Windows 2008 Server R2 - Whats New Apart from Hyper-V

By now you know that the Windows Server 2008 R2, latest version of Windows Server, will be available to all in just a few weeks. Some of the big features like Microsoft Hyper-V have received a lot of attention, but there are several other new features surfacing with this release, here are just a few of them:

1. Out of the box, Windows Server 2008 R2 uses less power on the same hardware than Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 – with no additional configuration. This isn't a gimmick, but a proven 10% to 15% reduction on identical boxes, just with a different operating system.
2. Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.5, included with Windows Server 2008 R2, supports .NET on Server Core installations. The big shortcoming in the original Server 2008 edition was the lack of support for running managed code on Server Core-based Web servers.
3. Microsoft's new BranchCache feature can speed up access to files for users at branch offices while allowing you to save on data line and bandwidth costs. Caching in their branch will help increase productivity and remove user frustrations without bailing out a telco.
4. The Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) has been enhanced in Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7, allowing for far smoother media playback, multi-monitor support and more.
5. The Agile VPN feature in Windows Server 2008 R2 allows a virtual private network connection to generate multiple paths between discrete points in the VPN tunnel. If a problem occurs, the Agile VPN feature uses other network paths to maintain the tunnel without interruption.
6. You can use BitLocker on removable drives to eliminate easy information leakage. This isn't just a Windows 7/Windows Server 2008 R2 feature either. If you protect a removable drive with BitLocker, the BitLocker to Go reader is also copied to the drive. This provides backward compatibility so that machines running Windows XP Service Pack 2 and higher can read the encrypted contents if the user enters the correct password.
7. Offline Files, a feature that helps mobile users maintain access to their network share files when disconnected, is now enabled on slow network connections. This reduces network traffic while not degrading the user experience too much.
8. IIS 7.5 now has a Best Practices Analyser (BPA). Microsoft Exchange Server, Windows Small Business Server, and other server products have had these BPAs for a while now. The BPA itself scans your environment and compares a number of different elements against known best-practice states, delivering the results in a very consumable format—an instant quick-check for your configuration.
9. Windows Server 2008 R2 also contains enhancements to PowerShell. Windows PowerShell 2.0, includes more than 240 new pre-built cmdlets along with a new graphical user interface with coloured syntaxing, new production script debugging capabilities, and testing tools.

Where did the Google Chrome Logo come from?

Just a bit of fun....

We have been blogging about Google Chrome OS for some time now, and have been using Google Chrome Browser for some time also - we like it.

Have you ever wondered where Google Chrome OS got its logo concept from?

The Italian cartoonist, Federico Fieni, cleverly portrays how Google first pondered how to challenge Windows, put its heads together, and ultimately devised Chrome....

Will you ride the Google Wave?

There has been a tremendous amount of buzz surrounding one of Google’s newest products,Google Wave. Essentially, it is a real-time communication platform that combines aspects of email, wiki, chat, app platform, and more into one tool.

With a potentially game-changing product set to make its debut tomorrow, will you be riding this Wave and what impact to a small business will it have?

Q: What is the purpose of Google Wave?

A: According to Google, it is “is a new tool for communication and collaboration on the web.” Perhaps the best explanation might be Google Wave is what email would be if it were invented today. Conversations (aka “waves”) occur faster, they are easier to organize and parse, and they are not limited to the individual.

Q: What are Google Wave’s biggest features?

A: While Google’s real-time communication platform has a lot of features, there are a few big ones that you don’t see in most communication platforms.

• Wave employs wiki-style editing, meaning that anyone can edit anyone else’s message. The goal is to have a malleable conversation.
• There is a playback feature, which lets you view an entire wave conversation as it developed if you missed it.
• It employs drag-and-drop file sharing.
• You can use apps within a wave – this is called a Wave Extension. You can embed maps, games, and more into wave conversations.
• It’s open source, so you can create your own private version of Google Wave and install it on your own server like an Exchange Server.

Q: Will it kill email?

A: That’s a question nobody can answer. In many respects it’s more advanced than email, but ultimately it depends on whether the regular person adopts Wave over email.

Q: Is it useful for a small business to use it?

A: It has a lot of useful features, like drag-and-drop file sharing and apps that make it a useful project management and collaboration platform for business. It’s very efficient for communication, once you learn how to use it.

Q: Will it get widespread adoption?

A: That’s the million dollar question. It has hundreds of thousands of people signed up for the beta testing occurring later this month.

Should be an interesting time, and the output of technology from Google in recent months and proposed projects seems to be increasing exponentially. There has been a lot of development effort put into Wave so I am sure its going to be exciting.

Are we going full circle? Lets Make PC's thin again..

It seems that the onset of VDI is bringing with it a number of requests again, one of which I am getting time and time again from clients is can I dumb down (thin) my existing desktop estate? This has been a request I have been familiar with since starting with Citrix technologies back in 1999, and it slowly started to become less frequent with many organisations wanting pure Thin Client environments or to provide a mixture of local processing power and applications with the benefits of remote applications. However, the more I engage with clients for VDI architectures the more I am getting questions raised again about thinning down the endpoint once again.

There seems to be two ways this is being achieved:

1. Windows-based Conversion Products

These products live in Windows, locking down the interface so that users can only do certain, pre-configured tasks. The software can be installed or deployed using your existing application deployment technologies.

2. Thin Client OS.

The products, while running on PC hardware, are running some version of a thin client or slimmed down operating system.

These solutions aren't as vulnerable to security problems, and can even be provisioned on boot so that the client is refreshed each time it's started. That way, if something should happen, the machine can just be powered off and restarted without any repercussions.

Management typically involves some sort of additional management infrastructure beyond that of simply managing Windows environments.

Google Search Results Now Show Hot Trends

With millions of Google searches performed every day, it makes sense that what people are searching for can be a good indicator of what has captured the interest of the U.S. and the world.

That's exactly what Google Trends does: it tells you what's currently popular on the search engine via its Hot Trends feature, which displays how popular the search is and graphs out the volume of searches over time.

But sadly Google Trends is not widely known about as it is a destination site, but Google are about to change this and have announced that it has integrated Google Trends in actual Google Search results.

The integration is rather simple. Now when you search a hot trend, you will find the trend and its graph at the bottom of the search engine results page (SERP), you will find its hotness, how it ranks in the top 100 most popular searches, and the search volume graph

Google's been busy lately with new additions. Search snippets and Place Pages are just two of the small additions/tweaks that add a new layer of functionality to Google Search to keep at bay Bing, there are plenty more features still to come.

Bing is the fastest growing Search Engine.....

According to a Nielsen report this week, Microsoft's new Bing search engine is growing faster than any of its search competitors in the top 10.

Earlier this year, Bing was sitting at around 9.4% of the search market in July, but Nielsen's new numbers confirm the search engine's continued growth through the month of August, up to 10.7% of the total market.

The rankings for the top 11 engines reveal Bing's impressive growth rate at about 22% month-over-month. Compare this to the rest of the pack, none of whom breaks more than a 3% increase (Yahoo and Comcast are both losing share).

The growth is thanks in part to an enormous marketing campaign, but also surely to some of the innovations Microsoft is bringing to the table with Bing. The recently launched visual search feature is arguably flat out better for browsing certain types of information, and social sharing of search results will soon be coming to Bing as well for an interesting new twist.

So what does XenApp 5 FP2 really mean?

So cutting through all the marketing mist what does Citrix XenApp 5 Feature Pack 2 really boil down to, well we thought we would share with you what it initially looks like:

• VM hosted apps - Lets you deliver Windows applications from centrally hosted virtual machines running Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7. This feature is great for regulated applications and those which have performance bottlenecks, peripheral compatibility and general compatibility issues on Terminal Services. It's also great for applications where your ISV won't support them on Terminal Services. One thing is, for VM hosted apps, you'll need Microsoft VECD licenses, not Terminal Services CALS. Most environments will have a mix though so just keep this in mind as you consider it.
• Windows 7 and Windows Mobile support - In this release, Citrix now support access from Windows 7 devices to server and VM hosted apps, as well as streamed applications running on the users desktop. Citrix also released an updated profiler which includes Windows 7 as an option.
• Power and Capacity Management - You install an agent on your XenApp servers (whether virtual or physical) and Power and Capacity Management turns them on and off when capacity is needed based on rules you create. You tell it how much capacity you always want available on standby and it just keeps turning on servers as users log into your farm to maintain that buffer capacity. Plus, you can manage multiple farms from a single implementation. But Power management is only half of this feature. The other half is capacity management. This feature will help to keep sessions consolidated on fewer servers while maintaining adequate user performance. . You can even tell capacity management to drain sessions on servers for you so you can come back later and perform your maintenance. Available to Enterprise and Platinum customers running XenApp on Windows Server 2003.
• Provisioning Services - some key enhancements which you might already be aware of but certainly worth mentioning are multi-partition and dual NIC support for provisioning images. Plus there are some wonderful new fault tolerance improvements that have been made such as server maintenance mode which let's you transfer image management between multiple provisioning servers in the event you need to bring one down for maintenance. And of course, Provisioning services can be used to manage VM hosted applications. Enterprise edition customers can use Provisioning services to manage VM hosted apps only. Platinum customers can use Provisioning services to manage VM hosted or server hosted apps.

• Service Monitoring - Service monitoring now measures the performance of XenApp servers running on XenServer by giving you visibility into the performance of the hypervisor. This will help you better determine the right mix of physical and virtual servers in your environment. In addition, you can now measure application start up time for streamed applications - a nifty feature for testing those new performance improvements we've made with your own apps. Service monitoring is available to Platinum customers.

• HDX MediaStream for Flash - . Basically, it leverages the processing power on the users Windows device to render Flash content and applications. This offloads the server and also improves performance and fluidity for the user. What's more, if the users device isn't capable of rendering the content, it will automatically fall back to server-side rendering. Citrix call that Adaptive orchestration. It's available in Advanced, Enterprise and Platinum Edition and for XenApp running on Windows Server 2003.
• HDX Plug and Play for USB storage devices - Citrix have supported USB drive mapping before. This is just a bit different in that users can plug in their USB drive even if they are already in a session and it will be mapped automatically without their having to restart their session. It's a great usability feature and is available to Advanced, Enterprise and Platinum customers and for XenApp running on Windows Server 2003.
• Profile management - Profile management has seen some bug fixes and platform support enhancements. Plus Citrix have added a number of counters to Service monitoring that expose the performance of user profiles within your environment to give you a better idea of how performance bottlenecks in user profiles can be affecting the performance of your applications.
• EasyCall voice services - In the previous XenApp release, Citrix introduced this as a Xen-based virtual appliance available to Advanced, Enterprise and Platinum edition customers. Basically, EasyCall let's users hover their mouse over any phone number on their screen and then click to call that number. This is accomplished using a plugin on the users device. The plugin communicates call requests to the EasyCall virtual appliance and then the appliance tells the VoIP system to call the user at their current location and then to call their destination number. In this release, Citrix added a feature called Find Me which lets users configure phone numbers that EasyCall will use to redirect their calls to if they are not available, trying each one in order. EasyCall is available to Advanced, Enterprise and Platinum edition customers.