Making IT Work - By Michael Otey

[9/3/2009]

VMworld 2009: VMware readies PCoIP
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Another new technology that was demoed in Steve Herod’s VMworld 2009 Wednesday keynote was VMware’s new PC-over-IP (PCoIP) protocol. Like Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Protocol, PCoIP is a remote display technology. VMware acquired the PCoIP technology from Teradici and will use it to connect thin clients to VMware View. With PCoIP the host renders the graphics. The demo showed remote support for 3D graphics and a YouTube streaming video. PCoIP will be shipping later this year. You can find out more about PCoIP at www.teradici.com.
- posted by Michael Otey

[9/3/2009]

VMworld 2009: Is Spring Source a good fit for VMware?
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Most of VMware’s VMworld announcements showed tremendous customer support for their new vSphere product line. For example, Todd Nielson, VMware Chief Operating Officer (formerly CEO of Borland and a former Microsoft vice president) stated VMware products were in use in 96% of the Fortune 1000 companies. In addition, the new vSphere release is downloaded 20-30,000 times per week.

Clearly, VMware’s moves have been well received by business worldwide. Even so, I had to wonder how the announcement of the acquisition of Spring Source helps VMware. Spring Source is essentially a Java application development platform and I for one just don’t see the connection to virtualization or enterprise management. While it is clear that at the end of the day virtualization is about better supporting the applications that an organization runs it also seems that this move is outside of VMware’s core competency. I couldn’t help but think its main thrust may be just to annoy Microsoft.


- posted by Michael Otey

[1/19/2009]

Windows Workstation 2008: Step 2
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In my last blog  entry I headed down the path of building a Windows Workstation 2008 by starting with Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition and configuring it for desktop use. Last week I added the Aero interface. This week I’ll continue configuring the Windows Workstation by tuning the system and adding audio. Along the way I’ll show you the steps I followed and share some of my experiences.

The first issue I ran into was that the system would not activate. I didn’t notice this until after the Aero interface was installed. Activation is always a hassle but this time it inexplicably was calling out a DNS error. I knew full well everything with the DNS was fine. Reentering the product key fixed the problem but why that worked was as mysterious as the problem itself.

Next, by default Windows Server 2008 is tuned to favor services over applications. To make sure the system is set to favor applications you need to open up Control Panel and then click on System. Go to the Advanced tab (have you ever noticed how everything you want is always on the Advanced tab…) and click the Settings button in the Performance section. Next click (you guessed it) the Advanced tab again and make sure the Adjust for best performance is set to Programs as you can see in the following screen.



By default the Audio Service is disabled in Windows Server. Fortunately turning on the Audio Service is easy. Open the Control Panel then click on Sound. You’ll see the Audio Service Not Running dialog shown below.



Clicking Yes starts the Audio Service. And you’ll see the Sound dialog shown below.



At this point Windows Workstation is a useable workstation platform. The aero interface is enabled, the system has been activated, and sound has been setup.  Next time I'll share some fine tuning tips to further enhance the system’s performance and usability.


- posted by Michael Otey

[1/8/2009]

Windows Workstation 2008: Step 1
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I’ve been using Vista as my main desktop since before it was officially released and honestly while I don’t dislike it I was also never satisfied with it. For me the main issue has been performance. My main desktop was a 3 GHz system was a 1.5GB of RAM. This system ran XP great but has always been sluggish under Vista.  I HATE waiting for the system to respond and this system tries my patience several times a day. As the New Year rolled in I decided to put together a new system to replace it. This time I used a quad core with 4GB or RAM and room for 4 GB more.  However, just as I was ready to load up Vista I had a  thought, I had heard of people running Windows Server 2008 as a workstation and I had a copy of Windows Server 2008 Standard edition so I thought I would see how Windows Server 2008 would fair as a workstation platform. I was look for more robustness and better performance. Plus, one additional benefit that I was looking to get was the fact that Windows Server 2008 can run Hyper-V. This would allow me to run VMs from my desktop. You can’t do that with Vista – or with ESX Server for that matter. Along the way I thought I’d see what other issues I may run into.

Completing the installation was a piece of cake, the Windows Server 2008 installation is a simpler and better experience that the Vista installation. However, the first glitch I ran into was that Windows Server 2008 didn’t recognize my XFX video card where Vista did.  The fix was simple enough. I downloaded the drivers from the XFX web site and installed them.  Windows Server 2008 recognized them right away.

The next thing I saw was that there was no Aero interface. Granted, I could have easily done without it because there’s nothing in Aero that really helps your productivity. But I thought since I was going this route I would enable the Aero interface. To enable Aero you need to install a Windows Server 2008 feature named the Desktop Experience. In addition to the Aero interface the Desktop Experience adds a number of other programs including: Windows Calendar, Windows Mail, Windows Media Player, Video for Windows, Windows Photo Gallery, Windows SideShow, Windows Defender, Disk Cleanup, Sync Center, Sound Recorder, and Character Map.

To install Windows Server 2008’s Desktop Experience open up Server Manager. Next click on Features then right click on Features and select Add Features from the context menu this will display the Add Features Wizard that you can see in the following screen shot.



Scroll through the Features list until you Desktop Experience. Check the box in front of Desktop Features and then click Next followed by Install. This will start the installation process. When it’s complete you’ll see a Restart Pending notice in the features list. Click on Close and then click Yes on the Do you want to restart now? dialog.  This will reboot the server. After the server boots up the Resuming Configuration screen will be displayed showing the progress of the installation. When that is finished the Desktop Experience will be installed on the system.
That’s the first step to installing Aero interface. However there are still a couple of more steps that are required. Next, enable the Themes service.  Click on Start then Administrative Tools then Services to display the Services dialog. Scroll through the services until you see Themes. Right click on Themes and then select Properties as you can see in the following screen shot.



On the Properties dialog change the Startup type to Automatic and then click OK. Then click the Start the service link to start the Themes service.

Next, tell Windows Server to use the Vista theme by right clicking on the desktop and select Personalize from the context menu. Then click Theme to open the Theme Setting dialog. Click on the Theme dropdown and select Windows Vista as illustrated in the following screen shot.



After selecting the Windows Vista theme click Apply and then your Windows Server 2008 Workstation will be using the new Vista theme. However, there’s one more step required to the Aero interface. Right click the desktop and select Personalize. Then click on window Color and Appearance.  Then in the Color scheme dropdown select Windows Aero as you can see in the following screen.



That put the Aero interface on my Windows Workstation 2008 build. In the next post I’ll cover some of the issues I ran into with activation, audio, and services.
- posted by Michael Otey

[12/31/2008]

Vista: Where oh where has my Telnet Client gone?
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If you need to check connectivity to a remote host over a given port then good old telnet is your first option since you can’t use ping over a specific port. However, if you’re running Vista you might be surprised to see that telnet is no longer one of the options. However, while it may not be obvious, telnet is still a part of Vista.

To install the Telnet Client go to Control Panel and select Programs and Features. Then on the Uninstall or change a program window click Turn windows features on or off. This will display the Windows Features dialog. Scroll through the list until you see Telnet Client. Check the box in front of Telnet Client and click OK. After a couple of minutes the text-based Telnet Client will be installed and ready to go.
- posted by Michael Otey

[12/4/2008]

Report From PASS: Interview with Tom Casey, General Manager of Microsoft Business Intelligence
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At this recent PASS Community Summit in Seattle I had the opportunity to meet with Tom Casey General Manager of Microsoft Business Intelligence. We discussed a number of topics including the next release of SQL Server, codenamed Kilimanjaro, as well as the new Gemini and Madison projects and future SQL Server Services.

Tom, who presented Wednesday’s keynote, started with Kilimanjaro. In addressing the question about whether Kilimanjaro may be too soon for many organizations Tom said that readers should think of Kilimanjaro as a minor release and that not every SQL Server installation may need what it offers. Tom pointed out that Kilimanjaro is in keeping with Microsoft’s plan to provide a new release every 36 months with an R2 release somewhere in the middle. Kilimanjaro will offer scalability enhancements with support for up to 256 logical processors. The Kilimanjaro release will be focused on self service BI and will be released in conjunction with a project code named Gemini. Gemini is focused on changing and simplifying the end user experience for access BI data. Excel is unquestionably the end user tool of choice for data analysis. Gemini will extend Microsoft Excel with Add-ins enabling BI data access and end-user collaboration. End users can create BI data access workbooks in Excel and then share them with other users via SharePoint. In addition to enhancing end user data analysis and collaboration Gemini will also help IT professionals to end Excel hell where end users create a number of spreadsheets that are vital to the organization but there’s no visibility or manageability. Gemini will track all the data access reports published using the Excel BI add-in enabling IT to better manage these important Excel workbooks.  Tom stated that Microsoft’s plan is to have the first CTP of Kilimanjaro available in 2009.

Tom also discussed Microsoft’s Madison project. Madison is essentially the resurfacing of Microsoft’s earlier acquisition of DATAllegro. Madison will essentially be a Data Warehousing appliance that Microsoft will provide in conjunction with hardware partners like HP and DELL. Using massively parallel processing (MPP) Madison will be able to support multi-terabyte data warehouses using up to 24 node scale-out technology.

Another topic we touched on was SQL Data Services (formerly known as SQL Server Data Services). SQL Data Services (SDS) is Microsoft’s cloud-based database offering.  SQL Data Services offers a subset of the capabilities of SQL Server and it is hosted by Microsoft’s global infrastructure. SDS can provide a database backend for global ISV applications. Developer’s will use the REST protocol for SDS data access. Tom mentioned that a CTP of SQL Services is currently available. You can sign up for the public CTP at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/sqlserver/dataservices/default.aspx

 


- posted by Michael Otey

[12/2/2008]

Report From PASS Summit 2008
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At this year’s recent PASS Summit I sat down with Bill Graziano, Vice President of Marketing for PASS to discuss some of the important changes that the PASS organization has made over the past year and what their future directions are. As an aside, if you’re not aware of it, PASS stands for Professional Association for SQL Server and it is the premier user group for SQL Server DBAs and developers.

One of the most far reaching changes that Bill pointed out to me is the membership in the PASS organization is now free. PASS used to charge a yearly membership fee to belong to the organization.  This past September PASS dropped the yearly membership fee making it easy for all SQL Server professionals to be a part of the PASS organization. This was news to me and certainly is a win-win situation for both PASS and SQL Server professional everywhere. If you’re not already a member of PASS you should go check it out at www.sqlpass.org. The PASS organization is growing fast and now has over 32,000 members with 136 chapters world-wide.

Bill noted that this year’s conference was the most successful event yet with over 3500 total registrations and almost 1000 first time attendees.  The conference featured 144 sessions spread out over 3 days.  Bill pointed out that the PASS Summit has a strong Microsoft presence making it easy for attendees to talk with members of Microsoft’s  SQL Server team. One of the most practical examples of Microsoft’s involvement is the First Aid Station which is manned by Microsoft PSS support staff. The First Aid Station is available to answer all Summit attendee’s technical questions.
In conjunction with this year’s conference PASS has also kicked off a new section on their web site called PASSport that provides a Facebook style community site for SQL Server professionals. The site allows you to post your profile and interact with other SQL Server professionals.

In the future PASS is looking to expand its local chapters through a regional mentors program where experienced group leaders help new chapters get off the ground. In addition, PASS is looking to continue to grow its European Conference which is held in Neuss, Germany in April 2009. The next U.S. PASS Community Summit 2009 will be back in Seattle Nov 3-6. In the meantime, if you’re a SQL Server DBA, developer or part time admin you should be sure to check out www.sqlpass.org.
- posted by Michael Otey

[11/20/2008]

Enabling Vista's Hibernation
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I recently migrated my main work laptop from XP to Vista. Overall, the upgrade went smoothly. However, after the migration was complete I was surprised to discover that the option to hibernate the system was gone. The expected sleep function was there and Vista’s sleep is way better than the XP’s standby option. However,  sometimes you need the system to be completely powered off. For example, when you board an airplane or when you know that the system won’t be used for an extended period of time.

After looking through the Control Panel’s Power Options  I was surprised not to find any obvious way to enable hibernation. The help files point you to the Advanced settings but there was nothing on my system that mentioned hibernation. Fortunately, there was an easy way to reenable hibernation using the powercfg command that you can see below:

powercfg.exe /hibernate on

After running powercfg.exe the hibernate option was immediately available off Vista’s Start menu.


- posted by Michael Otey

[11/12/2008]

Moving from Command Shell scripting to PowerShell
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A recent project that I was working on was originally written using Windows Command Shell scripts. The project essentially revolved around two levels of script files. At the top level was driver script which kicked off a number of second level scripts.  The project worked but occasionally there were problems with the Command Shell scripts not calculating certain variables like time intervals correctly. Mathematic operations were never really a natural part of the Command Shell scripts and the code that performed the calculations was more than a bit esoteric. In addition, I wanted the scripts to be able to use some ADO.NET objects for database access and there was no way to do that directly in Command Shell scripts.
Initially, I must admit that I was a bit worried about the learning curve. I had done a number of smaller projects with PowerShell but I was definitely not as familiar with it I was Command Shell scripting. At first editing and attempting to debug the scripts was a major hurdle. However, Quest’s PowerGUI (www.powergui.org) provided a productive and free development environment that helped get the project off the ground.
The power of PowerShell really began to shine as I moved into the portions of the project where I wanted to use ADO.NET code. PowerShell was easily able to instantiate the ADO.NET SQLClient objects. You can see and example of using PowerShell with the ADO.NET SqlConnection, SqlCommand and SQLDataReader objects in the following code listing:

 $con = New-Object System.Data.SqlClient.SqlConnection
 # Create a SqlCommand object, define command text, and set the 
 #  connection string
 $cmd = New-Object System.Data.SqlClient.SqlCommand
  
$con.ConnectionString = "Server=" + $vm + ";Database=AdventureWorks;integrated security=true"
 $con.Open()
 Write-Host "Query 1 "
 $cmd.CommandText = "SELECT * FROM HumanResources.Department"
 $cmd.Connection = $con
 $rdr = $cmd.ExecuteReader()
 # Write out the results
 $row = ""
 while ($rdr.read())
 {
   for ($i=0; $i -lt $rdr.FieldCount; $i++ )
   {
   $row = $row + $rdr.GetValue($i)
   }
   Write-Host "Query 1 " $row
   $row = ""
 }
 $rdr.close()

If you have experience in Visual Studio this style of coding is very natural and easy – and not too unlike VB or C#. You use the New-Object cmdlet to instantiate objects. Then you use those object’s same methods and properties that you would in VB or C#. This example creates a SqlCommand object and then a SqlCommand object. Next, it sets the SqlConnection object’s ConnectionString property with the required connection string. Then it uses the SqlConnection object’s Open method to open a connection to the target database. Next, the SqlCommand object’s CommandText property is assigned a SQL SELECT statement. Then a while loop is used to read the result set produced by the SQL query.

Some of the best points about PowerShell for this project were:
• Productive development debugging environment
• Support for robust control flow
• Support for a complete set of math operations
• Support for elapsed time
• Support for sleep without external programs
• Support for .NET objects

The PowerShell conversion wasn’t all peaches and cream. There was one sticky issue:
• No equivalent to the Command Shell Start command – In this project the driver script launched a number of other scripts without waiting for the earlier scripts to complete. I saw no way to do that in PowerShell 1.0. I wound up using a Command Shell script as the driver program.

For this project the move to PowerShell wasn’t nearly as tough as I thought it would be. Getting the right tools was half the battle. After that learning which cmdlets to use was a matter of experience combined with a dash of Google.


- posted by Michael Otey

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