IT Expert Voice

Clustering has been around since almost the earliest PC and mainframe days. But a new take on clustering is emerging that leverages virtualization tools and is becoming more appealing, particularly as enterprise IT shops gain more experience using virtual servers and as the virtualization vendors add more high-availability features to their products.

A combination of services, were previously only the province of very expensive and customized clustered configurations, are now available in the virtual world. READ MORE

Making the switch from hosting your servers and applications to letting a Managed Service Provider do it for you can reduce costs and improve productivity. But a mismatch with the wrong MSP can be a disaster. Here are questions you need answered before you tie the contractual knot.

MSPs are becoming more popular. Using an MSP can help an enterprise maintain existing service levels with a reduced IT staff, or provide a less-costly means of increasing services than hiring new staff. Since many of them have expertise in Internet applications, they can quickly bring them online. Also, increased regulatory complexity requires offsite storage, which can be provided by MSPs. READ MORE

When Emerson Network Power consolidated dozens of data centers around the globe into a facility at its campus just north of St. Louis, the most interesting feature wasn’t even inside the building.

As part of its consolidation, Emerson, which makes a wide array of power conditioning and management systems, built a new 35,000 sq. ft. data center in St. Louis last year. The building sports a rooftop 100 kV (DC) solar array that occupies about a quarter of its surface area. The array provides about 15% of the power requirements for the equipment inside and is just one of several technologies that are used to show how green a new data center can be. READ MORE

If you are trying to track down a particular program that owns a file or to try to kill a process for a particular application, then you might want to look at Sysinternals Process Explorer. This short screencast shows you what it can do.

Process Explorer v12.03 is a neat — and free! — little utility that extends what you can do beyond the task monitor that is found in Windows.

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Windows Server 2008 introduced a series of programs called RemoteApp that appear as if they are running on a local computer, even though they are accessed remotely. With Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7, these programs can be grouped along with entire virtual desktop sessions, and both can appear in the local Start menu of your desktops. It is a pretty neat trick.

The result is that it’s easier for IT administrators to deploy and maintain remote apps. You can make changes to the apps in one place and the changes are transmitted to the various end-user desktops that are allowed to see them. RemoteApp also makes managing software licenses more cost effective, since you can have tighter control over who uses what software programs when. Finally, it makes it a more natural experience for end users; they can use the Windows search to find these remote apps, and they don’t have to do anything different to launch them compared to their locally-installed apps that are on their desktops.

RemoteApp isn’t unique: Citrix has been selling something similar for years. What is unique, though, is RemoteApp’s level of integration with the underlying Windows 7 OS, and how it can offer something similar for relatively low cost, too. (We’ll get to the licensing issues in a moment.)

To pull this off, you first need to update your Windows 2008 Server to the R2 version, which really means doing a re-install of a new server OS. Then you need to add some additional Microsoft software to your R2 Server, which will look like the following when you have everything set up.

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Cloud computing is everywhere these days, but one of its more mundane uses is in providing anti-virus (AV) and anti-spam endpoint protection. Here’s what these services offer, and the features you should look for.

The idea is that you don’t have to worry about your users forgetting to install the latest virus signatures or turning the protection off, or, as in the case of the recent McAfee fiasco, incorrectly tagging  a legitimate file as malware. The cloud gives you the opportunity to instantly see what is happening across your network and find out which PCs are protected.

Cloud-based AV simplifies deploying new PCs, too, because there is less software to install on each one. AV scans happen more regularly, since they are initiated by the cloud service and (again) they don’t depend on individual user behavior. Cloud AV solutions cost about the same or in some cases less than the traditional desktop AV software.

The cloud AV services all operate the same way: A small agent or client piece of software runs on each desktop, and makes a connection to the central monitoring server in the cloud. As long as the desktop user has an Internet connection, updates to the virus signatures happen automatically and frequently. The client uses as little memory footprint as possible, since most of the heavy lifting (in terms of protection and processing) happens in the cloud. READ MORE

Software inventory is one of the most important steps in migrating desktops to Windows 7. This video shows you the promise — and limitations — of Microsoft’s Software Inventory Analyzer.

One of the benefits of the Software Inventory Analyzer, as you’ll learn in the screencast, is its price: It’s a free download. The tool only looks for Microsoft applications. There are dozens of other inventory tools which may or may not be better suited to your needs.

Also, be sure to read our article that goes into more depth on doing software inventories, Retain, Retire, Rewrite: Performing Application Triage in Your Windows 7 Migration.

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While Windows 7 is getting all the attention, especially here at ITExpertVoice, Microsoft has a few other irons in the fire. The company has been hard at work updating its rather extensive server line. Some of the new technologies in its latest desktop OS are slowly finding their way into its Windows Servers series of products. In this article, I give you a roadmap to show what is new in the Windows server side of things, how they all fit together, and how the server versions make use of Windows 7.

Microsoft provides five dizzying ways that you can take a closer look at their servers. Many of these products have free trial versions that you can download, some for 30, 120, or even 180 days before you have to purchase a real license. Other products are set up on Microsoft-hosted websites, so you can experiment  using your Web browser. And some have Virtual Hard Disk images (VHDs) that you can download and then run on a HyperV server to set up your own test network of virtual machines. Also, a series of “Virtual Labs” lets you watch videos and be guided through the product on MSDN. No membership is required, but you need Internet Explorer and Windows XP to run the lab software. Finally, Microsoft is also beginning to make Amazon Machine images available on Amazon’s cloud-based services so you can set up your own test networks there.

Microsoft splits its server line into six broad pieces, as shown in the summary table below. These are somewhat arbitrary, and inconsistently applied across their various websites. The table is packed with URL links that take you to the trial software, or in some cases to the real McCoy, which you can download or experiment with. READ MORE