Since the release of Windows 7 and Server 2008-R2 we have about 3000 Group Policy Settings available to centrally configure and manage Windows clients and servers. Though some among us might have worked with GPO settings from the early days on, knowing about the existence of each and every available setting is nearly impossible. It still happens to me that while I am configuring a specific GPO setting, I do come across other GPOs I didn’t knew of yet.
Have we not all been in a situation once, where we wondered whether a certain system configuration item could be managed via a GPO setting? So what would you do? Open the Group Policy Management Console and browse through the settings until you find the setting you’ve been looking for? Yes, that is possible approach and sometimes the quickest if you know in which area the setting is most likely stored. Another approach is to download the Group Policy Settings Reference for Windows and Windows Server spreadsheet and search through the Excel sheet.
Now here’s another nice solution that allows you to search for Group Policy settings without opening the GPMC or an Excel sheet. All you need is Windows 7 and Internet Access.
Having difficulties finding menu and toolbar commands in Office 2010? Here’s a nice tool called the Interactive menu to ribbon guide. You can either download the offline versions here or access the guide directly from the web here.
There’s a lot of talk about Windows 95 in these days as it’s 15 years ago when Windows 95 was launched. Well if all are so much in “Operating System Birthday” celebration mode, then let’s not forget that soon it will be 25 years ago since Microsoft released the very first version of Windows 1.0.
More Windows Desktop OS History can be found here. What happened in 1985 here and in 1995 here.
Microsoft recently published a deployment guide for Microsoft Office 2010. The content in this book is a copy of selected content from the Office 2010 Resource Kit Technical library. Download the guide from here
Last week I had a Windows 7 planning meeting with one of our clients and like in any other Windows 7 related meeting that i have had in the past months with other customers, the topic about XP Mode was brought up. It appears that when speaking about application compatibility, first thing people think of is XP Mode. To be honest I don’t blame them, because when XP Mode was first introduced in April 2009 during the Windows 7 Beta phase it was promoted as a possible workaround for Application Compatibility issues and therefore got a lot of attention. The message almost sounded like “There is no barrier to move to Windows 7 because if you run into an application compatibility issue, you can always use XP Mode”. So what’s your point? Well, while the statement as such is absolutely true, there are a few things to consider when we speak about computers that run in an enterprise environment.
What is XP Mode?
Windows Virtual PC is the latest Microsoft virtualization technology for Windows 7. It is the runtime engine for Windows XP Mode to provide a virtual Windows environment for Windows 7. With Windows Virtual PC, Windows XP Mode applications can be seen and accessed from a Windows 7 desktop.
So in simple words, with XP Mode one can run the Windows XP operating system in a virtualized environment on top of Windows 7
System Requirements
The first version of XP mode required that the hardware supported hardware assisted virtualization (HAV), but that requirement was removed in March 2010 allowing more users to use Windows XP Mode. The hardware therefore should at least meet the Windows 7 system requirements plus an additional 512 MB – 1 GB of memory and 5-15 GB disk space for the Virtual OS.
Installation – Deployment
If only needed on a handful of clients Windows XP mode can be installed manually by a systems administrator through the following website http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtual-pc/download.aspx which will install Windows Virtual PC and then the XP Mode Virtual Machine. But if more than just a few installations are needed, companies should consider preparing an automated process for which Microsoft has provided a guide and sample scripts that can be downloaded from here. When deploying XP mode either the standard Windows XP Service Pack 3 image provided by Microsoft or a customized Windows XP Service Pack 3 image can be used.
Applications that run in XP Mode
Applications that need to run in XP Mode can be made available either by having them pre-installed within a customized image or by installing them through Software Distribution. Of course it would also be possible to install applications manually on a per VM basis, but this is a time consuming task. When using Software Distribution, companies must take into account that also the virtual OS will consume a license.
Antivirus and Security Updates
Because the virtual OS has also access to a companies IT infrastructure (users will want to print and access data from their applications running in XP Mode), Antivirus protection and security updates must be taken into account as well. Companies will have to carefully look at the licensing aspects because usually most products are licensed on a per installed operating system basis. However some vendors offer special agreements for the use of XP Mode. McAfee allows the use of VirusScan Enterprise on both Windows 7 and XP Mode on one computer and counts this as one license, however for the use of the McAfee Host Intrusion Protection software a single license can only be used either for Windows 7 or Windows XP Mode. If both clients need HIPS, two licenses are needed. (McAfee source).
To keep the Windows XP VM up to date with operating system security patches, companies should consider to either patch these clients through their Software Distribution Patch Management infrastructure or configure these clients to directly access Windows update or an internal WSUS server and automatically install patches as they become available respectively become approved by the system administrator. Again the number of deployed clients with XP Mode enabled will dictate the best dictate the best and most efficient strategy.
Will this work out?
If the use of XP Mode is only considered for a small number of clients, the effort of manually installing XP mode or preparing an automated deployment process is acceptable, however if a company plans to deploy XP Mode on several hundreds of clients and in addition plans to use it for a longer period of time they should look at more scalable solutions such as Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MED-V). MED-V provides a more centralized approach for deploying and managing virtual images. However only companies that have access to MDOP which is available through the Software Assurance program can use MED-V.
Running a virtualized Windows XP on top of Windows 7 is probably the easiest way to solve compatibility issues, however companies should not consider the use of XP Mode as a way to get around the effort of testing and remediating their applications for the use with Windows 7. XP Mode should be seen as a short term temporary solution removing potential road blocks for the deployment of Windows 7. In the long run remote desktop virtualization or application virtualization might be a better option.
Seeing is believing – watch this 20 minute recorded demonstration of the AppTitude application testing and application remediation platform to learn how to accelerate your Windows 7, Microsoft App-V, Citrix XenApp, 64x, Windows Server and IE8 projects. . Video here (one-time registration required).
When I watched the VirtualComputer NxTop video on DABCC last week, I was pretty impressed about what Doug Lane was showing us there. Especially after the release of the XenClient from Citrix the bare metal client hypervisor got a lot of attention. Now while Citrix just released it’s first public version of a client hypervisor, VirtualComputer seems to be a big step ahead, especially when we take into account the management of hypervisor based clients.
So after having watched the NxTop demonstration video I headed over to the VirtualComputer website, created an account and downloaded the software and installation guide. I quickly checked the NxTop system requirements and decided that I am going to give this a try. Is this really as good as it looks in the demo video?
I first installed a Windows Server 2008-R2 with Hype-V enabled and then installed the NxTop Center which is the Management Console from where you create and manage the NxTop virtual machines. The installation went smoothly, actually there was nothing I had to do since all required components (SQL Database, Apache Tomcat Server and Java Runtime) are automatically installed by the NxTop Center installation process. Detailed information for the NxTop installation can be found here (registration required). Some additional configuration was needed for the Hyper-V integration, but that was about it.
Now that I had the NxTop Center ready, I prepared two virtual machines, one for Windows XP and one for Windows 7. Now here comes one of the first cool things, when creating a NxTop within the NxTop Center console, it actually launches a new VM in Hyper-V, once I had the two VMs prepared I was ready to publish them to a NxTop Client. Now that I had the server side ready, I continued by installing the NxTop engine (the bare metal client hypervisor) on a notebook. This is a simple process, just burn the provided NxTop Engine ISO file to a CD, boot from it and follow the installation instructions. Once the NxTop client was ready I logged on with my previously created user and connected to the NxTop Center server.
The above picture shows the NxTop Center. Although the NxTop Center console is a web based application, it does very much look like an Microsoft Management Console Snap-in, and in fact the Console follows many of the design principals of an MMC. Configuration items on the left, content description in the middle and an action pane on the right. But now lets go back to the NxTop Engine client. So once i logged in for the first time, the NxTop client registered itself automatically with the NxTop Center.
As a next step I assigned the two prepared NxTop VMs to my test user.
I then headed over to the NxTop Engine client, initiated a refresh, and after having contacted the NxTop Center two NxTop OS logo’s appeared on the desktop and the download of the VMs to the NxTop engine started. The download of the VMs over a local LAN went pretty fast, once downloaded some additional local configuration tasks were executed, but after a few minutes I was ready to go. Of course I bumped into an issue once or twice but that was all a matter of not having read the documentation properly. (i talk about those in another post).
Conclusion, this is as good as it looked like in the video, if not even better! Easy to install, simple to manage and NxTop Engine performance is great. A special thanks to Sandrijn Stead from VirtualComputer for providing me with a demo license on a Saturday afternoon.
As written in my previous post, I have just finished installing a Server 2008 R2 to conduct a proof of concept. I have also some PDF documents that I will use for reference. So I was just about to install some PDF reader software, but then I thought, hey why “install” software, there must be something small out there that allows me reading a PDF file without having to install anything on my fresh installed server.
I’ve come across various portable applications, but at the end I found a really cool one called Cool PDF Reader, well neat would actually be the better word, as the executable only uses 651KB and does not require an install.
Cool PDF Reader is FREE and can be downloaded from here.
I was just about to drop a post on how to enable Wi-Fi in Server 2008 (R2) as I just bumped into this when installing a Server 2008 R2 on a HP 8730p notebook and found out that by default this Service isn’t enabled, which makes sense as usually Servers don’t use a Wireless connection.
But why rewrite something others did already. Read more about enabling Wi-Fi on Server 2008(R2) here.
BranchCache is a new feature available in Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 that reduces WAN bandwidth usage and improves application responsiveness when workstations in a remote location access content from the head office or data center by downloading and caching content on the local network as it is requested, making it immediately available to other clients that subsequently request the same content.
This paper examines the BrachCache functionality specifically in the context of software distribution using System Center Configuration Manager 2007 to determine if it is an optimal solution for the deployment of software, patches and operating systems to remote, serverless branches.
Refreshing my knowledge a bit on Time Synchronization, NTP etc. and came across this utility. It’s FREE and doesn’t require installation.
The Domain Time LMCheck test tool lets you assess the current time of all the Windows machines on your network quickly and easily. It uses the built-in LAN Manager NetRemote TOD (Time of Day) function to check the time on all the machines in the browse list.
Just came across the Windows 7 Compatibility Search provider, allowing you to do a quick Windows 7 compatibility check for an application or hardware. Download and install the Windows 7 Compatibility Search Provider from here
