Windows Vista Security Guide
Microsoft has released the Windows Vista Security Guide which can either be downloaded or viewed online. This set of documentation describes best practices and guides for hardening your Windows Vista deployment. Topics include disk encryption, defending against malware, application via Group Policy, etc.
Happy Christmas!
IT Forum Presentations
Citrix Buying Ardence
Brian Madden is reporting that Citrix (famed market leader in Server Based Computing) has announced that they are buying a company called Ardence. Who are Ardence and what do they do? Ardence make a product that allows you to stream an operating system onto desktops or servers. Think about this … you can make a single image of your OS with all your standard software and stream it to client PC’s as required. Need to make a change to the build? Simple … update your image and restream it. There’s also some benifits to server computing.
Obviously, what I’ve just said about desktops can apply to Citrix servers. It’s not an uncommon practice for companies to rebuild Citrix farm servers in rotation. Having a streaming process would make this a doddle.
But hold on. There’s more. You can leverage Ardence to consolidate servers. Have a busy web server during the day that does nothing at night? Great … restream it as a backup server or some batch processing server so you don’t need extra hardware. Maybe you have application silos in your Citrix farm and need to move servers quickly between them to match demand. Streaming the OS makes this easy.
Brian Madden has written some documentation on the solution and I recommend you read it. This is one of those solutions that just makes so much sense that I cannot believe I’ve never seen it deployed.
New Windows 2003 Cluster Functionality
Cougar and Centro Betas
MS TechNet Ireland Event: Using Microsoft Virtualisation Technologies
Colm Torris is keeping busy. He’s just announced an event on Microsoft virtualisation technologies that will be held on January 18th in the Guiness Storehouse. Topics being covered include:
- How Virtualisation will change IT
- Microsoft Virtual Server Technology: capabilities, deployment, challenges
- How Virtualisation (Hypervisor) fits into Windows Server Codename Longhorn
- Managing a mixed/virtual infrastructure: System Centre Virtual Machine Manager (VMM)
- Tools and techniques to deploy, monitor, maintain and back up virtual and physical machines
- IT Lifecycle: Provisioning, Back-up, Migration, Monitoring
- Changes introduced with Windows Virtualisation
- Virtual Server Architecture
- Microsoft SoftGrid – Application virtualisation and streaming.
- High Availability capabilities in Virtual Server
- Benefits of AMD-V and Intel VT hardware virtualisation
- Real life examples on deploying and managing virtual environments
- Licensing implications of adding/removing virtual machines
I’m a huge fan of selectively using virtualisation technology to consolidate hardware, facilitating DR and operational recovery. MS have some good products that have them neck and neck with VMware in the PC and mid-level market. "Longhorn" will definitely put them into direct competition with VMware ESX Server. I highly recommend that you check this free event out.
SDM Software Ships First Product
SDM Software is a start up by famed Goup Policy guru Darren Mar-Elia (MS Press, Windows IT Pro, Conference Speaker, etc). The company has just shipped it’s first product, GPHealth reporter. In Darren’s own words:
I’ve started a software company called SDM Software. Well, I’ve just shipped my first little product! Boy it feels good! The product, called GPHealth Reporter essentially reports on the details related to GP processing on a given local or remote system. You can use it to gather overall health of GP processing, and it can also save that information to a report, PDF or Excel. You can also use the tool to trigger a remote GP refresh against the machine you’re focused on. You can download a free 10-day trial copy of the product and check it out.
Best of luck, Darren!
Install VHDMount
A while back, I mentioned how you could back up Vista to a VHD file which you could mount using a VM or a tool called VHDMount. VHDmount is a part of Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 Beta 2. Dave Northey blogged a way to install this component without installing a full blown Virtual Server:
- Download the installer.
- Extract it’s contents: setup.exe /c /t <drive letter>:<path to the .msi file>
- Install VHDMount: msiexec /i "Virtual Server 2005 Install.msi" /qn ADDLOCAL=VHDMount
Someone also commented that you shouldn’t try this on a machine with an existing installation of Virtual Server.
Credit: Dave Northey.