VM-Aware

Brian Madden has created an article that walks you through using Microsoft’s SoftGrid product to sequence or virtualise Microsoft Office 2007 in 30 easy to follow steps.

It is worth a read even if you don’t own SoftGrid as the concepts can be applied to other Application Virtualisation products. I used the section about tweaking the virtual registry (step 24in ThinApp and it worked a treat.

Read it here. Thanks Brian!!

I’ve found a multitude of blogs that point out that significant performance enhancements can be attained by disabling the File Last Access Time Check registry key in Windows Server 200x& XP.

I tried it and it does indeed make a difference, but don’t just take my word for it as Microsoft have disabled it by default in Vista & 2008.

Check out these blogs for various discussions about it:

• How To Geek
• Microsoft CAB Site
• PCTools
• VMwareInfo

Give it a go, unless of course you run an application that depends on this parameter being updated.

VMware recently published an article on the Virtual Reality blog that raises some interesting points as to why VMware is better than Xen & Hyper-V.

Some of the areas that get particular analysis are:

• Uptime
• Direct driver model
• Memory management

More interesting still are some of the comments to post, have clearly been made by Citrix & Microsoft employees or people with a vested interest.

I find some of the points amusing, but my 2 penneth worth is thus:

• No VMotion or equivalent = not production ready

I think that this in itself is a good enough reason to use VMware over anything else.  There are a multitude of other reasons, that hundreds of posts discuss, but this is the one for me.  Even after all these years, the ability to transfer one running VM from one host to another amazes me.

It’d be interesting to see what people think, so please do comment and see if we can get a debate going.

I stumbled across this great pdf, call it Microsoft Licensing for Dummies or whatever you want, but it has a great breakdown of how licensing should be undertaken to be fully legit.

• Server & CAL Licensing
• Enterprise CAL Suite
• Core CAL Suite
• Server Licensing
• Licensing Exchange Server

It even has a stab at Sharepoint, but I think that this is better handled by reading one of my earlier posts. Thanks to vinf.net for the original spot.

The guys over at PSS SQL Blog have written a short but really sweet article about how to really detect whether you have a bottleneck with SQL Server implementations.

It gives a few pointers of what to look for if you really start digging including:

• PAGE I/O Waits (select * from sys.dm_os_wait_stats where wait_type like ‘%PAGEIO%’)
• Virtual File Stats (select * from sys.dm_io_virtual_file_stats(-1, -1))
• Stalled I/O Warnings
• Additional disk based performance counters and available hardware utilities

I found this useful recently when SQL Server was virtualised and all other methods of monitoring looked fine (perfmon, vCharter), but couldn’t find the problem.

Here’s an interesting little piece comparing Microsoft’s PowerShell to good old Bash.

It is as non-biased as I have seen these comparisons be and it does a good job of pointing out the major difference, PowerShell is object-oriented and Bash isn’t. I don’t think that this in itself is reason enough to consider one better than the other, but it does mean that PowerShell can have a very steep learning curve whilst overall being more powerful.

It is an interesting PDF so have a look if you get chance.