Infrastructure Optimization

We are extremely  pleased and honored that Microsoft has recognized Getronics work and continued support in fiscal year 2008.

Specifically for our USA team, we were selected as a finalist in the category of   Advanced Infrastructure Solutions, Systems Management (LiveID required) for our Getronics Virtualization Services : Enabling adoption and management of virtualization technologies in enterprise organizations.

For years, we have been doing a lot of work with SoftGrid which turned into MDOP’s Application Virtualization and is now called App-V, but most recently also with Virtual Server, SCVMM, Hyper-V… Lots of fun and potential in this area!

At the  global level, Microsoft has awarded us the 2008 Partner of the Year for Advanced Infrastructure Solutions, Windows Desktop Deployment (LiveID required.)

Getronics was recognized for superior technology and innovation in Advanced Infrastructure Solutions, Windows Desktop Deployment. The global Windows Desktop Deployment Partner of the Year award honours partners with proven expertise in helping our clients migrate to a Windows Vista Optimized Desktop. This award recognizes the partner that has successfully deployed Microsoft technologies with Windows Vista to help organisations more efficiently and cost-effectively deploy and manage their desktop assets. We were chosen from a pool of more than 2,000 entrants worldwide, and over 650,000 partners.

Getronics Australia was also a finalist in the Information Worker Solutions category.

Congratulations to our colleagues, friend and most importantly, our clients!

Last week we had the pleasure of spending time with Shanen Boettcher, General Manager of Windows Product Management for the enterprise at the Redmond stop of his week-long press tour.. It was great to see first hand how much has MDOP plays a strategic role in the Microsoft’s desktop stack…

1. He told the press that Microsoft has sold over 6.5 million licenses of MDOP to date, making it the fastest-selling volume licensing product in Microsoft history.
   –> A lot of these will be deployed in the next 12-months which is GREAT news for most of us
2. He also told that officially, Microsoft had completed its acquisition of Kidaro, an Israeli-based startup that allows management of virtual machines and many other virtualization features much-much user friendly. Furthermore the product will be included in the MDOP offering, with the name “Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization” . This is fantastic news as it increases the value of MDOP tremendously. We are very exited about seeing the product come to market in the early 2009.
3. We will make a special posting on the Kidaro technology, but to give you an idea:
   during the demo we saw a scenario in which IE6 launched inside a XP-Virtual PC (transparent to the user) based on a specific URL being typed on IE7 - Very useful in application compatability challenges –

Shanen’s full article can be found at: Windows Vista News Blog

Exciting times coming ahead! - Look forward to the rest of 2008 and 2009.

PS - I noticed that we got a quoted by Ina Fried on “Beyond Binary / CNET “ blog … She noted:

I am sure we will be exploring this theme in the near future… Stay tuned!

For the company, such personally owned laptops can save on support costs and serve as a retention tools for Generation Y-ers, said Lee Nicholls, global solutions director for IT consultant Getronics.

“They have a really high expectation of what they want to work with,” Nicholls said. “They want a degree of flexibility.”

Seen on The Deployment Guys: An excellent video containing a walkthrough on how to set up SCCM 2007 OS Deployment and integrating Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2008.

Download Video Here (51.28 MB)

Great kick-start for those of you just getting into this.

From the Awesome Ideas Department, Brian Tucker has raised the idea of an SCCM Ranger training event that would encourage a team-based deep-dive into the management software, and would do so in a casual setting - a house on a beach, for example, rather than YACRIAMH (yet another conference room in a mediocre hotel.)

While this might conjure visions of a ServerNerd reality show, the less-sarcastic part of me loves this idea. Get a bunch of smart people together, and discuss advanced scenarios for SCCM configuration and real world applications for complex architectures. Do it with pizza, beer and s’mores. Provide a Microsoft “title” - “SCCM Ranger” or something less evocative of a merit badge, and make the training pass/fail.

What do you think? Is this a good idea? Does it sound better than sitting in a training room looking at another PowerPoint deck? I sure think it does.

Brian Tucker’s SCCM 2007 Ranger Training Class poll

And yes, Brian, 249 of us are probably lazy or busy, but I still think your idea rocks!

Any of you that read Ben Hunter’s blog, have probably noticed that the posts have been a little light as of late. Well, he decided to give it up. However, never fear: in the spirit of “Ben Hunter is dead! Long live Ben Hunter!” he’s combined efforts with several other Microsoft Deployment folks, and has created an aggregate blog called:

The Deployment Guys

From a Ben Hunter-penned entry called “What is The Deployment Guys”:

“The Deployment Guys” is a blog focused on deployment.

“The Deployment Guys” is a combined effort.

There many different blogs out there with useful deployment information. This is great but it can be difficult to keep track of them all, there must be a better way.

With this in mind we have decided to combine out deployment related blogs into one blog, this blog!

But that is not all…. We have also managed to convince a number of deployment gurus from within Microsoft Services that do not currently have blogs to contribute.  These are guys that have great information to contribute and will really add something to the blog.

So look out for posts from Richard Smith, Daniel Oxley and Ben Hunter as well as a host of others. We have a lot planned.

We have high hopes for this blog hopefully you will find it useful as well.

This post was contributed by Ben Hunter a consultant with Microsoft Services New Zealand.

Adios and welcome back, Ben! We’ll be watching!

Is your company struggling with its migration plan to move to Microsoft Vista or Windows Server 2008? Does your IT Staff dread the thought of having to deploy new hardware in your enterprise environment? Do you still have technicians that run around with a handful of CD’s to deploy a new PC in a remote location? Do you have a separate image for every hardware platform in your environment? If an employee PC hard drive crashes, does it take more than 2 hours for your IT department to redeploy their system? Is your company still running Windows 2000 or maybe better yet, NT 4.0?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, don’t be embarrassed; because the truth is most companies today (both large and small) still struggle to migrate from one Operating System to the next.

At the heart of the issue for most companies is an ineffective strategy to rapidly create, maintain, and deploy images that will meet the needs of their entire enterprise as a whole. It is a well known fact that maintaining up-to-date images is an expensive, time-consuming problem in most large enterprises.

Despite the fact that today’s PC’s are blazingly fast and can practically jump through hoops, most companies ‘approach to Image Management is very antiquated. Typically, the process is very manual and difficult, at best, to keep up with today’s refresh cycles for hardware and software changes in the enterprise.

The nightmare for most IT departments begins because they work in heterogeneous environments where there are multiple PC and Server platforms from different vendors with unique hardware specifications. Secondly, from marketing, to finance, to human resources, each department and individual user has distinct application requirements. To further complicate issues, the great divide between geographical regions and their language requirements makes it increasingly impossible to develop, test, and maintain images across the enterprise. Most companies deal with this challenge by creating multiple images that eventually become outdated very quickly and a nightmare to update in a timely manner.

The Challenge

What if, like magic, you could totally automate the creation of your image and what if, you could condense the dozen or so images floating around your enterprise down to a single image that was capable of being applied to any hardware platform in your environment.

Device drivers and hardware dependent software tools could load independently of each other and do it dynamically as the image loads. And what if this was a highly compressed image that could be streamed across the network to multiple machines simultaneously and would be finished loading by time you came back from your lunch break.?

Better yet, what if you didn’t have to use expensive third-party software to accomplish all of this? Sound too good to be true? Could this be imaging nirvana?

The Solution

The reality is that there are IT shops that are experiencing this state of utopia and are successfully deploying PC’s and Servers throughout their environment with just a few mouse clicks.

You are wondering by now, how is this possible? Folks, the reality is, I have worked on several such projects in the past and customers are finding out that in most cases they already have the tools that they need to get out of the dark ages when it comes to image consolidation.

So here’s the deal, there is a global giant out there in the market place called Microsoft and over 95% of all companies (both small and large) use their software products (from the Client, to Messaging, to Management) to run their business.

Moreover, most companies using Microsoft software have made a huge investment in software licensing agreements for such products as XP, Vista, Server products, SMS, SQL, MOM, etc. and the list goes on.

The problem is that most of these companies find out that a lot of these products sit on the shelf and are underutilized for the amount of money that they have spent on it.

Over the past few years, Microsoft has spent a lot of time and effort in creating and developing what they call “Solution Accelerators”. These solutions are designed to help customers deal with point specific problems and to help them realize and exploit the capabilities of their existing software and infrastructure.

One such example is the Microsoft Deployment solution accelerator, whose sole focus in life is to provide the tools and guidance for rapid image consolidation and deployment.

Formerly known as BDD (Business Desktop Deployment), Microsoft Deployment is now in its fourth generation and has really come full circle as a solution that helps customers fill in the gaps to realizing and unlocking the potential of their infrastructure that they are already heavily invested in.

The latest name change signifies the fact the product has been extended beyond the desktop and is now capable of rapid server imaging as well.

Is this cool stuff or what? Imagine a world where, with a few mouse clicks, you can redeploy a client machine and deploy a dozen or so blade servers all at the same time.

And the best of all: this is a free download from Microsoft.

So I guess if my story has a moral, it would be this: you could quite possibly already have all of the ingredients in your lab to begin transforming the way you develop and deploy images in your environment.

If you haven’t already heard of it, you will: The Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack, or MDOP for short, is an add-on subscription for customers with Microsoft Software Assurance (SA) coverage for their Windows desktops.

The five core components of MDOP are SoftGrid Application Virtualization, System Center Desktop Error Monitoring, Asset Inventory Service, Diagnostics and Recovery Toolset, and Advanced Group Policy Management.

There’s a lot of great stuff in MDOP, but the application virtualization and error/diagnostics/recovery tools really caught my eye.

Application Virtualization with SoftGrid

Microsoft Application Virtualization (as you know from reading this blog, the word “SoftGrid” is disappearing, sadly!) transforms applications into virtualized network-available services that are not installed on user desktops or laptops, but are instead delivered as a service. This allows you to centralize your applications and the management of those applications. We’ve looked at (we think) all of the application virtualization products out there, and AppVirt gets it right.

As opposed to the ways of traditional Electronic Software Distribution (ESD), when users need new applications, you simply add those users to the list of users authorized for those applications, and voila, the application icon appears on their desktop. There is no installation, and no desktop visit required. None! This feature alone has sold more copies of MDOP than I can count.

This technology also makes having roaming users and disaster recovery easier with applications being centrally managed and delivered since the applications are tied to the user’s logon and not the machine.

Another really unique use is when new versions of an application need to be tested side-by-side with the previous version(s) of the application. Each version is isolated from the other in their own virtual “bubble,” so there’s no conflict and you can quickly see the results without the need to use different machines or load/unload different versions. I could have used this back in my application development days.

Decreased PC Sick Days with MDOP

We’ve all had the experience of encountering a PC that is either failing, generating an error (or the dreaded “unknown error” – my personal favorite!), or, if you’re having a really super day, won’t even boot.

System Center Desktop Error Monitoring (DEM) is one of the unsung heroes of MDOP. It provides an insight into application and operating systems issues.

You know the routine: many times if a PC “hangs” or at least stops responding, your users will merely turn the power off and re-boot the machine. Problem solved for today, but what about tomorrow? Will this error happen again? Will this error spread and begin to affect your other users? Will your users throw up their hands and say ”Nothing Changed! I Swear!” or “I don’t know why it’s hanging! But I just flip the power switch and it works again!”

Enter System Center Desktop Error Monitoring.

DEM provides an agentless way to track these events, identify their frequency, and provide crash details and automated responses to a centralized console that you control. This gives you a better clue as to what’s been going on and where to look in the PC, without relying on silent or unreliable user reports.

Having this head-start is so much better than just a short time ago (perhaps last week for some of you?) when you needed to look at everything on a sick PC just to try to figure out where to start diagnosing the real problem. Seriously: I’m sure you can imagine how the time savings from not having to do this is worth it. On top of this, DEM arms you with the tools to forecast problems down the road, and gives you the chance to take corrective steps before things get out of hand.

BUT: what if you’ve got a PC that is totally busted? DEM can tell you about it but it seems quite certain that once you know about it, you’ll be expected to do something about it. Well, MDOP’s got some IT Admin love for that too: a Swiss Army toolkit to allow you to resurrect dead PCs and pro-actively manage PC failures leading to better stability and reduced downtime.

The Diagnostic and Recovery Toolset (DaRT) can help you save time and reduce the challenges associated with troubleshooting and repairing system failures. The challenges include unusable PCs, issue diagnosis, and repairing unbootable or locked-out systems.

The toolset provides options for recovery, even when Windows Safe Mode or normal boot will not function. That’s a big benefit right there since you now have a better chance of not needing to reload or re-image the entire PC!

DaRT’s off-line boot environment helps you quickly restart computers, recover deleted files, remove malware whilst the computer is off-line and therefore protect the other computers on the network. Your desktop technicians will thank you if they have this tied to their utility belt.

Other coolness: DaRT’s ERD Commander boots PCs into a windows-like repair environment. Crash Analyzer determines the most likely cause of a crash. System Restore lets you safely remove changes that could be causing the system to malfunction. Taken together, this toolset allows you to work more quickly to minimize downtime due to lost productivity thus reducing associated support costs. Copy and paste that last sentence: your boss is going to love it.

Real quick: if you’re an SA customer with Microsoft, and are managing PCs, you are going to really want to get your hands on MDOP. It’s a great suite of products that we’re really excited about here on the team, as we’ve seen our customers’ real-world solutions reduce costs and downtime as well as increase productivity not only of information workers, but of over-taxed IT staff.

Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack

Correction: Now I know why searching for “Fantastic 40″ didn’t bear much fruit. After a little more digging, I discovered that Microsoft refers to these templates as the “Fabulous 40.” Yipes. Sounds like something I’ll be seeing on my birthday cake in about 18 months.

I attended a Microsoft TS2 event yesterday, and I’m currently preparing a report for my colleagues on what was announced and showcased. As I digest and remember everything from the event, I’ll post things of interest to the community here.

The event centered around Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Virtualization, Data Protection Manager and several other minor launches. It was a quick four-hour overview, and as such, not a deep technical dive, but for partners, it was a great way to get excited about these products and the potential they have for improving our customer’s IT operations.

As a teaser, one of the great and lesser-known resources that Microsoft provides for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0  is a collection of 40 application templates to get your business up and running using this excellent enterprise collaboration tool.

There’s a wealth of cool stuff here: templates for Boards of Directors, Business Performance Reporting, a Competitive Analysis Database, Team Work Sites, Timecard Managers, Change Request, Call Center, Budgeting, Inventory, Sales Leads and just a ton more. And, as with all cool things, they are free.

Microsoft refers to them as the Fantastic Forty. And, hyperbole notwithstanding, they might be on to something, despite the name. Get your SharePoint fix here:

Application Templates for WSS 3.0

This has been reported widely across the blogosphere, but if you haven’t yet linked this page, and you use Microsoft Deployment, stop what you are doing, and go here now.

The MS Deployment dev team has posted a Technical FAQ based on questions they have received via Support calls and email. Lots of amazing tidbits in here.

The team has pledged to update this site as new questions come in. Very bookmarkable!

Best Practice Alert – did you folks in the app-virtusphere know that Office 2k7 was not initially designed for virtualization?

I’m a bit bemused by the SoftGrid Blog team using that phrase “not designed.” I just wonder, with my tin-hat on, waiting for the black helicopters – did MS do this with intention? Will Biff go into rehab?

From the SG Blog – (link) Microsoft Office Support of SoftGrid Outlined

“Keep in mind that Office 2007 was not designed for virtualization, so there are some features that will not work in a virtualized environment. Find out more about best practices and limitations at www.windowsvista.com/optimizeddesktop.”

With intention? I don’t think so - along the sequencing path there have been a few add-ons to achieve packaging nirvana as well as updates to the AppVirt client. For instance to the AppVirt sequencer base image - we’ve added Windows Installer, .Net and VC++ redistributables as needed. Hey, even the AppVirt sequencer needs a nip and a tuck every once in a while - don’t hate it becuase its beautiful!

Reading on -

“Depending on the usage scenario, we recommend that customers install Office 2007 on their client machines to ensure access to all of the product features, and use virtualization for older versions of Office in cases where they need to run multiple versions of office at the same time. “

Best Practice-

This last quote is the “one ring” to rule them all that falls into “best practice.” We have found in our AppVirt deployments that its beneficial for long term support – from within your own enterprise and from Microsoft to follow best practice and install Office locally and sequence other versions for AppVirt delivery. We learned this lesson back in the version 2.x days on a two thousand plus seat deployment. While Office sequenced and streamed it was trial and error to find all the touch-points where other applications needed Office connectivity. It became very clear we needed to install locally and sequence and stream older versions.

Biff did go into rehab - my helicoptor awaits.