Entries tagged with feature of the week - TechNet Edge

IT Pro Feature of the Week: MMS Announcements

AdamBomb — Thu, 01 May 2008 22:48:00 GMT

It’s Thursday, and that means one thing: Time for another Feature of the Week! Since I’m on location (along with Joey, who does in fact know everyone) at MMS (Microsoft Management Summit) this week, I thought I’d just give you a roundup of the announcements Microsoft made at the event

MMS Announcements Roundup

Beta availability of Virtual Machine Manager 2008 Available immediately for download, VMM 2008 provides complete management of Virtual Server, Hyper-V and VMWare virtual machines. Also includes PRO (Performance and Resource Optimization) tips that can dynamically move and provision VMs to best use the resources available across all your virtual machine hosts.

Beta availability of Cross-Platform extensions for Operations Manager Utilizes industry standards and open source technologies like WS-Man and OpenPegasus to bring SCOM management to HP-UX, Solaris, and Redhat and SUSE Linux. Partners providing Oracle, MySQL and Apache management packs.

Release of Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) 4.0 The first major MOF release in 5 years, this release moves beyond just operations to include the whole IT lifecycle. It also includes guidance that you can start implementing in just 20 minutes, and strong community engagement and interaction.

Configuration Manager SP1 Integration with Intel’s vPro technologies for deeper hardware layer integration. Asset Inventory Services – cloud based application catalog. Available in May

Configuration Manager R2 native integration of Application Virtualization distribution and streaming. SQL Reporting services and Forefront integration. RC in June.

Links

The Newly redesigned System Center home page

The MOF homepage

MMS coverage on TechNet Edge

Windows Server 2008 - Unix Interoperability

AdamBomb — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 07:01:00 GMT

I used to bang the interoperability drum a lot – I still don’t think we do a good enough job as a company of telling the story of how well Windows plays nicely with others. Case in point: while perusing the Book of Longhorn looking for something to write about this week, I noticed just one or two brief mentions of Unix and our interoperability.

The good news is we still have a strong Unix integration story in Windows Server 2008. Read on for more details.

Unix Support in Windows Server 2008

Why do Unix Support? There are two main reasons:

· Maximize previous investments – we have interoperability with platform customers have already deployed, and administrators can leverage their existing knowledge and skills.

· Lower costs – few management tools reduces the cost of administration, management and migration

What are we actually offering? Unix support is spread across a few different roles and features in Win2k8:

· Telnet, both a server and client, for command line administration

· Services for NFS allows transfer of files between Windows and Unix machines.

· Subsystem for Unix-based Applications (SUA)allows you to compile and run Unix apps on Windows with minimal changes to the source code. It also provides 300 Unix commands, utilities, and shell scripts.

· Identity Management for Unix (IDMU) – password sync between Windows domains and many Unix flavors, and a Server for NIS that allows AD to act as a master NIS server for NIS domains.

Those all sound familiar – what’s actually new here? Windows Server 2008 is the first time we’re offering x64 versions of these tools – now with x64 SUA you can use it to port x64 or x32 bit Unix apps to x64 Windows. Most scripts should run without changes at all. This is the first time that we’re including all this functionality as part of the OS – it was previously offered via web download or on the supplemental disc in Server 2003 R2.

Get started

Services for Unix on Server 2008 site (worst site ever)

Telnet Operations Guide

Server for NFS on TechNet

SFU Team blog on MSDN

IDMU on TechNet

Windows Server 2008 - DNS enhancement nuggets

extreme — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 07:59:00 GMT

There are a number of enhancements to DNS in Windows Server 2008. There are already some lengthy articles on the features, so in this post I hope to give a quick “why you care” on each of the features and some nuggets of wisdom / insight. Here we go…

DNS on Server Core: I see this as a very useful scenario for most people who use DNS in conjunction with RODC in branch offices using the new primary read-only zone. You get all of the server core benefits such as improvements in performance, less patching, security, etc, and it can have all of the same core functionality as a regular DNS server. The easiest way to manage is remotely using the DNS MMC.

Background Zone Loading: Companies who have a large number of records in AD-integrated zones might have to wait 1+ hours to have DNS respond to queries after restarting. Now, DNS spawns off multiple threads to be able to respond to client queries right away. If the record in the zone hasn’t been loaded into memory yet and it is still in the process of loading the entire zone, it will query the node in AD, cache it in the zone, and return a response to the client.

IPv6 Support: Microsoft supports IPv6 in Server 2003, but it was a bit of a management pain and there were some other limitations. See Joseph Landies Cable guy article for the management/integration improvements made in WS08. Also, some other improvements:
· DNS servers can now send recursive queries to IPv6-only servers
· The server forwarder list can contain both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses
· DHCP clients can also register IPv6 addresses in addition to (or instead of) IPv4 addresses.
· DNS servers now support the ip6.arpa domain namespace for reverse mapping.

Make sure your critical apps are cool with receiving a response for an IPv4 address and an IPv6 address. I haven’t personally seen any app problems, but nonetheless, worth mentioning.

Primary read-only zone: This new zone type is also referred to as a “branch office zone” which is available on RODCs running DNS. The zone will make a read-only copy of all of the AD-integrated zones locally from a full DC. The easiest way to think about it is as a read-only secondary zone, but better due to the benefits of AD-integration (i.e. security, management, and you can easily replicate multiple zones).

Global Names Zone: This allows you to resolve single-label names in DNS as an aid to get rid of WINS. If you still need computer browsing, you have apps hard-coded to only use NetBIOS name resolution, or have really old clients & NT4 – sorry, you probably still need WINS. However, if you just need the single-label name support for things like custom-named internal websites or servers throughout your entire environment – this is the solution. There are quite a few things to consider with this, so I recommend reading the whitepaper listed below. A couple quick key limitations are a) this functionality only works with WS08 DNS servers and b) it also doesn’t support dynamic updates.

DNS Client changes: For Vista clients or WS08 servers, the DNS client has a few good changes:
· Periodic check to make sure the client is authenticating with a local DC (configurable via group policy). Previously, a client would only fail back to the closer DC when forced.
· Locate the nearest domain controller using the defined Active Directory sitelink costs instead of searching randomly. This is disabled by default, but good to enable when you have clients across slow site-links.
· Use link-local multicast name resolution (LLMNR), also known as multicast DNS or mDNS, to resolve names on a local network segment when a DNS server is not available.

Get Started
Windows Server 2008 & Domain Name Service: What's New (WS08 Blog by Kurt Roggen)
Changes in Functionality from Windows Server 2003 with SP1 to Windows Server 2008 (http) (doc version)
The Cable Guy DNS Enhancements in Windows Server 2008 (by Joseph Davies)
What's New in DNS in Windows Server 2008 (very short blurb on TechNet)
DNS Server GlobalNames Zone Deployment Whitepaper