Jonathan Cusson dot Com

Once again this year I will have the opportunity to present a session at Tech Days 2010 in Montreal. Microsoft allowing IT people from different regions to present at one of their event is a nice thing. It is a great experience with some challenge but that’s what makes it exciting. Last year was the first time I was presenting to an audience and believe me the stress level was high. It was a good challenge and I even if it wasn’t my best presentation(your first one can’t be) I couldn’t pass on the chance of doing it again.

This time however I will be better prepared to deliver my session. There are several steps in preparing to give a presentation in front of a large, tech savvy audience. The most important thing to remember(and it helps to lower your stress) is that people in the room are there to learn and gain knowledge on your subject, and you are in front because the organizer(Microsoft in this case) believe you know your stuff. Another important step in getting ready: Rehearsal! If you commit yourself to do a presentation or conference, you must put as much time as possible rehearsing and do it in front of people, even if they don’t have a clue what you are talking about. 

Also if you don’t feel nervous even 5 minutes before it starts, when the lights turns on you, your stress level is going to go up for sure. If you master your subject and are well prepared it will go down after the first few minutes when you see that people are listening to you. However if you want keep their attention you must be dynamic and have some short stories related to your subject to catch back their concentration. If you don’t have enough stories or examples, they will start thinking about other things and that’s what you must avoid.  Oh, after doing a presentation ask for critics from people you know who attended it and keep an open mind. You will make mistakes and to improve your skills you must build on those and any suggestion you get.

This year I will be presenting the following session on a subject you really like (and that is another keep point, you MUST be passionate about what you talk), Hyper-V:

INF307: Getting the Most out of Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V with the Integration of the System Center Suite

I was deploying System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 on clustered RMS for a client when we had a failure/corruption of the Windows cluster. After creating a new Windows cluster and reinstalling my RMS cluster I had an other issue. Agents already install were showing up in the console but the status was Not Monitored even after several hours. I tried to do a repair and also tried to do a Modify on some servers but nothing. After seeking on Internet I found a solution but it was for removing the agent on one server using command line. Unfortunatly I needed to remove over 250 agents! I noticed other were also looking for a way to remove agents on several servers so here it is.

The easiest way to remove SCOM agent from a machine is to use one of the following command line (if you are not sure which version you got, follow the procedure here):

Uninstall R2 Agent
msiexec /x {25097770-2B1F-49F6-AB9D-1C708B96262A} /qn /norestart
Uninstall SP1 Agent (slipstream only, not RTM upgrade)
msiexec /x {E7600A9C-6782-4221-984E-AB89C780DC2D} /qn /norestart

Uninstall SP1 Agent (RTM > SP1 upgrade)
msiexec /x {768DB8BD-CB3A-43F4-9A4C-BA2921D27AD3} /qn /norestart

Now if you have to remove the SCOM agent from several servers, you can use PSexec to do it. You will need the list of servers on which you want to remove the agent. Copy it in Note Pad, add the command line for each one and save the file as .cmd file. Each line should look like this:

psexec -d MachineName msiexec /x {25097770-2B1F-49F6-AB9D-1C708B96262A} /qn /norestart

or

psexec- d MachineName “msiexec /x {25097770-2B1F-49F6-AB9D-1C708B96262A} /qn /norestart”
Note: It has occcured a few time that putting ” ” gave an error.

Putting -d tells psexec not to wait for application to terminate. This is useful if you are running this for a very large number of machines. Otherwise it might take a long time to run on all servers.
Hope this helps!

A lot of people have been looking for virtualization stencil with good and usefull icons for quite a while. Well, I’ve decided to create one myself and I am now sharing it with you. This stencil is made of icons derived from Hyper-V and other virtualization images. Each image was trimmed and optimized to be used in Visio.

Hope you enjoy!

Virtualization stencil

N.B.: If you have any suggestion or would like a modified version send me a message.

Recently I had to prepare a business case on virtualization for a client and, while collecting data and writing the document, I realized that one of the key point those pushing for VMware often use is actually not suitable for production environments servers. I’m talking here about memory overcommitment which VMware has been using intensively to promote their virtualization solution. Memory overcommitment basically consists of assigning an amount of memory to several VM’s while the total amount of allocated memory is greater than what is physically available on the host system.

This is technically possible because in most case VM’s are not using the total allocated memory, thus allowing for more VM’s on a single host. However, if you are thinking of implementing High Availability and have the ability to “live migrate” VM, memory overcommitment does not make sense.  If you overcommit memory on hosts and a member of a cluster has a major problem, you won’t have enough resources available for you failed VM’s to be loaded. This alone makes memory overcommitment irrelevant for a production environment.

VMware also state the following in their Performance Tuning Best Practice for EXS server:
Make sure the host has more physical memory than the total amount of memory that will be used by ESX plus the sum of the working set sizes that will be used by all the virtual machines running at any one time.

With this in mind and considering here that we are talking about production environment in which you will want to have High Availability capability, there is no way memory overcommitment can be used as an “advantage” of VMware. In most scenarios I’ve seen on the Internet, people compare VMware with overcommitment vs. Microsoft Hyper-V, but in a real world production environment, you cannot consider these scenarios. Of course, for a development or test environment were High Availability, failover or live migration are less critical, you could consider memory overcommitment but you would still have to keep a close eye on usage.

I just gave a presentation on Live Migration at Tech Days 2009 in Montreal, in which I covered required storage options and I thought some people might want to get more details. A lot of people want to test or evaluate Live Migration and Failover Cluster but they often lack the network storage needed, say an iSCSI SAN. There is a solution available that few people have heard about but that can solve this, Windows Storage Server 2008. This version of Microsoft OS is normaly only for OEM’s selling storage appliances and solutions.

 However, if you have a Tech Net or MSDN subscription, you can download WSS08 and install it on a machine that meets the requirements. This is actualy great because it allows you to use a computer you might have that does not support Hyper-V but that has enough memory and some disk to be used. After installing Windows Storage Server 2008, you will want to install Microsoft iSCSI tools which will allow you to configure iSCSI targets on that box.

 You than have a system that you can use to test Failover Cluster, Hyper-V or other features requiring iSCSI storage. Note that in a corporate environment you will mostly use iSCSI or Fiber SAN to deploy those solutions. Also, Microsoft allow the use of Windows Storage Server 2008 for testing, training and development. You cannot use this in a production environment, the software license being only distributed to OEM partners.

I just got confirmation that I will be speaking for two sessions at Microsoft Tech Days 2009 in Montreal! I will present sessions 1 & 3 :

Session 1: From Zero to Live Migration: How to Set Up a Live Migration – Live migration is one key feature of Windows Server 2008 R2 which brings Microsoft’s dynamic datacenter vision one step closer. With live migrations, customers can move VMs from a host Hyper-V server to another without any perceived downtime. Come spend a session understanding what live migration is and how it will help you; and walk through setting up a live migration environment from start to finish..

Session 3: Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Virtualization Considerations and Best Practices - Virtualization is one of the key industry trends. Organizations are virtualizing small departmental workload to critical workload to cut cost, provide business continuity and easier management of server. In this session, learn about virtualized SQL Server deployment and some the best practices for creating a virtualized SQL Server infrastructure. We provide insights on performance tradeoffs and cover topics such as using virtualization for business continuity. We also talk about the future roadmap for SQL virtualization. Learn about all aspects of SQL Server virtualization in this session.

That’s what I call a big challenge and I like it!

Windows 7 beta is now available and I could not wait to test it. I already have 3 installations of Windows 7 for intensive testing. I have decided to put Windows 7 trough a really good test.

When Vista came out people complained that it took too much resources and that you needed a powerful computer to run it. Well, I just tested Windows 7 with a 6 years old computer and believe me the performance are surprisingly good even on old PCs. Here is the hardware setup of that machine:

As you can see the system global score is 3.0 but keep in mind this is a 6 years old computer with slower CPU, memory and video card. What is also amazing is that all the hardware was detected and Windows Update to care of installing latest drivers. I have installed Office 2007, Norton 360 version 3(beta), Photoshop CS and Nero 9. Well the performance are good enough to work on it. I am used to very good performance on my main computer (Dual Core T9300, 4GB RAM & Quadro FX 1600 512MB) and I can say that Windows 7 performs well even with older configurations. I even went to a slower configuration with a Pentium 4 2Ghz, 1GB of RAM and a very old ATI R92LE 32MB video card. (don’t ask me how I got this card, I can’t remember) With that, the system got slower but would still be enough to use for Internet navigation, Word and Excel.

The most amazing is that so far I did not get any errors or crashes on that old PC. All of those waiting for a new Windows that offers stability, compatibility and performances are served!

This post was written with Live Writer on Windows 7.

Jonathan

Windows 7 beta is here for TechNet and MSND members. For those of you that don’t have access to these, here is a link for public download. No CD Key but you don’t need it……30 days trial!

http://snipurl.com/9psn8

Jonathan

New owner of an iPhone 3G, I am agreeably surprised by the quality and performance of this cell phone. The interface is well designed, functional and easy to navigate. The quality of the screen is great with auto-adjusting brightness. Two things could however be improved; the battery capacity and a voice command feature.

There are a lot of apps available for the iPhone including Bloomberg to follow stock market in real time. Other good apps: Spend, TankBuch, Wordress, Wikipanion and Urbanspoon.