Windows Phone 7 Series

Let’s start with the obvious: once more, Microsoft had to get a new name for it’s mobile OS, so their brand name is basically: worthless.

I haven’t tried it yet, but from what I’ve been reading:

• Cool: rewritten from scratch. Or branched from Zune. About time!
• Cool: Leveraging product application from Zune to XBox.
• Not so cool: IE escaped this rewriting. Something we’ll regret on a near future.
• Unknown: SDK and backward compatibility?

Hope to get one - probably only on 2011. Until then, I’ll continue to suffer with WM6.5.

Installing ESXi 4.0

Here are my notes on my last ESXi installation:

1. Download and burn CD from VMWare – the Dell customized version for a PowerEdge 2950

OPTIONAL BINARY
VMware ESXi 4.0 with Dell Customization
Version 4.0.0 | 181792 - 08/07/09
Binary (.iso) (417 MB)
Image for ESXi Installable that includes Dell customization.
md5sum: 0ff898e830a095abb2275181175e065e

2. Installing ESXi

Not much to say here. Basically set the password and configured the 1st network adapter.

3. Activated SSH (here’s where I’ve learned about this)

• At the console, hit ALT-F1
• type unsupported and hit <enter> (NOTE: you won’t see what your typing until you hit enter…)
• login
• edit /etc/inetd.conf
• uncomment the ssh line
• restart the services (services.sh restart)

We can now get the hell out of the datacenter :)

 

4. Install vSphere client

• HTTP the server, downloaded and installed vSphere client to my workstation
• On Windows 7 you have to fix it. Here the long and the short version

 

5. Install ftp server (here’s where I’ve learned about this)

• Downloaded OEM.tgz
• Uploaded to the datastore using the datastore browser
• On an SSH session, copied it to /bootbank/oem.tgz
• Added to /etc/inetd.conf:
• ftp stream tcp nowait root /usr/sbin/proftpd proftpd
• Reboot

And there you go, you’ve got an ftp server on your ESXi! For client ESXi has native support as:

• wget: wget ftp://user:password@source_ESXi_IP/path/file
• ftpput & ftpget

 

6. Install some precious tooling

• Your favorite ftp client
• VMWare Converter

 

Please remember:

• by default, VMWare Converter chooses flat files
• after uploading to the server your VMWare Server or Player versions, you’ll have to convert it: vmkfstools -d thin -i source.vmdk destination.vmdk.

 

Thanks for the support Rasteiro :)

Error converting Oracle VM

We’ve been converting out VMWare Server 1 and 2 to ESXi4. Today 2 of out Oracle servers stopped working after being VMWareConverted to ESXi. For some strange reason, oracle just managed to screw up the instance, and we got the following error:

ORA-01034 : ORACLE not available
ORA-27101 : shared memory realm does not exist

I had to re-register the service. Something like:

SET ORACLE_HOME=<my oracle home>
SET ORACLE_SID=<my oracle sid>

# delete service
oradim -delete -sid MCH9

# register service
oradim -new -sid <my oracle sid> -intpwd <my sysdba password> -startmode AUTO -pfile <my init.ora>

Running VMWare vSphere on Windows 7

Here’s a cool link to patch VMWare vSphere in Windows 7.

Hyper-V Physical to Virtual: Disk2vhd

SysInternals has just released an utility, disk2vhd, that creates VHD versions of physical disks for use in Microsoft Virtual PC or Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines. As it uses Windows’ Volume Snapshot capability, it can copy an image of an online system. Not that the competition doesn’t do it for long…

Download Disk2vhd (751 KB)

The Machine SID Duplication Myth

I’ve been using NewSID for years, first with disk cloning and on the last years with VM images. And it comes as a great surprise for me that it’s okay to have duplicate machine SIDs!

According to Mark Russinovich:

This blog post debunks the myth with facts by first describing the machine SID, explaining how Windows uses SIDs, and then showing that - with one exception - Windows never exposes a machine SID outside its computer, proving that it’s okay to have systems with the same machine SID

The exception to the rule is quite obvious: domain controllers.

Oops. How can so many people (me included) be so wrong for so long?

VMWare Player 3

I’ve upgraded VMWare Player to v3, and I’m having some mixed thoughts about it:

 

The good:

• We can create and update VM settings from within VMWare Player – no more VMX Builder for the majority of tasks
• VMWare tools are self-updatable from the net
• update: Multiple display support
• update: Unity support

 

The bad:

• Still no Unity support (changed "virtualHW.version" from "4" to "7" in the vmx file)
• Still no multiple display support (it works once you upgrade the VMTools)
• update: Unity is terribly slow

 

These last 2 seem to be dependent on a licensed Workstation copy. I can understand that VMWare wants to support its business, what I find hard to understand is why do they keep announcing the bloody features on the menu if they don’t intent to support it? Argh…

Oh well, still a great update.

<update>

I forgot to mention it: the display driver seems substantially slightly slower on my Windows 7…

</update>

An now for something completely different: dual boot :S

Ok, after years of evangelizing VMs against dual boot I’ve re-discovered dual boot! And what’s new about it? My new eSATA external disk!

 

I’ve now 3 OS on my laptop (and an extra 4 virtual machines):

• A conservative Windows 7 on my internal drive
• A Windows Server 2008 R2 directly on my eSATA
• A Windows Server 2008 R2 supported on eSATA as a VHD

 

The later was installed the way I’m installing OSs from now on. Here’s how:

 

• Start installing Windows Server 2008 R2
• Start the shell (Shift-F10)
• Launch diskpart
• Create a VHD file:
  • create vdisk file=”D:\Documents\Virtual Machines\VWMROMANO-DEV05\VWMROMANO-DEV05.VHD” type=fixed maximum=20000
• Attach it:
  • select vdisk file=”D:\Documents\Virtual Machines\VWMROMANO-DEV05\VWMROMANO-DEV05.VHD”
  • attach vdisk
• Install into your new disk :)

 

Here’s a simple how to.

 

It’s cool having a bunch of native OS on my laptop! Just think about it: the next time you want to test-drive a new beta OS, you can do it without compromising you stable workstation :)

 

<update>

When we already have the VHD, here’s how to registry the boot entry:

bcdedit /copy {originalguid} /d "New Windows 7 Installation"
bcdedit /set {newguid} device vhd=”[locate]\Image.vhd“
bcdedit /set {newguid} osdevice vhd=”[locate]\Image.vhd”
bcdedit /set {newguid} detecthal on

I had to look for it as EasyBCD messed up the VHD boot entry. In the same blog it states:

The advantages are magnificent:

• Simply copy one file (the .VHD file) and you’re entire system is included.
• Create incremental VHD files: One VHD file can be based on another one. So if you have different systems, create a base Win7 VHD and make all others incremental. This will save a lot of disk space!

There’re also some small disadvantages :-)

• The .VHD booted OS needs to be Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 or later.
• There’s a performance decrease of about 3%.
• Hibernate and some BitLocker scenarios don’t work
  (BitLocker CAN be used within the guest VHD though, but not on the disk where the VHD resides).
• Windows Experience index won’t work.

</update>

 

<update>

Here’s another link from TechNet.

</update>

Windows 7 early adopters

Here’s one I’ve forgot to mention: the company I work for, Link Consulting, is one of the 30 Portuguese companies that are Windows 7 early adopters.

Other than me (I’m a full-time beta early-adopter of all Windows OS’s since I can remember), we’ve been massively installing Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 on our development and production environments.

Here’s a link to that news (in Portuguese).

Shrinking a Windows 7 disk

Windows 7 natively supports shrinking a disk, but doesn’t support reallocating the files to allow it.

Here’s a cool tool to do it: Power Defragmenter (GUI interface for sysinternals contig).

Here’s a cool howto: Working Around Windows Vista’s "Shrink Volume" Inadequacy Problems.

Windows 7 RTM available for download

As announced, Windows 7 RTM was made available to msdn subscribers. I’m presently downloading an Enterprise version – my previous Vista version was a Business VLK but I couldn’t find such edition. Let’s only hope Microsoft will release VLK key tomorrow for this Enterprise edition.

I will get Windows 7 RTM on…

Oops, don’t know for sure… Let’s see:

• ISV (Independent software vendor) and IHV (Independent hardware vendor) Partners: 6th August
• IT Professionals with TechNet Subscriptions: 7th August
• Volume License (VL) customer with an existing Software Assurance (SA): 7th August
• Microsoft Partner Program Gold/Certified Members: 16th August

Uhmm, probably on August 7th if we receive our VL keys on the very same day. If everything else fails, on August 16th. This time I’ll probably wait for proper channel release :)

Error formatting an external 1TB drive on OSX

No much to say here. Bought an external 1TB drive and failed to format it on Mac OSX on other than FAT32. Tried to format it on a GParted live disk with the same results. The solution: dropped the partition using GParted and OSX Disk Utility finally managed to created it.

PS: didn’t try to drop the partition using OSX, it would probably work

Azure pricing

Not as cheap as I expected, but anyway here it is:

 

Windows Azure:

• Compute = $0.12 / hour (editor’s note: by the pricing I assume this is CPU time. At least I hope…)
• Storage = $0.15 / GB stored / month
• Storage Transactions = $0.01 / 10K
• Bandwidth = $0.10 in / $0.15 out / GB

SQL Azure:

• Web Edition – Up to 1 GB relational database = $9.99
• Business Edition – Up to 10 GB relational database = $99.99
• Bandwidth = $0.10 in / $0.15 out / GB

.Net Services:

• Messages = $0.15/100K message operations , including Service Bus messages and Access Control tokens
• Bandwidth = $0.10 in / $0.15 out / GB

How Comsumption is Measured

Windows Azure

• Compute time, measured in machine hours: Windows Azure compute hours are charged only for when your application is deployed. When developing and testing your application, developers will want to remove the compute instances that are not being used to minimize compute hour billing.
• Storage, measured in GB: Storage is metered in units of average daily amount of data stored (in GB) over a monthly period. E.g. if a user uploaded 30GB of data and stored it on Windows Azure for a day, her monthly billed storage would be 1 GB. If the same user uploaded 30GB of data and stored it on Windows Azure for an entire billing period, her monthly billed storage would be 30GB. Storage is also metered in terms of storage transactions used to add, update, read and delete storage data. These are billed at a rate of $0.01 for 10,000 (10k) transaction requests
• Bandwidth requirements (transmissions to and from the Azure datacenter), measured in GB: Bandwidth is charged based on the total amount of data going in and out of the Azure services via the internet in a given 30-day period. Bandwidth within a datacenter is free.
• Transactions, measured as application requests

SQL Azure

Web Edition Relational Database includes:

• Up to 1 GB of T-SQL based relational database
• Self-managed DB, auto high availability and backup
• Auto Scale with pay-as-you grow
• Best suited for Web application, Departmental custom apps.

Business Edition DB includes:

• Up to 10 GB of T-SQL based relational database
• Self-managed DB, auto high availability and backup
• Auto Scale, Pay-as- you grow
• Additional features in the future like auto-partition, CLR, fanouts etc.
• Best suited for ISVs packaged LOB apps, Department custom apps

.NET Services:

Messages (Includes Access Control, Orchestration, and Reliable Queuing for message): .NET Services allow developers to easily connect their cloud applications and databases with existing software assets and users. This connection between cloud and on-premises assets is facilitated by the exchange of messages. The consumption-based pricing model means that customers will pay only for the number of message operations that their applications use. The definition of a “message operation” includes Service Bus messages and Access Control tokens. Messages are charged to the customer in discrete blocks of 100,000 (“100k”) for each monthly billing period, meaning that

• A customer who consumed 95,000 messages would be billed for 1x100k messages (plus the bandwidth used to send messages in or out).
• A customer who uses 150,000 messages in a billing period would be charged for 2x100k messages (plus the bandwidth used to send messages in or out).
• A customer who uses 20 million messages in a billing period would be charged for 200x100k messages (plus the bandwidth used to send messages in or out).

Service Level Agreements (SLA)

Windows Azure:

Windows Azure has separate SLA’s for compute and storage. For compute, we guarantee that when you deploy two or more role instances in different fault and upgrade domains your Internet facing roles will have external connectivity at least 99.95% of the time. Additionally, we will monitor all of your individual role instances and detect within two minutes when a role instance’s process is not running and initiate corrective action (we will publish by PDC the full details of our uptime promise for individual role instances). For storage, we guarantee that at least 99.9% of the time we will successfully process correctly formatted requests that we receive to add, update, read and delete data. We also guarantee that your storage accounts will have connectivity to our Internet gateway.

Service Level Agreements (SLA)

SQL Azure:

SQL Azure customers will have connectivity between the database and our Internet gateway. SQL Azure will maintain a “Monthly Availability” of 99.9% during a calendar month. “Monthly Availability Percentage” for a specific customer database is the ratio of the time the database was available to customer to the total time in a month. Time is measured in 5-minute intervals in a 30-day monthly cycle. Availability is always calculated for a full month. An interval is marked as unavailable if the customer’s attempts to connect to a database are rejected by the SQL Azure gateway.

Service Level Agreements (SLA)

.NET Services:

Uptime percentage commitments and SLA credits for .NET Services are equivalent to those specified above in the Windows Azure SLA. Due to inherent differences between the technologies, underlying SLA definitions and terms differ for .NET Services. Using the Service Bus module of .NET Services, customers will have connectivity between a customer’s service endpoint and our Internet gateway; when our service fails to establish a connection from the gateway to a customer's service endpoint, then the service is assumed to be unavailable. In addition, the service will process correctly formatted request for the handling of messages; when our service fails to process a request properly, then the service is assumed to be unavailable. SLA calculations will be based on an average over a 30-day monthly cycle, with 5-minute time intervals. Failures seen by a customer in the form of service unavailability will be counted for the purpose of availability calculations for that customer. Additional SLA definitions and terms will be detailed at a later date.

No Windows 7 RTM announced… yet…

Apart from a supposed RTM thrown at the torrents (a build 7600) no RTM has been announced nor released today. I’m betting that this 7600 is a bogus, at least as RTM, the early torrents releases were probably put there by Microsoft to assure free publicity and motivation for installation (for some strange reason called progress human kind doesn’t get excited with easy tasks. And Microsoft won’t ever upload an RTM, Microsoft no longer sponsors pirating their own software... It will get to the torrents, no doubt about it, but it will be first be delivered at least to MSDN subscribers.

Let’s wait a couple of days and see what happens. Is Microsoft managing the announcement cycle away from Silverlight 3?…

<update>

bink.nu sources seems to confirm the RTM as 7600.win7_rtm.090710-1945. That’s the torrents version. Could it be?….

</update>

<update>

According to windows blog:

We are close, but have not yet signed off on Windows 7. When we RTM you will most certainly hear it here. As we’ve said all along, we will RTM Windows 7 when it’s ready. As previously stated, we expect Windows 7 to RTM in the 2nd half of July.

And their advice:

I am using one of the so-called “leaked” builds of Windows 7, how will I know if it is the real deal?

As always, beware of what you download. There are many bogus copies of Windows 7 floating around the Internet. More often than not, they contain a rather nice malware payload. And don’t believe everything you read on the Internet. When Windows 7 hits RTM, it will be announced here. Until that happens, any builds you are likely to see on the web are either not the final bits or are laced with malicious code.

Ok, so I did download the leaked version though I firmly believe this is a bogus one, so what? :) Some of the better builds I’ve installed came were leaked versions :) I’l probably wait for the final version…

This will probably be one of the first site that announces the RTM, so let’s stay tuned.

</update>

One step further away from VMWare

Here’s a long time VMWare user that is about to dump it for good. The last straw: ESXi!

We’ve just installed an ESXi 4. Other than the over-simplicist setup (I couldn’t find how to set the partitions) and the lack of standard Unix services (ok, I can understand why, but man this is annoying), the last straw was the apparently network bandwidth capping.

VMWare doesn’t depend on open protocols to manage remote file systems, but on it’s own implementation. On this implementation I couldn’t go over 4MB/s, even using some alternative referenced faster tools. After some binging it looks like VMWare capped this on version 4 <update>Fixed broken link</update>. Incredible And since we are using free software we have to depend on standard tools and protocols to guarantee backup.

We’ll try NFS to see if we can get over this stupid limit. If it doesn’t work we’ll probably ditch ESXi. And now for the next options:

• VMWare Server over Windows or Linux (our present solution)
  • pros: less memory greed than Hyper-V, porting is direct
  • cons: no hypervisor (not has fast as Hyper-V)
• Hyper-V
  • pros: hypervisor (speed!)
  • cons: conversion needed

Let’s see how it goes.

 

<update>

Ok, now we have SSH and FTP on ESXi, and over FTP it seems like the capping has gone :)

</update>

Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 RTM set for…

… July 13th!

According to bink.nu:

Microsoft has now set July 13th for RTM “sign-off”. Sign off is the process where all divisions sign that they agree on the final code, which means the actual RTM build will be created a few days earlier, which is targeted on July 10th.

The general availability (GA) is set to October 22nd, this is when you can buy it in stores in a box or on new PC’s (OEM).

We can expect the RTM much earlier on MSDN, Technet and Volume Licensing download sites, probably a few days after July 13th.

<update>MSFT to RTM Windows 7 by June 26? Build 7260 leaks</update>

Shame on you, VMWare

I’ve been using VMWare since 2001, but now I feel like porting my VMs elsewhere. It came as a shock to me that a company like VMWare would anonymously post a video of a crashing Hyper-V on YouTube.

The shame doesn’t stop here. The post came from Scott Drummonds, a VMware Product Marketing! And according to ITPro:

And probably because the copy of Hyper-V that you see blue-screening is apparently running on pre-release Intel hardware that you get under the kind of agreement that says you won’t do benchmarking on it, certainly not for public consumption.

Well, at least they apologized.

Windows 7 task bar thumbnails

Microsoft applications seem to be quite well prepared to project independent windows thumbnails on Windows 7 task bar. And for some strange reason, applications like Chrome and Firefox still didn’t react, leaving IE with a (I admit, small) competitive advantage. When will Chrome and Firefox respond? Since Windows 7 I’m inverting my browser usage from Chrome to IE, can this be a reason?

Task or tray?

Now that Windows 7 has a cool new task bar (ok, a complete OS X rip off…) it’s probably a good time to set some order on the task versus tray.

Though probably not a rule set by Microsoft, in my vision we should:

• use task bar for applications
• use tray for system, services, utilities and notifications

As a corollary of this rules I’ve just made up, I’d propose:

• we should never put an application both on task and tray bar

This got more important now because of the new Mac OS like task bar. Applications that hide themselves when minimized may confuse the user more then ever. So my advice is: disable “hide when minimized” from all apps.

Now that we’re talking about that, let me share my experience with Outlook 2007. In my opinion it shouldn’t reside on the tray icon, I’d rather see it to represent the presence of unread mail. Anyway, when the “hide when minimized” is set and upon minimization it looks like Outlook is not running (ok, we can always check the tray bar). More, we can no longer take a thumbnail peek on the opened windows.

I’ll end this post with a suggestion: double-clicking a task bar windows could restores all opened windows. All I can do for now is hitting Ctrl when clicking: it will circle each of these windows.