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Windows Server “Centro” is built on Windows Server 2008 and provides an integrated server and management system for midsize businesses. The CTP includes many new Windows Server 2008 Beta 3 based components, as well as updates to the server applications that shipped in “Centro” Beta 1 (updated versions of System Center Essentials 2007, Exchange Server 2007 and ISA, as well as new updates to setup, Active Directory domain join functionality and a host of other improvements).

Please take a moment to read through the hardware requirements below. If you meet these requirements, go to http://connect.microsoft.com, click on Invitations, sign in with your Windows Live ID (Passport ID) and enter the following invite ID; Extr-GHBC-JCJM.

Windows Server Kent Compton, Product Manager in Microsoft's Windows Server Solutions Group, writes:

Another milestone for Windows Server code name "Centro" occurred this afternoon with the official signing off of the CTP (5241) build. The CTP builds on the foundation established in Beta 1 while moving into new areas such as enabling legacy Active Directory domain joins, including Windows Server 2008, etc. If you're in the TAP or TechBeta you should be able to download it from connect.microsoft.com within a few hours. Please test it, push it, break it and then file those bugs! We looking forward to hearing from you.

We're on the road to Beta 2...

Silect Software, a developer of products that reduce IT ownership costs, is pleased to announce the immediate availability of MP Studio 2007. MP Studio helps offset spiraling IT management costs by giving IT organizations the ability to more effectively leverage IT management knowledge critical to the operation and maintenance of complex IT systems. Working together with Systems Center Operations Manager 2007, the result is a highly tuned service monitoring capability which identifies the slightest deviation in service delivery from defined service levels.

MP Studio 2007


Operations Manager 2007 Management Packs contain rich operational knowledge used to deliver effective service level monitoring. MP Studio 2007 delivers a framework to achieve an efficient, repeatable process for managing the key stages of the Management Pack lifecycle including analysis, reporting, tuning and version control, reducing the cost of using and managing System Center Operations Manager while increasing System Center Operations Manager’s ability to effectively monitor and report on your organization’s IT infrastructure. (more)

Kirill Tatarinov Redmond, June 29th 2007 -- today Microsoft announced that Kirill Tatarinov, currently Corporate Vice President of the Microsoft’s Management and Solutions Division (MSD) within the Microsoft Business Division, will fill the MBS leadership position vacated by Satya Nadella in March. The move will be effective on July 2, 2007. Kirill brings extensive experience in leading R&D and broader business to the MBS leadership role. For the past five years Kirill has led Microsoft’s management business including prioritizing R&D bets, galvanizing the team and delivering high-quality solutions to customers and partners. This has yielded break-through results for Microsoft including a greatly expanded product portfolio and improved brand perception.

Prior to Microsoft, Kirill spent time in both large and small company environments and experienced what it was like to be a Microsoft partner. He was the Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer for BMC where he also spent time leading Business Development and running an end-to-end business, and was the founder of his own company, Patrol software, the developer of innovative software solutions for systems and network management. Patrol Software was acquired by BMC in 1994. Kirill has also worked in several systems, networking and consulting companies in Russia, Israel and Australia. (more)

Jalasoft We got this email from Jalasoft:

Jalasoft wants to proudly announce that Xian Network Manager Io RC2 is now available for download from our website.

This RC2 version is code complete and its release to manufacturing (RTM) will be announced next week. This final code milestone concludes our Xian Network Manager Io Beta program to date, with several hundred participants.

Xian Network Manager Io RC2 for Operations Manager 2007

You should check out their offering, because it can extend your OpsMgr 2007 installation by adding detailed network device support and agents for non-Windows platforms like Solaris and VMware! See screenshots here.

Operations Manager 2007 I found an interesting blog with information about how Microsoft have implemented Operations Manager 2007 internally. There is a lot of information on how they have handled hardware design and SQL optimization and redundancy. The info is written by Cory Delamarter, Microsoft.

Here is the link to the "Monitoring at Microsoft with Operations Manager" blog.

Operations Manager 2007 In a previous post I found out the way to do basic queries to the opsmgr database. I got a request on what to do with two different objects with the same name. For example two SQL servers hosting a database with the same name. There is no way to distinguish them with my previous query.
I found the following query would do the trick;

SELECT MEG.[Displayname] AS Object, LEFT(MEG.[PATH], CASE WHEN charindex(';' , MEG.[PATH]) > 0 THEN charindex(';' , MEG.[PATH]) ELSE 1 END - 1) AS Server, TMV.[Name] AS MonitoringClass, MEG.[Healthstate] FROM dbo.ManagedEntityGenericView AS MEG
INNER JOIN dbo.[ManagedTypeView] AS TMV
ON TMV.[id] = MEG.[MonitoringClassId]
WHERE MEG.[Displayname] = ''
AND TMV.[Name] = 'Microsoft.SQLServer.Database'

IP PBX Miami, Florida - 26 June 2007 - today released the Enterprise edition of its new product 3CX Phone System, a Windows-based IP PBX that completely replaces a proprietary PABX. 3CX Phone System is based on the open SIP standard and interoperates with a wide range of popular SIP phones, VOIP Gateways and SIP-based providers. The Enterprise edition of 3CX Phone System implements enterprise telephony features such as Call Queuing and . It has been independently tested and certified for Microsoft Windows 2003.

The Exchange 2007 integration feature allows 3CX Phone System to use the Unified Messaging Server in Exchange Server 2007 as the voice mail server. This way, users can connect to their Exchange Server to listen to their calendar, have Exchange read out mails and receive their voice mail in their email inbox.

The Call Queuing feature allows companies to hold callers in a queue, whilst agents answer calls. Agents are able to login and logout to queues from Windows seeing the exact number of callers in the queue. (more)

SQL Server you can now attend a free e-learning on SQL Server 2008 at this URL :
https://www.microsoftelearning.com/eLearning/courseDetail.aspx?courseId=78337

Title: Clinic 7045 - What's New in Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2008
Course Type: Self-paced Course
Available Offline: Yes
Estimated Time of Completion: 2 Hours
Language: English
Description: In this clinic, you will learn about the new and enhanced features included in SQL Server 2008. You will explore the new data types and the data management features. Additionally, you will learn about the enhanced Integration Services, Analysis Services, and Reporting Services included in SQL Server 2008. This online clinic is composed of a rich multimedia experience.
Objectives: At the end of the course, students will be able to:

  • Describe the features of SQL Server 2008 and their benefits.

  • Describe the features of enterprise data platform that help you to secure data in applications.

  • Describe the dynamic development features that facilitate the development of database applications.

  • Describe the features of SQL Server 2008 that provide data storage solutions beyond relational databases.

  • Describe the enhanced features in SSIS that help you to integrate data effectively.

  • Describe the enhanced features in SSAS that help you to improve the BI infrastructure.

  • Describe the enhanced features in SSRS that help you to improve the scalability of the reporting engine.
  • VS 2005 R2 Arlindo Alves writes: "One of my colleagues developed a tool called VMRC Plus which is an improved version of the VMRC client that is deployed together with Virtual Server 2005."

    What does VMRCplus offer?
  • Direct control of local or remote instances of the Virtual Server service. IIS and IE browser are no longer required!

  • Tabbed interface to quickly jump between Virtual Server hosts and guest VMRC sessions.

  • Reusable saved states: this feature allows users to preserve a particular saved state and return to that state at any time.

  • Multiple guest selection supported for startup/shutdown/save/display.
  • (more)

    Kevin Remde links to a screencast which shows off for the first time support for an 8 core virtual machine.

    supported a utility called which allowed an administrator to connect to the Routing Engine Service on port 691, query it, and retrieve a view of the Routing Topology as seen by the server. The Routing Log Viewer in provides a similar function to WinRoute but for Exchange Server 2007 Hub Transport and Edge Transport roles.

    Since there is no Routing Engine to query, the log viewer allows an administrator to open a routing log file which contains information about what the routing topology looks like as seen by the server. To determine what the current routing topology looks like to Exchange Server, utilize the latest log file as indicated by the timestamp on the last modified date.

    Furthermore, it allows the administrator to open a second routing log and determine the changes that have occurred within the routing topology between two time periods. This provides a great benefit in instances where routing problems resolve themselves before the issue could be troubleshot or for determining which changes have occurred in the topology over time. In these cases, if problems were due to changes in the routing topology, the utility can be used to compare those changes and hopefully provide clues as to why it occurred. (continue at source)

    Microsoft Tuesday released the next beta version of that adds options for installing Microsoft’s newest Web server.

    The Community Technology Preview (CTP), which is Microsoft’s lingo for its release cycle of beta software, is available to MSDN subscribers, TechNet subscribers and Connect customers.
    With the new CTP, Internet Information Server (IIS) 7.0 is now an installation option under the Server Core feature of the server.

    Server Core is made up of the Windows kernel and a set of infrastructure “roles,” which install only the components needed for any of eight specific functions: Active Directory, Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services, DHCP, DNS, File, Print, Windows Media Services and Windows Server Virtualization (when it ships). (continue at source)

    Ever since Microsoft came out with , the demand for a real Load Balancing solution has been present. Up until now one would have to turn to third-party software to get a decent Load Balancing product. Citrix Presentation Server is the most well-known example of this. At But at BriForum 2007 In Chicago, Microsoft shocked the SBC world by announcing that will be able to do real Load Balancing.

    So what about this ““ in Windows Server 2008? What does it do? What can’t it do? Is it any good? Can I get rid of Citrix? Well, in this article we’re going to take a closer look at “Session Broker Load Balancing“ in Windows Server 2008 and see if we can answer these questions.(continue at source)

    Jeff Jones released his security report about the Security Vulnerabilities found in Windows Vista during the first 6 months. His analysis shows that Windows Vista has less High severity vulnerabilities in the first 6 months compared to Windows XP and other Operating Systems.

    Security

    Operations Manager 2007In some situations it’s nice to be able to query the OperationsManager manually. After setting up my lab en be able to change a health status of a dummy database. I ran a trace and searched for a clue where this healthstatus information is stored. Turns out that Microsoft has created some nice, userfriendly views (dbo.ManagedEntityGenericView and dbo.ManagedTypeView) that can be queried. theres plenty more to find but those 2 were enough to get the health status the way I wanted it.

    Using the following query you can see which monitor classes are being monitored for a certain object and which health state is has got. 1 being healty, 2 is a warning and 3 is an error;

    SELECT MEGv.[Displayname] AS Object, TMv.[Name] AS MonitoringClass, MEGv.[Healthstate] FROM dbo.ManagedEntityGenericView AS MEGv
    INNER JOIN dbo.[ManagedTypeView] AS TMv
    ON TMv.[id] = MEGv.[MonitoringClassId]
    WHERE MEGv.[Displayname] = 'YOUR OBJECT'

    YOUR OBJECT can be anything, form a database name to a server name. Just any object name that can be monitored.

    If you’d like to a more selective result and only want one specific monitorclass of one specific object you can use:

    SELECT MEGv.[Displayname] AS Object, TMv.[Name] AS MonitoringClass, MEGv.[Healthstate] FROM dbo.ManagedEntityGenericView AS MEGv
    INNER JOIN dbo.[ManagedTypeView] AS TMv
    ON TMv.[id] = MEGv.[MonitoringClassId]
    WHERE MEGv.[Displayname] = 'YOUR OBJECT'
    AND TMv.[Name] = ‘YOUR MONITORCLASS'

    YOUR MONITORCLASS is something like Microsoft.SQLServer.Database
    (Use the first query to list all the monitor classes for a certain object)

    Windows Server 2008 Matt McSpirit writes:

    In the video, you'll see Jeff Woolsey, Senior Program Manager for Windows Server Virtualisation (WSV), demo a number of different areas of the technology, and in particular, Jeff highlights 8-core Virtual Machines, Hot-Adding of hardware and Live Migration of Virtual Machines, none of which will make it into the first release of WSV.


    Virtual Lab Massimo ReFerre from IBM has recently blogged the technical differences between Viridian (WSV), VMware ESX, and XEN. You can read the full article in his post "A brief architecture overview of VMware ESX, XEN and MS Viridian", and a snippet is below:

    It is my feeling that there has been a bit of confusion lately around how hypervisors are being positioned by the various vendors. I am specifically referring to the three major technologies that seem to be the most relevant strategically going forward:

  • VMware ESX is the VMware flagship hypervisor product: it's the basis for the Virtual Infrastructure version 3 framework.

  • MS Viridian is the next generation hypervisor that Microsoft is going to use in the Longhorn time frame and that is currently being developed. It's basically the successor of Microsoft Virtual Server.

  • Xen is an opensource hypervisor that is being integrated by a number of players which include RedHat, Suse, XenSource and Virtual Iron.
  • (more)

    Operations Manager 2007I was playing in my lab and came across an error that couldn’t be find on google. For the sake of completion here is how I solved the simple problem. The error in the system eventvwr told me;

    Event Type: Error
    Event Source: Service Control Manager
    Event Category: None
    Event ID: 7023
    Date: 6/18/2007
    Time: 9:59:49 PM
    User: N/A
    Computer: SVR1
    Description:
    The OpsMgr Health Service service terminated with the following error:
    %%2164195395

    A cryptic message, when I started the service manually it would start. Another thing that came to my attention was, that it didn’t discover any clients or servers.
    A closer look at the event viewer revealed that there was an AD problem as well. It couldn’t contact AD (Source: netlogon Event-id: 5719) and also the DNS client couldn't register itself (Source: dnsapi Event-id: 11165).

    Clearly, a dns problem, I forgot my opsmgr server got a dynamic ipadress from my adsl modem and used my adsl modem as dns server. I pointed the servers dns client to the domain controller, rebooted the machine and the DNS, AD and opsmgr problems were gone.

    Microsoft I just got this email, revealing that a CTP for Windows Server "Centro" is underway:

    Big News! Microsoft is planning to release a Community Technology Preview (CTP) of Windows Server Code Name "Centro" in the next few weeks. We look forward to your continued participation with Windows Server "Centro" and are really excited to receive your feedback on the upcoming CTP.

    Windows Server "Centro" is built on Windows Server 2008 and provides an integrated server and management system for midsize businesses. The upcoming CTP includes many new Windows Server 2008 Beta 3 based components, as well as updates to the server applications that shipped in Windows Server "Centro" Beta 1 (updated versions of System Center Essentials 2007, Exchange Server 2007 and ISA, as well as new updates to setup, Active Directory domain join functionality and a host of other improvements).

    First of all, for those people who attended one of my sessions yesterday at Technet Live: thank you! It was a great experience and from the comments that I got, it seems that my message came through about System Center. I presented two sessions at Technet Live about System Center and DSI. During those sessions I did 6 (!) live demo's, almost one of every product. Amazingly, they all went fine and did not "Murphy" on me. :-)

    As promised, I am publishing the slide deck online. You can download it at the link hereunder. The first session was recorded and will be on the dutch Technet website in the coming 3-4 weeks. Again, thanks for joining yesterday and see you soon at another venue!

    Technet Live: System Center en DSI (Maarten Goet)

    Yesterday i attended the Technet Live event hosted by Microsoft in the RAI (Amsterdam). A couple of things got my attention while listening to the sessions:

    * No powershell on Windows Server core
    Although you can use powershell on a remote machine to manage a server core machine, my opinion is that Powershell must be available on server core as well, because in my opinion you want to standardise your scripting across your infrastructure on one language, and some scripts you want to have local on the machine itself.

    * No ASP.NET while running IIS7 on Server core
    Word is that Classic ASP works normally, but i can't imagine that microsoft would release a IIS product that won't support ASP.NET.

    Both of these limitation have to do with the fact that the .NET framework isn't available for Server Core yet, from what i have heard the .NET team at Microsoft is working on this issue. Let's hope it's in the final Windows Server 2008. What do you think? Please leave a comment.

    Also yesterday was the first time i heard Mark Minasi speak, in this case it was about "Living the Longhorn Live", Mark is a great speaker which can bring the story with lots of humour, if you have the chance you should really visit one of his sessions. Also much appriciation for Maarten and his talk about System Center, i noticed that Maarten has developed some real good presentation skills, something i want/need to work on myself. Maarten's presentation on System Center will be put on Techlog very soon.

    Maarten @ Technet Live

    While reading through my RSS feeds, i noticed a reference to the website: http://www.kbshortcuts.com/. The website gives you the opportunity to search for keyboard shortcuts for all kinds of applications running on the Windows Platform. I personally don't use keyboard shortcuts that much, but i know they can save you a lot of time when doing certain tasks. I will give it another try from now on.

    Visit Keyboard Shortcuts, Save a mouse, use a keyboard

    Jeff Alexander writes: We have just release some new resources for . Check them out below:

    SCUG Stefan Stranger, Arie de Haan and myself are already some time busy with setting up a Dutch System Center User Group (SCUG.nl) and on Monday we finally launch SCUG.nl at the Dutch TechNet Live Event in the RAI Amsterdam.

    The goal of our Dutch System Center User Group is exchanging info about all the System Center Products from Microsoft. First we start with OpsMgr 2007 and later more products will follow. You can ask questions in our forum and read blogs about System Center Products. Besides our website we will organize meetings to inform you personally. So keep a eye on SCUG.nl if you can read Dutch ;-).

    To celebrate the start of our Dutch System Center User Group we are giving away great prizes at TechNet Live in the RAI Amsterdam. (more)

    Operations Manager 2007 Microsoft has just released the Operations Manager 2007 Design Guide to their download website.

    This is really worth the read. The paper has good information about sizing, especially hardware requirements versus number of agents, which can be a real pain point for your deployment, if sized too small.

    Download it here:
    http://download.microsoft.com/download/7/4/d/74deff5e-449f-4a6b-91dd-ffbc117869a2/OpsMgr2007_DesignGuid.doc

    On the Website of Aaron Tiensivu you can find a list of Vista pre-SP1 hotfixes, sorted by category. He concentrates on the non-critical updates that don't always show up on Windows Update. He mentiones: "I wish Microsoft hosted a page like this." and i agree.

    A good portion of these are wrapped up into one package with Autopatcher.

    Updated list of Vista pre-SP1 hotfixes, sorted by category

    Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) is one of those technologies that tends to intimidate administrators who are unfamiliar with it. On the Performance team, we handle basic WMI issues - mainly relating to basic WMI functionality and permissions. So today, we're going to go over the WMI Basics. We're not really going to get into how to write WMI scripts - there's hundreds of online scripting resources and books available already. We are going to look at the architecture of WMI itself ...

    So - what is WMI? WMI is an implementation of the Web-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM) standard. WMI provides a uniform access mechanism to a vast collection of Windows management data and methods. WMI offers access to this information via script, C++ programming interfaces, dot net classes (system.management), and a command line tool (WMIC). Other WMI capabilities also include eventing, remoting, query, views, user extensions to schema and instrumentation, and more.(continue at source)

    Operations Manager 2007 Thanks to Edwin van Veltom for sending this in:

    Systems Management: Dell Management Pack for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007. The Dell Management Pack for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager integrates Dell PowerEdge server alerts into Ops Manager. The Management Pack provides a list of Dell-specific views that you can use to observe and drill down the system status in a network. Fixes and Enhancements:

    1) Added support for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007
    2) Enhanced health drill down model in Diagram views from overall Dell Hardware health to individual hardware components.
    3) Includes support for the latest versions of Dell OpenManage Server Administrator v5.2 (including the enhanced Storage Management Service 2.2).
    4) Supports monitoring of Dell printers using SNMPv2

    Dell Management Pack for Operations Manager 2007

    James Bannan from APC Magazine writes:

    One thing which really annoys me about the Vista desktop is the size of the icons. Perhaps I’m too used to Windows XP, but the icon size on XP seemed perfect.

    Not only does Vista’s icon size make me think that they’re providing a visual aid in my dotage, but icons to any third-party apps are instantly stretched too far, looking ugly and pixelated.

    Well, the answer is surprisingly simple – go the desktop, hold down CTRL and scroll the mouse wheel up or down. Down makes the icons smaller, up enlarges them.

    The main difference is in the level of localization in comparison to packages: packages provide the desktop user with an approximately 80% localized user experience. In addition, LIP doesn't allow users to switch languages. Once a LIP is installed, all users using that machine will have the same User Interface (UI) language. LIP relies on the same resource-loading technology MUI is built upon, and installs on top of the English version.

    Guide to Windows Vista Multilingual User Interface
    How do I get additional language files?
    Installing Language Interface Packs

    Virtual Server Today Microsoft released to the Web the final version of Virtual Server 2005 R2 service pack 1. Available at no charge, this service pack adds support for hardware-assisted virtualization and improved backup services and compatibility. A new feature to the service pack is Volume Shadow Services, which provides customers with improved support for backup and disaster recovery. Instead of scheduling downtime for backing up each virtual machine individually, customers will now be able to take snapshot backups of physical machines, with no downtime, that will in turn take snapshots of all the virtual machines on that physical host.

    Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 also supports host clustering, which offers customers minimal downtime depending on the speed of storage and amount of memory assigned to a virtual machine. Host clustering is storage agnostic, comes with Windows Server 2003 Enterprise or Datacenter editions, and is a high-availability solution for both planned and unplanned downtime. And with System Center Virtual Machine Manager, downloadable today as a beta 2 version, customers will have tools for high availability migration.

    Virtual Server 2005 R2 Service Pack 1 (more)

    Want to get a better understanding of how to architect, deploy, administer, and operate Operations Manager 2007? Walk through this online course designed to help you get ramped on using Operations Manager 2007.

    System Center Operations Manager 2007 Technical Walkthrough

    TechEd 2007 It's finished, basta, finito, done, afgelopen and ende. Teched 2007 USA, this year in Orlando, was great. The keynote was not that good, besides a really cool Back to the Future movie with Christopher Lloyd live on stage. But the week had some great sessions on Windows Server 2008, Windows Server Virtualization and other 2008 products.

    We had some nice meetings like the International Roundtable with Andy Lees, the bloggers breakfast with Microsoft security guru's and an exclusive conversation with Eric Berg on the acquistion of Engyro.

    We met lots of great people like Josh & Jeff from Windows Connected, Tom Warren from Neowin, Pete Zerger from System Center Forum and other dutchies like Raymond Comvalius. The party on thursday was fantastic; Microsoft really going to the max by renting Universal's Islands of Adventure exclusively for Teched attendees! Tonight we're going to watch the Space Shuttle launch at Kennedy Space Center and tomorrow were heading home.

    Thank you for joining us this week and thanks to Microsoft for having Techlog as official bloggers / media reporters to the event. We'll pick up the normal Microsoft news coverage next monday, when life returns to normal and the day job continues. :-)

    Windows Server 2008 I just sat on the 71-649 exam, Transitioning your MCSE on Windows Server® 2003 to Windows Longhorn Server Technology Specialist, at the VUE test center at Teched 2007. While I cannot comment on any specific question, I can comment on the areas of focus for studying for this exam (right, Trika?). If you will be taking this exam in the near future, learn about the details in these areas:

  • Terminal Services - the different roles, the new features, etc

  • IIS 7 - the new command line tools, new features, etc

  • Server Core - ofcourse, know your way with all the cmdline tooling that you can use

  • Virtualization - be sure to study on how Virtual Server 2005 works

  • Active Directory - the new features, but also AD in general


  • Other then that, just know your Windows Server 2008 stuff. Download beta 3 and have a go yourself with the installation and configuration. The new Server Manager is fantastisc and nothing beats some first hand experience on the product. In 8 tot 12 weeks time we will be getting the scores. Good luck to whoever is taking a shot also!

    The topic that seems to get a lot of interest is how we use Virtual Server and Clustering together to provide high availability. Basically Virtual Server is a 'clusterable resource' - which means that any guest virtual machine can fail over between cluster nodes (for both planned and unplanned downtime) - offering the ability to quickly move a virtual machine from physical server to physical server (we currently support eight physical servers in a single cluster).

    Quick Migration


    We've been able to do this since January 2006, but it seems that not a lot of people knew it (or weren't aware of what it meant). To help with the understanding, we've renamed this feature from Host Clustering to Quick Migration. For details on how to set this up, you can find the step-by-step instructions here.

    Quick Migration simply saves the state of a running virtual machine (memory to disk), moves the storage connectivity from one physical server to another and then restores the virtual machine (disk to memory). This is quick (seconds) - but it will depend on how much memory needs to be written to disk and the speed of the connectivity to the storage. For your reference, a 512Mb virtual machine can be migrated from one server to another in about six seconds using 1Gb iSCSI. (more)