensive Whitepaper on tuning terminal services has been released here
• Terminal Services in Windows 2008 is much more modular with 3 component services, this separation enables much better separation of session management behind the scenes.
• New TS app analyser has been released, which can examine applications and determine their suitability for use on a terminal server looking for common permissions/file issues.
• One thing to watch with RemoteApp sessions is that a full desktop is rendered in the background, if that user profile or application spawns a window-less UI it can become a stuck zombie process when the user closes the RemoteApp session, Acrobat Reader updater (AcroTray) is a common culprit.
• There is a complicated issue with registry profile time stamps in a TS farm which to be honest I don’t fully understand – but Immidio have some free tools to assist with this, Tritsch is an excellent presenter and certainly knows his material

Next was Anatomy of a hack 2008 by Jesper Johansson, showing how malware is being pimped in the guise of anti-malware software!

key points were;

• It’s all about the money – organised crime running the same sort of bait and switch scams as they always did, but now on a massive, easy to do scale.
• Malware developers are getting good, and well organised with some innovative and well thought out lures.
• Some Malware now alter their behaviour if it detects that it is running inside a VM to avoid security researchers usual MO.
• Fraudulent transactions are going to Eastern Europe and infrastructure is distributed around the globe to handle transactions and Malware distribution
• They are definitely targeting layer 8 issues rather than technical steps to compromise systems through vulnerabilities; preying on the naive, careless or less informed.
• difficult to prevent, education and caution the key

Last session of the day was with Mark Russinovitch (of Sysinternals.com fame) on Windows 2008 R2 Virtualization and native VHD support.

How Mark manages to keep all the encyclopedic amount of internal Windows information inside his normal sized head  I don’t know – but his sessions are always very detailed and thorough.

Key points for me were;

• This was the 1st session I attended that Windows 2008 Hyper V has been referred to as Hyper V 2.0.
• there are comprehensive power management improvements in R2 which are propagated through to Hyper V; allowing suspend “parking” of individual CPU cores and consolidating CPU core workload to the minimum required to provide service – thus reducing overall power requirements.
• Intel and AMD have EPT and NPT technology embedded into new CPUs which will handle shadow page table mapping in hardware delivering significant performance improvements and reducing host OS usage.
• VHD (Virtual Hard Disk format) is a strategic direction for Microsoft, intended to replace all other container formats (CAB, ZIP, WIM etc.).
• VHD is an open, documented file format – open to 3rd party solutions and integrations.
• Windows Backup in Vista and 2008 already write backup data out to a VHD file.
• Improved Windows 7 / Server 2008 R2 boot manager will support boot from VHD, BCEDIT is used to point at a file system mounted VHD file rather than the traditional partition.
• Pagefile and boot loader need to remain on a physical partition.
• This enables some highly flexible multi-boot scenarios and makes P2V, V2P much easier.
• Mark showed his laptop which was booting Windows 7 from a VHD file.
• Boot from VHD also supports differential disks, this enables some very cool scenarios where the root disk is a known good/safe image with all changes being written into a differential VHD – allows for neat roll back to a standard condition (Internet kiosk type scenario) or protection from patching etc.
• Also allows for offline servicing of OS through patching too.
• Allows ISV’s to deliver apps or even whole OS/VM installations ready to use (appliances).
• nesting VHD files inside each other is not recommended and >2 levels is not supported.

A final thought from me on this is that if they were to integrate the SIS (Single Instance Storage) features of the .WIM format into VHD files then that would be a very compelling solution for VDI farms, VM terminal servers, and would make the download/streaming of VM images (via MED-V) very efficient, you could distribute a single VHD with multiple variations of a Vista or XP OS build in a very storage efficient manner.

Ok, so that was day 4 – last day tomorrow!

3rd day out at TechEd, sorry for the delay in posting – have had lots of session time and work to slot in either side, plus it takes quite a long time to write this up, I hope you’re finding it useful.

I attended a number of sessions around SCVMM and Hyper V today, as well as some good chats with some people from the product teams. – the “ask the expert” booths are brilliant for this kind of thing as they are usually well staffed with people from the development or PS teams so you can usually get an answer to a complicated question; or be pointed in the right direction.

First session was Windows vista to Windows 7 desktop virtualization roadmap with Fei Lu, key points for me were;

• Microsoft are investing significant effort in application and desktop virtualization, the driver for this is that it makes it easier for people to deploy newer OS’es by de-coupling/virtualizing the integration between hardware/OS/applications/data – the pay-off for Microsoft is that they sell more licences and speed up adoption, to my mind this helps keep the traditional rich OS/app desktop in the game with adopters of Web 2.0 type on-line applications
• Wide range of products in this space now, Terminal Service/Desktop VM/central VDI and application virtualization which can all be mixed & matched to provide the required solution.
• Folder redirection/roaming profiles with good off-line caching is being positioned as data virtualization.
• VM Mobility and DR are popular scenarios for MS customers
• Windows 7 will provide even more off-line caching features for data and settings – data virtualization.
• The Kidaro acquisition becomes MED-V “Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization” which manages distributing VMs to PCs and provides offline use and desktop integration (more on this in a later session)
• VDI is also a popular scenario, Microsoft will not write an enterprise scale connection broker, they have partnered with Citrix to deliver this, Microsoft may provide a small scale connection broker in future.
• VDI and APP-V is nice solution for simple centralised desktop management, (I did hear later than there is no x64 support for APP-V as far as I know though)
• New VDI scenarios with Windows 7 RDP protocol support multi-monitor and bi-directional audio.
• Fei ran a very brave demo of speech recognition over RDP to a beta version of a Windows 7 VDI farm.. worked pretty well, and also played back some HD quality video which was pretty impressive (no details on bandwidth available/used though).
• In future Microsoft are considering a pure hypervisor based client device, and the ability to download a VM image and run it and support portability of the image to/from a VDI farm.
• Windows 7 will be able to boot a VHD directly, which must use the same code/logic as Server 2008 and Hyper V use to manage the parent partition.

Next up was a more detailed look at MED-V (Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization) this is the Kidaro product, integrated as part of the MDOP licencing programme, key points.

• It Manages and distributes virtual machines to client devices for local execution (think: running  Virtual PC on a Vista machine with centralised management and distribution of the .VHD files.
• PC needs MED-V client  (.MSI installer).
• Integrates start menu and seamless windows from the guest OS to the host like you get with VMWare Workstation’s Unity feature
• capable of distributing VMs over the network (delta based replication) or on media like USB/DVD.
• Policy control for expiry of a provided virtual machine; managing when it can be used etc.
• Maps printers back to local host
• Didn’t mention clipboard redirection explicitly but I assume it’s there?
• Configure which guest OS applications are published to the host OS start menu (nice)
• Integrated support for sysprep and setup scripts for things like domain membership if you have transient or persistent VMs.
• A very clever feature can redirect a MED-V presented IE window back to the guest OS instance of IE via an internal VPN tunnel (pretty sure that was what was said); based on the URL they are trying to reach. Which is good for a scenario where you are using a company supplied and secured MED-V VM on a home PC – ensuring that personal browsing does not traverse a company VM or VPN connection.
• MED-V isn’t available yet; beta out early Q1 2009 and RTM likely to be available 1st half of 2009.

Next up was a session on System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) which is used to manage virtual machines on both Hyper-V hosts and VMWare ESX (Xen maybe too in the future)

• VMWare Virtual Center is required to manage ESX hosts and clusters, SCVMM proxies control requests for ESX hosts via virtual center (using the API and PowerShell it would seem).
• SCVMM can manage multiple VMWare Virtual Center instances as well as Hyper-V and present a single pane of glass across the whole estate with centralised provisioning etc.
• SCVMM provides a Performance & Resource Optimisation feature (PRO) which is similar to VMWare’s DRS functionality
• PRO Can distribute VM load across multiple Virtual Center instances; which VMWare VC can’t do itself (but assume can’t vMotion this way so would have to shutdown and move).
• Can only use DRS or PRO – not both as they will fight each other.
• Can use SCVMM without SCOM but it can’t do the PRO stuff without SCOM as it doesn’t have performance data.
• There SCVMM is available now will be a new release to support Server 2008r2 and Hyper-V quick migration (vMotion equivalent).
• All in, looks to be a good product with some nice integrations but until Hyper-V is more prevalent managing mixed environments isn’t a huge requirement (to me) it’s not necessarily anything you can’t do out of the box now with VMWare Virtual Centre and some Windows VM monitoring via SCOM but definitley worth having in the arsenal for when Server 2008r2 brings live migration to Hyper V as adoption will pick up.

Next session was on connecting Active Directory to cloud services; this focused on the work Microsoft have done to build a hub and spoke federation architecture to allow cross-authentication between internal directory services (in this case Active Directory) and external service providers.

• the core of this is Microsoft Live ID, this service is essentially a broker hub for passing around authentication tokens and requests.
• Will be released in 2009; CTP available now, beta early 2009.
• Built on “Geneva” technology which seems to be a wider development of AD-FS
• Key point is tokens/claims are passed around the cloud and your service providers but authentication is always done via your home directory (i.e AD)
• Wizard based setup to enroll users/groups to the Federated Hub service.
• Release will be targeted at Active Directory as the authentication source, but framework is open so other vendors could write providers (Netware, Linux etc).
• Need to find out more about “Geneva” which is geared to complex enterprise scenarios.
• Will maybe build in more granular control for your administrators to specify what service providers your credentials can be used on, you never send passwords etc. just tokens but you may not want your internal users using this service to authenticate to non-business (i.e dating/social networking) sites that also participate in the Live ID federation hub.

Last session of the day was on the new Server 2008r2 Cluster Shared Volume (CSV) feature.

• Disks on traditional windows clusters could only be owned and accessed by one host over the storage area network (FC/iSCSI etc.) at a time; if other nodes try to mount the disk they can’t and there can be a risk of corruption.
• This is a multi-access shared disk volume, a bit like VMFS or ZFS.
• Hyper V is the only supported workload (but others may work)
• This is how they will enable live migration in Server 2008 R2 Hyper V
• 1 co-ordinator node manages access to the CSV and owns it.
• nodes send their read/write data to the CSV volume by the most efficient path (determined by the controller node?) this can be down the storage path or over a Ethernet network between the nodes (using faster Win2008 R2 SMB protocols)
• Can provide an extra degree of fault tolerance for access to the volume if a FC-path or network fails as it can route around it.
• you can assign priorities to certain paths to the storage.
• It’s still NTFS, all the tools chkdsk etc. still work and ACL’s etc.
• Supports MPIO, Fibre channel, iSCSI.
• This looks promising but I’m not sure about this data routing idea – surely you’d rather keep your server, storage and networking separate for security and performance reasons… but it is a clever idea and I can see that it could provide burst capacity if you were to saturate a storage path on an individual host, you could hand it off to another host to proxy it for you via an alternative path.

During the day we also got to speak to some of the Ask the Expert people around Hyper V – we discovered

• They’re unsure if Hyper V supports Windows Network Load Balancing
• You can’t do NIC trunking with Hyper V like you can with ESX; it’s 1 NIC — 1 vSwitch which means you can’t consolidate your VM network traffic into a pool.

That wrapped up day 3 and was followed by the UK TechEd party at Opium Cinema; it was a pretty good turn-out and the drinks flowed into the small hours.