Can Microsoft Save the World?

Transcription

1206red_Cover.v4
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The
1:24 PM
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Day
Hell
Froze
DECEMBER 2006
Over
9
W W W. R E D M O N D M A G . C O M
Can
Microsoft
Save the
World?
Stephen Emmott:
The art of blending
computer and
$5.95
1
25274 867 27
7
DECEMBER
•
12 >
traditional science
46
+
Microsoft’s Collaboration
Puzzle 28
Cool Tools for Free! 54
Mary Jo’s Top 10
Predictions for 2007 72
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Project3
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1206red_TOC1.v6
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Redmond
DECEMBER 2006
W W W. R E D M O N D M A G . C O M
Winner for Best
Computer/Software
Magazine 2005
THE INDEPENDENT VOICE OF THE MICROSOFT IT COMMUNITY
COVER STORY
REDMOND REPORT
Can Microsoft
Save the World?
9
Hell: Frozen Over
Microsoft and
Novell promise
to play nice.
Microsoft Research teams with
top scientists to tackle the world’s
most pressing problems—and it
could turn conventional computing
on its head in the process.
10 Small Business
Lives Large
Office Live helps
small businesses
feel big.
Page 46
Page 9
12 The Low Down
To Save and
To Protect
F E AT U R E S
28 Making Sense of Microsoft Collaboration
COLUMNS
The pieces are out there, but fitting them
together has proven a long and
confusing process.
4
Barney’s Rubble: Doug Barney
Saving the World—One Line at
a Time
39 Licensing Plan
Hopes to Solve
Virtualization
Dilemma
The virtualization
locomotive just
keeps on coming,
and Microsoft has
laid new tracks for
its licensing.
54 Cool Tools that
Rule—and They’re Free!
Page 39
Page 28
Finding the right tool for the job can be difficult and finding
it for free next to impossible. But standing next to impossible
is the Redmond Free Top 25. We think it can make your
search a lot easier.
22 Mr. Roboto: Don Jones
Shut Down, Redux
65 Never Again: Jim Madden
The Grass Is Greener in Your
Own Backyard
67 Security Advisor:
Joern Wettern
Security Myths Exposed: Part 2
REVIEWS
15 Follow the Rules
This strong, rules-based system
will keep a close watch over your
network’s population.
18 Keep Your Hard
Drive Healthy
Diskeeper helps keep today’s
monster hard drives neat
and organized.
24 Reader Review
VMware Workstation is
a Virtual Powerhouse
Readers say VMware’s desktop
virtualization tool, although
pricier than Microsoft’s free
Virtual PC, is definitely worth
the money.
72 Foley on Microsoft:
Mary Jo Foley
Microsoft Prognostications:
What’s up in 2007?
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE
Redmond Magazine Online
6 [email protected]
71 Ad and Editorial Indexes
2
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Redmondmag.com
DECEMBER 2006
Questions
with ...
Bill Soward
MCPmag.com
ADUC: Too Clicky?
T
ired of the ADUC—the Active Directory Users & Computers—with all its click madness? Greg Shields pens a
new column for MCPmag.com that keeps what he calls the
“mouse-moving and clicky-clicky” to levels well below the
threshold for carpal tunnel syndrome. Greg’s weekly quickTIPs column starts with a four-part series on simplifying
ADUC admin options through the command line, and follows on with useful tricks for the virtual world and beyond.
He’s also open to suggestions. FindIT code: MCPQTS
Catch Greg
Shields’ new,
weekly tip
column on
MCPmag.com.
Security Watch
Hackers Get More Ways to Hide
N
ew tools keep popping up that can help hackers hide their identity—
from the custom Firefox browser Torpok, which promises better
anonymity than any browser before, to The Onion Router, which offers constantly random IP addresses.
But according to our Security Watch columnist, Cybertrust’s Russ Cooper,
the risk isn’t just from browsing. “From a corporate perspective, the bigger
risk here is that the TOR network gets used to set up a server
internal to your organization that’s participating in the TOR
network,” he writes. “Such a server could be difficult to identify,
given that the traffic to and from it is encrypted via SSL.”
Keep on top of all the technologies you need to watch out
for by subscribing to Russ’ columns in our Security Watch
newsletter. FindIT code: Newsletters
Russ Cooper
REDMONDMAG.COM RESOURCES
Resources
Enter FindIT Code
>> Daily News
>> E-Mail Newsletters
>> Free PDFs and Webcasts
>> Subscribe/Renew
>> Your Turn Editor Queries
News
Newsletters
TechLibrary
Subscribe
YourTurn
CEO, Adaptive Planning
Michael Domingo interviews
Bill Soward
Bill Soward, CEO of Adaptive Planning, on Redmond
Radio this month, now available on
iTunes. FindIT code: Radio
With Google and Microsoft competing
in the free application space, will bit
players be able to compete?
Yes—by offering ones optimized for
mid-market and enterprise customers.
Our free, open source product is substantially better than anything offered
by Microsoft and Google.
Will open source applications ever
make serious inroads in the enterprise?
It’s already happening. SugarCRM, Compiere and Adaptive Planning all see rapid
adoption by companies of all sizes.
Where does OpenOffice rank among
free apps?
It’s gaining momentum, but Microsoft
Office won’t be displaced for a long time.
SOUND
BYTE
“A lot of what you can
do with .NET FX 3.0 you
could do before, but it was
prohibitively difficult.”
—Ami Vora, Microsoft Product
Manager, .NET 3.0 Framework
Source: “Working the New Framework,” Mary Jo
Foley, RedDevNews.com, November 2006
REDMOND MEDIA GROUP SITES: Redmondmag.com • RCPmag.com • ENTmag.com
MCPmag.com • CertCities.com • TCPmag.com • TechMentorEvents.com
2 | December 2006 | Redmond | redmondmag.com |
Project5
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When information
comes
together,
comes
together,
your software
software puts
puts
your
you at the top
of the
thefood
foodchain.
chain.
of
Information lives at companies that run EMC® software. As one of the world’s largest software providers, we help companies of all
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2
EMC, EMC, and where information lives are registered trademarks of EMC Corporation. © Copyright 2006 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved.
EMC2, EMC, and where information lives are registered trademarks of EMC Corporation. All other trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners. © copyright 2006 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved.
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Barney’sRubble
Redmond
Doug Barney
Saving the World:
One Line at a Time
C
apitalism is all about exploitation—making workers
produce for owners more than they take home in
wages. That’s how Carnegie, Rockefeller and now
Gates got so rich. Gordon Gecko worships this approach, while Karl Marx
was less impressed.
In the old days, robber barons donated
some of their proceeds to relieve a little
guilt, and because charity cocktail parties rule! There wasn’t a lot of oversight
of their money, they gave it, scarfed
champagne and a few truffles, and went
straight back to making more.
The new generation has the potential
to be so much different. Sure, they make
their money the old fashioned way—by
bringing in more than they pay out. But
when they give away these collected
earnings, they apply the same discipline
of capitalistic efficiency. The best
example is the Bill
& Melinda Gates
Foundation, which
watches its money
closer than an
accountant on a
fixed income.
Microsoft Corp.
is doing just as
much, and probably way more
good—and profits
remain a motive (am I starting to sound
like an Ayn Rand rehash?). As you can
see by our story “Can Microsoft Save
the World?” Redmond researchers are
working with scientists to craft new
tools to fuel scientific breakthroughs.
These folks are in the trenches, crafting
vaccines, cures for cancer, ways to fight
global warming—even trying to find
the origins of Life (which apparently
pre-dates even Altair BASIC and MSDOS!). This is a fundamentally new
model of capitalism as much as it is a
new model of software. For a public
company to purposely devote resources
(Microsoft Research is $6 billion to $7
billion and counting) to projects that
may never make them a dime, or return
dollars to them decades in the future, is
pretty much unheard of.
Not everyone has the extra fundage
for pure research the way Microsoft
does. Even so, there
may be ways others can apply
the Redmond
model. Food,
drug, auto and
energy companies could all
make a difference by
working with independent scientists on technologies that can save
lives and the environment—instead of buying
up all the good patents.
Maybe someday they
could even make a buck
or two by selling products
that replace the need for oil, gas, surgery,
refrigerators or even Windows XP.
And how do I hope to change the
world? All my cash goes to buying
Madonna CDs, K-Fed concert tickets
(someone has to buy ’em!) and saving the
mansions in Newport, R.I.
Do you think Microsoft can really do
some good and, if so, how? Tell me at
[email protected].
PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY ALAN TAO
THE INDEPENDENT VOICE OF THE MICROSOFT IT COMMUNITY
REDMONDMAG.COM
DECEMBER 2006 ■ VOL. 12 ■ NO. 12
Editor in Chief Doug Barney
[email protected]
Editor Ed Scannell
[email protected]
Executive Editor, Reviews Lafe Low
[email protected]
Executive Editor, Features Carolyn A. April
[email protected]
Managing Editor Wendy Gonchar
[email protected]
Editor, Redmondmag.com Becky Nagel
[email protected]
Associate Managing Editor Katrina Carrasco
[email protected]
Contributing Editors Mary Jo Foley
Don Jones
Greg Shields
Joern Wettern
Art Director Brad Zerbel
[email protected]
Senior Graphic Designer Alan Tao
[email protected]
Group Publisher Henry Allain
[email protected]
Editorial Director Doug Barney
[email protected]
Group Associate Publisher Matt N. Morollo
[email protected]
Director of Marketing Michele Imgrund
[email protected]
Creative Director Scott Shultz
[email protected]
Senior Marketing Tracy S. Cook
Manager [email protected]
Senior Web Developer Rita Zurcher
[email protected]
Marketing Programs Videssa Djucich
Manager [email protected]
Editor, ENTmag.com Scott Bekker
[email protected]
Editor, MCPmag.com Michael Domingo
[email protected]
Associate Editor, Web Gladys Rama
[email protected]
Intern Michelle Rutledge
[email protected]
President & CEO Neal Vitale
[email protected]
CFO Richard Vitale
[email protected]
Executive Vice President Michael J. Valenti
[email protected]
Director, Circulation and
Data Services
Director,
Information Technology
Director of Web Operations
Abraham Langer
[email protected]
Erik Lindgren
[email protected]
Marlin Mowatt
[email protected]
Director, Print Production Mary Ann Paniccia
[email protected]
Controller Janice Ryan
[email protected]
Director of Finance Paul Weinberger
[email protected]
Chairman of the Board Jeffrey S. Klein
[email protected]
The opinions expressed within the articles and other contents
herein do not necessarily express those of the publisher.
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[email protected]
Dynamics: The Perfect Fit?
I am preparing for an ERP [enterprise resource planning] system
selection and really enjoyed Doug Barney’s article in the November
2006 issue, “Should You Buy Microsoft Dynamics?” I’ve seen a lot
of companies make a huge ERP system selection mistake by trying
to “run with the big dogs.” The size of the “organization unit” staff
should be the indicator, not the size of
the overall company.
I’m currently working for a company
that has roughly $1 billion in sales and
almost 7,000 employees. I can tell they
want to go with the “best” and seem to
be leaning toward SAP. If we were a
single business with factories in multiple locations serving the same or similar
markets, they might have a valid point.
The fact is we have at least five different
markets served by three very different
businesses with 27 fairly autonomous
locations on three continents. We only
have two sites with $100 million in sales,
and the average is closer to $25 million.
I think we’ll be making a huge mistake
trying to force the complexity of Oracle
or SAP on $25 million business units
where each has less than a 50 total G&A
headcount. We need a flexible SMB
system with some of the financial consolidation and analysis tools of an enterprise -class company.
In my opinion, one of the selling
strategies for SAP and Oracle has been
to focus on total corporate sales volume
and not operating unit size to expand
their target audience.
Name withheld by request
Los Angeles, Calif.
Whaddya Think
?!
Send your rants and raves to
[email protected].
Please include your first and
last name, city and state. If we
use it, you’ll be entered into a
drawing for a Redmond t-shirt!
No Great Expectations
[In regard to the November 2006 Reader
Review, “Microsoft Virtual PC: Good
Enough—for the Price,”] when Microsoft
bought Connectix (and thus gained Virtual PC) it was a very competitive product
with VMware. That was a bit over two
years ago. Since then, VMware has added
a whole slew of new features. I haven’t
seen a single new feature in Virtual PC or
Virtual Server in that time. I don’t expect
anything from Microsoft. However, its
virtual offerings aren’t even close to
VMware and I wouldn’t recommend or
use them in a corporate environment.
Dan Gilbert
Austin, Texas
Tough Crowd
Sorry, but currently Bill would only garner the “Windows geek” vote, as discussed in Doug Barney’s October 2006
column, “Bill for President.” He needs
to drop exclusive alliances and broaden
his acceptance of alternate worldviews.
For example, Bill should install
VMware Workstation on his XP laptop
and run at least three different flavors of
Linux. This would likely endear him to
“all geeks.”
Second, Bill has no appeal in the
southern “red” states. He needs to start
a NASCAR racing team (a la Joe
Gibbs). He can endear himself even further by jumping over the pit wall from a
standing position.
Finally, Bill needs the “Hollywood
celebrity” vote. Bill should hire Mel
Gibson to do a movie about his life. Mel
can get some blood and guts in the
screenplay to toughen Bill’s image. At
this point, Bill will be ready to take on all
comers, including Arnold. But, with
Microsoft’s software release track record,
could Bill accomplish all this by 2008?
Randy Johnson
Alpharetta, Ga.
Nice thoughts, Barney, but unfortunately that is all they are. You answered
your own question when you doubted
that all regimes would react the same
way. Why? Because their approach to
the world is not logical. Is Islam logical?
Or, as a matter of fact, is any religion
logical? Or is any human really logical?
I’d like to think I am, as I’m a very
analytical type. But I have to admit, I
do have my illogical moments. Who
am I going to vote for? Probably a
Republican—lower taxes, less government regulation, a strong defense, prolife, marriage between one man and
one woman and a host of other reasons.
Bill? Well, I doubt it, but then again, I
didn’t think a former actor who became
governor of California would make a
good president, either. Now I think he’s
one of the best we’ve had.
I’m an independent software developer
developing custom database applications
with Microsoft Access. I’m also a retail
business owner. I’ve got 35 years of experience in the software business so I’ve
experienced just about all of it.
Lon A. Wiksell
Overland Park, Kan.
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RedmondReport
December 2006
INSIDE:
Whether you’re running
virtual, remote or somewhere in between, you need
to protect your vital data.
Page 12
Hell Frozen Over
Microsoft and Novell promise to play nice.
I
Linux could offer greater appeal to
corporate accounts that already have a
healthy mix of both Windows and
Linux in their shops than what Red Hat
could offer by itself.
Other observers caution that Red
Hat’s position may not be as dire as it
appears. It remains to be seen how
many major vendors in the open source
market will endorse the Microsoft/
Novell deal. “This does put some interesting pressures on Red Hat, but what
you have to remember is the deal is
between Novell and Microsoft, not
between Microsoft and the open source
community. We have to wait to see
how the community responds, and
what kind of technology evolves out of
this,” says Al Gillen, research vice president of System Software with IDC in
Framingham, Mass.
Another development that complicated
Red Hat’s life just a week before the
Microsoft/Novell deal was Oracle
Corp.’s announcement that it would
offer Red Hat customers technical service and support for Red Hat’s version of
Linux at aggressive rates. Red Hat generates a significant amount of its revenues and earnings from such services.
This move clearly indicates they are maturing in their
approach to how they interact with open source.
Al Gillen, Research Vice President of System Software, IDC
proprietary technology that might be
intermingled with SuSE Linux or with
code developed for OpenSuSE.
Some observers believe the agreement
immediately improves Novell’s competitive position against Linux market
leader Red Hat Inc. on both the server
and desktop fronts. They believe
Microsoft’s endorsement of SuSE
Oracle also promised to indemnify
customers against patent infringement.
Red Hat was quick to respond, quietly
announcing on its Web site that it has
amended its OpenSource Assurance program to now include indemnification.
Some analysts wonder if Oracle’s move
is solely directed at Red Hat or if it’s also
aimed at larger companies that also earn
Microsoft and Novell working
together, Steve Ballmer in a penguin
suit ... hell has clearly frozen over.
PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY ALAN TAO
BY ED SCANNELL AND STUART J. JOHNSTON
n an announcement many thought
they would see only after hell froze
over, bitter rivals Microsoft Corp.
and Novell Inc. recently signed a peace
agreement that lays the foundation for
Windows and Linux and their respective
applications to work smoothly together.
Under terms of the deal, Microsoft will
offer its corporate customers a chance
to license its Windows operating system
as part of a package offering maintenance and support for Novell’s SuSE
Linux operating system.
“They said it couldn’t be done,” says
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. “This is
a new model and a true evolution of our
relationship that we think customers
will immediately find compelling
because it delivers practical value by
bringing two of their most important
platform investments closer together.”
Both companies plan to improve the
way Microsoft’s Office desktop applications and OpenOffice, its open source
competitor, work together. As a way to
further encourage corporate users to
accept Novell’s operating system,
Microsoft officials promised not to
assert its patent rights over any of its
significant revenues from Linux, such as
IBM Corp., Hewlett Packard Co. and
perhaps even Microsoft. “The burning
question that may not be answered for a
while is, is Oracle doing this as a tactical
slap at Red Hat, which will have modest
impact on the market, or it is more
strategic and aimed at putting pricing
pressures on IBM, HP and Microsoft
forcing them to respond,” says Dana
Gardner, principal analyst with InterArbor Solutions Inc. in Gilford, N.H.
The Microsoft/Novell deal, a fiveyear agreement that has been in the
works since April, has three major
components: a technical cooperation
agreement, a patent agreement and a
business agreement.
Ballmer promised the deal will be
good for any IT shop running both
Windows and SuSE Linux. He says the
technical aspects of the deal will result
in “higher levels of interop between the
two environments.”
This sentiment was echoed by
Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian. “When
you look at the customers’ environments, that mixed source environment
that they’re dealing with brings a
| redmondmag.com | Redmond | December 2006 | 9
11/14/06
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RedmondReport
whole host of benefits in each one of
the individual platforms while creating
other complexities for our customers,”
he says.
The deal also calls for the two companies to establish a joint research facility
at which Microsoft and Novell technical
experts will architect and test new software solutions, particularly in the areas
of virtualization, Web services for management of physical and virtual servers,
and document format compatibility.
Some see this as a welcome maturation of Microsoft’s attitude towards
open source, which Ballmer once
described as a “cancer” in the industry.
Even Chairman Bill Gates once called
open source developers “communists.”
“This move clearly indicates they are
maturing in their approach to how
they interact with open source. It’s a
direct reflection of the thinking of
people like Ray Ozzie and Bill Helf at
Microsoft now having real impact,”
IDC’s Gillen says.
Another surprising aspect of the deal
is that Microsoft will distribute about
70,000 coupons per year for support
and maintenance of SuSE Linux Enterprise edition. Each coupon entitles the
recipient to a one-year subscription for
maintenance and updates to SuSE
Linux Enterprise Server.
A critical aspect of the deal was determining how Microsoft’s “proprietary
source code” would co-exist with developers in the open source community.
Microsoft promised not to sue individual
open-source developers for the use of its
intellectual property, as long as the work
is for non-commercial purposes.
However, this peace agreement hardly
means a new era of détente between
the two companies. Ballmer says
Microsoft will continue to compete
hard against SuSE Linux.
“Tactically this is Microsoft saying,
‘You better pay a premium to SuSE in
order to be safe from us,’ but that’s
likely an idle threat,” InterArbor’s
Gardner says. “Strategically it is
Microsoft finally recognizing it has to
play with Linux,” he says. —
Small Business Lives Large
Office Live helps small businesses feel big.
BY CAROLYN A. APRIL
ne of the nice things the Web
gives small business is the ability
to look and act big. Something
as seemingly simple as e-mail has
changed the way the little guys navigate
the economy. With its recently released
Office Live, Microsoft is looking to capitalize on small companies’ online ambitions with a set of services that will help
affordably present and manage their
online business.
Despite the name, Microsoft Office
Live has nothing to do with Word or
PowerPoint for the masses. The subscription-based services address specific
business functions to help automate
small businesses, providing customers
with such things as a company domain
name, tools to set up a Web site, corporate-branded e-mail and IM accounts,
and online storage. Office Live recently
O
wrapped up a beta test period involving
160,000 customers, from which
Microsoft gleaned an enormous amount
of feedback.
One Microsoft executive insisted that
Live offerings don’t conflict with the
traditional on-site business software.
Instead, the Live services fill small
business needs that are distinct from
other types of customers’ needs.
“Our fundamental message when it
comes to Software as a Service and
Live Offerings will be around choice,”
says Satya Nadella, recently named
corporate vice president of the
Microsoft Business Solutions Group.
The services are meant to be extensible
so IT pros and partners can customize
them as needed. To that end, Microsoft
published a developers’ guide and
other tools for the Office Live platform
last month.—
3 Flavors of
Microsoft Office Live
Office Live Basics Price: Free
Services include: Company domain name, Web site with 500MB storage,
site reporting tools, 25 company-branded e-mail accounts (2GB storage
each), IM, calendaring and Office Live adManager Beta (to manage search
advertising campaigns).
Office Live Essentials Price: $19.95 per month
Same as Basics, but with two online business applications (Office Live Business Contact Manager and online Workspaces for 10 users), an additional
1GB of Web site storage, 50 company-branded e-mail accounts and offline
e-mail access in Outlook.
Office Live Premium Price: $39.95 per month
Same as Essentials, but with more storage (2GB for Web site, 2GB for e-mail
and 1GB for Workspaces), increased capacity for 20 additional users and a
set of Internet-based business applications.
Project1
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11:15 AM
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11/14/06
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RedmondReport
The
LOW
DOWN
By Lafe Low
To Save and To Protect
Whether you’re running virtual, remote or somewhere
in between, safeguarding information is vital.
L
ost assets can cost big bucks,
and the cost of the physical
hardware is only part of the
story. The intellectual property and personal information to
which those machines have access
is virtually priceless. Repercussions from losing those types of
assets quickly outstrip the
cost of computers.
Vector Networks has
blended its asset management technology with RFID technology. RFID, or radio frequency
identification, has started to take hold
of keeping track of wandering pets,
peripatetic kids and now grocery items
(Wal-Mart has famously declared its
intent to use RFID chips for product
tracking). For tracking IT assets, it
makes perfect sense.
Vector’s Asset Management Professional now uses RFID technology not
only to determine the physical location
of an asset, but also to trigger an alert
when an unauthorized user picks up a
laptop or if someone tries to tamper with
or remove the RFID chip. Stay tuned for
news of upcoming deals Vector has in
the works to help organizations use
RFID to keep track of their machines.
Go Back in Time
That’s exactly what you want
to do after a data-destroying
disaster. And now you can.
DataCore Software has a new continuous data-protection product called
Traveller, which protects your data
by letting you roll back to a previous
time prior to a virus attack, power outage or some other disaster.
Traveller uses high-availability data
mirroring and storage virtualization to
restore data to a known, “good” state
prior to disaster. It’s a potentially
smoother approach than data snapshots, which can leave gaps between
recovery points. Traveller chugs away
transparently in the background
without affecting any applications or other operations,
just waiting for Godzilla
to crush your data center.
Virtual Protection
What do you do with all those applications and all that data running on virtual
machines (VMs)? Just because you’re
using the awesome power of virtualization doesn’t mean you should be skating
on thin ice when it comes to data protection and availability.
SteelEye Technology’s LifeKeeper
Protection Suite for Windows now sup-
Speak Up
Argent Software has teamed up
with Vocabra to add voice alerts to
Argent’s monitoring and alerting suite.
Vocabra’s Voice Alert Portal will give
Argent users the option of receiving
interactive voice alerts.
Argent Extended Technologies
already sends alerts via e-mail, text message, pager and to the Argent Console.
ports 64-bit platforms, which helps it
manage applications running within
VMware ESX Server or Microsoft Virtual Server VMs. Now you can consolidate your servers and still have the same
sort of safety net for your data
and applications you’d
have on a physical machine.
With the Vocabra integration, those
alerts can now come through a natural
language interface. When you get a call
from your network, you acknowledge
the alert and accept responsibility for
managing the alert condition.
Pretty cool stuff, but I have to wonder
where the voice comes from. Would
you really want a voice that sounds like
a cantankerous New York cab driver
bellowing at you, “Hey pal, you’re runnin’ outta bandwidth here!”
Burning the Midnight Oil
Microsoft is certainly keeping busy these
days with the imminent release of Vista
and Office 2007 (a release celebration
for the latter is planned for Nov. 30 in
New York). Besides the rock-star level
products like Vista and Office, it’s also
busy putting the wraps on Exchange and
working on a whole other wave of technologies coming in 2007.
That next wave includes the longdelayed “Longhorn” (apparently now
in the pre-beta stage) Windows Server, updates to
its virtualization products, Windows Small Business Server (code-named
“Cougar”), Windows Server for
midsized businesses (code-named
“Centro”), Windows Storage Server,
Windows Server 2003 R2 Service Pack
2 and Certificate Lifecycle Manager. It
will be another busy year for those
who use—and observe—Microsoft
technology.—
Lafe Low is Redmond’s executive editor of
reviews. Reach him with any company or
product scoop at [email protected].
Project1
3/14/06
3:47 PM
Page 1
Project18
9/5/06
3:39 PM
Page 1
Defragment Every Drive On Your Enterprise
Without Leaving Your Chair
(Or even lifting a finger)
PerfectDisk Command Center™
Perfection Made Automatic
Introducing
Centralized Management
And Reporting
Patent-pending
Resource Saver™ Technology
Exclusive Space
Restoration™ Technology
Exclusive AutoPilot
Scheduling™
Recognized as the world’s most powerful
defragmenter, PerfectDisk has always been the
secret to faster, more reliable computers. Now,
with a powerful new suite of enterprise tools,
PerfectDisk 8.0 takes disk defragmentation to
the farthest reaches of the enterprise, while
placing total control right at your fingertips.
Are you sitting down? Good. Because
with the PerfectDisk Command Center™ you
can easily deploy, configure and manage the
defragmentation of every system on the enterprise... all from the comfort of your own desktop. And that’s just the beginning.
Our all new enterprise reports deliver
valuable performance statistics and at-a-glance
graphical displays that track and identify any
fragmentation issue on any managed computer,
and much more.
In addition, PerfectDisk‘s patent-pending
Resource Saver™ technology finds file frag-
mentation without having to first open the file,
further reducing any system impact of defragmentation. And new disk and CPU throttling
provide even greater control over resources.
What’s more, Raxco’s exclusive AutoPilot
Scheduling™ provides automatic defragmentation at the optimal time for each user. And
AutoPilot Scheduling’s Screen Saver Mode
enables idle-time defragging at user-defined
intervals. (There’s really nothing to it.)
And features like our Single File Defrag
and Consolidate Free Space Defrag (part of
PerfectDisk's Space Restoration Technology™ )
are particularly valuable for users working with
supersize files.
Give your users reason to stand up and
cheer. And while PerfectDisk 8.0 is busy keeping each computer in tip top shape, you can sit
back and simply take the credit. For the details
and a free demo, visit
www.pd8command.com
®
1-800-546-9728
www.raxco.com
June 8, 2004
PerfectDisk 6.0
¤
May 24, 2005
PerfectDisk 7.0
Microsoft, Windows, and Windows Server are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. PerfectDisk is a registered trademark of Raxco
Software. PC Magazine Editors’ Choice Award Logo is a registered trademark of Ziff Davis Publishing Holdings Inc. Used under license. All other product names mentioned herein are the trademarks of
their respective owners.
1206red_ProdRev15-20.v8
11/14/06
12:21 PM
Page 15
ProductReview
Follow the Rules
This strong, rules-based system will keep a close watch over your
network’s population.
ELM Enterprise Manager 4.0
Pricing begins at $50 per IP node, $80 per workstation,
$425 per server, $835 per cluster node
TNT Software
360-546-0878
www.tntsoftware.com
BY RICK A. BUTLER
Keeping tabs on the health of
your systems and servers is a
fundamental and essential
task. ELM Enterprise Manager 4.0 uses filtered alert
monitoring and rules-based
notification to let you know
exactly what’s happening
throughout your network.
ELM 4.0 is actually a
combination of three of
TNT’s tools:
• ELM Log Manager
collects event information
and creates central aggregated views
• ELM Performance
Manager tracks performance in real time
• ELM Event Log Monitor creates a central reposi-
REDMONDRATING
Documentation: 20% ___ 8.0
Installation: 20% ______ 6.0
Feature Set: 20% ______ 7.0
Performance: 20% _____ 9.0
Management: 20% ______ 9.0
Overall Rating: 7.8
________________________
Key:
1: Virtually inoperable or nonexistent
5: Average, performs adequately
10: Exceptional
TNT has made a number
of improvements since
Redmond reviewed an earlier
version in January 2004.
Most are aimed at delivering
more concise information.
TNT redesigned the console
to create categories around
Figure 1. ELM gives you full details on every alert.
tory for Windows Event
Log data.
ELM monitors Windows
networks, including
Windows NT, 2000 and
2003 servers and Windows
NT, 2000 and XP workstations. It also works with
Active Directory, IIS,
Exchange and ISA. Through
syslog events and SNMP
traps, it supports nonWindows platforms and IP
devices like printers or
routers as well.
the major functions. ELM
Advisor now provides pop-up
style messages when specific
alerts are triggered. The AtA-Glance views create specific
groupings of alerts, which
make it easier to analyze a
particular segment of your
infrastructure. ELM also
added a tighter integration
for ASP.NET and souped-up
the Web components.
Architecturally, ELM
Enterprise Manager operates in much the same way
as other utilities of its class.
ELM has a central administration utility as an MMC
snap-in, a Web-based interface, a database that collects
the messages for ELM and a
series of agents that communicate with the central system.
On the other end of the
wire, ELM uses three different types of agents. Service
Agents install directly to the
system and have the most
functionality. If you don’t
want to install something on
your server, you can use a
Virtual Agent. This is what
TNT used to call a Remote
Agent. These monitor almost
as well as the Service Agents,
but they do so from afar.
ELM also comes with IP
Virtual Agents that monitor
non-Windows platform
devices, which is good for
capturing the status of routers
or Unix-based systems.
Agent management is quite
simple with ELM. You just
go into the console and add
an agent for the node you
want to monitor. If you no
longer want to monitor that
node, simply delete the
agent from the list. If you’ve
installed the Service Agent
to the system, it will automatically roll off the system.
Installation was a bit of a
challenge when dealing with
requisites. While the tool
does install quite easily, one
11/14/06
12:21 PM
Page 16
ProductReview
improvement would be to
have it sweep to make sure
everything required is in
place and operating. The
requisites are in the documentation (for those of you
who actually read the directions before installation), so
you should be OK. If you run
into trouble, Tech Support is
ready to help, and they are
quite a responsive group.
The installation routines
won’t tell you if you’re missing something, though. It
will just error out or freeze.
Installing to SQL Express
2005 was a showstopper. I
ended up installing MSDE
2000 so I could continue with
the installation. Once all the
requisites were sorted, the
software installed in around
10 minutes, very clean and
neat. All the databases were
created and configured, and
the principle services were
added and started—all that
without a reboot.
To Monitor and
To Protect
ELM centers around three
major functional areas: monitoring, notification and
reporting. Monitoring is
ELM’s shining attribute.
There are a number of preconfigured monitoring
items, and you can create
your own based on a list of
23 different categories. You
can also place a polling frequency on each monitor
item, such as “ping XYZ server every five minutes and
report if there is no reply.”
The System Information
function is one of the most
comprehensive snapshots I’ve
ever seen in a tool like this.
There’s data on hardware
specifics, software, drivers,
modules and DLLs, service
status, status on the IP stack,
modules in use by the Browser—the list goes on. This
level of information is a huge
benefit in a trouble-shooting
capacity. Similar functions on
ELM can even send you an
IM if you’re using MSN
Instant Messenger (or
Yahoo! now that the two are
more conjoined).
One of the more quaint
notification methods was the
Marquee Device. ELM can
send notifications to an LED
The System Information function is one of
the most comprehensive snapshots I’ve ever
seen in a tool like this.
other tools are so bland that
their usefulness is questionable after the first pass.
ELM’s primary function is
to monitor and report events
as they occur, but such a tool
would be remiss without a
solid notification utility, and
the one within ELM Enterprise does not disappoint.
ELM’s powerful filtering
ability is connected to targeted scripts. That means
ELM can run certain scripts
or notifications based on
specifics within the logged
event. This gives you the
information that you need to
see without overwhelming
you with data you don’t need.
Speaking of filtering, you can
set up each Windows event,
syslog event or SNMP trap
to include it or exclude it
from interest, depending on
what you need.
ELM handles notification
through a number of different approaches, such as an
e-mail or a page. The system
can beep or even talk if
you’re using the Microsoft
TTS engine. You can set up
pop-up messages to appear
on a desktop console, similar
to an IM notification. Heck,
Reader Board. At first, I was
thinking that server errors
aren’t something I’d like to
see in lights. If you have a
large data center with a lot of
activity, though, using a
reader board to announce
issues with your server network might be a good idea.
Still, I would be willing to
bet that most ELM shops
aren’t going to be using this
notification method.
Robust Reporting
Reporting—the last major
functional area—is of critical
importance for any tool that
will be used for compliance
issues, whether HIPAA or
Sarbanes-Oxley. ELM comes
with a strong reporting capability, bundled with a good
range of report formats. You
can also quickly create your
own report formats to cover a
range of time or role-based
activities, such as a view for
your DBA, exchange admin
or sys admin. You can also
capture reports for trending
analysis and export them out
of the system for long-term
storage. Reporting was the
main reason behind the console redesign.
The one thing I would’ve
liked to see in the report
scheduler is a “Run Report
Now” option. The Scheduler
lets you run reports on a 15
minute granularity. In order
to execute a run report order,
you have to wait for the next
quarter hour before doing so.
I do like the fact that you can
set up reports to automatically run based on a specific time
period. This helps keep the
information current and covers the range of times you
need to monitor.
Performance Monitoring is
also part of the Results area.
You can configure ELM to
watch the server for specific
performance events. While
you can log those and chart
them out with Windows
Performance Monitor, ELM
can notify you of specific
performance-related events:
for example, if a specific
process spikes the processor
to 100 percent or uses a certain amount of RAM.
The updates TNT has
made to ELM Enterprise
Edition 4.0 have made it
easier to use, but haven’t
given up one iota of power
or functionality. If you’re
scouting for something to
monitor and manage your
growing network population, make sure ELM is on
your list of contenders. It’s
well-designed and well-suited
for whatever monitoring
tasks you have in mind. —
Rick A. Butler, MCSE+I, is
the director of information services for the United States Hang
Gliding and Paragliding Association. Reach him when he lands
at [email protected].
1206red_RDNSubAdFinal
11/14/06
12:47 PM
Page 1
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11/14/06
12:21 PM
Page 18
ProductReview
Keep Your Hard Drive Healthy
Diskeeper helps keep today’s monster hard drives neat and organized.
Diskeeper 10
Price: Professional: $50 per seat, Server Enterprise: $999
Diskeeper Corp.
818-771-1600
www.diskeeper.com
BY RICK A. BUTLER
There’s no end to an admin’s
to-do list. The top three tasks
these days are invariably running anti-virus and antispyware checks, installing
software updates and patches
and defragmenting hard
drives. While the latest virus
and the headaches of “Patch
Tuesday” grab more headlines, the health of your hard
drives is no less deserving of
attention. Not running a regular defrag has a huge impact
on system performance.
In a perfect world, hard
drives would store every file
contiguously and arrange
them so each file would be
quickly accessible. This
would save on hard disk
access time, which translates
to time saved and less wear
and tear. However, that’s
rarely the case.
REDMONDRATING
Documentation: 20% ___ 7.0
Installation: 20% ______ 8.0
Feature Set: 20% ______ 7.0
Performance: 20% _____ 8.0
Management: 20% ______ 9.0
Overall Rating: 7.8
________________________
Key:
1: Virtually inoperable or nonexistent
5: Average, performs adequately
10: Exceptional
When you save, the file
system breaks files into
blocks so they can fit in a
contiguous space. As you
add or delete files, you end
up mixing up blocks of data
because the file system will
start using the first free
space it finds.
Because you have no real
control over where or how
it gets stored on the disk,
the OS ends up making
generally inefficient decisions and your data ends up
scattered across the drive.
This causes your hard disk
heads to thrash around
looking for chunks of data,
which takes time. While
we’re only talking milliseconds of access, if you’re
accessing a couple thousand
files, that adds up.
Some users thought bigger
hard disks would alleviate the
problem, but it only made
things worse. People store
larger files and more data in
larger volumes. Improved
hard drive seek times, faster
processors and vast quantities
of RAM have helped, but the
hard disk is typically the
slowest component in a
computer. Fragmented files
can grind performance into
the ground.
Figure 1. Diskeeper shows you fragmentation levels on a timestamped chart.
Defrag Veteran
Diskeeper has been a mainstay since the days when it
filled the void for Windows
NT 4 (NT 4 had no defragmentation utility). Even
today, Windows XP ships
with a scaled-back version of
Diskeeper 6, paving the way
for Diskeeper 10 to impress
you with some of its more
advanced features.
At the core of the suite is
the product we all know and
love, the defragmenter tool.
Diskeeper 10 has five editions, each suited for systems
with increasingly larger file
volumes: Home, Professional,
Professional Premier, Server
and Server Enterprise. Professional will defrag a
768GB volume, whereas
Server operates in the terabyte range. Server Enter-
prise is virtually unlimited.
As with previous versions,
Diskeeper 10 does an excellent job of quickly sorting
through your disk and aligning your data.
Diskeeper reports the average number of file fragments
per file, the fragmentation of
your master file table (MFT)
and the response time you
would potentially gain by
reading a fully defragmented
volume. All the machines
upon which I ran Diskeeper
showed me nearly a 50 percent gain in seek time performance by executing the
defrag. In most cases, I
found my MFT to be more
fragmented than what
Diskeeper was calling acceptable. In each case, I noticed a
modest performance increase
after defragging.
Project6
9/12/06
2:29 PM
Page 1
EXCHANGE JUST WENT DOWN
The Most Recent Backup Was Done Last Night
What Are You Going To Do?
The Problem: Massive Data Loss Due to Protection Gaps.
Traditional Exchange backup agents from CA,
CommVault, Dantz, EMC, Legato, Symantec,
Veritas and other traditional backup solutions
leave you vulnerable – up to 24 hours or more
of data-loss.
The Solution: Continuous Data Protection Closes the Gap.
Lucid8’s DigiVault Continuous Data Protection
solution with SingleTouch Recovery™ represents
a major improvement over traditional backup,
replication, and snapshot systems.
• Automatically captures all changes to the
Exchange databases as they are made
• Advanced features like compression saves
bandwidth and disk space (up to 80%) and
256-bit encryption keeps the bad guys out
• SingleTouch Recovery™ to multiple points
in time before the corruption occurred
• Centralized management, Enterprise capable,
Easy to implement, Simple to use
The Bonus: TRADE-UP to DigiVault with CDP
Created by
and SingleTouch Recovery™ by
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money you’ve already spent on the
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TRADE-UP TODAY
To learn more, call 425 456 8478 or visit our website at
www.lucid8.com/tradeup for a FREE 30-Day DigiVault Test-Drive and a copy
of The Essential Guide to Continuous Data Protection for Exchange.
Copyright © 2006 Lucid8. All rights reserved. Microsoft® Exchange Server is a registered trademark of Microsoft® Corporation. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.
11/14/06
12:21 PM
Page 20
ProductReview
What’s Next
s this review went to press, Diskeeper was just preparing to ship a new version of its defrag tool. Diskeeper
2007 automates many defragmentation and disk maintenance
tasks. Here’s a look at the significant upgrades coming in
Diskeeper 2007:
• InvisiTasking technology performs true real-time
defragmentation, automatically handling fragmentation as
it occurs.
• I-FAAST 2.0 speeds file access through intelligent monitoring. It learns which files are needed most and accelerates
access to those files by anywhere from 20 percent to 80
percent. (This feature is available in Professional Premier,
Server and Enterprise Server versions.)
• The Frag Shield maintains system stability and reliability
by preventing fragmentation of critical system files.
• The Terabyte Volume Engine 2.0 (TVE) provides thorough
real-time defragmentation of large volumes (more than 60GB).
• The improved interface provides flexible and intuitive
controls, simplified configuration, and reports on disk
health, real-time performance and fragmentation statistics.
• Automatic online directory consolidation boosts antivirus
scans, back-ups and file searches.
• Diskeeper 2007 now has native 64-bit support for
Windows operating systems.
A
What’s really cool here is
version 10 sports a boot time
defragmentation sequence.
This lets you defragment the
paging file rather than
deleting it. It turns it off in
Windows, performs the
defragmentation and then recreates the page file.
Apart from the defragmenter utility itself,
Diskeeper Administrator is
a great interface that lets
you control your enterprise
defragmentation efforts.
From the console, you can
roll out the appropriate
versions of Diskeeper to
machines across your network, schedule primary and
secondary policies of when
to run defrag operations on
groups of machines, and
even let non-administrator
logins access the defragment utility.
I did have one hang up
with the Admin tool. You
have to make sure TCP/IP
is turned on as a protocol if
you opt to use SQL Server
2005 Express as your database engine. I’m told
Diskeeper will update this
info as part of the documentation/installation in subsequent versions. While this is
certainly not a failing of
Diskeeper, but rather a
change in how MSDE/SQL
provides surface exposure, it
can throw you for a loop if
you’re not ready.
Intelligent
Defragmentation
Diskeeper 10 contains a
number of features designed
to conduct defrags in an
intelligent way. I-FAAST
adapts to the changes in
your file storage habits based
on your disk geometry. This
makes the product adaptive
because it essentially analyzes a volume to determine
what type of volume it is and
how often you’re actually
retrieving “commonly
accessed files.” It then
arranges the files on the
drive in such a way that the
most common files are within
the easiest reach.
It used to be that if you
were going to defragment
your system, you had to wait
until later at night to ensure
that disk activity would be at
its lowest. If the computer
had to read or save to the
hard disk while a defrag routine was in process, the
integrity of the data would
often be in question and the
software would begin the
process again. It could also
end up running so slowly
that performance would be
heavily affected.
Diskeeper created I/O
Smart so the tool could continue working through
accesses by halting the
defrag process and allowing
the file activity to continue
and complete before resuming defrag. This is powerful
because the system takes
advantage of idle time when
it would otherwise have to
do maintenance.
Depending on the level of
file activity on the disk, the
size and types of files used,
and the amount of free space
available, Diskeeper can use
the Smart Scheduling feature to figure out what the
period between defrags
should be. This is pretty
cool, as your system doesn’t
kick off a defrag cycle when
there’s little to defrag.
In Professional edition,
Diskeeper has a powersaving function that works
for notebooks. It cuts down
on power consumption
while quietly cranking away
on those pesky fragments.
You can just use the
Windows Defragmenter,
which works reasonably well
for most situations. You’d
still be using a proven version
of Diskeeper, albeit several
versions earlier than the current version. Diskeeper’s key
selling point is that it’s a
huge improvement over the
packaged Windows version.
It all comes down to how
you use your storage, what
your read/write activity is
and whether your drives are
getting fragmented. You
can run an analysis in
Windows and begin measuring how fragmented your
data has become.
If it’s truly getting thrashed
around on a regular basis,
and you’re able to determine
that it’s due to drive fragmentation, latching onto a
tool like Diskeeper is probably a good idea. Diskeeper
has been at it a long while,
so it’s worth a long look if
you need an enterprise-level
defrag solution. —
Rick A. Butler, MCSE+I, is
the director of information
services for the United States
Hang Gliding and Paragliding
Association. You can reach
him when he lands at
[email protected].
Project2
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Mr. Roboto
Automation for the Harried Administrator | by Don Jones
Shut Down, Redux
S
hutting down, restarting and logging remote computers must be a hot topic for Windows administrators.
After running a column entitled “Shut Down Already”
(see Mr. Roboto, July 2006), I received numerous comments
from clever readers. They all had
other ideas for remotely shutting
down and restarting remote machines
en masse.
One reader—who shall remain
anonymous for his protection—simply
suggested that we should all “make the
interns walk around and do it.” Sorry,
but Mr. Roboto is not into the InternNet method of doing anything. Besides,
nothing would cause an uprising of the
interns quicker than that.
Another reader, Mark Mills, had a
better suggestion. He uses Special
Operations Software’s Specops Gpupdate tool (download the tool from
www.specopssoft.com/products/specop
sgpupdate/default.asp). This tool meets
the First Law of Roboto with its price:
Figure 1. Gpupdate lets you select an
entire Active Directory organizational unit.
Free. It’s a plug-in for Active Directory’s
Users and Computers console—a tool
with which most admins already spend
plenty of quality time every day.
Using this tool, you don’t have to
select individual computers. Instead, you
can select a whole organizational unit
(OU) full of machines (see Figure 1).
Then your options include restarting
the computer, shutting down the computer, starting the computer (using
Wake-On-LAN, requiring that the
computer have a WoL-compatible network adapter), or forcing the computers
to refresh their Group Policy settings.
As its name would imply, that’s the
tool’s primary purpose.
When you select any of these options,
you get a bar chart showing you the outcome of the operation (see Figure 2).
You’ll see how many computers are still
working on it, how many are complete,
how many didn’t work and how many
couldn’t be contacted because they were
either offline or protected by a local firewall. By the way, if it’s the Windows
Firewall that’s blocking access, you can
use a Group Policy setting to open the
proper exceptions to allow this kind of
remote administration. That’s an important trick to keep in mind.
Anyway, you’ll see a detailed list that
will show you exactly which computers
are in which category of success or
failure. That’s when you can put the
Intern-Net to work to handle the computers you couldn’t reach remotely.
Looking at the simplicity of the
Gpupdate tool, you have to wonder
Figure 2. After making a change, you'll
see a graph showing the results.
why Microsoft didn’t build in a similar
type of functionality. It doesn’t really
matter because Specops stepped in.
Because the tool is free and works well,
there’s virtually no reason not to use it
and continue to restart manually. Let’s
hope we see more companies producing
free tools like this.—
Don Jones ([email protected]) is a contributing editor for Redmond magazine.
He’s currently working on “Windows PowerShell: TFM” (www.sapienpress.com).
Long Live Free Tools
y now, you’ve probably
heard about Microsoft’s
purchase of Winternals, the
company co-founded by guru
Mark Russinovich. Mark
recently stated in his blog that
Microsoft plans to keep the
huge library of free Sysinternals (www.sysinternals.com)
tools available to the public.
In case Microsoft changes its
mind later, you should go
download them all now.
— D.J.
B
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Your turn to sound off on the
latest Microsoft products
D
ER
DR
EN
IV
VMware Workstation is
a Virtual Powerhouse
RE A
1206red_ReaderRev24-27.v7
Redmond
Readers say VMware’s desktop virtualization tool, although pricier
than Microsoft’s free Virtual PC, is definitely worth the money.
BY JOANNE CUMMINGS
Mware Workstation 5.5 debuted in December 2005 to rave reviews.
Although Microsoft, its primary competitor, has bolstered its arsenal of virtualization tools in recent months (see “Virtual Server Has Real Fans” and
“Microsoft Virtual PC: Good Enough—for the Price,” October and November
Redmond, respectively), VMware is still widely considered best of breed when it
comes to desktop virtualization. “We are a Microsoft partner and a VMware partner,
so we support and use both,” says John Hanley, CEO of Portlock Software, a
storage management and disaster recovery software provider in Redmond, Wash.
“VMware Workstation is, in my opinion, a much better product than Virtual PC
because it’s more flexible and has more options,” he says.
VMware Workstation 5.5 runs on Windows or Linux hosts, a decided advantage
over Microsoft’s Virtual PC, which supports only Windows hosts (although it
does support limited Linux guests). VMware also supports more flavors of Linux
guests, including the latest distributions from Red Hat, SUSE, Ubuntu, Sun
Solaris x86 and FreeBSD.
“There’s more Linux expertise in VMware. I’m sure Microsoft has vast Linux
expertise, but they don’t apply it to developing products for Linux,” Hanley says.
That could be changing, though. “VMware Workstation is a better product for
Linux now, but that may not be true once all the Linux extensions come out with
Microsoft,” he says.
V
We can take snapshots of our data and ship
those to our Texas office, and vice versa.
Steve Birchfield, Network Administrator at AnazaoHealth Corp.
Bit by Bit
Workstation 5.5 supports both 32-bit and 64-bit guest and host machines
(Microsoft’s Virtual PC supports 64-bit hosts, but only 32-bit guests). VMware
also lets users run 32- and 64-bit operating systems simultaneously on the same
physical machine. The 64-bit guest capability is only supported on certain AMD
64 and Intel VT-enabled processors. (VMware provides a free utility that checks
for supported processors as part of the download process.)
For most readers, the 64-bit support is important, but not yet critical. “Most of the
environments I’m working with right now aren’t 64-bit,” says Bob Fox, an independent consultant who is also a Microsoft MVP for Windows SharePoint Services,
VMware Workstation 5.5
$199
VMware, an EMC Company
877-486-9273
www.vmware.com
a Pfizer SharePoint Lead and a member
of the Microsoft Center of Excellence.
“Maybe down the road it might make a
difference, but I don’t think it’s going
to affect me in terms of testing Web
parts and different applications.”
Hanley agrees that 64-bit support will
become more important. “Most of our
desktops are still 32-bit, so we can’t run
a 64-bit virtualized OS on our desktops,” he says. “As we replace them with
new 64-bit machines, that will change.
But right now, I haven’t been all that
thrilled with the 64-bit Windows XP
version’s reliability or stability.”
VMware Workstation 5.5 also offers
experimental support for virtual symmetric multiprocessing, in which users
can dedicate as many as two virtual
processors to a given virtual machine
(VM), as long as the host machine is
configured with at least two logical
processors. This is an advanced feature,
however, that most readers have yet to
use. “I haven’t tried the 64-bit stuff or
the multiprocessor,” says Paul Moore, a
senior developer at a small software
company in Mountain View, Calif.
Moore’s company uses VMware
Workstation primarily because of its
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Linux and Windows support. “We do a
lot of development on Red Hat systems
and we do development for Red Hat
talking to Active Directory. We need
lots of domain controllers that we can
bring up, take down, roll back and so
on. Plus, we need lots of Red Hat systems we can bring up, take down and
roll back. VMware is perfect for our
environment,” he says.
Bread and Butter
Beyond the Linux support, most users
cite VMware Workstation’s snapshot
and cloning capabilities as key differentiators. “The snapshot feature is very
appealing,” Moore says. “If I’m about
to try something weird or different I
can just take a snapshot, and that snapshot is very fast and lightweight.”
VMware Workstation lets users take
snapshots at any time, even while the
virtual machine is running. The result
is a lightweight copy that takes the
snapshot and stores only the changes
from that point.
“It has a very nice tool for managing
snapshots,” Moore says. “The UI actually shows you all the different snapshots
you’ve made. You can give them all
names, and it’s fairly easy to navigate. So
you can try one thing and if that doesn’t
feel quite right, you can go back to a
previously known good state, without
destroying where you just were.”
Virtual PC right now has no snapshot
capability, although it does let users “go
back” one level. “For developers who
are always messing around, the snapshot
feature is really useful,” Moore says.
“When you’re developing things deep
down inside Windows, if you make a
mistake with a real machine, you have
to clear the whole thing off and reinstall. It’s a big problem.”
Non-developers also find the snapshot worthwhile, especially for disaster
recovery purposes. “We can take snapshots of our data and ship those to our
Texas office, and vice versa,” explains
Steve Birchfield, network administrator
at AnazaoHealth Corp. in Tampa, Fla.
“So if something happens here, a hurricane or some other event, they can just
bring those copies of the virtual
machines up and we can function and
operate out of the other location.”
Other readers like the snapshot capability but find it difficult to navigate. “I
tried the snapshots, but I got myself all
confused on which snapshot was which,
so I just deleted them all and started
over again,” Hanley says. “I think better
tools for managing snapshots in
VMware would be cool. We’re constantly changing the environment and
like to go back to known states.”
Storage space is another caveat when
it comes to snapshots, readers say. “The
problem I have is the hard drive require-
VMware Workstation
lets users take snapshots
at any time, even
while the virtual
machine is running.
ments,” says Fox. “You are definitely
going to be losing space fast because
you’re storing all those images.” Fox
says he usually stores snapshots on a
separate 300GB portable hard drive to
avoid space problems.
Cloning is another key feature of
VMware Workstation 5.5. Users can
make either a full copy of a VM (called
a full clone) or a linked clone. Linked
clones are lightweight copies in which
only changes are saved. “VMware’s
ability to clone one [VM] based on
another is a great feature,” Moore
says. “If I have a [VM] and a snapshot
of that machine, the linked clone feature lets you have both of those
machines running simultaneously.”
This works well for Moore because he
can quickly and efficiently create multiple copies of VMs sporting only incremental changes. “If I have a domain
controller and want to make another
domain controller just like it, except that
it’s configured to run in Chinese, it’s
easy,” he says. “I make a clone of the
first domain controller and fire that one
up while the first one is still running.
Then, on the second one, I can go into
the control panel and say, ‘OK, you’re
now running in Chinese.’ And it hasn’t
taken 10GB of space, because for the
second one, VMware is just maintaining
the differences between the two. It’s
very efficient on disk space and it’s very
efficient to set up.”
Some Support Still Lacking
VMware Workstation isn’t perfect,
however. Readers find it lacking in
some key areas, including support for
Windows Vista and the fact that it
doesn’t yet have a physical-to-virtual
(P2V) converter for Linux. “VMware
Workstation doesn’t support Windows
Vista very well,” Hanley says. “I’m
assuming that will be fixed rapidly with
Vista going to manufacturing. When
you pop an image of Windows Vista
and start VMware on that, the graphics
look atrocious. It reminds me of the
Atari ‘Pong’ days.”
Not only are the graphics less than
stellar, but Vista also tends to crash the
whole machine. “I’ve had Vista as my
host machine for a half hour at one
point and it was just blowing up so I
just reverted back,” Fox says. “Vista as
a guest on VMware runs fine, but the
host has some issues to work out.”
This should change once Vista is out
in production. “In all fairness, Vista
isn’t a production operating system yet,
so you really can’t expect Workstation
to support Vista when it hasn’t shipped,”
Hanley says.
Workstation also has no support for
Linux P2V, an important feature for
AnazaoHealth’s Birchfield. “Right
now, VMware really doesn’t have a
P2V for Linux at all—it’s just for
Windows. And that’s one thing that’s
lacking for us.”
AnazaoHealth is a pharmacy, and
many applications in that industry run
only on Linux. “When we purchase
11/14/06
10:55 AM
other pharmacies, chances are they’ll
have a Unix or Linux system,” Birchfield says. “It would be nice if VMware
had some kind of tool where we could
easily pull their servers into a virtual
environment and not have to worry
about supporting that hardware.”
There are some tools like PlateSpin
PowerConvert to do conversions, but
support is a problem. “You’re kind of on
your own as far as support,” he says.
“Other people going through the same
thing try and help you out, but really, as
far as official support, there’s not much.”
VMware currently offers a Windowsonly converter. The next version of
VMware’s Converter tool will convert
Windows physical machines into VMs,
as well as converting Microsoft Virtual
PC VMs into VMware Workstation
VMs. That tool is currently in beta and
expected to be released in early 2007.
Beyond P2V, VMware support can be
a soft spot. Readers say VMware Workstation is a solid, stable product that
needs very little support. For those
pushing the envelope, though, support
can be hard to find and expensive.
“There’s no support after 30 days.
You can buy it, but it’s not included,”
Moore says. “I’ve had a couple of issues
where I haven’t been able to get things
working. I went onto some of the
forums, got a few suggestions and still
couldn’t make it work. It wasn’t critical,
but if it was, I would have had to cough
up the money and pay for support.”
Even with its downsides, readers say
that VMware Workstation is head and
shoulders above the competition and
well worth its $199 price tag.
“Virtual PC is free today, but there is
no way that I would use that as my main
tool,” Moore says. “The productivity
differences between the two are huge
and the platform support isn’t there in
Virtual PC. So it’s not just about the
money. VMware is a better tool.” —
Joanne Cummings is a freelance technology
journalist. You can reach her via e-mail at
[email protected].
Page 27
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1206red_F1Collab28-36.v10
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ILLUSTRATION BY MARK COLLINS
11/14/06
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Making
Sense of
Microsoft
Collaboration
The pieces are out there, but fitting them together has
proven a long and confusing process.
BY CAROLYN A. APRIL AND ED SCANNELL
11/14/06
10:16 AM
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Collaboration
T
hree years ago,
Portal Server. Cool stuff. People were
We see real value
Microsoft Chairman
impressed, if not a little confused.
and Chief Software
Fast-forward to today and reality
in providing
Architect Bill Gates
sinks in. Microsoft’s ambitious colstood before a crowd
laboration strategy is just beginning
customers with
in New York City and laid out
to take shape, and it’s still confusing.
a dizzying new direction for the
Some products and features are far
intuitive access to
company’s flagship Office suite.
more ready for prime time than othNo longer merely a collection of
ers. IT pros are faced with a portfolio
the information
core desktop productivity applicathat’s voluminous, lacks complete
tions, he contended, the newly
unification and, quite frankly, fails to
they need to do
dubbed Office System had evolved
sidestep a rash of redundancies. On
into a seamless collection of clients,
top of that, Microsoft’s budding
everyday work.
servers, services and tools that
support for emerging voice and other
would enable a new era of worker
unified communications technoloJeff Raikes, President,
collaboration.
gies—which it considers an integral
Microsoft Business Division
Gates then went on to demonpart of the overall collaboration
strate such things as one-click Web
story—sets the stage for some tricky
conferencing, integrated presence in the Outlook client and
training, implementation and development work for IT
capabilities of the new collaboration darling, SharePoint
managers over the next couple of years.
Microsoft Speaks Up
on’t underestimate Microsoft’s ambitions
to establish voice technology as a key
ingredient of its collaboration product stew.
The company has plans to make it work integrally with all things collaborative and could
signal the company’s entry into the telephony
business as a serious competitor.
One indication of those ambitions is the
deal it struck with Nortel earlier this year. The
deal is seen by many as a concerted effort
to transition the more traditional business
phone systems into software by leveraging
Microsoft’s Unified Communications platform
with Nortel’s software products to improve
telephony functions. The deal has more
strategic implications for Microsoft’s collaboration plans than the joint development
deal it has with Cisco for voice technology.
Where Microsoft and Cisco work together
but also compete in the voice market,
Microsoft and Nortel will work together,
but avoid any “coopetition.”
“Someone near the top at Nortel did some
soul searching and decided software development was too far outside the company’s core
competency and made the decision to harness their efforts to Microsoft’s. It’s a deal that
D
could work out for both given Nortel’s presence as a large international company,” says
Peter Pawlak, a senior analyst with Directions
on Microsoft in Kirkland, Wash.
“Voice will play a huge role in their next generation of [collaborative] products, to the
point where Microsoft could conceivably jump
into the telephony business in a major way
and do something way beyond just v-mail
working with Exchange and Outlook. It could
be Active Directory providing your whole
directory and security structures and
Exchange providing a place to queue messages and unify communications servers,”
Pawlak says.
Microsoft thinks of voice as yet another
application, and that it’s at a stage now where
instant messaging was in the enterprise five
years ago. “We are moving to a world where
people will use software to switch VOIP very
quickly. These legacy PBXes and voice mail
systems represent a huge investment our
users have made and so we will continue to
offer interoperability with those systems. We
will deliver a VOIP PBX software solution,”
says John Richards, Microsoft’s director of
SharePoint Services.
— E.S.
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“Being a stack architect is very difficult these days. It
used to be so simple to pick the right Microsoft technologies and build a stack,” says Tim Huckaby, CEO of
InterKnowlogy, a custom .NET development shop.
“These days, it’s overwhelming.”
Huckaby is no neophyte, either. His firm is a
bleeding-edge adopter of Microsoft technologies,
and has been in on the ground level of the whole
raft of collaboration products. The company’s latest project, with The Scripps
Research Institute, involved building a
collaborative molecular environment
(CME) client-based tool that lets
researchers share 3-D information via
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
and Vista. Among other things, the application
achieved better—and necessary—integration
between SharePoint and some of the other Office clients,
including PowerPoint.
That lack of inherent unification in past and current collaboration products is something that Microsoft is
working hard to address in the 2007 platform
releases expected to begin in phases starting
this month.
“We continue to evolve and improve
upon our Office System,” says Jeff
Raikes, president of the Microsoft Business division. “We see real value in providing customers seamless, intuitive access
to the people and information they need
within the context of everyday work.”
The cornucopia of upgrades includes Microsoft
Office SharePoint Server 2007, Office Communications
Server 2007 (formerly Live Communications Server 2005),
Exchange Server 2007, Office Communicator 2007, Office
Groove 2007 (formerly Groove Virtual Office 3.1) and
Office Outlook 2007. New products like the Office RoundTable 360-degree audio/ video conferencing device will also
Collaboration Rivalry
icrosoft’s primary rival in the collaboration space remains IBM Corp., which has
been forging ahead with real-time collaboration,
unified communications, e-learning and social
networking capabilities like wikis and blogs.
IBM’s Lotus division is the anchor to its
efforts. Key to that is Sametime, the real-time
collaboration platform that enables presence, instant messaging, application sharing
and Web conferencing. The latest version of
the platform, Sametime 7.5, features the
Eclipse development environment, which
helps simplify integrating Notes-based applications and other software inside a corporate
environment, according to Ken Bisconti,
IBM’s vice president of workplace, portal and
collaboration products.
“We believe the next-generation of applications will be built using the composite model,”
Bisconti says. “By putting Eclipse on Sametime and Notes you get the ability to combine
Notes applications with any other programming model.”
Like Microsoft, IBM has not fully unified its
collaboration components and faces some of
the same challenges as Redmond in putting
the unified communications puzzle together.
Thus far, IBM’s approach to blending collaboration and communication capabilities revolves
M
around partnering with third-party networking
vendors such as Cisco, Avaya and Siemens. In
these solutions, IBM’s Sametime delivers the
real-time collaboration components, while the
partner provides audio/visual services to
enable multimedia conferences or connect-tocall scenarios, according to Bisconti.
Perhaps the most confusing thing about
IBM’s strategy has been reconciling the relatively new Workplace portfolio of Web-based
collaboration and messaging tools with the
client/server Notes/Domino franchise. Bisconti
acknowledged this has been a sticky issue for
customers and partners trying to decide what
they need and what they don’t. One of the
things IBM is doing today is using Workplace
as a platform for technical innovation, then
taking some of the more cutting-edge features—server-managed clients and composite
application support—and driving them into
the core Notes/Domino products.
“[IBM has] Lotus with Notes/Domino and
SameTime, but they also have WorkPlace,
which is a completely different group. From
what I can see there is no more unification
between Sametime and Notes than there is
between LCS and Exchange,” says Peter
Pawlak, senior analyst with Directions on
Microsoft in Kirkland, Wash.
— C.A.
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debut after years of speculation and discussion. The links
offline capabilities made it difficult to keep documents
between Office clients, Exchange and SharePoint have
properly updated if some were offline and others could not
reportedly all been improved, however, many analysts and
communicate with them.
users say the connections between those products and the
“They haven’t laid out how Groove is going to move fornewer communications software remain murky.
ward in the next go around, but I’d expect that you’ll no
Herein lies the problem: While Microsoft talks about
longer see this idea of a separate Groove client. The capabuilding a seamless, pervasive collaboration platform,
bilities of Groove will likely get folded into SharePoint
many analysts and users complain that the company has
over time,” Pawlak says.
done a poor job of clearly sorting out and positioning the
Huckaby agrees, contending that giving Groove a separate
many product pieces that constitute that strategy. They
Microsoft SKU to sell alone will result in confusion for
believe there are some pieces that overlap each other in
buyers because Groove’s feature set conflicts with a lot of
terms of core functions and they
other things within the Microsoft
don’t get an adequate feel for the
stack. “We paid all this money to get
[Microsoft] could
company’s long-term commitment
Ray Ozzie, but Groove is contradicto some components.
tory to what is ‘Better Together,’” a
do a better job
What seem most perplexing to
reference to an internal mantra
some industry observers are the
Microsoft applies to its products.
helping the market
various communication products
Quite frankly, it’s becoming a
and how they might work in conSharePoint world. SharePoint,
understand what is
cert with server and desktop prowhich sits at the heart of any numductivity software to form a more
ber of combinations of collaboration
really a multi-faceted products, is gaining respect as a
overarching set of solutions. This
has contributed to a rather fracbattle-tested platform among entertured view among users as to the
prise accounts. Some now consider
story, and how
breadth of the company’s actual
SharePoint in the same category of
collaboration strategy.
mature and reliable products as
these different
“They have been dropping the
SQL Server and Active Directory.
term ‘collaborative’ for a few years
technologies address “SharePoint is reaching a state of
now, but they only talk about it in
maturity now where larger customers
piecemeal fashion or as part of
are not looking down on it. With this
very different
some point product discussion.
last release it has reached a critical
[Microsoft] could do a better job
mass to where people say, ‘OK, this is
problems.
helping the market understand what
not going away,’” says John Henderis really a multi-faceted story, and
son, an IT specialist with a large
Dwight Davis, Ovum Summit Inc.
how these different technologies
regional insurance company in Farmaddress very different problems,”
ington Hills, Mich.
says Dwight Davis, vice president at Ovum Summit Inc., a
Pervasiveness
market researcher in Seattle.
Ozzie, the inventor of Groove and now Microsoft’s chief
Groove on This
software architect, is the man who has supplanted Chairman
Take SharePoint and Groove, for example. Microsoft offiBill Gates as Microsoft’s guiding light into the murky techcials say Groove will continue as a separate product with its
nology future. He and Raikes are in charge of the collaboraown unique set of features for the foreseeable future, yet
tion and unified communications products, and are trying to
there is rampant speculation among analysts that key Groove reshape the collaboration story from one of disparate point
features will instead get baked into the SharePoint pie.
products to a pervasive platform. They envision a scenario
Microsoft’s view of Groove’s role in the larger scheme of
where users get the benefits of various collaboration tools—
its collaboration strategy has changed since it bought
from instant messaging to Web conferencing to documentGroove Networks Inc. in early 2005, according to Peter
sharing—within their application or interface of choice, be
Pawlak, a senior analyst with Directions on Microsoft in
it Outlook or some other client. In other words, collaboraKirkland, Wash. The initial plan was to leverage Groove’s
tion software as embedded infrastructure.
peer-to-peer capabilities in a “serverless” environment
“This notion of pervasive capabilities is a departure from
where people could work jointly on an ad hoc basis on a
what people thought about Microsoft five years ago. We
variety of projects besides those just involving documents.
don’t think about making collaboration as a separate place
Those hopes broke down because the product’s online and you have to go to, but something that just happens in the
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Collaboration
context of how you work. This notion of pervasiveness is
really important to drive cultural adoption,” says John
Richards, Microsoft’s director of SharePoint Services.
Microsoft now views mobile computing as a core set of
investments it must make that, for instance, would give
enterprise workers access to any SharePoint Web site from
a wide range of devices using Microsoft or non-Microsoft
software from any location through a browser. In the
upcoming business version of Office 2007, Microsoft continued that commitment with a wide range of capabilities
that let it work better with the company’s collaboration,
communications and voice technologies.
“Having back-end collaboration services integrated into
Office apps adds a lot of value,” says Erica Driver, an analyst with Forrester Research who recently published a
report on Microsoft’s collaboration strategy. “It’s a differentiator for Microsoft.”
In the forthcoming Outlook 2007, for example, users can
better take advantage of RSS feeds and work with SharePoint content offline (another redundancy with
Groove). Microsoft still has a way to go to call its
platform unified, Driver insists, though the
truth is that no IT vendor has nailed
unification: not IBM, which is
Microsoft’s prime competition, nor
the raft of available open source solutions that largely remain the domain of
point products.
Communications
Breakdown
One of the things that makes it difficult for
larger enterprises to understand Microsoft’s
collaboration products and strategies is that
there are typically a half dozen different
groups of IT pros spread across a single company—
each responsible for only one or two of Microsoft’s collaborative products. This bogs down decision making or results
in the use of two or three different Microsoft-based collaborative products. It also becomes a matter of available technical training. Some users blame this on Microsoft, others on
their own organization’s lack of dedicated resources.
“[Collaboration] technology gets spread around so many
areas, you typically don’t get all in the same room the guys in
IT running SharePoint with the guys in charge of the IM
servers with the guys responsible for the communications
stuff. It’s very hard for large shops to get their arms around a
single collaboration strategy just from an organizational
standpoint,” says Mike Drips, an independent IT specialist
who works with large IT shops in the San Francisco area.
This difficulty intensifies when you add communications products to the mix. The Office Communications
Server, for example, lags behind more established servers
like Exchange and SharePoint, and therefore has IT pros
working at various points on the learning curve to implement the platform as a whole.
In particular, analysts say the development interfaces in
the communications product are much harder to learn—
still, in some cases, using COM wrappers—while other
products sport Web services APIs. “Programming for
[Office Communications Server] is not for the faint of
heart,” posits Huckaby.
Nonetheless, Raikes defends Microsoft’s approach. “Creating a leading VOIP and unified communications solution
helps customers be more productive in their day-to-day
work, and it’s an opportunity I’m personally very excited
about. A software-centric approach to unified communications allows information workers to more efficiently manage all types of communications,” Raikes says.
Overall, the APIs for the entire messaging, team collaboration and real-time communications/collaborations portfolio
need smoothing out, according to analysts and users. Angela
Hlavka, vice president of strategic solution development at
MTS Allstream in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, says
the API issue even goes beyond the desire to
streamline the interfaces. She’s simply had
trouble getting the proper documentation or
the right versions. “When Office Communicator came out, we did not have the API documentation to even write presence into
our applications,” Hlavka says. “Instead,
we wrote small sections of code to whatever APIs were out there, until we finally
got the right documents just recently.”
Hlavka says Microsoft appears to be
addressing some of the interface issues
with the release of the 2007 products,
many of which her company is already running in its labs. She’s also had a chance to see where
Microsoft has done a good job dealing with weaknesses
in the products’ overall capabilities. For example, Office
Communications Server 2007 vastly improves the 2005
version’s challenges in sending audio and video across
multiple firewalls, she says. Also, Exchange Server 2007
now integrates with Microsoft’s Speech Server and
brings together voicemail—unified messaging in a more
elegant way.
This kind of integration is exactly where Microsoft is
hoping to go as it brings various communications technologies into the fold. “Within unified communications,
you can do a bunch of things to bring together all of the
different communications capabilities you have, no matter
where you want to work,” says Richards.
Still, most analysts agree it will take some time before
these two sides of the technology pie work seamlessly
together, and even more time—at least a couple of
years—before IT managers are implementing this platform on a widespread basis.
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1206red_F2License39-44.v8
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Can You Cash In with
Virtualization Licensing ?
The virtualization
locomotive just
keeps on coming,
and Microsoft has
laid new tracks
for its licensing.
BY GREG SHIELDS AND STEVE KAPLAN
ILLUSTRATION BY PHILIP HOWE
nterested in jumping onto the virtualization bandwagon but still have concerns about the licensing
implications? You’re not alone. Microsoft’s policies
on licensing in virtualization environments are complex, to say the least—but times are changing.
Over the last year, the Redmond, Wash., giant has
worked to provide much more clarity around virtualization in general, and unveiled a set of licensing policy
revisions that, in the end, could be a big boon to your
organization’s pocketbook.
Microsoft’s new rules should help companies deal with
the unintended—and somewhat ironic—consequences of
going virtual: the immediate explosion of new server systems and the associated increase in total license costs.
Herein lies the problem. In the old way of managing a
network, startup barriers for adding servers were relatively high: purchasing hardware, OSes and software;
waiting for delivery, racking-and-stacking; and finally
conducting a lengthy and sometimes manual OS and
application installation.
Fast-forward to the virtual way and things are much
easier. Need a new server? How about a copy, paste and
rename? So you add them in droves and then wonder
where all these additional licenses came from. No fun.
I
11/14/06
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Virtualization Licensing
Taming the Growing Beast
Is that All?
To combat this problem and other uncertainties associated
with licensing and virtual systems, Microsoft has released a
policy update titled, “Licensing Microsoft Server Products
with Microsoft Virtual Server R2 and Other Virtual
Machine Technologies.” This document was released to
clarify Microsoft’s definition of a virtual machine and
announce additional support for licensing in virtualized
environments. The policy revision revealed a number of
changes to how running physical and virtual instances are
counted against a business’ available licenses.
Bottom line? How you implement virtualization will
dictate how much you save. Plenty of savings are available
if the correct distribution of resources is engineered for
per-processor applications. However, for those who
haven’t adopted the most recent versions of Microsoft
software, many businesses are looking at potentially costly
upgrades before they can enjoy those benefits.
For versions of Windows prior to Microsoft Windows
Server 2003 R2, any running physical or virtual instance of
the operating system would count against available software
licensing limits. If you have 10 licenses for Windows Server
2003, you can run 10 copies of it either on a physical
machine or virtually using virtualization software.
The changes don’t stop with the operating system. Licensing
for some of the more expensive per-processor Microsoft
servers like SQL Server 2005, ISA Server 2004 and BizTalk
Server 2004 is also updated to include virtualization verbiage.
For the most recent versions of these servers, software
inside a virtual environment is licensed based on the number
of virtual processors rather than the number of physical
processors on the server. This limitation holds true no matter if the number of virtual processors is greater or fewer
than the number of physical processors on that server. This
can have a substantial impact in one of two ways on how
these servers are deployed in a virtual environment.
For the first, remember that system virtualization tools
allow for the concatenation of multiple physical machines
How you implement virtualization
will dictate how much you save.
Though this is essentially no change to the established
practice for OS licensing, one useful change now grants
the ability to store copies of running virtual machines on a
file server for backup and disaster recovery purposes. This
new benefit makes fully legal the process of creating full
OS snapshots of production systems and storing them on
tape or on file servers for emergency purposes.
The game changes, however, with Windows Server 2003
R2 Enterprise and Datacenter Edition. In what appears
aimed at enticing customers to upgrade from R2 Standard
Edition to R2 Enterprise Edition, Microsoft grants users
of the most recent server operating system version four
additional virtual OS instances for every licensed physical
instance. The text of these “Expanded Use Rights” for R2
reads, “Each software license allows you to run, at any one
time, one instance of the server software in a physical OS
environment and up to four instances of the server software in virtual OS environments on a particular server.” If
you’re one of the few who run Datacenter Edition, you’re
bumped to an unlimited number of virtual servers on a
single physical server.
It’s important to note that by leveraging Microsoft’s
“downgrade rights” clause, an organization is allowed to run
a previous version of the software in place of the R2 version.
A Simplistic ROI
In the end, it’s the return on investment that will
drive the conversion to a virtualized infrastructure. In a simplistic example, let’s assume a company needs to roll out 100 Windows Server
2003 R2 Standard Edition systems, all of which
are candidates for virtualization. List price for
R2 Standard Edition approximates $725 per
server with no included CALs. The total price for
the additional deployment will reach $72,500
for the operating system licenses alone.
But because there’s not always a 4:1 compression of virtual machines to physical machines,
and because virtual instances are not the same
as physical instances, the licensing math can get
a little complicated. From a conservative performance standpoint, it is realistic to assume an
8:1 or better compression of virtual machines
onto physical machines. In the 8:1 case, a purchase of 25 Enterprise Edition licenses will be
required to obtain the 100 necessary virtual
licenses. In your network environment, you may
only deploy 13 servers to host the 100 virtual
machines, but an excess of 12 physical licenses
remain for other purposes. See Table 1 on p. 42
for how physical and virtual licenses stack up.
List price for Enterprise Edition approximates
$2,300 per server with no included CALs.
Looking from a financial perspective—even if
our sample deployment only requires the functionality of Standard Edition—an all-virtual rollout on Enterprise Edition will cost $57,500,
minus the sunk cost of the 12 excess licenses
that can be used for other purposes, for a total
savings of $15,000. Additional savings on
power, cooling and deployment costs also factor into the savings.
Project9
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Page 42
onto the same server. As an example, imagine four twoAdler, a commercial law firm headquartered in Concord,
processor servers are virtualized onto a single four-processor Calif., this perk played a role in his decision to migrate to
host. If each virtual server is configured to use two procesvirtual infrastructure.
sors, then the total number of virtual processors on that
“While the primary drivers for our enterprise virtualization
physical host is eight.
project were certainly the enhanced high availability and DR
According to Microsoft’s updated policies, eight percapabilities,” Hicks explains, “the ability to have virtual
machines running at our DR site without requiring addiprocessor licenses would need to be purchased for the
Microsoft servers hosted on those virtual systems. There- tional Microsoft licensing was economically attractive.”
fore, although a savings in Windows
Calling All CALs
licenses is realized by aggregating
Physical Virtual
Total
Client Access Licenses (CALs) are
physical servers onto virtual ones, no
Licenses Instances
Instances
also affected by virtualization.
economies are gained for the licenses
According to the new rules, each
associated with SQL, ISA and other
1
4
5
CAL allows any number of OS enviservers that may be installed on top
2
8
10
ronments on a particular client
of that Windows license.
device—virtual or physical—to access
Secondly, for some Windows servers,
3
12
15
the server software. Separate CALs
virtualization’s improved rollout and
4
16
20
for physical and virtual machines on
resource assignment capabilities may
the same physical device are not nechelp. As was discussed before, in the
5
20
25
essary. This change holds true for
old paradigm (one service per physical
Windows servers like Exchange
server) barriers to change were diffi6
24
30
Server 2003, SQL Server 2005 and
cult. Because purchasing additional
7
28
35
Windows Server 2003, as well as the
hardware for existing servers is timeassociated TSCALs for connecting
consuming and costly, new servers
8
32
40
to Terminal Services.
added to the environment are typically
9
36
45
Users of VMware Workstation,
purchased with the greatest number of
VMware ACE and Microsoft Virtual
processors and RAM available for the
10
40
50
PC—virtualization applications that
chassis type.
11
44
55
operate at the desktop level—enjoy
Once virtualized, server resource use
the greatest benefit from this change.
can be more granularly defined. If you
12
48
60
For example, should a company wish
find out after deployment that two13
52
65
to provide multiple desktop environprocessors are overkill on your SQL
ments to its user base via one of these
server, then you can reconfigure the
14
56
70
tools, they are not required to purvirtual machine to run on only one.
chase additional CALs for those OSes’
Don’t need six gigabytes of RAM?
15
60
75
connections to file servers, mail
Reconfigure for two and reboot.
16
64
80
servers and terminal servers. This
This benefit of virtualization means
clarification can mean a significant
that Windows servers previously
17
68
85
reduction in rollout costs to support
over-spec’ed at the time of purchase
18
72
90
multiple desktop environments.
can now be right-sized for greater
efficiency of available hardware
19
76
95
Virtual Support
resources. If businesses convert their
20
80
100
This ability to expand systems into
four-processor instances to twothe virtual space is great, but only if
processor and/or two-processor to
21
84
105
it’s supported by the manufacturer.
one-processor, they stand to realize a
22
88
110
In tandem with the clarification on
halving of their licensing costs. Your
licensing, Microsoft has updated its
mileage may vary.
23
92
115
support policy for Microsoft softDR on the Cheap
ware running in non-Microsoft
24
96
120
Inactive instances of Microsoft prodhardware virtualization software like
25
100
125
ucts, like those running on a failover
VMware’s ESX Server. This Knowlserver at a disaster recovery site, do
edge Base article, found at http://
Table 1: Buy one get four free. That’s one
not require extra licensing. For Paul
support.microsoft.com/kb/897615,
physical and four virtual and no more.
Hicks, IT director for Eskanos and
discusses how Microsoft support will
Project12
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3:44 PM
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11/14/06
10:20 AM
Page 44
100
80
0
100
0
20
25
100
40
$57,500
$72,500
60
Enterprise Edition - Virtual Deployment
Standard Edition - Physical Deployment
Figure 1: Fewer gets you more with the five-for-one Enterprise
Edition deal.
handle issues when the operating system in question lies
in a virtualization environment.
According to the document, businesses with a Microsoft
Premier-level support agreement get special dispensation
when calling in support cases. “Microsoft will use commercially reasonable efforts to investigate potential issues
with Microsoft software running in conjunction with
non-Microsoft hardware virtualization software,” reads
the article. A problem called in to Microsoft support may
need to be replicated outside the virtualization environment, but for Premier customers it will not necessarily
be required.
Non-premier customers beware: You don’t qualify for
the same level of virtualization support. “For Microsoft
customers who do not have a Premier-level support
agreement, Microsoft will require the issue to be reproduced independently from the non-Microsoft hardware
virtualization software.”
With either support level, Microsoft relates the obvious disclaimer that they do not provide any warranty associated with
running their product on top of that of another company.—
Greg Shields, MCSE: Security, CCEA, is a senior consultant for
3t Systems (www.3tsystems.com) in Denver, Colo. A contributing
editor to Redmond magazine and a popular speaker at TechMentor events, Greg provides engineering support and technical
consulting in Microsoft, Citrix and VMware technologies. Reach
him at [email protected].
Steve Kaplan, MVP, is president of AccessFlow, a VMware Premier Partner headquartered in Sacramento, Calif. In addition
to co-authoring the Osborne/McGraw-Hill series of Citrix
Official Guides and Advanced Concepts Guide books,
Kaplan has had dozens of articles published on various IT topics
ranging from security to disaster recovery to regulatory compliance. Kaplan can be reached at [email protected].
Project4
10/13/06
12:44 PM
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1206red_F3SaveWorld46-52.v8
11/14/06
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Can Mic r
Save the W
Microsoft Research teams with
top scientists to tackle the world’s
most pressing problems—and it
could turn conventional computing
on its head in the process.
hree years ago, William Henry
Gates III ordered Microsoft
Research to launch a Science
division. Money was one motive—by
staking out a position in the growing
field of scientific computing, future
profits were insured. Fortunately
Microsoft Research doesn’t have to
T
11/14/06
10:32 AM
Page 47
Stephen Emmott:
Microsoft’s Man
of Science
c rosoft
e World?
turn every dollar and man-hour into
marketable products. The Science
group has the wonderful freedom to
work on the big problems: global
warming, disease, the future of
medicine, the origin of the universe
and the creation of life—those sorts
of things.
Leading this charge is Stephen
Emmott, director of the Microsoft
Research European Science Program,
an Englishman with some 20 years of
experience in science and computing,
including a stint at Bell Labs.
Emmott’s main goal is to blend
computer science and traditional sci-
BY DOUG BARNEY
ence, and in the process transform
both. “We are at a profoundly important point in time where computer
science and computing have the
potential to completely revolutionize
the sciences,” Emmott says.
Microsoft doesn’t plan to do this all
alone. Today 14 Microsoft researchers
11/14/06
10:32 AM
Page 48
Microsoft Research
are working with some 40 scientists
around the world. Those numbers are
rapidly expanding. “Within 12 months,
there’ll be 30 Microsoft Research
Cambridge scientists collaborating
with around 80 to 100 scientists worldwide to build new software tools for
addressing important scientific challenges,” Emmott explains.
These efforts were given legs during
the 2020 Science conference, where
some 30 scientists, hailing from
nations from Japan to Germany and
representing universities such as Stanford and companies like GlaxoSmithKline Inc., gathered. The group
produced an 82-page oversized glossy
book, “Towards 2020 Science,” outlining their goals, technologies and
plans.
The conference also set the stage for
research projects, now ongoing, that
match Microsoft researchers with
their scientific counterparts.
“The real benefits come from bringing together people from Microsoft
Research—whether they’re computer
scientists or computational biologists
or computational climatologists or
oceanographers—with people in the
wider science community, to do the
kinds of things that neither of us could
do on our own,” Emmott explains.
Understanding
Life Bit by Bit
One of the more interesting Microsoft
projects is “Simulating Biological
Systems in the Stochastic Pi Calculus.” The idea is to create a more
scaleable way to track “the behavior of
biological systems.” One approach is
to build a so-called Stochastic Pi
Machine, a project driven by Andrew
Phillips of Microsoft Research.
So what does stochastic mean? Well,
a stochastic process is one in which
there is a certain amount of randomness. This means that computers and
scientists can gather data and analyze
the process, but, due to its random
nature, cannot make accurate predictions about it.
The Stochastic Pi Machine is
designed to simulate and model the
workings of biological systems. Using
The Gates Factor
O
ne peek at the Science 2020
work and you’d swear it was
tailor made for The Bill & Melinda
Gates Foundation. Not the case. While
so many of the goals are identical,
they are two entirely separate efforts.
“Bill has clearly had input into the
overall European scientific program.
He launched it last year and has
provided input on numerous occasions. With The Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation there is no formal link
with what we’re doing. However,
some of the work that we are doing
clearly has an implication for the
areas that the foundation is working
in,” says Stephen Emmott, director
of the Microsoft Research European
Science Program.
Nevertheless, Gates’ foundation is
privately funding projects that could
just as easily be paid for by Microsoft
Research. While Microsoft Research
obsesses over the human genome,
the Gates Foundation has earmarked
$2.5 billion to fight malaria by building a genetic map of the disease. The
foundation is also working with
GlaxoSmithKline, a Microsoft Research
partner, to test a new vaccine.
Beating meningitis is another item
on the Gates Foundation’s agenda.
The foundation, along with the
Serum Institute of India, is working
on an inexpensive vaccine that works
across all age levels and prevents the
disease from being passed from person to person.
— D.B.
stochastic pi calculus, biological models
can be built step by step, where models of small systems are ultimately
built into a model of staggering complexity—the type of complexity that
matches the reality of biological
systems themselves.
Interestingly enough, computers are
built much the same way. They start
off simple, but through more and more
memory, networks, grids etc., increase
in complexity in an additive way.
One of the biggest 2020 goals is
fighting disease, a goal shared by the
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation,
which has no formal relationship with
Microsoft Research Science.
“It is remarkable to think that it’s
2006 and it’s not known even how a
cell works—let alone how a human
works. As a consequence, it’s not well
understood how to treat disease,”
Emmott says. “Once we get to a stage
where we have the tools for understanding fundamental biological
processes, it is only a short step to
building the tools and the languages
to model how disease occurs in those
Project8
5/16/06
1:55 PM
Page 1
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11/14/06
10:32 AM
Page 50
Microsoft Research
biological systems—i.e. when something goes wrong or when the system
is invaded by a virus.”
Emmott believes that such an
approach could “completely revolutionize how we think of treating disease
and how we can identify and discover
entirely novel therapies for treating
diseases, whether they are third-world
diseases such as malaria or first-world
diseases such as cancer and obesity.”
Projects are on the way. “We’re just
getting underway on a project with my
team in Cambridge and one of the
world’s leading mathematical biologists at Imperial College in London to
build a global pandemic modeling system to predict when outbreaks of diseases will occur—global outbreaks of
diseases from Avian flu to malaria.
This will be a powerful tool for agencies such as the World Health Organization, for scientific researchers
around the world to be able to use to
do their own modeling [and] for medical research councils, as well as for
interventionist types of organizations
like the United Nations,” Emmott says.
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Climate and the environment are key
factors in understanding and predicting many diseases. “There’s a tremendously important relationship between
environmental conditions and outbreaks of third-world diseases, but the
relationship is not well understood,”
he says. “Being able to more effectively
model and understand, say, climate
change and increases in, or changes in,
third-world diseases will be tremendously valuable eventually for agencies
and foundations such as the Bill &
Melinda Gates Foundation.”
The future of science, and in particular fighting disease, lies in miniaturiza-
Computers
and Science:
A Short Course
Bioinformatics: This field, also
called computational biology,
applies math, statistics and computer science to the understanding
of biology, in particular the behavior of biological systems (see
Systems Biology).
Machine Learning: Here software
learns from experience. One technique is Bayesian, a machine learning approach applied to spam.
Molecular Computer: A computer
small enough to fit into a cell. By
detecting its surroundings and
making decisions, these computers
could support smart drugs.
Smart Drugs: Drugs that can
adapt to their surroundings—for
instance, releasing their contents if
disease is detected.
Stochastic: A Stochastic process
is “fuzzy.” You can collect the data
and understand certain trends,
but you can’t predict precisely
what will happen based on past
experience. The stock market,
especially given the last five years,
is a prime example.
Systems Biology: The attempt to
understand how biological components work together.
11/14/06
tion. Take molecular computers.
These tiny devices, while small
enough to fit into a cell, are smart
enough to understand inputs, such as
whether a cell is diseased, and take
actions—for instance, releasing just
the right amount of a cancer drug. In
fact, one of the biggest benefits of
molecular machines is supporting
smart drugs, which can be released or
held back based on their surroundings.
Sensor networks are another example of tiny yet powerful tools. Here,
massive networks of sensors can be
placed—say, around a mountain—
that collect information on weather,
plant life and trends, and help scientists understand the health of the
mountain’s ecosystem. Through wireless networks, this data can be
amassed and scrutinized.
Similar to molecular computers,
small, intelligent, adaptable systems
could support new artificial immune
systems. “Virtual human immune systems should be able to compute the
results of host-pathogen interaction,
including solutions to the pattern
recognition problem of discriminating
between self and non-self,” wrote
Soren Brunak, a member of the 2020
Science Group, in “Towards 2020 Science.” The goal? To “compute a specific vaccine design tailored to
individuals with different tissue types in
the best possible way,” Brunak argued.
10:32 AM
Page 51
verters performs at such a level.
There’s something like 1.6 kilowatts
of energy [from the sun] that falls onto
every square meter of the planet every
hour. The most efficient converter of
that energy from the sun into its own
energy for a different purpose—for
growth—is a plant,” Emmott says. “It
isn’t terribly well understood how they
make such efficient use of the sun’s
energy. That’s because we don’t even
know how a cell works, whether it’s a
cell in a plant or a cell in a human.”
If we fully understood how plants
Computational
Biology, Energy &
Global Warming
World health is one area where the
pairing of computer science and traditional science holds tremendous
promise. Future energy is another.
New energy sources are important for
two reasons: We are running out of
fossil fuels, and these fuels, most
believe, contribute to global warming.
Science, in particular computational
biology, could help. With this style of
biology, scientists can build new tools
for understanding biological processes. We could “understand how one
of the world’s efficient energy con-
11/14/06
10:32 AM
Page 52
Microsoft Research
convert energy, we could perhaps
“help energy companies and energy
scientists mimic that process to build
entirely novel technological solutions
for new sources of energy that are
currently unimaginable today. That’s
a decade or so away but it’s worth
pursuing,” Emmott believes.
Every year, humans crank out three
times the amount of carbon dioxide
that nature’s “carbon sinks” absorb. If
and oceanographic type of effects,
with the biotic—produced or caused
by living organisms—elements of
determining climates and climate
change. That [includes] the organisms
that live in the ocean that are carbon
sinks, oxygen producers, regulators of
the carbon cycles and regulators of climate, and also the biotic aspects such
as forests—terrestrial sources of carbon sinks and oxygen producers. It is
currently largely unknown how the
two interact—the physical and biotic
components. It is largely unknown
what the impact is of the biotic components. It’s an incredibly important
component but just one that’s not
understood,” argues Emmott.
Science Gives Back
this keeps up, many scientists believe
the planet will be forever changed by
global warming, perhaps even doomed.
While this problem is not on the top of
the Microsoft agenda, Emmott’s group
does hope to help. “Our research
efforts around climatology and earth
life support systems, of which climate is
an important one, are based around
working with climatologists, oceanographers and ecologists, and building
new computational tools that scientists
urgently need,” Emmott says.
“Climatologists are not short of data,
so building tools to create yet more
data is not urgently needed. What
they do urgently need are software
tools to model and couple the physical
aspects of climate change, atmospheric
Microsoft is also working with The
Sloan Digital Sky Survey, and has
already helped craft an online astronomy catalog. Physicists and
astronomers for centuries have tried
to unravel the mysteries of the universe—yet after all this work our picture is far from complete.
“Understanding the universe is a
large-scale data-acquisition and dataanalysis problem. That is one [area]
where the standard software tools
that Microsoft currently produces,
from Web services to database technologies to better acquire, share and
analyze large scale data in the science
community, can help the science
community understand origins of the
universe and how the universe
works,” Emmott says.
While science pushes the envelope of
computing, computing and Microsoft
also benefit.
“Science is where the real action is
GetMoreOnline
Learn more about the 2020 Science
conference and Microsoft’s contributions at Redmondmag.com.
FindIT code: MSWorld
redmondmag.com
A Brief Timeline
2010-2015:
■ Molecular machines emerge.
■ Large-scale sensor networks
come out.
2015-2020:
■ Artificial Scientists perform
autonomous experiments.
■ Scientists create a “full model of
a single cell.”
2020 and beyond:
■ Synthetic biology creates biological products that are “designed by
simulation.”
■ The makeup of the universe
is understood.
■ Biological knowledge is largely
codified.
going to be for computer science
over the next decade. By being at the
cutting edge of the intersection of science and computer science, Microsoft
will gain remarkable insight as to the
key things the company needs to do on
the broad business and personal computing challenges and opportunities a
decade later. They can think of what’s
happening at the intersection of science and computing as being like Formula One. BMW and Ferrari do
Formula One because the technology
they need to develop to compete in
Formula One ends up in any standard
family car a decade later—and its gives
them remarkable insights into technical engineering,” Emmott says.
The 2020 Roadmap is more specific.
It argues that by 2015, the work done
to build new scientific software frameworks will “radicalize” business computing. And beyond 2020, we should
look for “novel, biologically inspired
computing architectures and paradigms,” according to the roadmap. —
Doug Barney is the editor in chief of
Redmond and the editorial director of
Redmond Media Group. Reach him at
[email protected].
Project4
10/30/06
11:38 AM
Page 1
You’ve managed hundreds of projects to a
successful completion.You’ve stayed on budget and
on time even when no one thought it was possible.
It’s time you get recognized for all you do daily.
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1206red_F2Top25_55-62.v9
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Cool Tools
that Rule—
and They’re Free!
Finding the right tool for the
job can be difficult and
Disaster
Recovery
finding it for free next to
impossible. But standing
next to impossible is the
Redmond Free Top 25. We
think it can make your
search a lot easier.
BY GREG SHIELDS
Why buy a tool when you can get it for free?
That is the question we posed to users in putting together
the first Redmond Free Top 25. Sure, some Windows
administration issues require an end-to-end solution purchased from a reputable vendor, but there are times when
a very small problem requires a very small answer. In those
cases, the best course is to wander off the beaten track and
explore the little-traveled roads of the Windows world.
With the invaluable help of our readers, we present the
best of the best and the freest of the free. The only
requirement we placed on user submissions was that they
provide great value at no cost. We categorized tools into
four major groups: Disaster Recovery, Network, Developer and Administrative, with the reviews being split
between yours truly and our readers.
hile it represents the smallest category, Disaster
Recovery tools are the ones that can help you the
most when your Windows servers won’t boot.
Comprised of bootable tools that provide full functionality to
servers, these products can either completely resurrect a dead
server or transfer critical data from one that can’t be revived.
The first entry is from Wade Lahr, a network administrator for Sysco Food Services in Kansas. He casts his vote
for the UBCD4Win Recovery CD, which is designed to
be used as a CD- or DVD-bootable OS. It’s a tool, he says,
that has saved the day in many different system-down situations. If you get a “No Operating System Found” message, just pop in the UBCD4Win Recovery CD to boot a
Windows-looking interface that enables you to further
investigate the problem. UBCD4Win, which has several
W
1206red_F2Top25_55-62.v9
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Redmond Free Top 25
built-in freeware programs, including Ad-Aware, McAfee
AVERT Stinger anti-virus scanner and Disk Tools, can
bring a server back to life. If you can’t resurrect a server,
the tool allows you to copy important files from the hard
drive to a USB flash memory card or external drive. It can
even burn files to disk. You can grab UBCD4Win from
www.ubcd4win.com.
Kirk Unruh, IT manager for Buffalo Air Handling Co. in
Virginia, nominates BartPE, which stands for Bart’s Preinstalled Environment. This tool allows you to create a
bootable CD-ROM or DVD that provides a complete
Win32 environment allowing access to hard drives and network resources. Once the PE builder is downloaded, just
point it to the Windows installation files, add any additional
files or plug-ins and burn a bootable CD. It’s useful for
troubleshooting failed hardware and recovering data and it’s
freely downloadable at www.nu2.nu/pebuilder.
Network
lthough many Windows admins shy away from
administering the network, all Windows servers rely
on that same network for their basic communication.
Our free tools in the network space serve to enlighten the
Windows admin about what’s open and listening on the
network while helping to narrow the knowledge gap
between layers seven and one.
Bill Brower, network operations manager for the Monroe
County Government in Indiana, says that Sam Spade is a
freeware network utility that offers a range of network
troubleshooting tools through a single interface. The utility
includes well-known tools such as ping, traceroute,
nslookup and WHOIS, and is best suited for network
troubleshooting. If you’re interested in looking at raw
HTML instead of rendered HTML in order to troubleshoot a Web page, you should dig Sam Spade. Most
useful is the traceroute function, which is quicker than
the native Windows version and can be tweaked to do
parallel queries for a faster response. Admins can download it at www.samspade.org/ssw.
Tom Cole, a consultant from Delaware, says he finds the
open-source tool Angry IP Scanner to be a fast and configurable IP and port scanner. Cole reports that he can install
it on a range of servers and finds it particularly useful for
Sam Spade provides a console that can run many useful
network tests.
confirming who has what IP address at any given time, as
well as for checking whether certain addresses have unauthorized open ports. It’s available at http://ipscan.source
forge.net/ipscan.exe.
Troy Sorzano, director of professional services for RippleTech in Pennsylvania, believes www.dnsreport.com is one
of the leading DNS and mail-server testing tools. If you are
concerned that your external DNS is not configured to
meet the RFC requirements, then admins should point
www.dnsreport.com to any externally-accessible DNS
domain name and it will automatically run and report on
dozens of tests that validates addresses’ configurations.
A
DNS Report will run a series of sanity checks on any DNS zone.
Mark Morgan, enterprise architect for the Washington
State Dept. of Information Services in Washington, religiously uses the SolarWinds Advanced Subnet Calculator for
figuring out subnets, subnet sizes and their boundaries when
he doesn’t want to calculate in binary. The utility will also
carry out a WHOIS lookup for a host server or IP address.
The product is available at www.solarwinds.net/Tools/Free_
tools/Subnet_Calc/index.htm.
Project1
9/13/06
1:27 PM
Page 1
7:30 - Running with Marty
9:00-12:00 - Replace RAID controller
12:00 - Lunch with Dennis
12:30 - Installing SQL Server 2005 Class
2:00-4:00 - Meet w/ hardware vendor
it’s your time.
4:30 - Monitor usage queue’s
5:30 - See tape library demo
6:30 - Managing SQL Server Security Class
Focused learning. One-on-one mentoring. Flexible scheduling.
New Horizons Mentored Learning program puts time back in your hands. Flexible
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Targeted learning means you learn what you need to learn without wasting your
time with what you may already know. New Horizons knows that time is money and
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mentored
learning
1206red_F2Top25_55-62.v9
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Redmond Free Top 25
code writers to highlight, edit and debug code, while still
ensuring an easy installation at a reasonable price.
Nao Takano, software developer for Aurora Loan Services
in Colorado, says that GNU Emacs text editor has long
been a staple for Unix environments but points out there
is also a useful Windows version. While it can’t be considered a fully Integrated Development Environment
(IDE) that supports execution and debugging within the
software itself, GNU Emacs does provide more than
enough keystroke shortcuts to the point where programmers can eliminate using the mouse. One of its best features
ithout developers, there would be no Windows to
is automatic code indentation, which makes logic syntax
administer to, nor any developer tools to work
clearer and debugging easier for C/C++, C#, Java, JavaScript
with. Tools in this category make it easier for
and Perl programmers. GNU Emacs for Windows can be
found at www.gnu.org/software/emacs
/windows/ntemacs.html.
Both Notepad++ from http://notepad
plus.sourceforge.net and SourceEdit
With the new GFI FAXmaker 12 fax server
from www.sourcedit.com are “great free
text editors,” according to Chad Ness,
director of technology for Art Institutes
International in Minnesota. Both products have built-in markup of source code
that supports a variety of different languages, he says, as well as other features
Onl
$ 12 y
such as multiple views, code highlightfor
25 u 50
ser
ing, and search and replace.
s
The Chief Code Monkey for Artful
Development Organization in Ontario,
Canada, Arthur Fuller, claims the single
app he couldn’t live without is NoteTab,
available from www.notetab.com. What
Firefox is to IE, NoteTab is to Notepad,
he says. The product has tabbed panes,
the ability to reopen every file that was
open at the last exit, and leaves every
cursor just where you left it. NoteTab
DOWNLOAD YOUR FREE TRIAL FROM WWW.GFI.COM/FRM/
even allows you to open Linux text files
and HTML files.
For programmers with lots of experience
using vi, or those jumping back and
Fax server for Exchange Server & SMTP servers
forth between Unix and Windows, gvim
GFI FAXmaker for Exchange/SMTP is an advanced fax server that integrates directly with Exchange
has the ability to accommodate both
Server and other mail servers and offers users easy faxing from Outlook, Outlook Web Access or other
needs, says Kevin Weinrich, sub-team
email clients.
New FAXmaker 12 connector works via SMTP
leader for the Environmental Protection
Supports Brooktrout, ISDN and modem cards
Agency in Georgia. The tool seems to
Supports DID/DTMF routing
4 fax lines as standard, expandable to 32
intuitively know what you want it to
No schema updates or installation on Exchange necessary
do, and, Weinrich notes, includes color Supports Exchange 2003/2000/5.5 and other SMTP servers simultaneously
Fax archiving to SQL Server
GFI FAXmaker configuration
coded syntax highlighting for “just
More than 75,000 installed worldwide
about any language” you need to use
Used by companies like Microsoft, Ericsson, Siemens and Volkswagen
including Perl, PHP, HTTP and others.
Gvim can be downloaded from www.cse.
unsw.edu.au/~homecomputing/cdrom/
tel: +1 888 243 4329 | fax: +1 919 379 3402 | email: [email protected] | url: www.gfi.com/frm/
html/gvim.html.
Developer
W
Hit a home run with management
1206red_F2Top25_55-62.v9
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Daniel Sheehan, a senior systems engineer for DataLine in
Maryland, says he has used POSTIE (www.infradig.com), a
utility he uses in batch files to automatically send e-mails,
for years. By combining this command-line e-mailer with
some batch environment variables, it allows you to send
“bad reports” to one set of users while sending “good
reports” to another. He also uses this tool to test SMTP
connectivity to remote mail servers when there is a problem with mail delivery.
Administrative
reating your own tools takes time and effort, but
finding free administrative tools on the Internet
means we can go home early and catch the football
game. Being a systems administrator means working with
other people’s data and using other people’s tools, but
finding just the right one is typically the hardest part. The
tools in our Administrative category, the largest one in the
Redmond Free Top 25, are favorites of systems administrators around the globe.
Kelvin Lee-Ting, senior technical systems analyst at
RBC Financial Group in Ontario, Canada, says his
favorite free tool is still the good old Windows
C
NoteTab adds tabs and additional functions to our old friend
Windows Notepad.
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DOSKEY macros. He uses it to build his own custom
commands that can take variables as input. Since
DOSKEY is included as part of every Microsoft OS, his
custom commands can be used all the way from a DOS
machine to the current operating system on both workstations and servers. If you are looking to shorten an
often-used command, by using DOSKEY you can just
open a text file called MyCommands.mac and create custom commands like the following:
[cmd.exe]
mac=doskey /macros:ALL
applog=type "\program
files\myapp\deepDirectory\myApp.log"
elog=notepad "\program
files\myapp\deepDirectory\myApp.log"
cdapp=cd \program files\myapp\deepDirectory
np=notepad $1
nu=net use * \\$1\c$ /u:$1\$2 $3
To use My Custom Commands, start a command prompt
with cmd.exe /K doskey /macrofile=D:\MyCommands.mac.
Harvey Colwell, senior network analyst for System
Development Services in Illinois, has owned several versions of Adobe Acrobat and swears that for some highend publishing-related activities “it’s the only way to
go.” But for most people, PDF Creator from
http://source
forge.net/projects/pdfcreator can do everything you
need. Based on the Ghostscript engine, this tool enables
a simple Windows printer driver that generates a PDF
file instead of a printed output when you click Print.
Because Adobe provides Reader at no cost for so many
different platforms, the PDF format has long since been
the de facto standard for archiving and making information available to the masses. With PDF Creator, now
even the writing is free.
The favorite free tool of Stuart Garner, computer specialist for the Internal Revenue Service in Washington,
D.C., is IE Privacy Keeper, available from Browser Tools
at http://browsertools.net/IE-Privacy-Keeper/index.html.
This tool performs a suite of browser cleanup processes
that clean up the browser history upon exit. Some features include the ability to clean up index.dat files without restarting and to securely delete files, folders,
registry keys and managing cookies by keeping selected
ones and automatically deleting all others. It can be set
to run the same for all users or allow individual users to
configure selected items. IE Privacy Keeper works with
all versions of Windows back to Windows 98 running
Internet Explorer 5.5, or Firefox 1.0 and later.
For admins overseeing HP servers, Dave Krzynowek, a
systems engineer for Excelsior College in New York,
suggests the Web-based HP Insight Manager designed
for managing servers. Insight Manager monitors all
aspects of server hardware, which includes monitoring
network traffic through network cards, server temperatures, uptime reports and component pre-failure warnings. The tool even generates reports to capture server
serial numbers for those painful inventory projects.
Insight Manager can be set up to page an administrator
for events like failed hard disks or servers not responding.
The utility and server agents can be downloaded from
HP’s Web site, www.hp.com.
David Loder, an Active Directory architect in Michigan, claims that joeware is the premier Active Directory
command-line tool. Just by dropping any executable into
your path, you can start banging away at AD to your
heart’s content. Joeware’s single-executable tools allow
for rich querying and manipulation of AD and Exchange
Mailbox objects, he says, and can locate and clean old
machines and user accounts. Joeware can be downloaded
from www.joeware.net.
According to Tim Grigsby, an IT support manager
from Daytona Beach, Fla., LanSweeper is the best tool
for keeping the database responsible for all his company’s
computers up-to-date. The tool works through a log-on
script to pull hardware, software and configurationinventory data on every machine on the network into a
SQL or MSDE database. He describes it as “invaluable”
for troubleshooting support and for ensuring softwarelicensing compliance. Download LanSweeper from
www.lansweeper.com.
GenControl is an “amazing clientless tool,” says Jason
Boroff, a network engineer in Ohio, because it “allows
admins to remote into Windows-based computers.”
Unlike the VNC application, which requires a software
installation on each machine you want to control, GenControl does not require you to install anything on
unmanaged remote computers. Download GenControl at
www.gensortium.com/products/gencontrol.html.
Gary Praegitzer, senior systems administrator for BVS
Performance Systems in Iowa, stands by CCleaner as his
favorite freebie because it is so thorough in the removal of
the piles of garbage that Windows can leave behind. It’s
capable of cleaning up IE cookies, Temporary Internet
Files and History, as well as fixing and removing registry
inconsistencies. CCleaner can be scripted to run silently
from batch files, log-on/log-off scripts, or a Windows
scheduler. Get CCleaner at www.ccleaner.com.
The favorite of Jan Roose, IT manager for BBTKSETCa in Brussels, Belgium, is ClipName, which can be
obtained at www.mainsoft.fr/en/downloads.htm. If you
right-click any file on your desktop, this tool will copy the
complete pathname to the clipboard, and it’s handy for
pasting file paths into a command prompt. Also, multiple
file paths can be copied to the clipboard as a space- or carriage return-separated list.
If unfettered Active Directory Users & Computers
access for your help desk employees is giving them
Project6
8/11/06
3:10 PM
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Redmond Free Top 25
heartburn, then have them check out Password Control
from www.wisesoft.co.uk, says Hans Straat, technical
support specialist for Gentronics in The Netherlands.
Designed as a super-slim tool allowing help desk
employees to reset passwords without giving them a full
MMC console, this tool can help with that nasty reflux.
Process Explorer is a Windows Task Manager that provides information on system processes and the resources
used by those processes. According to Jenn Davis, an infrastructure engineer for SAIC, the product presents this information in a very intuitive and highly customizable format.
With this product administrators can get a complete view of
all their apps and processes running on a Windows machine.
For each process, you can drill down to see the DLL’s being
accessed and the TCP/IP connections being made, or kill a
malfunctioning orphan, abandoned thread or even an entire
process tree with a single mouse click. Personally, when
troubleshooting performance issues on a workstation or
server, Process Explorer is the first tool I load. It’s indispensable for controlling the CPU and memory usage, and
allows me to sidestep costly reboots. Download it from
www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/ProcessExplorer.html.
A Colorado-based IT Specialist, who wishes to remain
anonymous, is a big fan of Sysinternals PageDefrag, a tool
SysInternals
K, so I lied. There’s a fifth category. Think of it
as a surprise bonus. With their recent merger
with Microsoft, Mark Russinovich and Bryce
Cogswell’s Sysinternals site at www.sysinternals.com
is sure to make history, if it hasn’t already. For years,
the Sysinternals Web site has provided free administrative tools that solve the problems not resolved through
the native Windows toolset. Redmond readers have
shown such deep appreciation for the tools of Russinovich and Cogswell that we felt it necessary to plunk
them into their own section.
Todd King, lead Internet systems administrator for
Johnson County ITS in Kansas, says that BgInfo from
Sysinternals is his favorite tool because it provides easy
access to information like machine names and logon
domains, last boot time, IP address and drive information. The product builds a bitmap of system information
to display on the machine’s background. If you connect
to a large number of machines through remote desktop,
knowing exactly what machine you are on is important.
You can download BGInfo at www.sysinternals.com/
Utilities/BgInfo.html.
In the opinion of John Remillard, IS engineer for Perot
Systems in Rhode Island, the entire suite of PsTools,
downloadable from the Sysinternals site, is exceptional.
To use the tools from the command line, just download
the PsTools package and copy them into your path. I
personally use them to enable scripted daily event-log
gathering from our servers, to help users stop and restart
services for their applications, and to remotely launch
processes on other machines.
O
Sysinternals’ PageDefrag can be set to automatically defrag at
every boot.
that defrags the page file and registry on systems allowing
them to perform better. Typically, a well-performing page
file means a well-performing system. PageDefrag can be set
to run at each boot or on-demand. I am so impressed with
the performance it adds to the overall system that I’ve
incorporated the tool into our standard workstation images.
If you are interested in any of our free tools check out
their associated Web sites, and be sure to thank the
authors when you do. Redmond thanks the writers of all
these free tools for their efforts to make the lives of their
fellow administrators easier and much less expensive..—
Greg Shields, MCSE: Security, CCEA, is a senior consultant for
3t Systems (www.3tsystems.com) in Denver, Colo. A contributing
editor to Redmond, Greg provides engineering support and technical consulting in Microsoft, Citrix and VMware technologies.
Reach him at [email protected].
Project1
9/13/06
12:54 PM
Page 1
TM07_Red_fpad.v9
11/15/06
11:35 AM
Page 1
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1206red_Never65.v8
11/14/06
10:39 AM
Page 65
NEVER
AGAIN
By Jim Madden
The Grass Is Greener in Your Own Backyard
n the early days of my IT career at Benchmark Computers,
I
I worked at a few field offices after starting in the corporate
headquarters. I was a systems programmer with a focus on
developing communications software. With this experience,
I lived the adage that the grass appears greener in the next
pasture but it rarely is.
At one point we were having a
difficult quarter with the sales of our
credit union software and systems. It
was nearing the end of that quarter and
only two system sales were made, and
neither of them had been installed. The
technical people had a bonus plan that
was based on sales and installations
being completed within a given quarter.
They were seeking volunteers to
drive seven hours and install a 32-user
system, and then from there drive
another four hours to install a 24-user
system, all in the span of four or five
business days. I volunteered and got
paired with a hardware tech who’d
recently lost his driver’s license. Not a
good omen.
The following Monday, I packed up
a van with two large systems, some
tapes and 10 to 12 terminals. My
instructions were to set up the first
system and collect a check for $68,000
before the 3 p.m. Greyhound bus left on
Wednesday. The check needed to be on
What’s Your Worst
IT Nightmare?
Write up your story in 300-600 words
and e-mail it to Editor Ed Scannell at
[email protected].
Use “Never Again” as the subject line
and be sure to include your contact
information for story verification.
ILLUSTRATION BY MARK COLLINS
that bus and returned
to the office so payroll could be met
on Friday.
When we
arrived, a thirdparty hardware
tech was already
there, pulling
the server out of
the wall and
unplugging all the
cables, none of which
were labeled. We needed
to keep all port numbers consistent so as to keep all the printer
groups consistent.
We spent the next 20 hours testing
cable runs and fixing poorly laid cable.
We then went to the hotel, slept about
four hours and drove back to the credit
union. We worked until 11 p.m. that
Wednesday. Earlier that afternoon I
had asked the manager for the check to
pay for the installation work. At first
she was reluctant to give it to us, but
when I promised to complete the project
early the next day she relented. I drove
to the bus station and made arrangements to get the check back to our
offices where it made the payroll.
That night we drove four hours to the
next credit union, based in Ottumwa,
Iowa, and went right to the hotel. We
slept for four hours and at 9 a.m. on
Thursday we arrived at the credit
union, where we had a much smoother
implementation. We completed the
installation by 8 p.m. on Friday, and I
collected the check and drove another
six hours back to the office.
I unloaded all of the equipment by
myself because the hardware tech had
been dropped off at home along the
way. Before heading home I checked
my office mailbox at 4 a.m. Saturday and found a company
memo telling the staff
that they were adjusting bonuses to
allow a few more
technical people
to receive them.
This increased
the pool from
five people to
eight people,
dropping my
$500 bonus to
$320 for the quarter
just ending.
I was livid. On Monday
morning I asked for a meeting with the
vice president. He was very surprised
that I was so upset. He said, “Jimmy, no
one else complained about this!” I told
him no one else had volunteered for
the hellish week of installations I had
gone through.
Right then I quietly made my decision to make my way back home to the
corporate offices in Massachusetts.
Two months later I was working in
Wisconsin, and a year after that I was
working at corporate headquarters in
Westwood, Mass. The grass really can
be greener in your own backyard, if you
look hard enough. —
Jim Madden is now the director of information technology at the Andover Newton
Theological School in the Boston area.
Project6
11/14/06
2:56 PM
Page 1
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1206red_SecAdvisor67-68.v6
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SecurityAdvisor
Joern
Roberta
Wettern
Bragg
Security Myths Exposed: Part 2
D
ebunking myths of any kind is always an enjoyable
exercise. People want to know the real deal. Back in
July, I wrote about some of the more common security
myths—security practices that are widely considered to be
valid, even though they’re wrong. It’s time to look at a few
more, give them a thorough examination and debunk them
once and for all. Along the way, I’ll point out what you can
do to avoid falling for these myths. (To read more about
the first two myths—SSL Is Secure and Complex Passwords Enhance Security—see “Security Myths Exposed,”
July 2006.)
Myth No. 3: Power Users Are
Not Administrators
When Microsoft created the Power
Users group, it did so to give administrators the flexibility to let certain
users perform tasks that require elevated privileges like computer maintenance. Power Users can indeed do
many things, even without having fullfledged administrative access rights.
However, this group is often used as a
crutch to let users run badly written
applications. If your accounting program insists on writing its data files to
the Program Files directory, then your
accountant needs permission to do so,
as the program runs with his credentials. You would never give full administrative privileges to an accountant,
but making him a Power User doesn’t
seem all that bad and it helps get the
job done. It does, but it also creates a
serious security risk.
The problem with Power Users is
that their assigned level of rights and
permissions also lets them elevate
their privileges to become full administrators. So a Power User is simply an
administrator who has not yet elevated
him or herself.
There are many ways for Power
Users to elevate their privileges.
Among the easiest is to replace a legitimate program in the Program Files
directory with a malicious one that
will elevate privileges. The next time
an administrator or the system account
The problem with Power
Users is that their
assigned level of rights
and permissions also
lets them elevate their
privileges to become
full administrators.
starts, this program runs and will elevate the user. Even worse, this program may not have been placed there
by the Power User. Other malicious
software may have been responsible.
It would be easy to blame Microsoft
for making the Power Users group too
powerful. However, the reason that this
group exists is to make badly behaved
programs run for non-administrative
users. The real culprits are software
developers who are too lazy to write
their programs so they can be run by a
non-privileged user.
As frustrating as this may be, at least
things appear to be getting better.
Most software vendors have finally
learned how to write programs that
don’t make you have to resort to the
Power Users group. Vista also makes it
easier to let regular users run programs
with potentially risky behaviors—like
saving data in the Program Files directory, to use the earlier example.
In the meantime, the best you can do
is to investigate the rights or permissions that prevent problematic programs from running in the security
context of a regular user. Then assign
just those to your users. If there’s no
alternative to adding users to the
Power Users group, at least be aware
of the risks of doing so, and plan on
replacing programs that regular users
can’t run.
Myth No. 4: You Don’t Need to
Worry About Printers
I was recently looking into buying a
new printer. When I searched for
information about the model highest
on my list, I found a number of security advisories. You may wonder how
there could be a printer security problem. After all, printers don’t store
confidential data—they just spit out
paper in return for a steady diet of
toner or ink.
A networked printer can do a lot
more, though. The printer I was considering had several vulnerabilities in its
built-in FTP service. An attacker could
connect to this service and then redirect
the connection to other servers on the
network. It turns out that some hackers
love to do this type of redirection to
escape detection. After all, you’d never
1206red_SecAdvisor67-68.v6
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SecurityAdvisor
expect that your database server would
get attacked by a printer. As a result,
your intrusion detection system may
not sound an alarm if this happens.
Also, networked printers are often
password-protected to ensure that
only authorized personnel can change
configuration settings. It’s not
uncommon to see organizations using
the same password for all their printers. In many cases, this is the same
password used for other network
devices as well. If an attacker can find
this password, the next step is to try
using the same password to reconfigure network switches to further penetrate the network. As a result, you
should include printers and other network devices in your organization’s
security plan, even though they may
not be obvious candidates.
Myth No. 5: You Can Completely
Eliminate Spam
Two years ago, Bill Gates told the
World Economic Forum in Davos,
Switzerland, that spam would essentially
be eliminated by 2006. The last time I
checked my mail server, though, more
than 99 percent of incoming connections were due to spam. It appears Bill’s
prediction was just a bit off.
Gates isn’t the only one who has ever
made an inaccurate assessment about
spam. Not that long ago, Bayesian filtering was supposed to stop all spam. This
type of filtering detects spam by learning
patterns from the mail that you normally
send and receive, and adjusting its decision-making to these patterns.
It didn’t take spammers long to finetune their methods to defeat such
filters. Even worse, one method spammers now use to get around better filtering is to simply increase the number
of messages they send. After all, a
spammer’s goal is to get just a small
number of responses. Doubling the
number of e-mails sent essentially doubles the number of messages that arrive
in a valid mailbox.
Greylisting is the latest craze in
spam filtering. Mail servers already
use blacklists to block all e-mail from
certain addresses and whitelists to
always accept messages from other
addresses. When a server receives
an incoming connection from an
unknown address, a greylist will gen-
You’d never expect that
your database server
would get attacked by a
printer. As a result, your
intrusion detection system
may not sound an alarm
if this happens.
erate an error message that says that
the server is unavailable and to please
try again later. The message is only
accepted when the remote server
sends it a second time.
The logic behind this method is that
most legitimate mail servers will automatically try again. Spammers, however,
normally use a hit-and-run approach.
They send messages once, but won’t
re-send them if they don’t go through
the first time.
GetMoreOnline
To read more about security myths and
how Joern Wettern debunks them, and
to see the entire archive of Security
Advisor, go to Redmondmag.com.
redmondmag.com
Some organizations have achieved
remarkably high spam-blockage success
rates using greylisting. However, I’m
afraid this success won’t last for long.
Most new spam blocking methods work
well for a while. Once they’re widely
adopted, though, spammers notice an
increasing number of their e-mails
being blocked and quickly come up
with other methods to get around the
spam filters.
I expect the same thing will happen
with greylisting. Even if greylisting
remains effective, many organizations
find the delay it introduces by asking
the remote server to send messages
later is unacceptable, as it can result
in delays of an hour or more for
incoming e-mail.
There’s only one thing that will ultimately and completely stop spam, and
that is when spamming stops being
profitable. People have to stop buying
items offered in spam messages. As
long as there are people willing to buy
fake designer watches, graduate degrees
from obscure colleges that may or may
not exist and V|@gr@, there will be
enough incentive for the spammers to
develop more efficient methods to get
around spam filters.
While it appears that spam may be
with us forever, you can at least stop
most of it using one or more spam filters or a hosted solution. If you’re using
greylisting today, enjoy it while it
works. I predict that within two years,
greylisting won’t be seen as a cure-all
solution, but will join other spam filtering methods as one that works well in
conjunction with other methods.
If Bill Gates can be wrong, though,
then so can I. If spam does completely
disappear in the near future, I wouldn’t
mind being wrong about that. —
Joern Wettern, Ph.D., MCSE, MCT,
Security+, is the owner of Wettern Network Solutions, a consulting and training
firm. He has written books and developed
training courses on a number of networking and security topics. In addition to helping companies implement network security
solutions, he regularly teaches seminars and
speaks at conferences worldwide. Reach him
at [email protected].
Project4
11/14/06
2:02 PM
Page 1
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1006red_RedSubAd_17
9/15/06
9:59 AM
Page 1
1206red_Index_71.v3
11/15/06
9:50 AM
Page 71
AdvertisingSales
RedmondResources
AD INDEX
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Microsoft Account Manager
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Advertiser
Page
URL
Acronis Inc.
C3
www.acronis.com
Algin Technology
51
www.utools.com
www.avepoint.com
41
www.avepoint.com
Capella University
49
www.capella.com
CenterTools Software
27
www.centertools.com
CNS Software
69
www.cns-software.com
DataViz, Inc.
50
www.dataviz.com
DigiVault by Lucid8
19
www.Lucid8.com
Diskeeper Corporation
5
www.diskeeper.com
EMC Corporation
3
www.emc.com
Famatech
11
www.famatech.com
GFI Software
58
www.gfi.com
GOexchange by Lucid8
35
www.goexchange.com
IBM Corporation
7,37
www.ibm.com
iTripoli Inc.
23
www.itripoli.com
Microsoft
21
www.microsoft.com
netikus.net ltd
44
www.netikus.net
NetOp
31
www.netop.com
New Horizons Computer
Learning Centers
57
www.newhorizons.com
Quest Software
C4
www.quest.com
Project Management Institute
53
www.pmi.org
Raxco Software Inc.
14
www.raxco.com
Red Gate Software Ltd.
C2
www.red-gate.com
Redmond Magazine
17, 70
www.redmondmag.com
SAPIEN Technologies, Inc.
25
www.sapien.com
ScriptLogic Corporation
33
www.scriptlogic.com
Specialized Solutions
61
www.specializedsolutions.com
St. Bernard Software
13
www.stbernard.com
PRODUCTION
Sunbelt Software
8,43,63
www.sunbelt-software.com
Kelly Ann Mundy
TechMentor Conferences
64
www.techmentorevents.com
Production Coordinator
818-734-1520 ext. 164 tel
818-734-1528 fax
[email protected]
The Training Camp
45
www.trainingcamp.com
TNT Software
38
www.tntsoftware.com
Ultrabac Software
66
www.ultrabac.com
Western Governors University
59,69
www.wgu.edu
Company
Page
URL
Adobe Systems Inc.
60
www.adobe.com
Avaya Inc.
32
www.avaya.com
Brixoft.net
58
www.sourcedit.com
BrowserTools.net
60
http://browsertools.net
Canonical Ltd.
24
www.ubuntu.com
Cisco Systems Inc.
30
www.cisco.com
Diskeeper Corp.
18
www.diskeeper.com
DNSstuff.com
56
www.dnsreport.com
Fookes Software
58
www.notetab.com
Free Software Foundation
58
www.gnu.org
Gensortium Ltd.
60
www.gensortium.com
EDITORIAL INDEX
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Hewlett Packard Co.
60
www.hp.com
IBM Corp.
32
www.ibm.com
Infradig Systems
59
www.infradig.com
InterKnowlogy LLC
32
www.interknowlogy.com
McAfee Inc.
56
www.mcafee.com
Nortel Networks
30
www.nortel.com
Novell Inc.
24
www.novell.com
Open Source Technology Group
58
http://sourceforge.net
Red Hat Inc.
24
www.redhat.com
Siemens AG
32
www.siemens.com
SolarWinds
56
www.solarwinds.net
Special Operations Softw
22
www.specopssoft.com
Sun Microsystems Inc.
24, 72
www.sun.com
The FreeBSD Project
24
www.freebsd.org
TNT Software
15
www.tntsoftware.com
VMware Inc.
24
www.vmware.com
This index is provided as a service. The publisher assumes no liability for errors or omissions.
1206red_Foley_72.v7
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10:34 AM
Page 72
Foley on Microsoft
By Mary Jo Foley
Microsoft Prognostications:
What’s up in 2007?
I
t’s that time of year again for eggnog-laced predictions
“Winix.” Lately, a few market watchers have said that, in datacenters, at
about what Microsoft should, could and just might do
least, Solaris is gaining on Linux.
What if Microsoft decided to give its
in the new year.
nearly three-year-old collaboration
This time around, I’ve decided to
anonymous blogger, who is known for
agreement with Sun some teeth and
break my traditional Top 10 predictions
stumping for a leaner, meaner Microsoft, take Solaris off Sun’s hands in order to
list in two: One half being what I conhas been wavering a lot over the past
lock up the high-performance market?
sider relatively safe and well-considered year as to whether he (we know the
3. J Allard is appointed to head
Windows Mobile and brings his
bets on what Microsoft is likely to do
person is male) will continue in his role
Midas touch to phones. Why not give
(and is likely to fail to do) in 2007, and
as Microsoft’s conscience. I foresee
the Xbox and Zune MP3 player wizard
the other my out-on-a-limb list of
2007 as the year that Microsoft gets
a true challenge: Propel Microsoft’s
Microsoft predictions.
tougher on its bloggers.
mobile unit into the stratosphere?
5 (Relatively) Safe Bets:
4. Adobe will sue Microsoft.
Adobe almost sued Microsoft in
1. Microsoft will manage to ship
Longhorn Server in 2007. (And
June—if you believe the press
maybe even Vista Service Pack 1 to
reports—but didn’t actually pull the
go along with it.) A few months back,
trigger. But once Microsoft ships its
Microsoft quietly slipped the expected
Expression design tools (meant to
arrival date of Longhorn Server from
compete with Dreamweaver et al) and
5. Microsoft won’t buy Yahoo! or
the first half of 2007 to the second half. AOL (or Google, for that matter).
Windows Presentation Foundation
Wall Street will predict that Microsoft
Beta 3 is looking like it will hit in the
Everywhere (WPF/e) Flash-killer in
will buy a Web-centric powerhouse to
first quarter, as expected. And tester
2007, watch Adobe’s legal department
shore up its own MSN/Windows Live
feedback has been unusually positive.
kick into action.
unit. So many seem to forget that
2. Visual Studio “Orcas” will slip
5. Microsoft is forced to rescue
into 2008. While most developers and
Novell from angry GPLers.
Windows, Office, develLog on to
partners with whom I’ve spoken consider opment tools and server
Redmondmag.com I’ve been leery of the
Visual Studio “Orcas” to be a 2007
products are the cash cows for more Microsoft Microsoft-Novell partnership
prognostications.
deliverable, few Microsoft developer
since it was announced in
for the foreseeable future.
FindIT code:
division officials have called the product
early November. If Novell is
Foley1206
“Visual Studio 2007.” I’m hearing
excommunicated from the
5 “What the Heck
rumblings of an early 2008 product.
GPL camp, Microsoft might have to
was She Thinking (and
swoop in and shore up SuSE Linux in
Drinking)” Predictions:
3. First-year Windows Vista sales
will stall. Many PC makers and
additional ways. Maybe there will be a
1. Microsoft starts selling Oracle
services. If Microsoft really wants to
resellers still aren’t promoting Vista.
Microsoft Linux, after all …
Many can’t answer even basic questions mess with Oracle, what better way than
Got any of your own—either halfto offer paid support for disenfranchised
about which machines will and won’t
baked or fully cooked—to share? Write
Oracle users. Maybe they should just
run the various Vista SKUs. Granted,
me at [email protected].—
offer support for customers unhappy
Microsoft moves the bulk of Windows
Mary Jo Foley is editor of the new ZDnet
with Oracle’s Red Hat support. There
copies via OEM preloads, not retail
“All About Microsoft” blog and has been
are sure to be a few of those …
sales—but I’m still dubious.
covering Microsoft for about two decades.
4. Mini-Microsoft will be outed (or
2. Microsoft does a Novell-type
just drop out). Microsoft’s infamous
deal with Sun: co-markets Solaris as
Contact her at [email protected].
Maybe there will
be a Microsoft
Linux, after all …
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