Category Archives: Technology
Why you need regular backup of your computer
Backup your computer! This is something everybody know but most often you neglect or forget to take car of it. Last Tuesday I got a call from my dad saying that he had a black screen with a blinking white line. He had already tried rebooting and verified that no external drive was connected. Twenty minutes later I was at my parents house and the diagnostic was simple: hard drive failure.
For a lot of people this could result in the complete lost of documents, music and tones of pictures. Worst, if you are a freelancer or working from home you could be put out off business, but why? Microsoft includes a backup and restore tool with Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7. This tool works well, it’s FREE and takes little time to setup. Even without using this tool, making a copy of your files can be as simple as drag and drop on a USB drive.
Microsoft backup and restore tool allows you to do a complete backup of your computer or select specific folders. You can than schedule it to run, at least WEEKLY!!! That way if the worst happen you only lose a few days of data, not years and Microsoft tool is designed to do a full backup and only backup modified or added content on subsequent run. So, all you need to protect your computer is a few minutes to setup your backup and a USB or eSATA external drive. AT 100$ for 1TB drive there’s no reason why you can’t buy one.
Here’s a video showing how Microsoft Windows 7 Backup and Restore works.
As for my parents, I had already configured Microsoft backup and restore on their Windows 7 PC. I did have to buy a new drive and reinstall all their software but since they have a backup, nothing is lost and all that’s left is to restore on the newly installed system.
So, what are you waiting for? Take a few minutes and save yourself the lost of work and souvenirs!
Visio Stencils for IT Pros
Most IT Pros often find themselves looking for some Visio stencils and most time you end up not finding what you want or downloading an outdated stencil. Well, your pain is over because Visio stencils for Microsoft, VMware, Citrix, Dell and others are all here!
If you are looking for a specific stencil and are having hard time to find it, contact me and I might be able to help as I have over 150 IT related stencils.
Microsoft Office Documents Editing on iPhone
A lot of people are owners of an iPhone theise days with all the apps available. However, those of you using there iPhone for work and looking for a good application to view and most importantly edit Microsoft Office documents it hasn’t been easy. Like most people I’ve tried some free apps but none of them really worked well and some were just bad. So I did some research to find out which paid application could be worth a few dollars.
Well, I’ve found it and it work great. Documents To Go by DataViz of course allows you to view but most crucial, to easly and effeciently edit Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint files, and it also serves as a viewer for PDF, iWork and other file types. Plus, you are able to sync documents and folders between your PC and iPhone and also connect to cloud storage services such as DropBox or Google Docs. I wont go through all features of this great app but I can say that it works and it is worth the money. And, it works for almost all smartphone platforms.
Tech Days 2010 in Montreal
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:
Hyper-V and System Center are the ideal combination for your environment. Come learn best practices and lessons learned from hundreds of real-world implementations where Hyper-V R2 and the System Center suite of products (Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2, Configuration Manager 2007 R2, Operations Manager 2007 R2, Data Protection Manager 2007) successfully complement one another. You will learn how and when Live Migrations are used in various scenarios compared to built-in failover technologies like Exchange Server 2010 DAGs or SQL mirroring, how Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 supplements Hyper-V implementations, how automation on Operations Manager assist in 24x7x365 datacenter scenarios, and how Configuration Manager helps with compliance-level consistency in security and management.
A special tanks to Rick Claus from Microsoft who gave me the chance for my first presentation and has help me to become a better presenter.
#TechDays_CA, #TechDays
Uninstall SCOM Agent the easy way
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!
Virtualization Stencil
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!
N.B.: If you have any suggestion or would like a modified version send me a message.
Memory overcommitment, not for production servers.
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.
Windows Storage Server 2008
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.
Dell XPS 8000 – A good system to build a server.
A lot of people want to build themself a server at home for testing or learning. There is a lot of choice out there to fit any need or budget but most of us are looking for a PC with enough power to run apps and virtualization. You could always buy youself a real server for 5000$+ or build a system but if you are like me, you want a box ready for use for a good price. So, I was looking for a new system to build a Windows 2008 R2 machine with Hyper-V and I came across a system by Dell that really gives you a lot for your money. So, I got this new Dell XPS 8000 with Intel i7-860(a Quad Cord with HT giving 8 logical processors) which support virtualization, Intel® Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O and 8GB of RAM for under 1000$. Forget about the i7-920, benchmarks show that you won’t get better performance and it’s not as fast. One key feature that I was looking for and that works well on the XPS 8000 is the RAID support. The first thing I did was to had 2 disks in RAID-0, having an other drive for the OS and some data.
As soon as I got the system, I installed Windows 2008 Server R2 and like Windows 7 the installation is very fast. All my devices were recognized and drivers had been installed. Than, I added the Hyper-V role and some features. From that point on I was ready to create and deploy new VM’s but there is an application that I wouldn’t work without, System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2. If you want to learn more about it, you can go on the official site or come and see some very good people present it to you at Microsoft Tech Days 2009 in Montreal or one of the other city near you.
After setting up everything, I now have 7 VM running on 8GB of RAM. Make sure you put your VM’s on a different physical disk and not on the same you use for the OS. You will get better I/O performance and since HDD are cheap, buy 2 drive to do some RAID. If you have another system with Hyper-V that’s where SCVMM will make your life easier. You can manage all your hosts and you can even manage VMware and convert them to Hyper-V VM’s.
