Exchange 2010 Upgrade Plans – Poll Results

Interesting article by Paul Robichaux over here on Windows IT Pro as he ponders a similar question I’ve been hearing a lot lately.

If I’m on Exchange 2003, do I upgrade to Exchange 2007 and then Exchange 2010 – or do I wait and go straight to Exchange 2010?

poll results here:

As always, this stuff (polls/surveys/etc) is never scientific and it could be as little as 100 people who responded to this, however the results are worth considering – especially if your company has products that are designed to work with Exchange 2007 today.  Pretty soon your customers might start knocking on your door for the 2010 versions.

The Hyper-V Blue Screen Video Drama

Act 1.  The Posting

VMware employee posts a video of a bluescreen in a Hyper-V VM which takes down the whole physical box.

It was available here.

Act 2.  The Revolt

The VM community rises up and demand facts.  Read comments here.

Microsoft gives some facts.

Video largely discredited as FUD without much detail.

Scott Drummunds apologizes.

Microsoft piles on: here, here and here.

Act 3.  The Aftermath

Bruce Herndon from VMware posts detailed results from the testing. Summary here. Very interesting.  Maybe it wasn’t FUD?   How will the saga end?

Oh, and here’s a Microsoft “myth-busting video“.

I’d say we’re starting to see the beginnings of a not-so-peaceful co-existence.   These FUD battles are only part of a larger war that could take place over the next 5 – 10 years.   No one knows where things will end up, but one thing that we can be sure of, it sure is fun to watch!

[Update June 15th 2009: Microsoft cannot get the parent partition to crash, however the claim of 750,000 downloads and fastest growth hypervisor could be seen as hyperbole - does that include downloads suggested through Windows Update?]

Please take my 4 question, anonymous survey.

Best Practices for Backing Up SharePoint 2007

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is hard to backup.

You have a lot of moving parts:

• Multiple servers with different roles
• Various SQL databases (content, SSP, config etc)
• Index FS
• IIS customizations, web parts
• Logical architecture doesn’t translate into physical components

Although Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 does offer some native tools for backup and recovery (central admin, stsadm, recycle bin), each of these tools has major limitations.   Let’s look at each one:

The first is backup and restore through the Central Administration site:

Using this tool, a backup can be performed at various levels, the highest level being the entire SharePoint farm and the lowest level being an entire content database. It should be noted that this tool does not offer a great deal of granularity and does not provide coverage at the site, subsite, or item level.

Besides only providing granularity to the content database level, one serious shortcoming with this tool is that it does not natively contain any scheduling options. Thus an administrator will need to manually kickoff the backup processes each time it needs to be run or write a customized program to perform backups.

It should also be noted that this backup tool is not very robust. Errors or corruption in the backup file will cause the restore process to fail. Thus, it is good practice to backup the backup files and to consider a more frequent backup schedule.

Another option for advanced users is the stsadm command line tools:

Just like the Central Administration backups, this offers limited granularity.  These tools are cumbersome and manual command-line processes. While they are useful for performing various administrator tasks by a skilled administrator, they do not provide a true backup solution.  One other point about Stsadm is that a restore of the config database (which has many farm setting and a lot configuration data) is not supported with stsadm – VSS based solutions are needed.

An option for single item recoveries is the Recycle Bin:

The Recycle bin does a nice job of single item capture, but one minor issue with the Recycle Bin solution is that it does not allow any granularity when it comes to restore options.

If a user deletes an entire document library, but only a single document needs to be restored, the entire document library must be restored. An additional issue, and the reason why the Recycle Bin is not considered a true backup solution, is that it only captures deletion events. Errors, data corruption, or disaster events are still possible. These problems can occur at the entire farm level or down to the individual item level, and they will not be covered by Recycle Bin.

To address this, robust backup is required, and this backup needs to provide granular coverage down to the individual item level.

I’d recommend checking out the EMC Networker and the Microsoft Module which covers SharePoint, Exchange, SQL, DPM in physical and virtual environments.   Here’s the Networker Microsoft Module home page and here’s a whitepaper on SharePoint protection with Networker.

Free SharePoint Webinar: From Chaos to Success

On June 17th, Windows IT Pro magazine is hosting a free-for-you technical webinar called “SharePoint: From Chaos to Success” and EMC is a participating sponsor. Specifically, I will be giving a presentation called Top Ten Considerations for Large SharePoint Farms (at 12:30EST).

In 45 minutes, I will attempt to cover all aspects of the farm including networking, databases, web front ends, and give you specific insights on features that have shown to influence clear, real-world benefits.  Yikes.  But it’s not all about me, we got the data from various places:  a) our largest customers, b) from prominent experts in the field at other companies, and c) from our own Proven Solutions lab testing.

The best part about these events is the live Q+A, I will be joined by my colleagues Eyal Sharon and James Baldwin from the Proven Solutions team who really are the minds and hands behind what I will be presenting.

I promised them some tough questions, so please don’t let me down.  Send this to your smartest SharePoint pals and invite them to see if they can Stump these Chumps

We’ll also be giving away IoMega drives as part of the virtual conference, so on June 17th please check out our booth for more on that.

And for something really different, here is the Top Ten List in advance of the actual event.  I figure if you have this prior to the event, you might be able to research a bit and come to the event with better questions…

Prove It!

Every day a company is fooled by false advertising and claims that have no basis in reality.   Although EMC gets a fair share of knocks for being rough on our competitors, we’re equally rough on the applications and hardware platforms that we have to support.

Most everyone knows about EMC’s E-Lab

EMC E-Lab conducts the industry’s most rigorous interoperability testing, spanning every major platform and operating system. In the process, EMC E-Lab creates a deep pool of knowledge about complete environments as well as about every individual component you might use.  Most importantly, we share that knowledge with you so you can keep your environment operating safely and efficiently, regardless of your vendor mix  (this text lifted from our E-Lab website).

What many people don’t know about is EMC’s Proven Solutions

E-Lab basically stops at the OS.  Everything from the storage device up to the operating system and everything in between (HBA, switches, virtualization, and volume managers) is fulled covered by this excellent team.  No other storage vendors go that deep.

Then…  awhile back, someone had the idea that we needed to move our focus up a level and get serious about application testing.  Customers were demanding an application-centric view.  Customers wanted to see if 60,000 users could fit on a single CLARiiON.  They wanted to see how fast 20TB of Exchange data could be offloaded from a storage array to a disk library.  They also wanted to see it all together – what happens if I am replicating and archiving and cloning my data all at the same time?

The purpose of the group is to push the thresholds of the application and make sure we understand where the limits are – within the product or within our own products.  This has helped us to size storage layouts more effectively, understand bandwidth requirements, and how to manage and load balance a very large complex environment.  In some cases, we put Exchange, SQL, and SharePoint all in the same array and run heavy duty workloads for 24 hours to see what we can learn.    Needless to say, we end up breaking things a lot!

Check out this fun video that was produced in order to showcase Proven Solutions and how they can be used.   or click here.  Chris, the lab guy in the video, has a great sense of humor and sits right next to me in the office.  My favorite part is at 1:58 where he is bouncing back and forth between monitors with the keyboard tapping non-stop.  Fun stuff!

Symantec’s GRT = not so GReaT for Exchange

The tech industry is filled with “analysts” who will receive a buck and write exactly what a vendors asks of them.

In this installment, Symantec went to the “Tolly Group” and got them to blast EMC’s Networker for being slower than Symantec’s new feature for backing up and extracting single mail items, called GRT for short.   In their graphical depictions, they show how apples compare to watermelons.

It leaves one to wonder how much Symantec spent on that piece of marketing, and time will tell if users believe those claims. 

While Symantec offers what appears to be an interesting way to do a full backup and a brick level backup in one step,  this approach is unsupported by Microsoft.  Hmmmm, support is pretty important when you are talking about backups of a mission critical application, yes?

EMC and the Networker team do not recommend brick level backups, which are long, painful, direct MAPI scans and pulls.  Instead, they recommend using the Recovery Storage Group, as the Microsoft supported and recommended way to achieve single item restores with newer versions of Exchange such as Exchange 2007.   The Microsoft Exchange team in general is moving away from streaming backups altogether, so VSS (Volume ShadowCopy Services) and RSG recoveries are really the direction most companies will be taking – and the EMC NetWorker mailbox/message recovery solution does not have any of the long list of limitations offered in the Symantec solution.

And a really, really simple way to handle those quick “I need a piece of email back” requests is to turn up Deleted Items Retention to a larger amount.  This gives the user the ability to find their own mails that may have accidentally deleted without any administrator time lost.

A few last data points worth mentioning:

The Symantec GRT Solution

• Exchange GRT Recoveries are only is valid for backups to disk folders.
• Exchange GRT Recoveries are a single, TWO PASS backup. Granular backups/recoveries take longer to allow NetBackup or Backup Exec to index mailbox/public folder information
• Support for Exchange Full Backup only
• Microsoft Services for NFS must be installed on the Exchange server

The EMC NetWorker Solution

• Follows the best practices of the Microsoft Exchange Team for mailbox and message recoveries
• Allows mailbox and message recoveries from backups made to disk, tape or VTL
• Supports mailbox and message recoveries from source-based and target deduplication backups
• Can recover a large Exchange mailbox from the RSG in less than 8 minutes and an Exchange mail message from RSG in less than a minute

Windows 7 Release Dates Set

Microsoft has confirmed the Release to Manufacturing (RTM) (aka general availability) date for Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 as October 22, 2009.  RTM/GA code will be delivered to partners and TechNet/MSDN subscribers at the end of July.

According to an informal survey on ZDNet, this could mean the beginning of a delay period for many new PC purchasers.

Here’s a snippet and poll results from the ZDNet article:

__________________________________________

“Now, this presents anyone thinking about buying a new PC with a dilemma. Do they buy a PC now and skip 7 until they buy another? Buy a PC now and upgrade it when 7 is released? Wait until the tech guarantee is on offer, buy a PC with Vista on it and upgrade when the OEM delivers the upgrade? Or do they just wait for a PC with 7 pre-loaded on it? What would you do?”

• Wait until you can pick up a PC with 7 pre-loaded (54%)
• Wait until the tech guarantee is on offer, upgrade when 7 is available (27%)
• Buy the PC now with Vista on it, upgrade to 7 when it’s available (5%)

__________________________________________

It’s apparent from this data that, in general, people don’t like upgrades (54%) compared to those that are comfortable doing the upgrade (32%) so they may delay their purchases until the PC’s pre-loaded with the fresh OS is available (October).

Could this mean trouble for Microsoft?

Probably not.  First of all, not many people who go to buy a laptop online or at the local tech superstore are going to be aware of these dates (unlike us early information seekers).  Also Microsoft is obviously a large company with a large array of revenue streams, so that a slight downward turn in Vista revenues might only be a short blip on the radar.

I am guessing Windows 7 is going to be a huge hit, with the overwhelming majority of users who’ve tried the OS providing very positive reviews.  Unlike Vista, it’s small and fast enough to be loaded onto netbooks.  Early tablet users (shout out to Ryan!) are enjoying the enhanced multitouch capabilities.  Native VHD and boot from VHD support will be huge, once people understand it. Built-in Wireless anywhere will allow you to have mobile-phone like access to the web from anywhere.  And Wordpad.  Wordpad looks nicer.

Will Microsoft’s Bing be a Google Killer?

Probably not. Old habits are hard to break.

But I do like this video preview of Microsoft’s NEW search engine which should be announced sometime today.  It was formerly code-named Kumo (I got several hits from kumo.com spiders) and has been rebranded to have a slightly goofier, monosyllabic name – Bing.

In the 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, Al Ries and Jack Trout talk to us about the Law of Leadership and how it’s so hard for a company to carve out mindshare when they are second to a market (such as NetApp to EMC). The way to break this down is through additional focus and through expansion of categories.  An example from the book was delivery services.  UPS was one upped by FedEx when they started offering overnight.  Then DHL comes along and drives the “international delivery” message home…   In the storage space, NetApp went hard for NAS and a mostly single-appliance and they carved out a nice little niche for themselves.

Microsoft’s Bing appears to have the tools to do something really different here, but unfortunately because we’re talking about software/web services as opposed to hardware, it will be easy for Google to play me too as Microsoft wins a battle here or there.  Google is the recognized leader, and they have achieved the invincible “common term” status.  Instead of searching the web for stuff – you ‘Google’ it.

But… what Microsoft appears to have done (which is hard to quickly replicate) is to build up a nice set of partners with companies on the web who are known for given high-quality authoritative content in field like electronics, medical advice, and making travel plans. They are also  compensating them in a big way, I’d imagine.   Google let’s everyone fight it out – whether you are CNET or Joe’s Tech Gadget Review Site – you are treated equally as a paying customer.  As time goes on and as people desire more trustworthy content, I can imagine Microsoft’s approach will begin to gain some popularity.

On the video they show a great feature that aims to tell you when a particular airfare is going to be the lowest and I could imagine using that today.  But I also wouldn’t be surprised if someone told me that Google is already doing this…

How to Build an Efficient Application Infrastructure through Virtualization

I couldn’t figure out how to embed this into my blog, but this is a great, short video which shows how EMC is working with Microsoft to virtualize applications like Exchange, SQL, and SharePoint.  It’s only ten minutes long and showcases one of EMC’s great technologists, Brian Martin, as he speaks with Microsoft’s Jim Schwartz.

Conference Battle Royale: TechEd versus EMC World versus NetAppCon

As one of the few people at EMC who attended both TechEd 2009 in Los Angeles as well as EMC World 2009 in Orlando, I thought I had a unique perspective that I should write about.  My information about the NetApp Conference (NetAppCon) is all based on second-hand knowledge, so hopefully I wasn’t misled.

Let’s compare TechEd 2009 vs EMC World 2009 vs NetApp Conference 2009:

Weather – TechEd 2009 LA

The weather in LA was nice.  Not too hot, not too cold – just right for comfortable jeans/shirt.   The weather in Orlando for EMC World was horrible – it rained just about every single day.   TechEd wins this one.

The weather at NetAppCon was just plain cold (so I hear).

Location – EMC World 2009 Orlando

Orlando, although somewhat lacking in culture and “realness,” seems to be tailor-made for conferences. There’s lots to do. My hotel was a replica of a Venetian village. Unlimited themed bars and party spots – Blue Martini, Margaritaville, etc…  Not as overwhelming and damaging on the wallet as conference standard Vegas would be.   LA (TechEd) seems a little strange for a conference and it seemed like when the show ended, the fun mostly stopped and although my hotel was close, I wouldn’t dare walk home even if I was with the better-equipped gang. My hotel in LA was pretty weak (my fault for not fully researching) and I’ve joked with some friends that there seemed to be an odd stain the shape of a mouse imprinted on the shower floor (it was actually chipped porcelain).  Next years locations will be a debate for another time – New Orleans (TechEd) versus Boston (EMC World).

I heard (from other sources) that this year’s NetApp conference was very hard to locate on a map.

Session Content – EMC World 2009

Although TechEd 2009 gave some great content around areas I’m interested in such as Exchange 2010 and SharePoint, I found the session content to be somewhat underwhelming.  A few sessions stood out, but considering the ease of which Microsoft related VHDs or ISO files can now be downloaded from the web, I didn’t see much information that was brand new or “ahh ha” type content.   I talked to a few attendees candidly about their impressions of EMC World, and I got a few “not much new stuff” but I also got quite a few people that supported my claim that in the storage infrastructure business you have to go to a show to see the breadth of what is available – from IoMega drives to Celerra to CX to V-Max – it’s hard to download and play with this stuff (unless you’re grabbing Virtual Storage Appliances).

I heard NetAppCon didn’t offer any new content at all.

Hands-On Opportunities – TechEd 2009

Microsoft, with their tight relationships with server vendors, is able to place computers everywhere for as much hands-on as you could ever want.  You could install just about anything and configure just about anything you want in parallel to the sessions.  So you could attend a session on a product like Microsoft CRM, and then go try to install it.  This is nice.  EMC continues to raise the bar at EMC World for hands-on labs, but the labs are fit into the same slots as the lecture sessions, which sometimes don’t allow as much flexibility as some would like in taking their own pathway through a conference. Most often, people come to conferences with a fairly simple set of desires – learn something about X set of features, and learn how to install and configure Y set of features for backup, performance, DR, etc.

From what I heard, the NetApp conference area didn’t offer any hands-on with their latest technologies.  Hmmm.

Food and Catering – TechEd 2009

It’s hard as hell to feed thousands of people, but I thought Microsoft did a slightly better job pushing people through lines and feeding people at wider breakfast and lunch intervals.  The food quality was basically the same.  I liked EMC’s Baby Back Ribs on Tuesday, and the food options during the Gin Blossoms show were also excellent if you could handle the lines.   I liked those chocolate things on the stick that reminded me of Ring Dings.  Microsoft had a make-your-own burrito bar one day – wonder if they used local produce?  Another plus for TechEd is that soda jerks like myself could always get a Diet Coke anywhere, anytime – day or night.  They usually had fresh cookies and ice cream each day…  Continuous Diet Coke Availability plus daily ice-cream and cookies is a major plus for folks in this industry.  Our drugs are sugar and caffeine.

On NetApp, my inside connection told me that that he couldn’t find the dining hall, so he ended up having to bring his own lunch everyday…

Night Time Options – EMC World 2009

Microsoft definitely invested heavily in the soda and snacks factor over entertainment.  The Jam on IT event was somewhat weak and although I had a very tasty corn dog (haven’t had one of those in a long while), the feel of the event was very tame.  The main act of the night was Speaker Idol, where technical presenters competed for the judges in front of a crowd.  Sorry, learning sysinternals tips and tricks isn’t really my idea of a fun night out.  As a drummer I look forward to the Jam Sessions each year, and there was a podcaster-guy who cut about 40 minutes into the 2 hours allotted to the jam sessions. At least I got to jam to, “Gimme One Reason” by Tracy Chapman.  Here’s me playing drums last year (check out the great sax player and try to block out the guy who needs More Cowbell).

EMC decided to continue it’s tradition of live music acts (2008 Goo Goo Dolls, 2009 Gin Blossoms).  The more cynical folks commented that these are bargain basement bands that had their heyday years ago. But the more positive among us would say the Gin Blossoms were a great live musical show – they kept the crowd entertained and energized, they had more hits than I remember, they were really good and if you got close enough, they sounded fantastic.

Here’s what the Twitterers said the night of the show:

• Spartacus073: Just got back from #emcworld. Gin Blossoms and Blinky cups were cool. Very cool to see so many people from all over the world
• BCerInToronto: Gin Blossoms were great, and covered Rocketman during the encore. Sweet show, thanks #emcworld. Work begins tomorrow, bright and early.
• cgunst: Gin Blossoms just started concert at #emcworld and they’re awesome! Anywhere you go…I’ll follow you down…
• rabbitofdeath: Ooh! THAT is who the gin blossoms are!! #emcworld
• edsai: Meeting up with all cool kids at #emcworld with the gin blossoms jamming out.
• stu: 12seconds – Gin Blossoms get help from @storageanarchy and @LenDevanna #emcworld http://tiny12.tv/3F432
• NetAppDidn’tHaveAConferenceThisYear – sounds totally lame!
  

New Media Engagement

EMC pulled out all the stops this year and got huge props from those in the blogosphere and from the Twitterati – all commending folks like Len Devanna on a job well done in terms of execution, partnership, perks, and engagement.  I was very psyched to be a part of this exclusive club (and the constant hi-test coffee didn’t hurt either).  I had great conversations with folks who care about technology, their jobs, and their careers.  What a great thing.

EMC World 2009 Wins It.

Overall, I’d say it’s tough to be objective as EMC is my employer, but I’d without a doubt the combination of great technical content, great presentation of technical capabilities, combined with specialized treatment for bloggers/twitterati and a wide range of nighttime activities made for a better overall experience than TechEd 2009 this year.

(Disclaimer: There was some sarcasm in here… If you didn’t know, NetApp didn’t have a conference this year.  Some will say it’s the economy, but I think it goes to show their sentiment about 1. taking care of their customers and their employees, 2. their confidence in their technologies, and 3. their place in the market.)