Watching the Cloud...

Discovering AWS: Deployment & Management

2014-03-14T08:26:00.000+01:00

Cloud Formation

Cloud Formation gives developers and systems administrators an easy way to create and manage a collection of related AWS resources, provisioning and updating them in an orderly and predictable fashion. You can use AWS CloudFormation’s sample templates or create your own templates to describe the AWS resources, and any associated dependencies or runtime parameters, required to run your application. You can create a template, for example, from an entire environment and you can deploy it including parameters in execution time.

CloudFormer tool enables you to generate a template from an environment while it is running.

Data Pipeline

Data Pipeline is a web service that helps you reliably process and move data between different AWS compute and storage services as well as on-premise data sources at specified intervals. It helps you easily create complex data processing workloads that are fault tolerant, repeatable, and highly available. For example, you could move data from S3 to DynamoDB, and in DynamoDB run another process to move the data to other bucket in S3. AWS Data Pipeline also allows you to move and process data that was previously locked up in on-premise data silos.

CloudWatch

Amazon CloudWatch provides monitoring for AWS cloud resources and the applications customers run on AWS. It is included by default in all EC2 instances, collecting CPU, I/O Disk and Network Latency metrics totally free. You can implement more metrics with a little cost. CloudWatch is accessible from AWS Console, APIs, SDK and CLI (Command Line Interface).

Elastic Beanstalk

It is a way to deploy and manage applications in AWS. You simply upload your application, and Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and application health monitoring. To ensure easy portability of your application, Elastic Beanstalk is built using familiar software stacks such as the Apache HTTP Server for Node.js, PHP and Python, Passenger for Ruby, IIS 7.5 for .NET, and Apache Tomcat for Java. There is no additional charge for Elastic Beanstalk - you pay only for the AWS resources needed to store and run your applications.

Identity and Access Management (IAM)

IAM enables you to securely control access to AWS services and resources for your users. Using IAM, you can create and manage AWS users and groups and use permissions to allow and deny their access to AWS resources.

AWS CloudHSM

This is the only non-virtual component that you can find in AWS offering. It is a hardware piece that is installed in a rack in your on-promise datacenter. It stores your private keys and in case that it is opened, the device is deprogrammed automatically and all the information is lost. The CloudHSM service allows you to protect your encryption keys within HSMs (Hardware Security Module) designed and validated to government standards for secure key management. You can securely generate, store, and manage the cryptographic keys used for data encryption such that they are accessible only by you.

OpsWorks

AWS OpsWorks is an application management service that makes it easy for DevOps users to model and manage the entire application from load balancers to databases. Start from templates for common technologies like Ruby, Node.JS, PHP, and Java, or build your own using Chef recipes to install software packages and perform any task that you can script. AWS OpsWorks can scale your application using automatic load-based or time-based scaling and maintain the health of your application by detecting failed instances and replacing them. You have full control of deployments and automation of each component.

Discovering AWS: Networking

2014-03-12T07:36:00.003+01:00

Before to describe the different networking services in AWS, it is important to clarify that AWS doesn’t support Multicast.

Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)

It enables you to create a private network fully-managed in the same way you can do it in your datacenter. You have complete control over your virtual networking environment, including selection of your own IP address range, creation of subnets, and configuration of route tables and network gateways. Additionally, you can create a Hardware Virtual Private Network (VPN) connection between your corporate datacenter and your VPC and leverage the AWS cloud as an extension of your corporate datacenter.

Route 53

It is a DNS service. It use a global DNS servers network to publish DNSs, when a client needs to resolve a DNS name, it will reach the AWS DNS nearest to it, that reduce the network latency. Route 53 effectively connects user requests to infrastructure running in AWS – such as Amazon EC2 instances, Elastic Load Balancers, or Amazon S3 buckets – and can also be used to route users to infrastructure outside of AWS.

Elastic Load Balancing

It is a load balancer service. ELB supports routing and load balancing for HTTP, HTTPS and TCP traffic to EC2 instances. ELB automatically scales its request handling capacity to meet the demands of application traffic. Additionally, Elastic Load Balancing offers integration with Auto Scaling to ensure that you have back-end capacity to meet varying levels of traffic levels without requiring manual intervention. Single CNAME provides stable entry point for DNS configuration.

Direct Connect

It establish a dedicated network connection from your legacy datacenter to AWS VPC. AWS Direct Connect makes it easy to scale your connection to meet your needs. AWS Direct Connect provides 1 Gbps and 10 Gbps connections, and you can easily provision multiple connections if you need more capacity. You can also use AWS Direct Connect instead of establishing a VPN connection over the Internet to your Amazon VPC, avoiding the need to utilize VPN hardware that frequently can’t support data transfer rates above 4 Gbps.

Discovering AWS: Application Services

2014-03-10T17:52:00.002+01:00

Simple Workflow Service (SWF)

It is a task coordinator and state management service for your applications in the Cloud. It has Deciders and Workers that we could configure as we need. SWF ensures tasks are executed in a reliable way, in order and without duplicate them. Deciders and Workers run in your infrastructure and SWF manage the state.

CloudSearch

It is a fully-managed service that makes it easy to set up, manage, and scale a search solution for your website or application in the Cloud. It integrates a quick search and highly scalable functionality in your application. It escalates automatically. With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, you can create a search domain, upload the data you want to make searchable to Amazon CloudSearch, and the search service automatically provisions the required technology resources and deploys a highly tuned search index. As your volume of data and traffic fluctuates, it seamlessly scales to meet your needs. You can easily change your search parameters, fine tune search relevance, and apply new settings at any time without having to re-upload your data.

Simple Notification Service (SNS)

It creates, operate and sent notifications. Publish a message from an application and distribute it immediately to all subscribers or to other applications. It includes now a Mobile Push Messaging service that enables you to push to mobile devices such as iPhone, iPad, Android, Kindle Fire and internet connected smart devices. It can also deliver notifications by SMS text message or email, to Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) queues, or to any HTTP endpoint.

Simple Queue Service (SQS)

It is a fast, reliable, scalable, fully managed message queuing service. You can use SQS to transmit any volume of data, at any level of throughput, without losing messages or requiring other services to be always available. To prevent messages from being lost or becoming unavailable, all messages are stored redundantly across multiple servers and data centers. Developers can get started with SQS by using only five APIs: CreateQueue, SendMessage, ReceiveMessage, ChangeMessageVisibility, and DeleteMessage. Additional APIs are available to provide advanced functionality.

Simple Email Service (SES)

It is a bulk and transactional email-sending service. You can send transactional email, marketing messages, or any other type of high-quality content and you only pay for what you use. In the Cloud, servers can changes, IP addresses can changes (especially if you use AutoScaling) so a server can’t send mails itself. It needs to use SES to send mails. Important thing: this is not a spam tool.

Elastic Transcoder

It is media transcoding in the cloud. It is designed to be a highly scalable, easy to use and a cost effective way for developers and businesses to convert (or “transcode”) media files from their source format into versions that will playback on devices like smartphones, tablets and PCs. It can be used for audio and video transcoding.

Amazon CloudFront

Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery web service. It integrates with other Amazon Web Services to give developers and businesses an easy way to distribute content to end users with low latency, high data transfer speeds, and no commitments. It is basically a Content Delivery Network (CDN) like Akamai. It supports video streaming and live streaming with Adobe FMS.

Discovering AWS: Database

2014-03-04T18:44:00.000+01:00

Relational Database Service (RDS)

It provides a SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle or PostgreSQL server, installed, configured and ready to use. AWS will manage the infrastructure: they will install the patches, execute the backups, resizing, availability (they will manage the failover, for example), etc. And our DBAs will manage the databases.

DynamoDB

It is a NoSQL database solution, we have to specify the performance we need, for example, 20 writes/second and AWS will resize the solution to provide it. It could store any amount of data, it has not limits. It is very easy to provisioning and resize the capacity needed for each table.

It is totally integrated with AWS Elastic MapReduce.

MapReduce is a Hadoop cluster, so it could manage petabytes of data. It converts a complex and vast process in an easy and effective process from a cost perspective.

Redshift

It is a data warehouse in AWS, it is optimized for OLAP. It can be escalated from 1 node 2TB XL to 100 nodes 16TB 8XL, and vice versa. You pay just for the infrastructure you provisioned, it is fully managed and compatible with SQL and all AWS services. It is optimized to work with AWS S3.

ElastiCache

It is a fully managed caching service. It is protocol-compliant with Memcached. It manages patching, detection and recovery of failures in a cache node. We need just a simple call to the API to grown or shrink the cluster. It is fully integrated with AWS CloudWatch (monitoring service) and AWS SNS (notification service) for monitoring and alerting, and supports Security Groups. Seamlessly caches in front of SimpleDB or RDS instances.

SimpleDB

It is a highly available and flexible non-relational data store that offloads the work of database administration. Developers simply store and query data items via web services requests and Amazon SimpleDB does the rest. It is optimized to provide high availability and flexibility, with little or no administrative burden. SimpleDB creates and manages multiple geographically distributed replicas of your data automatically to enable high availability and data durability. The service charges you only for the resources actually consumed in storing your data and serving your requests.

Discovering AWS: Storage

2014-02-26T19:40:00.003+01:00

Simple Storage Service (S3)

It is not a file system, it is an object store. It has an unlimited store capacity, it is highly scalable and available, and exists inside a region, this means that object are not moved outside of the region unless you specify it. By default, all objects are replicated. All object exists in three different locations. It is a WORM store (Write Once, Read More) so it is perfect backups, log files, etc. even for static web pages for a web application.

Interfaces with S3 could be REST or SOAP, if we provide a key, data will be encrypted (AES-256) automatically. The name of our bucket could have 1024 characters as maximum, and it have to be unique (for all AWS, not just in our region or AZ).

It enables multipart upload (100 MB/piece, 10000 pieces as maximum), access control (using Amazon S3 policies, ACLs o IAM rules) and object versioning (you have to pay for both, original object and old version).

Reduced Redundancy Storage (RRS) is a new option inside S3 offering. It provides 99.99% of durability and availability, and a low level of redundancy. You pay 2/3 of S3 price.

Elastic Block Store (EBS)

EBS is for AWS the same that a SAN volume for a VMWare host. It is a simple storage volume that we could join to our EC2 instance. It is POSIX-Compliant (so you can use it as boot device). It is replicated automatically by default inside the same Availability Zone, and snapshots are stored in S3. A new EBS can be created from the snapshot and attach it to another EC2.

EBS volume is “portable”, you can move it from an instance to another (detach/attach), but it can’t be shared between different EC2 instances.

If we choice ESB-optimized option during the provisioning, the volume will be provisioned in a storage dedicated network zone that has a dedicated bandwidth.

You can use EBS Provisioned IOPS too. Differences between both solutions:

EBS Standard	EBS PIOPS
IOPS: 100 IOPS steady-state, with best-effort bursts to hundreds	IOPS: Within 10% of up to 4000 IOPS, 99.9% of given year, as provisioned
Throughput: variable by workload, best effort to 10s of MB/s	Throughput: 16 KB per I/O = up to 64 MB/s, as provisioned
Latency: Varies, reads typically < 20ms writes typically < 10ms	Latency: low and consistent. Second/IOPS, at recommended QD
Capacity: As provisioned, up to 1 TB	Capacity: As provisioned, up to 1 TB

In EBS Standard you pay for you use, in EBS PIOPS you pay for provisioned.

Glacier

Similar to S3 but used for archiving purposes. Its cost the tenth than S3 service, 1 cent/GB/month. It takes 3-5 hours to recover the data, so you should use it for data that you don’t need in your day-by-day. It is a WORN store (Write Once, Read Never), you pay for access to the data.

AWS Import/Export

AWS Import/Export accelerates moving large amounts of data into and out of AWS using portable storage devices for transport. AWS transfers your data directly onto and off of storage devices using Amazon’s high-speed internal network and bypassing the Internet. For significant data sets, AWS Import/Export is often faster than Internet transfer and more cost effective than upgrading your connectivity.

Discovering AWS: Computing

2014-02-24T20:15:00.002+01:00

I would like to share a series of post explaining the main services that AWS offered right now, just the main ones because the number of services grow day by day. We will see just a simple description of the main features of each service.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

EC2 is in AWS the same than a VM in Virtualization world. You can configure the capacity of your EC2 from AWS console in a very simple and easy way. Changing CPU, RAM, etc. in just some minutes. You will pay only for you use.

EC2 CPU is measured in ECUs, 1 ECU = CPU capacity of 1.0-1.2 GHz 2007 Opteron or 2007 Xeon processor. You can find a depth explanation on this link.

AutoScaling

This service enables you to scale your EC2 capacity horizontally, adding or removing additional EC2s when conditions specified by you are complied. It works with Amazon CloudWatch (AWS monitoring tool) to enable that. It doesn’t have any additional cost, you will pay just for the EC2s that were running, not for AutoScaling service.

AutoScaling just exist in a Region, but it could be implemented in all Availability Zones of this Region. The first step is to create an AutoScaling Group, then we have to create an AutoScaling Policy (based, for example, in the work load supported by CPU or RAM) and apply it to the Group created before.

We can use AutoScaling with Scheduling Policies too. For example, we can establish that at a concrete time I want 2 additional server in my web front-end, and at other time, I want to remove them.

AWS Solutions Architect certification!!!!

2013-12-21T17:47:00.000+01:00

I'm happy to share with all of you that I just got the AWS Solutions Architect - Associate certification!!!

A great way to finalize the year jejejeje

Cloud IaaS by Gartner

2013-08-29T11:04:00.000+02:00

Amazon continues as the leader and Microsoft is the new visionary.

All the information in Gartner web site http://www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-1IMDMZ8&ct=130819&st=sb

Publish a web site in Windows Azure

2013-07-30T21:46:00.000+02:00

I like to use Web Matrix 3 tool for my “home developments”. Microsoft Web Matrix is a free, lightweight, cloud-connected web development tool that you can use to publish your web site into Windows Azure in just some simple steps. You can download it from this link http://www.microsoft.com/web/webmatrix/

When you have finished your development, from the Web Matrix environment, click on Publish button (in the ribbon):

In this case I will use a test site I have created for a non-profit organization where I am collaborating.

On the window opened, click on Create a new site option:

Select a name for your site, and a location:

And click OK:

Click Continue to start a compatibility test of your code.

If the result is successful you should see something like that, Click Continue:

Select the files to upload (in case you don’t want to upload all of them) and click Continue:

Publishing process will start in the bottom of Web Matrix environment, and advise you when it is completed:

You can see the log files clicking in the link:

And it is ready!!! http://fietgratia.azurewebsites.net/

In your Windows Azure Manager console you can see a new item in Web Sites section:

https://manage.windowsazure.com/

My Lab Environment in Windows Azure

2013-07-18T12:17:00.001+02:00

You can build your own lab environment in Windows Azure following these simple steps:

To avoid extra charge for your lab environment when you are not using it, we can use PowerShell to de-provision and re-provision your environment when you need. To do that follow the steps included in this other post:

De-provision / Re-provision your Azure Lab Environment via PowerShell

Enjoy it!!

Define a Virtual Network in Windows Azure

2013-07-18T12:13:00.001+02:00

Access to Windows Azure Management Portal https://manage.windowsazure.com/

Select Networks on navigation pane.

+NEW and select Networks –> Virtual Network –> Quick Create:

Fill the data and click on CREATE A VIRTUAL NETWORK:

De-provision / Re-provision your Azure Lab Environment via PowerShell

2013-07-18T12:00:00.000+02:00

Your functional SharePoint lab environment is now complete, but if you’re like me, you won’t be using this lab environment 24x7 around-the-clock. As long as the virtual machines are provisioned, they will continue to accumulate compute hours against your Windows Azure account regardless of virtual machine state – even in a shutdown state!

We can leverage the Windows Azure PowerShell module to de-provision our lab virtual machines when not in use and re-provision our lab virtual machines when we need them again in just 5-10 minutes.

Launch PowerShell for Windows Azure. Right-click on the Windows PowerShell shortcut on the desktop and select Run as Administrator to launch Windows PowerShell with Administrative Rights.

Run the following commands:

# Set the Windows PowerShell Execution Policy
Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned

# Import the Windows Azure PowerShell Module
Import-Module Azure
# Download and Import a Windows Azure publish settings file
Get-AzurePublishSettingsFile

Internet Explorer will be opened automatically and settings file will be downloaded:

Save it in your local machine.

Import-AzurePublishSettingsFile “<complete path and filename of saved file>”

#type the name of your VMs

$myVMs = @("angellab001","angellabAD01")

Foreach ($myVM in $myVMs) {

           Stop-AzureVM -ServiceName $myVM -Name $myVM
          $ExportPath = "C:\AzureStuff\ExportAzureVM-$myVM.xml"
          Export-AzureVM -ServiceName $myVM -name $myVM -Path $ExportPath

}

You can create a PowerShell script with these commands and run it from the console.

Ensure that all export files have been created correctly:

Now you can proceed to de-provisioning your lab environment. You need to run the following command (you can create a script and run it from console too):

# De-provisioning your lab

$myVMs = @("angellab001","angellabAD01")

Foreach ( $myVM in $myVMs ) {

Remove-AzureVM -ServiceName $myVM -name $myVM

}

Before

After

Just the cloud services (Affinity Group, Virtual Network, Storage Account) exist, VMs have been removed.

To re-provisioning your lab environment you have to run the following commands or create a script:

#type your virtual network name
$myVNet = "angellabnet01"
#type your VMs name
$myVMs = @("angellab001","angellabAD01")
#type your storage account
$myStorageAccount = "angellabstore01"
Get-AzureSubscription |
       Set-AzureSubscription -CurrentStorageAccount $myStorageAccount
Foreach ($myVM in $myVMs ) {
           $ExportPath = "C:\AzureStuff\ExportAzureVM-$myVM.xml"
          Import-AzureVM -Path $ExportPath | New-AzureVM -ServiceName $myVM -VNetName $myVNet
           Start-AzureVM -ServiceName $myVM -name $myVM
}

Take into account the order of the VMs in $myVMs vector. If you have an Active Directory server, it should be the first one to re-provision before of the rest of servers that are joined to the domain. Or if you have a SharePoint server + a SQL server, SQL server should be re-provisioned before the SharePoint one because this contains the SharePoint configuration databases needed to get SharePoint server running.

Before

After

Build a VM in Windows Azure

2013-07-18T11:43:00.000+02:00

Access to Windows Azure Management Portal https://manage.windowsazure.com/

Go to Virtual Machines menu, and click on +NEW button at the bottom toolbar. Navigate to Compute –> Virtual Machines –> From Gallery.

As you can see Windows Azure provides us a lot of templates, not just for Microsoft products but for different Linux providers:

We will select Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview one, and click next. Fill the configuration fields and click next:

Select the correct Network and Storage Account and click next:

Leave the default values and click ok:

VM will be created:

If we click on the VM name, the VM Dashboard will be opened:

To access remotely to the server, click on the server name and click on Connect button in bottom toolbar:

If you receive this message, click on Open:

Or Save if you prefer to save the .rdp file in your machine and use it in the future.

In the next window click Connect button:

Enter your credentials and click OK. You will access to your new server.

If we have created an AD server to host our own domain, we can join this new server to the domain and use our domain accounts to manage it.

Configure Windows Server Active Directory in a Windows Azure VM

2013-07-18T11:37:00.000+02:00

Access to Windows Azure Management Portal https://manage.windowsazure.com/

First we have to create a VM, click on +NEW and navigate to Compute –> Virtual Machines –> From Gallery:

Select Windows Server 2012 Datacenter and click on button:

For lab purposes we can choice Extra Small size. Fill the rest of the fields and go to next page:

Fill the fields and ensure you are using the correct Virtual Network and Storage Account:

In the next page, click button to start the creation of the VM.

As the new virtual machine is being provisioned, you will see the Status column on the Virtual Machines page of the Windows Azure Management Portal cycle through several values including Stopped, Stopped (Provisioning), and Running (Provisioning). When provisioning for this new Virtual Machine is completed, the Status column will display a value of Running and you may continue with the next step in this guide.

If we click on the VM name, the VM Dashboard will be opened:

On Dashboard menu we will see all VM related information (IP, External IP, DNS, Server Name, etc.). In our case, IP address should be 10.0.0.4:

On the bottom toolbar, click on ATTACH, and select Attach empty disk:

Give a name and a size to the disk and click OK:

On the dashboard we can see the new data disk attached:

Click on Connect button in the bottom toolbar:

If you receive this message, click on Open:

Or Save if you prefer to save the .rdp file in your machine and use it in the future.

In the next window click Connect button:

Enter your credentials and click OK. You will access to your new AD server.

You will access to your new AD server:

Inside the AD server, go to Server Manager –> File and Storage Services –> Volumes –> Disks

Right click the 10GB disk we have created right now and select New Volume:

And Next:

To use all the available space, click Next:

Click Next:

And Next again:

And click on Create:

When process is finished click on Close button:

From Server Manager Dashboard click on Add roles and features:

Click Next. Select Role-based or feature-based installation and click Next:

Click Next. Select Active Directory Domain Services:

Click on Add Features:

And click Next.

In the next windows, click Next, Next and Install.

Go to AD DS menu in Server Manager:

Click on More… (system advise to us that we have to follow a post-deployment configuration for AD):

Click on Promote this server to a domain… link to start the configuration.

Create a new forest with the name you prefer, and click Next:

Type a password and click Next:

Click Next in the following window. And Next again.

Put all the paths in the drive we have attached, F:

Next, Next and Install.

Now you can create domain users that you could use in the rest of server you will create, and join them to your domain.

Register a DNS server in Windows Azure

2013-07-18T11:29:00.000+02:00

Select Networks on the side navigation bar and click on +NEW button, select Networks –> Virtual Network –> Register DNS Server.

Complete DNS information with, for example, this data:

And click on REGISTER DNS SERVER.

Define a Windows Azure Storage Account

2013-07-18T11:26:00.000+02:00

Virtual Machines that are provisioned in Windows Azure are stored in the world-wide cloud-based Windows Azure Storage service. In terms of high availability, the Storage service provides built-in storage replication capability – where every VM is replicated to three separate locations within the Windows Azure data center region you select. In addition, Windows Azure Storage provides a geo-replication feature for also replicating your VMs to a remote data center region.

Access to Windows Azure Management Portal https://manage.windowsazure.com/

Click on +NEW button on the bottom toolbar and select Data Services –> Storage –> Quick Create:

Type a unique name for your storage account and ensure that correct Affinity Group is selected:

By default Geo-Replication is enabled, but you can disable it if you want to use it. Click on CREATE STORAGE ACCOUNT to create the storage.
Storage will be created:

Define a Windows Azure Affinity Group

2013-07-18T11:19:00.000+02:00

Affinity Groups in Windows Azure are used to group your cloud-based services together, such as Virtual Machines, Virtual Networks and Storage, in order to achieve optimal performance. When you use an affinity group, Windows Azure will keep all services that belong to your affinity group running within the same data center as close as possible to each other to reduce latency and increase performance.

Access to Windows Azure Management Portal https://manage.windowsazure.com/

Select Settings in the side navigation bar, and then Affinity groups:

Click on +Add button and specify a name for your affinity group and the region where you want to host your components, and click on button:

Group will be created:

Microsoft TechEd Europe 2013 is here!!!!

2013-06-26T00:01:00.002+02:00

Connection Analysis with WireShark

2013-03-31T17:36:00.002+02:00

One of the ways to get a clear picture about a communication between two servers is to use WireShark tool. I have to admit that this tool has much functionalities that I don’t know anyone that know how to use all of them J but everyone agree that it is the best networking troubleshooting tool that you can find right now (and it is free).

As I explained in a past post you can create a simple and useful report about the number of connections executed in a testing using WireShark and Excel and clicking just in two options of the tool http://watchingthecloud.blogspot.com.es/2010/06/how-to-see-connections-in-wireshark.html

You can filter the log using simple commands like: DTC, HTTP, or ip.addr==10.10.10.10

If you need to demonstrate that the communication between your server and other one has been executed successfully, you can use the ip.addr filter to catch just the packets related to the destination server (ip.addr will filter all the packets from or to IP address specified). Then, go to Statistics menu and select Flow Graph…

Leave the default values and click OK button. A graph analysis will be created. You can use it to shown if a communication or interface has been executed correctly or not:

How to reinstall MSDTC

2012-12-10T18:13:00.001+01:00

Sometimes MSDTC is down and it is impossible to get it running again. You try to reboot the server... but nothing... MSDTC service is down and you can't run it.

In this situations, the only solution you have is to reinstall the service, but (as you have tested some minutes ago), trying to uninstall and install the service again from IIS not fix the problem. To reinstall MSDTC you have to follow these steps:

- Execute these commands from command-line console:

net stop msdtc
msdtc -uninstall

- Open system registry and delete these entries:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \SOFTWARE \Microsoft \MSDTC]

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \SYSTEM \CurrentControlSet \Services \MSDTC]

- From command-line console again, run these commands:

msdtc -install
msdtc -resetlog
net start msdtc

It is possible that the problems in MSDTC service have corrupted the transaction logs too. In this case, it is better that additionally to the steps to reinstall MSDTC service, you execute the following steps to reset the log-file:

- Go to %SystemRoot%\System32\DTCLog folder (or to the folder where logs are generated if you have changed the default one)

- If exists a Msdtc.log file, rename it to Msdtc.old (MSDCT service has to be stopped)
- Use notepad to create text file named Msdtc.log
- Open command-line console and run this command:
msdtc -resetlog

Project Server or SharePoint Server, when to use each one?

2012-11-15T12:53:00.002+01:00

If you made yourself this question sometime, Microsoft has published this useful diagram that could help you to choice the best solution depending on the size of your team and the level of the process in your project.

(click on the image to enlarge it)

HP Cloud is here!!

2012-11-06T11:34:00.002+01:00

As you know, we have a new player in the ground. HP has started to lunch its Cloud solution and you can register now and start to play with it. The technology they are using it is based on OpenStack, they have implemented some open source building blocks and added all the parts required to build a Cloud service similar to the Amazon one.

You can create a test account to start to play with HP Cloud. As you can see on HP Cloud site:

“New customers get a $20 credit per month for the first three billing months to try any service or combination of services.”

Access to https://www.hpcloud.com/and click on Get Started Now button:

Fill the form with your date, any credit card information is requested:

Click on Create Account button to finalize the account creation process.

You will receive a mail like that to confirm your registration:

Clicking on the link, you will be redirected to login page and could start working with you HP Cloud account:

From now you can access directly to login page using this link https://console.hpcloud.com/login

Enjoy it!!

The amazing journey of Data to the Cloud

2012-08-14T21:18:00.004+02:00

An amazing graphic from Visual.ly about data journey from the begining to the Cloud.

Browse more infographics.

How to fix the 250 character limit on Windows file copying

2012-08-08T11:29:00.000+02:00

We are moving some folders from an old infrastructure to a new offering that we will deploy during the next days. During this migration process we have found some errors when we tried to move some folders that contain subfolders with long (very, very long) names.

It seems that exist a 250 character limit on Windows file path, this is not a limitation of NTFS but a characteristic of Windows explorer shell.

The best way to avoid that is to use a command-line command named subst (well… the best way should be to teach to our customers how to work with a shared folder… name folders and subfolders using an average of more than 25 characters is not a best practice…).

From your command-line console type the following:

Subst v: “\\sourcefolder\path\to\my\ridiculous\extra\large\folder\and\sub\folder\name”

Subst w: “\\destinationfolder\path\to\my\ridiculous\extra\large\folder\and\sub\folder\name“

Now you can use, for example, a Robocopy command to copy the data from one folder to another one:

Robocopy v:\ w:\ /e /MT:128 /LOG:"D:\mytransfer.log"

When you finish your copy, you can unmap both paths using these other commands:

Subst v: /d

Subst w: /d

Today Dinner? Wine and iPad

2012-04-26T20:02:00.000+02:00

One of the surprises I had during my last travel to Chile last month was when we went to dinner to Ritz-Carlton hotel in Santiago de Chile. When we request the Wine list, we received an iPAD!!!

Entaste provides you an application that enables you to navigate on the wine cellar of the restaurant where you are. You can navigate by type of wine (red or white), by harvest, by stock, by region, by price, etc. You have a short description about each wine and some of them has a long description including an oenologist comment (and I suppose that this is the business… vineyards should pay to include this additional information). If you are interesting in some of the wines, you can enter your mail address, and an oenologist will send to you a wine card with the information.

For restaurants, Entaste application is an additional value for their clients at the same time that enables them to apply changes to the wine list in an easiest and cheaper way.

Entaste has known how to use the technology to revolutionize a sector and provide value to their clients.