Entries for Volker Will

Bing - The Sound of Found [Bing - The Sound of Found]

Volker Will — Fri, 29 May 2009 22:21:00 GMT

At the All Things Digital Conference, Steve Ballmer announced our new search engine called Bing. Bing is way more than just a search engine. Check out details about Bing on our sister site Channel9. Laura and Stefan Weitz take us on a test drive.

in reply to Bing - The Sound of Found

TechNet Edge at TechEd [TechNet Edge at TechEd]

Volker Will — Tue, 12 May 2009 16:47:00 GMT

Besides doing interviews and videos here at TechEd 09 in LA, we're also active on Twitter. Just follow @tnedge.
If you need a rest, relax in the TechNet Edge lounge in the MSDN/TechNet area.

in reply to TechNet Edge at TechEd

Windows 7 Manageability Overview [Windows 7 Manageability Overview]

Volker Will — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 18:35:00 GMT

End of last week Microsoft published 30 page guide for IT Pros titled “Windows 7 Manageability Overview”.

The information about the fact might have been lost over all the noise about CeBIT, recent announcements and the weekend. From the content:

Windows 7 Manageability Overview
Increased Automation
PowerShell Integrated Scripting Environment
PowerShell Cmdlets
PowerShell Remoting
PowerShell Eventing
Automating Management of GPOs
Executing PowerShell via Group Policy
Keep Users Productive
Advanced and Customized Troubleshooting
Problem Steps Recorder
System Restore
Windows Recovery Environment
Resource Monitor
Reliability Monitor
Flexible Administrative Control
AppLocker
Enhanced Auditing
Enforced Data Encryption
Group Policy Preferences
DirectAccess
Summary

Resources:

Windows 7 Manageability Overview
Windows 7 Homepage
Engineering Windows 7 Blog
Windows 7 on Springboard
Tim’s Blog

in reply to Windows 7 Manageability Overview

SQL Server 2008 Service Pack 1 (SP1) CTP available [SQL Server 2008 Service Pack 1 (SP1) CTP available]

Volker Will — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 18:23:00 GMT

Yesterday the SQL team released the Customer Technology Preview (CTP) for Service Pack 1 of SQL Server 2008.
The CTP addresses feedback received from many of you who have deployed SQL Server 2008 since our release back in August 2008.
For more details check out the team blog of the Microsoft SQL Server Release Services team.

in reply to SQL Server 2008 Service Pack 1 (SP1) CTP available

Edge is now Twittering [Edge is now Twittering]

Volker Will — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 22:26:41 GMT

Join our Twitter feed at http://twitter.com/tnedge.

in reply to Edge is now Twittering

Announcing Windows 7 beta [Announcing Windows 7 beta]

Volker Will — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 18:46:00 GMT

Wow, this year starts with some exciting news! Last night at the International CES 2009, Steve Ballmer (Microsoft CEO) announced the broad availability of the first beta release of Windows 7. Watch the keynote video and more about CES at microsoft/ces.

The beta of Windows 7 is on schedule and feature complete. Now is a great time for partners and customers to get their hands on this fantastic new platform. If you are a MSDN or TechNet subscriber you already have access to the bits. Just go to subscriber downloads, locate the Windows 7 bits under Operating Systems and off you go.

From this Friday on everyone will be able to try Windows 7 Beta. Downloads will be available at http://microsoft.com/windows7. This website also sports scenario videos providing great introductions and ideas for cool things to try with Windows 7, IE8, and Windows Live.

If you want to stay on top of things, don’t forget to monitor what is coming on TechNet Edge. Over the next days, weeks and months we will extensively cover Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.

in reply to Announcing Windows 7 beta

Feature of the Week: Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V Scripting [Feature of the Week: Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V Scripting]

Volker Will — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 17:59:00 GMT

Virtualization is on everybody's mind — and with good reason. It's a critical, sea-changing concept with wide-reaching implications. The idea that you can make pools of dynamic resources with unlimited capacity available to users anywhere at any time is extraordinary.

Because it is so vital, Microsoft^® is committed to driving the adoption of virtualization. However, unlike today's conventional wisdom, we don't view virtualization as an isolated, tactical tool. Rather, since virtualization can have a profound impact on your entire operation from the datacenter to the desktop, Microsoft believes it should be embraced as part of an enterprise-wide infrastructure strategy.

Windows^® Management Instrumentation or WMI is the essential underlying technology for managing Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V. WMI allows administrators and IT professionals full access to the Hyper-V stack.

Virtualization WMI Classes

Hyper-V does not expose a COM API for scripted management like previous products from Microsoft. Instead, Hyper-V is managed by working with WMI classes. Make sure to browse the MSDN section on the virtualization WMI classes to become familiar with the different classes and their properties.

Software Requirements

For today’s Feature Of The Week we will use VBScript and PowerShell. In order to write VBScript code, you may use PrimalScript by SAPIEN Technologies or your preferred editor Notepad. To write Windows PowerShell scriptlets, you must have at least Windows PowerShell 1.0 installed. Windows PowerShell is an optional component for Windows Server 2008 and can be installed by using the "Add a Feature" option in Server Manager. Finally, for the VB.NET and Visual C# code snippets, you can use Visual Studio Express.

Ok, assuming you have these tools installed, let’s go ahead and start scripting!

Scripting Hyper-V with VBScript

In the examples we are going to expose, we will be doing very simple Hyper-V WMI querying. In this case, the script we want to write will list all of the Virtual Machines (VMs) running in a local Windows Hyper-V installation (you can find this script in the code snippets included with this newsletter).

Here’s how you find the information using VBScript:

The first line of the script sets the variable strComputer to “.” which is used to specify the name of the server to query the WMI service (in this case, the local server). If you wanted to connect to a remote instance, then you would only need to change this to the name of the remote machine.

The second line obtains the WMI service object from the virtualization namespace. The next section gets the name of the host on which this script is running, then queries for the Msvm_ComputerSystem object that represents the host. Since ExecQuery() returns a collection, it is necessary to get the single object in the collection using a For Each loop.

After we have the host, we query for all Msvm_ComputerSystem objects associated with that host via Msvm_HostedDependency objects. These objects represent all the VMs running on that host. Finally, the foreach statement is responsible for displaying the ElementName and Caption properties of each virtual machine. Pretty straightforward, don’t you think?

Scripting Hyper-V with PowerShell

PowerShell has to be, without a doubt, one of the most useful — if not the most useful — scripting technologies on the Windows platform. Not only does it allow you to write powerful scripts but it also allows you to utilize .NET objects —something that VBScript cannot do.

One of the key features of PowerShell is how easy it is to understand. It follows noun-verb syntax, and that makes the comprehension of scripts very straightforward.

Let’s get back to our original example. If you recall, we wanted the script to output the names of the virtual machines with their installation date. The script to do this in PowerShell follows:

Just like in our previous example, the first line uses the Get-WMIObject (which can be abbreviated as gwmi) command to obtain the WMI object for the host in the virtualization namespace. A list of all Msvm_ComputerSystems is piped over to the next command. The where clause is responsible for finding the parent partition — this is analogous to the if statement we introduced in the VBScript. Once again, we make a second WMI query to find all VMs hosted on this machine. Finally, the last line is used to display the elements ElementName and Caption. An example on what the output looks like in our test machine follows:

You will find that this is a lot easier than the VBScript solution. Reading the script and understanding is also easier than the VBScript solution; you could probably understand what the script is doing if you had never read the description on what it does.

That’s it of this week’s FoW on Hyper-V scripting.

in reply to Feature of the Week: Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V Scripting

Turning a Mac Mini into a virtual Windows HPC cluster. 3 of 4 [Turning a Mac Mini into a virtual Windows HPC cluster. 3 of 4]

Volker Will — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 17:42:00 GMT

I am going prepare a Mac Mini in such a way that you will be able to install a Windows HPC cluster in virtual machines based on Hyper-V.

In the third video we are going to install the Windows Server OS in the Boot Camp partition.

Check out my blog post if you are looking for more details.

in reply to Turning a Mac Mini into a virtual Windows HPC cluster. 3 of 4

Turning a Mac Mini into a virtual Windows HPC cluster. 4 of 4 [Turning a Mac Mini into a virtual Windows HPC cluster. 4 of 4]

Volker Will — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 17:42:00 GMT

I am going prepare a Mac Mini in such a way that you will be able to install a Windows HPC cluster in virtual machines based on Hyper-V.

Once you have Windows Server 2008 running, it is just a matter of a few clicks and a reboot to get Hyper-V running.

After this final step you are ready to use Giovanni's document and prepare your Cluster-In-A-Box-Mac-Mini.

Check out my blog post if you are looking for more details.

in reply to Turning a Mac Mini into a virtual Windows HPC cluster. 4 of 4

Turning a Mac Mini into a virtual Windows HPC cluster. 1 of 4 [Turning a Mac Mini into a virtual Windows HPC cluster. 1 of 4]

Volker Will — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 17:41:00 GMT

I am going prepare a Mac Mini in such a way that you will be able to install a Windows HPC cluster in virtual machines based on Hyper-V. Once you followed the steps outlined in the videos you will be able to install a fully functional HPC cluster environment, literally a cluster-in-one-box.

The video series will not show how to install the HPC nodes. Giovanni has posted an excellent document describing how to do that. I just focus in these 4 videos on building a nice virtual host for HPC clusters.

This first video shows the reinstallation of the Mac OS.
I had to reinstall the Mac OS due to the fact that I screwed up the original installation the system shipped with. I did so much disk partitioning and repartitioning that the volume was in serious conditions and required reinstall. I also wanted to keep a minimal Mac OS installation on the hard drive. Just in case.

Check out my blog post if you are looking for more details.

in reply to Turning a Mac Mini into a virtual Windows HPC cluster. 1 of 4

Turning a Mac Mini into a virtual Windows HPC cluster. 2 of 4 [Turning a Mac Mini into a virtual Windows HPC cluster. 2 of 4]

Volker Will — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 17:41:00 GMT

I am going prepare a Mac Mini in such a way that you will be able to install a Windows HPC cluster in virtual machines based on Hyper-V.

In this second video we are going to prepare the Mac hard disk for the installation of Windows Server 2008 via Boot Camp. Boot Camp is the feature that Apple provides to build a partition on a Mac hard disk to install Windows or any other OS side-by-side with the original OS.

Check out my blog post if you are looking for more details.

in reply to Turning a Mac Mini into a virtual Windows HPC cluster. 2 of 4