Yesterday at around 1600hrs, I met up with Rick Claus from Microsoft for a coffee in Downtown Halifax. He was in town for an event as part of roadshow for Windows 7 called EnergizeIT with Pierre Roman and Christian Beauclair. We talked about new trends, projects that I’m working on and Windows 7. He told me of the EnergizeIT event they have going on the same evening and I asked if I could attend uninvited and Rick gave me the green light. So here goes…

Today, I made up my mind to get myself a new Laptop. I will drop in at Best Buy to pick one of for around $500. I know it will come with Windows Vista but by the time I have it fully setup, I expect that Operating System to have turned into Ubunto 8.10. I was considering Fedora 10 but I actually refer Ubunto’s Graphical User Interface (GUI). Fedora 10 looks more like a MacOS from the screenshoots I’ve checked out. I worked with Fedora 7 and was great from functionality perspective but Ubunto has a friendlier feel to the GUI and doesn’t remind me of a MacOS.

However, I may actually just get the computer and install Windows 7 as the host OS and run a variant of Linux in a virtual mode. But I need to find out the facts about Windows 7 before I can use it as my main OS at home. I will not stand for anything like Windows Vista. NO WAY JOSE!

The reason why I’m seriously considering Linux is that I actually need to start living and breathing security especially now that I plan on becoming a fully focused on becoming Security subject matter expert. Using Linux as my primary computer will be give me good head start. Not because it is inherently secure out of the box because that’s a misconception but because of all the free security tools that comes with the distro. Furthermore, I need to learn more CLI unix/linux command. I am, however, aware of losing some of the applications in Windows that I currently take for granted i.e. Communicator 2007 for VoIP and Zune software for my music sync. Either way, it is time to go Open Source at home!

WOW! We now have Windows 7 even though I have never installed the last one (yeah, that one called ‘Vista’) for personal use. I did, however, provide support for it whenever need be. I chose not to use it on my PC or any of  my notebooks because I didn’t see any gain in doing so. It was bloated, slower than XP and required vast resources to run acceptablely. This is why I am somewhat excited to see what Windows 7 is all about. I’ve only seen screenshots so far but I will get a Beta copy installed for my personal use pretty soon. I’m darn sure it will thrive where Vista has failed!

Finally, Hyper-V version of Windows Server 2008 is here. While Microsoft is not new to the Server Virtualization space, they only competed for very small share of the market with the release Virtual Server 2005. That product competed directly with VMWare GSX Virtual Server which is mainly used in test environment because it virtualizes servers on top of an existing host Operating System. Therefore, the virtual machine could only have access to resources shared out by the host OS but not the the raw kernel of the hardware.

VMWare ESX on the other hand gives direct access to hardware resources to each instance of virtualized machnice. This is exactly what Hyper-V is now going to be offering or at least some of those features.

What is Server Virtualization
Before I go into overdrive on the subject, let’s define what Server Virtualization really means – This technology allows workload to be distributed to across different virtual machines while limiting the hardware used in the process. It enhances full utilization of hardware resources by running several independent operating systems on one physical box.

So, what exactly is this Hyper-V?

“Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, the next-generation hypervisor-based server virtualization technology, allows you to make the best use of your server hardware investments by consolidating multiple server roles as separate virtual machines (VMs) running on a single physical machine. With Hyper-V, you can also efficiently run multiple different operating systems—Windows, Linux, and others—in parallel, on a single server, and fully leverage the power of x64 computing.”

- http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/virtualization-consolidation.aspx

From that excerpt from Microsoft’s definition, you can see that Hyper-V is a core component of Windows 2008 architecture and part of the move toward 64bit computing.

Capabilities

New and Improved Architecture – 64-bit archetecture to provide better performance and security

Broad Support for multiple – Supports Windows, Linux, BSD and others
Symmetric Multiprocessors (SMP) Support – Support for up to four multi-processors

New Hardware Sharing Architecture – This is the main benefit of Hyper-V. It provide low level access to the utilization of core resources, such as disk, processors, memory space, networking and video card.

Quick Migration – Minimize downtime by migrating images of Virtual Machines instead of the old fashioned way of reinstallation.

Snapshot – Hyper-V enables you to take snapshot of a running virtual machine and revert to it just like system restore in XP. This again helps with business continuity and disaster recovery process

Consolidation and Scalability – This enables IT departments to drastically consolidate servers without losing productivity and scaling out as needed. This is even better when blade technology is deployed in the data center.

Conclusion
I’m very excited about this product. While VMWare ESX still stands out from functionality perspective, Hyper-V is a solid start and provides a decent alternative for those IT departments in SMB waiting to advantage of virtualization in their data center.

Earlier in this week, I published my first impression of Windows Server 2008 codenamed Longhorn.

In this entry I will go further to talk about what this new server OS has to offer.

Here are seven core scenario for Windows Server 2008 (TechNet July 2007)

1. Centralized application access
2. Security and policy enforcement
3. Web and applications platform
4. Server management
5. High availability
6. Branch office
7. Server virtualization

All these core scenarios are very significant improvement from Windows Server 2003. Let’s look at how things have improved by analyzing each scenario.

1. Centralized application access
   This focuses on the way business applications are delivered to users on the network. It is built on the well known Terminal Services. However, it has been greatly improved by introducing two modes; Terminal Service Gateway (TSG) and Terminal Services Remote Application (TS RemoteApp) technology.

   TSG enables users outside the LAN to connect to applications through firewall without establishing VPN connection with the LAN. This is similar to RPC over HTTP used in Outlook. To use this facility, Remote Desktop Client on Windows XP clients need to be upgraded and can be downloaded for free from Microsoft. This has already been built into Vista.

   TSG RemoteApp technology makes it possible for for network users to run a remote application as though it is on their local machine. This eliminates the need for users to log on to Terminal Server and making the remote application as seamless as possible.

   Further development include Terminal Services Web Access which gives users the ability to run a remote based application via the web. A page is setup to publish applications to authorized users. This can be integrated into SharePoint server site.

2. Security and policy enforcement
   Network Access Protection (NAP) has now been included in Windows Server 2008. This is a policy based access control system that controls access to the network by allowing only complaint and authorized devices. This enhances security a great deal throughout the network and integrates well into DHCP, VPN, IPsec and 802.1X.

   Network administrator are advised to put careful consideration into design of this technology before implementation it because it could lead to extensive outage otherwise.

3. Web and application platform
   Windows Server 2008 comes with new version of IIS, ISS 7. This is coupled with a new Management Console MMC. IIS 7 core now has over 40 separate modules that can be added or removed to enhance security and direct reduce surface attacks.

To be continued…