In my recent article about the realities of managing a virtualised infrastructure, I mentioned the need to patch offline virtual machine images. Whilst many offline images will be templates, they may still require operating system, security or application updates to ensure that they are not vulnerable when started (or when a cloned VM is created from a template).
Now Microsoft has a beta for a tool that will allow this – imaginatively named the Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool. Built on the Windows Workflow Foundation and PowerShell, it works with System Center Virtual Machine Manager and either System Center Configuration Manager or Windows Server Update Services to automate the process of applying operating system updates through the definition of servicing jobs. Each job will:
“Wake” the VM (deploy and start it).
Trigger the appropriate update cycle.
Shut down the VM and return it to the library.
Although I haven’t tried this yet, it does strike me that there is one potential pitfall to be aware of – sysprepped images for VM deployment templates will start into the Windows mini-setup wizard. I guess the workaround in such a scenario is to use tools from the Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK) to inject updates into the associated .WIM file and deploy VMs from image, rather than by cloning sysprepped VMs.
“[it’s] not part of our DNA and I don’t think this is something that we should be doing.â€
Well, maybe things are changing in post-Gates Microsoft. I knew that System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 (named at last week’s Microsoft Management Summit) included support for managing VMware ESX Server and a future version should also be able to manage XenSource hosts, but what I had missed in the MMS press release was System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) 2007 Cross Platform Extensions. These allow SCOM to manage HP-UX, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Sun Solaris and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server through management packs with Novell, Quest and Xandros adding support for common applications like Apache, MySQL and (a real surprise) Oracle. Then, for those with existing investments in major enterprise management suites, there are SCOM connectors to allow interoperability between System Center and third-party products like HP OpenView and IBM Tivoli.
I really think this is a brave step for Microsoft – but also the right thing to do. There are very few Microsoft-only datacentres and, whilst I am no enterprise management expert, it seems to me that corporates don’t want one solution for each platform and the big enterprise management suites are costly to implement. With System Center, people know what they are getting – a reasonably priced suite of products, with a familiar interface and a good level of functionality – maybe not everything that’s in Tivoli, UniCenter or OpenView, but enough to do the job. If the same solution that manages the WIntel systems can also manage the enterprise apps on Solaris (or another common Unix platform), then everyone’s a winner.
Even though Inbox Zero has helped me gain some control over my e-mail, I still need all the help I can get. Last week, Simon Coles sent me an invitation for Xobni – a plugin for Microsoft Outlook that offers fast search, conversation threading, a social networking platform, and many other features designed to make email better – or as Xobni (inbox spelt backwards) like to put it:
“Xobni is the Outlook plug-in that helps you organize your flooded inbox.”
It’s already becoming very useful – earlier today I couldn’t find a document that I was sure I’d been sent (and the Outlook 2007 search functionality didn’t seem to find it either). I used Xobni to highlight another e-mail from the same correspondent and there was the missing document – one of the listed files that we had exchanged – from where I could open the original e-mail, or the attachment that I was after. Xobni will pull contact information out of e-mail messages (even if I don’t have an address book entry for a particular contact) and tells me who my contacts correspond with that I do too. There’s also an analytics feature that lets me track the volume of e-mail I receive (and how long it takes me to process), ranking my correspondents and telling me what time of day they tend to send me e-mail. It can also read my calendar and automatically highlight the times that I am available over the next few days, placing the details in an message, all ready to send. There’s VOIP integration too – although clicking on the Skype logo launched Office Communicator on my system (I don’t have Skype installed but I do have OCS). Finally, Xobni has its own built in search capabilities, which I’ve used a few times this evening to track down long lost e-mails based on the snippets of information that I could recall from the recesses of my mind. In fact, the only niggle I found was in my work e-mail, where it struggles to differentiate between first and last names (our display names are formatted with the lastname in front – e.g. “Wilson Mark” – and, even though the e-mail address is something like mark.wilson@country.companyname.com, Xobni thinks my name is “Wilson” but has no such problem for contacts with sensible display names – like “Mark Wilson” – or with punctuation in the display name – such as “Wilson, Mark”).
Xobni’s invitation-only period is over (although they are still banding around the beta tag in true web 2.0 style) and the product is available for all to download. I’ve only been using it for a few days but I’m very impressed with the information that it gives me – even so, I’ll leave the product review to those who know it best – check out the video below:
As someone who works closely with Microsoft, I’m very interested to see what happens to the company as Bill Gates steps aside. Changes are already afoot – anyone who has attended a recent marketing event (like the 2008 launch wave) will have heard about the idea of software plus services – and some of Microsoft’s partners need to start thinking about their own business models as hosted services become more and more attractive to corporates.
Two years ago, I wrote that I didn’t think the “webtop” would replace the desktop. I still think that is true – enterprises are not yet ready to store their data in “the cloud” – but things are starting to change and there seems little doubt that web services are the direction that were all heading in. Windows and Office will be here for a while yet but Microsoft desparately needs to get a piece of the action if it is to stay relevant – hence their failed attempt to buy Yahoo!. Meanwhile, rather than follow the Google model of storing everything in cyberspace, Microsoft Live Mesh looks at how to make data accessible by connecting people, processes and technology – wherever they are.
Personally, I’m glad that Microsoft didn’t launch a hostile bid for Yahoo! and instead withdrew their offer. It seems pretty clear that the Yahoo! Inc. management team would rather have hit the self-destruct button than become part of Microsoft Corporation and, to me, that implies a degree of immaturity. Meanwhile, Microsoft can keep their cash and move forward with their software plus services model. When one of the world’s largest companies has to borrow money for a takeover, that’s not a good sign – and that’s an awful lot of money that they could do something useful with.
As the day job has been taking over my life (reducing my time for blogging), I thought I’d finish up the week with some light-hearted humour. I’ve commented before that I think Apple’s MacBook Air ultraportable PC is overpriced and underspecced. And whilst it may be selling to the Apple fanboys and those execs with more money than sense it’s not really much use for people who really need a light PC to travel with for their work (in my opinion, as someone who travels a lot, and uses standard notebook PCs – although, sadly, my employer won’t give me a ThinkPad either). Not wanting to start up the Mac vs. PC rubbish (I’ve been there before), I thought I’d post Lenovo’s view on what an ultraportable PC should be like:
This video has been floating around the web for a few days now, and some of the responses I’ve seen have been along the lines of “Yeah, but the MacBook Air does everything I need without needing to plug anything in”. Right. Of course it does. Well, if the MacBook Air is good for you, then all I have to say is “good for you”. Personally, I’ll take the ThinkPad. And if Vista is too much of a compromise (I don’t think it is) then I’ll take a normal Apple MacBook (mine is running OS X and Vista).
Even though