The Microsoft US VAR Champions Club program is designed to recognize partners for their exceptional performance in delivering Microsoft technology to the marketplace. Var Champions have exemplified an outstanding level of commitment and were chosen out of an extensive field of partners for their leadership and impact in driving Microsoft technology in the U.S.

Eric Martorano, Director of Channel Strategy at Microsoft elaborates, “The Microsoft® US VAR Champions Club program recognizes our partners for their exceptional performance, tremendous contributions and outstanding achievements in the past year and highlights their commitment of delivering solutions and applications to customers.”

GCS is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner.

Just buy an OS license per user, right? Not so fast, there. Behold the glory that is the Virtual Enterprise Centralized Desktop or VECD. This special license, with an even more special name, is required for every virtualized desktop. And the best part is that it's only sold Per Device. Connect from your PC at work - that's 1 license. Once in a while from a laptop? That's a second license. Microsoft does allow access from home without requiring a second license. And you can receive up to 4 virtual instances per license, which is nice.

Per Device licensing has always seemed a bit strict for those organizations that nearly match in users and devices. Usually Microsoft offers both Per Device and Per User options. This is even more so for those users that login from multiple devices, which is a rapidly growing segment of the workforce. I connect from four different devices regularly.

With the recent release of Microsoft Exchange 2010, most of our client base is faced with yet another upgrade. Exchange 2010 offers three compelling features that should justify the upgrade. The addition of email archival functionality is a long-awaited tool typically performed by expensive third-party add-ons. A hybrid model of mailbox storage allows both on-premise and cloud-based mailboxes. This eases the transition to the cloud while maintaing large, slow mailboxes in a high performing environment. Improvements to the failover functionality make highly available email much easier for small and mid-market clients.

Many clients and prospects have no email archival strategy at this time. Compliance with federal and industry standards such as Sarbanes Oxley represent only one benefit. Email is the primary communication tool used by business today. Promises are made, orders placed, complaints lodged and bad behavior recorded. Storing this data in an easily accessible manner ensures that committments are upheld and risks mitigated.

Adding a variable cost element to your email system without sacrificing the superior performance, storage and customization of an on-premise Exchange server is desired by many companies. A recent prospect has a few hundred seasonal employees with mailboxes and another few dozen year round staff. The year round staff average nearly 5GB per mailbox. By splitting this storage up between on-premise and cloud the prospect can elimate mailbox costs during the slow season. This can be accomplished in Exchange 2007 as well but is more elegant in Exchange 2010.

The disaster recovery improvements in Exchange 2010 allow easier failover and failback during outages. Many of our clients have embraced virtualization for hardware redundancy. Exchange 2010 allows for equally graceful level of software and data redundancy.

A great, in depth article on the DirectAccess feature in Windows 7 was posted recently on Informit.com. They nailed down the architecture well.

So, can DirectAccess kill your VPN? Yes and no. It is not intended to work on non-company owned PCs. Why would you want it to? You'll still need VPN for that. I've seen many organizations utilize VPN for vendor access. DirectAccess is not a replacement for vendor access. DirectAccess also requires IPV6. Oh. Though many organizations are unintentionally running IPV6 already, this will present some pause to many IT Managers.

Back in August, I introduced the various components of the System Center family. I also pointed out that the cost would of licensing each product, or even licensing a single product for multiple virtual machines, would be prohibitive for most smaller organizations. However, Microsoft has responded with the Systems Center Management Suite license that includes the licenses to manage multiple virtual machines using the full System Center family for a far more approachable price.  Here is what is included:

·         A license to run the Virtual Machine Manager server.

·         Management license for:

o   Data Protection Manager (DPM)

o   Operations Manager

o   Configuration Manager

o   Virtual Machine Manager (VMM)

This license is sold in two flavors:

·         The Enterprise flavor is licensed per physical server and allows you to manage 4 virtualized operating systems on that server. 

·         The Datacenter flavor is licensed per CPU (a minimum of 2 processors) but allows you to manage an UNLIMITED number of virtualized operating systems on a physical server.  When licensed for two CPU’s the Datacenter license is only about 25% more than Enterprise, and most likely if you have more than 4 VM’s you’ll have two CPU’s and will save money by going with the Datacenter edition.

But for small environments the biggest value of the license comes when using DPM for backup. But to explain the benefit let’s use a small virtual environment example. 

We have a Hyper-V server with 4 virtual machines:

·          A domain controller/file server

·         An Exchange 2007 server

·         A SQL server

·         A SharePoint server

The DPM protection agent also comes in two flavors:

·         Standard Data Protection which allows you to perform basic file level protection of a server.

·         Enterprise Data Protection which is required to provide protection for advanced applications like Exchange, SQL, SharePoint and Hyper-V

One of the benefits that drove this small organization was the ability to backup an entire virtual machine, which means we would need an enterprise DPM license for the Hyper-V server. When a Hyper-V server is protected with the enterprise license you are also permitted to deploy a standard DPM license inside any of its virtual machines. This allows us to backup the domain controller and file server, but the other servers would each require their own Enterprise protection license. So we would need 4 enterprise licenses.  Similarly, to properly protect all these servers with alternate backup products would require a special Hyper-V agent, SQL Agent, SharePoint Agent and Exchange Agent.

But, if this company was to purchase the Enterprise Server Management Suite they would be entitled to all the Enterprise DPM licenses they needed. And because of the new pricing, they would pay less.  Just 3 enterprise DPM licenses would cost more than the enterprise suite license. And on top of that you get management licenses for all the other System Center products.

There are two gotchas with this management suite:

·         The only System Center Server license included is the VMM server license. So you still need to purchase the server licenses for DPM, Operations Manager and Configuration Manager to take advantage of the management licenses included in the suite.

·         Despite all being part of the same product family, the System Center server product cannot all run on the same server.  Only VMM and DPM can coexist.

Because of these limitations it is likely that smaller environments will only take advantage of the VMM and DPM components of the suite, but it still offers a compelling value to consider.

Last week Microsoft published the first release candidate of the new Exchange Server 2010. This is one of the final milestones in the roadmap for final release early next year. As with any new update the biggest question is what is in the upgrade that makes the expense and hassle of an upgrade worthwhile. This is especially true for users that have recently upgraded to Exchange 2007.  I’m pleased to say that while there are numerous improvements in Exchange 2010, there are several that standout and make a compelling argument for upgrade.

At the top of the list are the improvements made for high availability.  Exchange 2007 offered a number of different high availability (HA) options (SCR, CCR, and SCC).  Standby Continuous Replication offered relatively inexpensive DR functionality for Exchange, but failover was a manual process. CCR, or Cluster Continuous Replication, and SCC, or Single Copy Cluster, allowed for automatic failover within a single site but required installing only the mailbox role inside the cluster. This meant a minimum of three Exchange licenses to achieve high availability, four if you wanted redundancy for the other Exchange roles. In addition to that expense, the configuration was a very manual process that required a great deal of time.

In Exchange 2010, Microsoft has eliminated many of the prior HA configuration in favor of a new concept called database availability groups (DAG).  DAG allows for a fully redundant configuration with onsite or offsite replication. Microsoft has changed the architecture of Exchange so that the mailbox database is no longer tied to a specific server. DAG permits a mailbox database to be replicated to up 16 different servers. What’s more the configuration has been highly simplified and can be fully managed from the Exchange Management Console.  You can even configure a single server for DAG and then add a second server at a later date without reconfiguring.

In addition to DAG Microsoft has improved the consistency of mail delivery with the concept of Shadow Redundancy.  Where DAG applies to the availability of mailbox database, Shadow Redundancy handles providing redundancy for messages during the transportation process. Basically each server in the transportation process holds onto a copy of a message until it receives confirmation that the message was received by the next “hop” in the process.  If confirmation isn’t received the message can be resubmitted to the next server or an alternate server if one is available. Unfortunately, Shadow Redundancy can only be used up to the point the mail is forwarded to a server that doesn’t support this functionality. But, it is a big step forward in ensuring consistent mail delivery within the Exchange routing environment.

Aside from high availability, there are numerous other improvements built into Exchange 2010. Some highlights include optimization for handling large individual mailboxes (10GB and larger), further improvements to Outlook Web Access (now known as Outlook Lite), and new message archiving and compliance functionality out of the box.  These are valuable improvements that I’ll expand on at a later date. But, email has become a mission critical application in organization large and small these improvements to increase the uptime of Exchange are by far the most compelling.

Wikipedia?! Check out the article here. My only complaint is that I wasn't able to locate the Show Desktop button. That's because its not labeled with any visual indicator. Find the clock, go right about 5 pixels and hover. Viola! Transparency. Now add some gadgets to your desktop so you have a good reason to use that again.

For most users that skipped Windows Vista, the search features of Windows 7 will be an eye opener. I've been on Windows 7 for about two months. In those two months I have given up on browsing for ANYTHING. Search is faster, more accurate and grabs results that I didn't always expect (a newer version, etc). Search is much faster than browsing my start menu which is overloaded with dozens of apps. If I want to start OneNote, i just start typing One... and it filters the Start Menu for me.

More interesting are some of the advanced search features. WinExtra demonstrates extending the Windows search to automatically pull results from Twitter. The business value of Twitter may be suspect but integrating search to third party services is a heck of a feature.

Microsoft has long offered a number of system management products. Recently these products have been grouped into the System Center family of products.   The founding members of the family were SCOM and SCCM.

·         System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) is a highly extensible monitoring system. Because of its expandability SCOM can be configured to monitor an entire environment from network and server hardware to detailed monitoring of applications.

·         System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM), formerly known as SMS, is a powerful system management product capable for end to end management of both servers and client.

Historically these products have been targeted at medium to large environments. While smaller environments could benefit from the enhanced management capabilities, they could rarely justify dedicating servers to host these products or the cost of the server software. However, newer additions to the System Center family combined with virtualization have altered the playing field to a point that smaller environments should re-evaluate the potential of System Center.

Virtualization is probably the biggest game changer for the small environment. On the one hand virtualization gives smaller environments the flexibility to host additional isolated servers, like system center servers, without requiring additional expensive hardware.  The downside to this freedom is the increase in the number of systems that need to be managed.  If virtualization is added to a small environment without additional systems management capabilities the potential for problems and poorly designed environments increases drastically.

Data Protection Manager (DPM) and Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) are the newer members of the System Center family.

·         DPM is Microsoft’s foray into the backup software market. More than just another multipurpose backup solution, DPM is designed by Microsoft specifically to backup Microsoft systems and applications using the new concept of continuous data protection.

·         VMM allows IT professionals enhanced management capabilities and centralized management of virtualized environments large and small. VMM can be combined with SCOM for even more functionality to ensure optimal placement of virtual workloads.

As smaller environments begin to build virtualized infrastructures, DPM and VMM can become powerful, indispensible tools. But the cost of licensing of these products individually would seem to keep them out of reach for these environments.  Microsoft has release a new license called System Center Server Management Suite that addresses this issue, puts System Center within reach of small environments, and will be the focus on the next post in this series.

Windows 7's official release is imminent. Business Technologists must decide if they will deploy this new OS. Here are my official recommendations that are being made to my clients.

A Change is Required: Windows XP will not live on forever. Driver support is already waning. Technical support, including security updates, has a limited lifetime. If you have not transitioned to a 64 bit OS increased memory capacity for high end users will drive that conversion.

Users Will Love Windows 7: Most users are both technically uninformed and fickle. Vista's increased hardware requirements made it appear slow to most users. Windows 7 will not have the problem. It is aesthetically pleasing, fast and provides more efficient navigation. Users will love Windows 7 for the same reason many like Macs at home.

New Features: Can you quickly name the new features introduced in Windows Vista? Probably not, even though there were several great improvements. Windows 7 builds on that success with an even broader array of features including App-V/Med-V, Branch Caching, AppLocker and more.

If not 7, then what? Windows 7 will be the best option for the vast majority of PCs in the world. Linux desktops can't crack more than a few percent of the business desktop market. Mac OS X still lacks many network features and requires a new skill set for most IT departments.

Look forward to more posts concerning Windows 7 in the near future.