Last week we hosted an excellent event here with Matt McSpirit of Microsoft as a preview event for Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2, what great timing as those two products were released to manufacturer (RTM) in the last week, which means it’ll be out there for use in anger over the next month or so for VL customers and for everyone else by October 22nd.

While Matt was here he covered some great topics so we wanted to give a brief overview of what these two excellent product releases can to your business.

In part 1 of this post here are some of the features of Windows 7

Direct Access

This has potential to be a biggy for lots of businesses, the ability for you to connect through to your corporate infrastructure securely and quickly without the need for VPN, this has the potential to improve the user experience, while lowering support and admin costs, got to be a good thing!

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/enterprise/products/windows-7/features.aspx#directaccess

BranchCache

Provides another solution to an age old business problem, how do i centralise my document storage, without degrading the user experience, here’s a potential answer.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/enterprise/products/windows-7/features.aspx#branchcache

Integrated Search

one of Vista’s successes was the integration of search technology straight into the OS, Windows 7 takes that and enhances it hugely, with integration with the web and Sharepoint as well as your desktop apps and data, in terms of productivity a massive 7 plus.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/enterprise/products/windows-7/features.aspx#enterprisesearch

Bitlocker to go

building on the data encryption of Bitlocker in Vista, Bitlocker-to-go provides the ability to strongly encrypt the data that you store on external devices, such as USB keys, meaning next time I leave one in a taxi, no one will be able to access the data on it!

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/enterprise/products/windows-7/features.aspx#bitlocker

XP Mode

One of my favourites, for those old, or those funny applications that don’t run cleanly under Windows 7 or maybe didn’t run under Vista. XP mode allows you to run a virtualised XP session into which these applications can run. This is different to running in compatibility mode, this is a full virtualised session running within the OS.

XP mode also allows for the virtualised app to be presented in its own Window without the need for a full XP desktop to be presented. For a single user application virtualisation mode, this is a great solution. If you want something a bit more enterprise and centrally managed then look at App-V but as a starter, this works great.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtual-pc/

This caught our attention today on the BBC website, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8148969.stm as Microsoft are looking to grow significantly their “cloud” offerings, already there is Exchange Hosted Services, Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS, online versions of Exchange, Sharepoint, OCS and Live Meeting) and now with the addition of online versions of the office suite, this is going to provide an impressive set of choices for office infrastructure deployments.

The real plus about Microsoft’s offerings which differentiate it from some of the others we have looked at, is with their heritage of “on premise” solutions, Microsoft offer an excellent mix of either On premise, Cloud or importantly a “co-existence” offering providing both on premise and cloud working together seamlessly. we are currently working with a big client of ours on a project that does just that for over 1000 mailboxes.

interesting times.

if you want to see more on office 2010, check out the Microsoft site http://www.microsoft.com/office/2010/

As many of our customers know and to be fair anyone who has had a look at our website realise we like to use NetApp storage with our clients.

But Why?

There are many reasons, but mainly our clients no longer wanted just spinning disk for their enterprise storage solutions, they wanted something with some intelligence, something that not only added capacity, but something that added some real improvements in service and added functionality that improved their entire storage infrastructure and management.

In our opinion NetApp lead the way in this but also importantly for many of our clients NetApp also have outstanding integration with Microsoft’s technology and this was recently highlighted by NetApp been awarded as Microsoft’s storage solution partner for 2009, interestingly specifically around Hyper-V and the value they add to this virtualisation platform.

if you want to read a bit more about this then check out NetApp’s website http://www.netapp.com/us/solutions/solution-partners/global-alliance/microsoft-partnership.html 

NetApp are so confident about the value they add to a virtual platform they run a 50% guarantee programme, which they commit to guaranteeing you using 50% less storage on a NetApp platform for virtualisation than on competitive vendors.

http://www.netapp.com/us/solutions/infrastructure/virtualization/guarantee.html

so if you are virtualising on Hyper-V or VmWare or Citrix, then check them out or have a word with Gardner and come in and see this stuff in action.

we’ve been working on a number of virtualisation projects recently and one of the things often missed is the types of virtualisation that are available, one of the reports I’m writing at the minute outline some of the different types of virtualisation solutions out there and thought you may find it useful to be familiar with some of the phrases that get thrown around by us technical folk!

There are many types of virtualisation out there however some of the ones that are more common are;

• Server Virtualisation
• Desktop Virtualisation
• Application Virtualisation
• Presentation Virtualisation

And these are just a few of them, there’s things like storage virtualisation and compute clusters and many more!

The following section provides a brief description of each technology

Server Virtualisation

Is a method of partitioning a physical server computer into multiple servers so that each has the appearance of running on its own dedicated machine. Each virtual server can run its own full-fledged operating system, have its own resources allocated to it and each server can be independently rebooted.

The ability to partition physical hardware in this way as long been available on mid and mainframe systems, however is becoming increasingly widely adopted in the Intel (and AMD) server arena, with increasing amounts of virtualisation software been made available.

Desktop Virtualisation

Is a relatively new term that describes the process of separating a personal computer desktop (its applications, files and data) from the physical machine. The ‘virtualised’ desktop is stored on a remote central server instead of on the hard-drive of the local personal computer. This means that when users work from their desktops, all of the programs, applications, processes and data used by the desktop are kept and run centrally, allowing users to remotely access their desktops on any device which is capable of displaying the desktop, such as a PC, laptop, smartphone or thin client.

Application virtualisation

Is an umbrella term that describes software technologies that improve portability, manageability and compatibility of applications by encapsulating them from the underlying operating system on which they are executed. A fully virtualized application is not installed in the traditional sense, although it is still executed as if it is. The application is fooled at runtime into believing that it is directly interfacing with the original operating system and all the resources managed by it, when in reality it is not.

Presentation Virtualisation (Terminal Services)

Allows you to install and manage applications on centralised servers in the data center; screen images are delivered to the users, and the users’ client machines, in turn, send keystrokes and mouse movements back to the server. Administrators can present users with the individual applications and data they require to complete their task, or the whole remote desktop. From a user perspective, these applications are integrated seamlessly—looking, feeling, and behaving like local applications.

thought as we wrote this into a report, it would be something others found useful, hence here it is been blogged about.

of course these technologies don’t have to be run in isolation and can indeed all be run together as they are not necessarily competitive technologies but can be very much complimentary.

now just to find an explanation of storage virtualisation!

A real buzz word and something we are asked about on a regular basis here is around virtualising the desktop.

big players like Citrix, VmWare and Microsoft all have compelling views on virtualising your desktops.

although the hot topic is virtualising or VDI as many are calling it there is still many considerations as to whether its right for your business.

One of the leading techies I know in this field is Matt Mcspirit over at Microsoft, Matt is the UK partner tech specialist for Windows Server and MS virtualisation technologies, but Matt also has a good view on the general virtualisation scene.

Matt is joining us here at Gardner on 14th July to present where Microsoft are going with Server 2008R2 and Windows 7 (due for release in October)

Microsoft are an excellent source of information on this topic though and Matt has a great piece on his BLOG today with some of the sizing tools MS have available. Check it out, could give you some valuable information as you search for your ideal desktop strategy.

go check out Matt Blog post about “windows desktop optimised scenarios”