The Hypervisor

BMW develops ultimate Windows driving machine

admin — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 19:30:17 +0000

BMW cars don't run on Windows 7

Speaking at an Intel sponsored event promoting the latest range of Intel Core i5 and i7 processors, a BMW IT Manager said the car giant had begun migrating its 85,000 Windows desktops from XP to Windows 7.

The fact that anyone is upgrading XP to anything is somewhat remarkable.

Windows XP was launched 10 years ago, and most businesses have continued to use it rather than upgrade to Windows Vista, launched in January 2007.

Upgrading Windows desktops is also likely to require a disproportionate amount of effort, so many firms are likely to delay the move as long as possible.

BMW’s Thomas Schmidt said the firm had begun the migration now because Microsoft support for XP would eventually be stopped and the car giant did not want to wait until the last minute to begin the upgrade.

However, Schmidt said the car giant was using its own IP [custom software] to help automate the upgrade. Attempting such an IT overhaul without custom software would presumably be far less than ideal.

Certainly many third-party service providers are offering migration services to help firms migrate from XP to Windows 7 without needing to develop their own IP.

On a lighter note, Microsoft’s UK director of Windows Clients, Nina Sundberg, declined to comment on what one speaker at the event referred to as the Vista Effect, which could be the sound of a sales plummeting. But even Sundberg acknowledged that Vista had not been as successful as Microsoft had hoped.

Intel’s latest chips hit with gamers

admin — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 17:52:19 +0000

In January Intel launched its flagship Core i5-5xx and i7-6xx series processors. Based on the new 32nm Nehalem architecture, these chips are Intel’s current state of the art products.

No doubt the Core i7-6xx series will be a popular choice in server systems and with people looking for the very highest performance workstations for video editing software and other specialist applications. The new chips will also prove interesting to people running hypervisors on their desktops for software testing. For example, I was chatting to an IT consultant recently who was eagerly awaiting a new Core i5 laptop so he could begin testing server configurations using VMware Workstation.

The new chips include a new feature called Turbo Boost, which allows the CPU to run faster than its normal clock speed when the operating system asks it to. But there are a few catches to watch out for. For a start, Turbo Boost works only with supported operating systems – Windows Vista or Windows 7 would do the trick, but good old faithful XP would not.

Also, a number of environmental factors could kick in to limit the Turbo Boost feature. For example, the number of active cores, estimated current consumption, estimated power consumption and processor temperature all play a part in determining how much and how long Turbo Boost would be allowed to operate.

It remains to be seen how effective Turbo Boost really will be in home computers. It could turn out to be another saga reminiscent of HyperThreading, which was introduced with great hullaballoo in the Pentium 4 and then Xeon chips, before being withdrawn, perfected and finally relaunched in the Core architecture.

Meanwhile, even Intel’s marketing gurus tacitly admit the Core i7 chips may be just a tiny bit too fabulous for many users. And when it comes to buying desktop PCs for normal office software, you’ll probably find older chips offer much better price/performance.

Facebook hit by spam

admin — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 11:00:28 +0000

An increasing number of spammers are using fake Facebook email addresses to bypass spam filters and clog up recipients’ mailboxes. The spammers’ trick works because many mail systems don’t verify the sender’s email address.

The Hypervisor estimates that in recent weeks around half the spam hitting our mailboxes claimed to be from Facebook. Of course, the spam messages were not sent by Facebook and the sender had no connection with the social networking site. However, email systems were not originally designed to verify the senders email address.

The good news is that email providers can use the DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) standard to verify which organization actually sent a particular email. For example, in 2008 Google announced it would use DKIM to filter phishing mail that claimed to be from PayPal and eBay.

Brad Taylor, Google software engineer, said, “[DKIM] is a key tool we use to keep spam out of Gmail inboxes. But [DKIM] can only be effective when high volume senders consistently use [it] to sign their mail.”

So Google and other mail providers can only use DKIM to filter spam from domains that consistently use DKIM when sending mail.

Google does not currently apply the DKIM check to mail that claims to be from Facebook, but it seems Facebook uses DKIM on all its outgoing mail so mail providers could apply DKIM checks to Facebook mail if enough customers requested it.

In our lab tests we configured our spam filter to reject mail from Facebook if it failed the DKIM check. The result was that only genuine Facebook messages were delivered to our inbox. If only all mail systems were made that way.

Snow Leopard a cheaper alternative to Windows

admin — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 15:00:17 +0000

Apple fans argue Snow Leopard Server is functionally equivalent to Windows Server running Microsoft Exchange, Office Communications Server, SQL Server, SharePoint and a third party anti-spam engine, but that Snow Leopard Server costs much less than Windows.

And with OS X there are no additional per-user license fees to pay for each of these apps.

Hardware costs for running Snow Leopard Server could also be much lower than a Windows equivalent. For example, Windows Small Business Edition requires some kind of server hardware, and Microsoft Windows Essentials Business Server needs three separate hardware platforms.

By contrast, Snow Leopard runs on any Apple Mac hardware, ranging from low cost Mac Minis up to datacenter grade Apple Server kit.

At its core, OS X is a Unix operating system configured with various open-source applications. Consequently a skilled server administrator could achieve similar results using a free Linux distribution. However, the amount of time and effort needed to build a Linux server with the same set of applications makes Snow Leopard a compelling alternative.

In our Lab tests we found installation of the full Snow Leopard suite was very quick and simple. It took us about one minute to configure the various options, and about 30 minutes for the software to install – we booted with the Snow Leopard DVD, answered a few questions and left it to complete the installation process. After this our Snow Leopard Server had been automatically configured with things like self-signed SSL certificates – a process that requires extra work in alternative server environments. Of course, a little further setup was needed to configure some of the server applications, such as the Bind DNS and Mail 2 email servers, but where possible the server apps were working properly without any extra input from us.

For example, the Wiki engine was up and running as soon as we booted our new server. We pointed a Microsoft Internet Explorer web browser at our server’s IP address and were greeted by a neat and stylish front page, complete with a login button and buttons to access the Wiki.

Snow Leopard Server includes an easy to use Wiki

Once we logged in we could navigate to our private Wiki pages and web based views of our iCal calendar. The web versions of these tools presents superb, polished and feature rich user interfaces for users that don’t have access to a Mac desktop, which could include people using Windows desktops and mobile devices.

As we said earlier, the applications that are bundled with Snow Leopard generally come from major open-source projects, and in many cases these are best of breed tools such as the Apache web server and Bind DNS server. But in the case of webmail, Snow Leopard uses SquirrelMail. While this is stable and simple to use, it looks old and clunky alongside the Wiki and web based iCal tools. Let’s hope it will not be long before Apple releases an update that replaces SquirrelMail.

Microsoft announces Office 2010 prices

admin — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 14:17:47 +0000

Later today Microsoft will announce the price of Office 2010 at the CES show in Las Vegas. But while the software giant is ready to announce the price for customers in the USA, it will take a little longer before people in the rest of the world will be told the price for the new software.

Even without the worldwide details this is good news for business buyers that may have been holding off purchasing additional Office licenses until they could order the new version.

However, students and home users may be more interested in free alternatives such as Google Docs, which provides free web based word processing, spreadsheet, database and presentation graphics tools. An added benefit of the Google Docs approach is that documents are stored on Google servers rather than on the user’s hard disk. This means documents are less likely to be lost because of a hardware failure than if they are stored on home PCs.

Lotus Domino supports iPhone push

admin — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 15:43:41 +0000

Firms using the Lotus Domino email system can now provide push email to people using Apple’s iPhone. The only requirement is that the Domino servers be running Lotus Domino server version 8.5.1 or higher, and must be configured to use the optional Domino Traveler software module.

Once the Traveler software is installed, users can connect to the Domino server using an Active Sync account on the iPhone. The combination of Domino Traveler and iPhone Active Sync provides users with instant synchronization of calendar, email and contacts between the iPhone and Domino server.

Configure iPhone using the Traveler website

In The Hypervisor lab we tested this set-up with our Domino server and found things worked much as expected. The only possible problem we found was during installation. Our tests revealed users must visit their company’s Traveler web site and click on a link to “Generate an Apple iPhone Profile” (see left).

The iPhone will then be automatically configured with a new Active Sync account configured to work properly with the Domino Traveler software.

People that add a Traveler Active Sync account to their iPhone using the “Settings” app will find they cannot connect to their Traveler server.

Domino 8.5.1 was released on October 6 2009.

Windows 7 touch gestures towards iPhone

admin — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 15:47:59 +0000

Today Microsoft finally launched the consumer versions of its Windows 7 operating system. While the software ushers in several new features like a much improved Task Bar, the most ground breaking is new support for Touch Screen devices.

Experts say it will take time before software such as office tools and consumer titles will be updated to make the most of the new Touch support, but in the long term the new touch options will change the way people use their computers and open up new markets for Windows software.

For example, one Microsoft pundit told The Hypervisor he predicted a boon in kitchen appliances. “Before now PCs were a bit of a no-no in the kitchen, but with Touch you could use them for recipes and on-line shopping to fill the fridge.”

In fact Windows has had support for basic Touch Screen devices for some time, but with Windows 7 these capabilities have been expanded. The new capabilities bring Windows in line with the type of gestures that can be used with the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch to zoom pictures and change content.

Adding the new Windows 7 Touch gestures to Windows mobile devices would allow Microsoft to compete more effectively against Apple in that arena.

Gmail Delivers Push Email Very Slowly

admin — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 11:52:36 +0000

Google Push email fails to excite

In September Google announced the availability of its Push email service for iPhone, iPod Touch and Windows Mobile devices.

The idea behind the Push service is that notifications of new email messages are sent, or pushed, directly to the phone as soon as an email arrives at the Gmail server. This is in contrast to the existing “Fetch” option, where devices such as the iPhone needed to poll the server at regular intervals to see if any new mail had arrived.

However, almost immediately after the launch many users reported problems with the Push service. For example, on September 22 a discussion on Google’s web based support forum started with someone asking “Is the new Gmail push service down? “ Replies varied from “Not down but very very slow,” through to “It never worked for me in the first place” from another frustrated user.

Unfortunately the teething problems seem to be ongoing. One of the most recent entries on the Google support forum, from earlier this morning, said, “I am receiving email but quite late. My IMAP inbox is far more up-to-date than my [Google push] inbox, even though both should be identical. It’s worth noting that IMAP and the Gmail web interface show the identical emails whereas the Gmail Push has been “late” over the course of the last couple weeks. Sometimes the connection to the server does not take place so checking email [on my mobile] is impossible. I imagine Google must know about this but is remaining silent for whatever reason.”

We’ll keep you posted!

Work from home with Windows 7

admin — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 16:29:56 +0000

Burgess: Good security

Windows 7 contains new tools to make it easier for people working from home. New Remote Desktop features in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, both released last month, enable employers to provide remote access to Windows software for people working away from the office.

Using the new tools, staff connect to their office computers using a web browser. Once connected, new Remote Desktop tools enable employers to deliver individual applications or even a full Windows desktop to remote workers.

Jamie Burgess, a Microsoft partner technical specialist, told The Hypervisor, “This provides better security because the corporate data and other important stuff around it remains in the datacenter, so if a laptop or home computer is lost the data is not lost with it”.

Burgess said users could be provided with conventional server based remote desktops using Terminal Services – which is renamed as Remote Desktop in Windows 7. This allows the IT department to host a large number of desktops and applications on the same Windows Server. This approach allows users to share one license for the Windows operating system and applications software, possibly making it the cheapest way to deliver apps to users.

Alternatively, the IT department could provide users with remote access to a dedicated Windows 7 system, which would actually be running as a virtual machine in the company’s datacenter. This approach has the advantage of allowing home workers to use “administrator” accounts on their Windows 7 desktop, which is required for some software to work properly.

Although these arrangements might sound complicated for end users to grapple with, Burgess said new features in Windows 7 made it just as easy for people to run remote applications as to run software installed on their hard drive. “There’s a new Control Panel app in Windows 7 called Remote Applications and Desktop Connections that lets the IT department define a home portal for the user. The app automatically populates a new folder in the Windows Start menu that contains the remote resources the user can access,” Burgess said.

People working away from home and using a borrowed computer could do much the same thing using a secure web portal, Burgess added. “Windows Server 2008 R2 introduced a new broker service, which gets a list of available VMs from Hyper-V. The broker also gets a list of Remote Desktops and the applications they offer”.

People use a web browser and connect to the web portal, and the web portal gets a list of apps and VMs from the broker, Burgess added. “Security could be as tight as you like. We can use Remote Desktop to access software and can prevent the clipboard from taking a copy of the data,” said Burgess.

VMware PowerShell tools updated

admin — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 11:56:07 +0000

Herold: New tools make for easier remediation.

On October 12 The Virtualization EcoShell Initiative (Vesi) will release version 1.2 of its free Virtualization EcoShell software.

Focussed on helping people running VMware virtualization, the new suite runs on Windows and includes a graphical editor for handling PowerShell scripts.

The new Virtualization EcoShell editor adds a new integrated search tool to find free PowerShell scripts stored in the popular Poshcode.org repository.

It also includes a range of other new features. For example, it previously had features to collected data about the virtual infrastructure. The update includes new features to display that data on charts and graphs.

Likewise, the previous version had best practice filters to highlight VMs that had potential configuration problems, such as those configured with a virtual CD-Rom drive connected. Such VMs would not work properly with VMware’s VMotion live migration feature.

Scott Herold, Vesi lead architect, told The Hypervisor, “Previously people needed to dig deep into the user interface to find help with remediation. The new version simplifies the path to get remediation. Now it’s one click to identify the issue and one more click to fix it”.

The new Vesi tools will be available as a free download from this site from October 12.