Windows 7 is a good thing…
Posted on 19 June 2009 | No responses
I’m an agnostic when it comes to operating systems. I don’t possess the religious ferment present in a lot of us geeks as to the ‘best’ OS nor do I believe in the ‘free is always best’ mantra of the open source zealots. But this is starting to feel political so I better move on…
I’ve been running Windows 7 RC on my desktop for a while now and I must confess that is has been a refreshing experience, especially when compared to Windows Vista. Windows 7 has been reliable, fast, and even pleasant. No strange networking behavior. No driver uglies. It just works and doesn’t get in the way. I’m running 64bit Windows 7 RC on an Intel Core 2 Quad 2.4GHz with 6GB RAM and I’ve yet to push the box at all. It always has plenty of spare resources. Dare I write that Windows 7 is more efficient? Oh gosh, I guess I did ;-).
Best of luck with your Windows 7 endeavors. So far mine have been pleasant and pain free. And for a Windows OS RC experience that is a new result, at least for me.
Another addition to the regulator alphabet soup?
Posted on 18 June 2009 | No responses
Yikes, so here we go… We need to give the least transparent and least accountable entity with the most control over our economy more power without restrictions or transparency. That sounds like a great idea, doesn’t it? NO! IT DOES NOT. The Federal Reserve does not need more power and giving it more power without forcing transparency on decision making will leave us with more closed door decisions that benefit Wall Street at the expense of the tax payer. NO THANKS!!
Oh yeah, and we need another regulator to oversee financial instruments marketed to consumers to make sure they are safe. Hey, keep that lead paint out of my mortgage! Another massive bureaucracy funded by our tax dollars with little or no accountability and no firewall between duty to the consumer and political pressures from the beltway. Yes sir may I have another! But it feels so good when it stops!
What we really need and many independent analysts agree is real reform. The regulatory system in place today is a patchwork of incomprehensible junk built up over years and years of patching a system designed for the economy that existed six decades ago. It ALL need to be rethought, simplified, and firewalled from politics. But, of course, when those in charge benefit from the current system, this type of reform is dead on arrival.
Ah well, the very very very very slow pace of democracy when campaign cycles drive decision making. It is just as bad as the myopic quarterly obsessions of publicly traded companies. The Democrats have one year to get something meaningful accomplished. After that, we’ll be back to gridlock over the midterm elections and then the next Presidential cycle.
What a mess.
New MacBook Pro models
Posted on 16 June 2009 | No responses
Well I’m drooling a bit over the new MacBook Pro models. I happen to love the design, support and build quality of the notebooks as well as the stability of the platform. The new models that can hold 8GB of DDR3 along with an SSD for storage should be really fast and very very lovely for running lots of virtual machines and avoiding the pain of waiting on disk i/o. Come on, a 5400 RPM drive is way to slow for power users. But an SSD, now we’re getting somewhere.
cnet’s Apple Byte has some info after you get past the iPhone hype.
Microsoft storage goodies
Posted on 22 January 2009 | No responses
I’ve been spending a fair amount of time working with Microsoft’s storage management enhancements. These include the Virtual Disk Service (VDS), Multi-path I/O (MPIO), iSCSI, iSNS, and the Volume Shadow-copy Service (VSS). If you’re not familiar with these don’t worry. Use your favorite search engine or the Microsoft corporate site to learn more. They are all quite useful and add more value to what is in the box when you purchase a Window Server version.
I’ve implemented VDS and VSS hardware providers, MPIO DSMs, iSCSI targets, and management tools for all of the above. If you need assistance with any of these technologies please feel free to contact me. I’m always happy to answer quick questions and my offer advice.
And of course, I’m always interested in new business.
Microsoft’s in-box disk multipathing is a good thing…
Posted on 16 December 2008 | No responses
I’ve been spending some of my time implementing the storage vendor supplied widget that fits into Microsoft’s MPIO solution. MPIO is short for Multi-path I/O. What is that? It is the ability to have more than one physical connection to your storage device. Why would you want that? For redundancy and performance. The concept and storage vendor specific implementations have been around for a long time. Microsoft first introduced MPIO as an add-on available only from storage vendors as part of Windows Server 2003. Microsoft then decided to add it to the OS distribution in Windows Server 2008. So if you are running 2008, you have it. The storage vendor supplies a widget called the Device Specific Module (DSM). The DSM is responsible for selecting which path an i/o request (think read or write) will take to the storage device. Now this can be a bit complex in large Storage Area Networks (SANs) and it can be very simple in directly attached SAS drives. Remember SAS drives have two ports, not one like the old parallel SCSI drives. So every SAS drive is capable of taking advantage of MPIO. Check out Microsoft’s FAQ.
If you’re trying the new Windows Server 2008 R2 check out this. for the latest information. There are also command line tools for when you’re using Server Core.
So if you have specific questions regarding MPIO and would like a second opinion or an independent (I’m not a Microsoft employee) opinion feel free to toss questions at this post or at my email address (see Sales tab).
It feels like I know just about all there is to know about the moving parts in this solution and how to effectively manage it in large environments.
Check out my blogroll, there are a few Microsoft blogs worth catching if you’re working on understanding what this is and how to take advantage of it. It offers some goodness in-box that usually costs a lot of extra money from the storage vendors. So be careful to ask your array vendor if they support Microsoft’s MPIO and if support costs extra. It just might save you a few thousand dollars per host which is nothing to take lightly these days.
Windows device driver installs
Posted on 19 October 2008 | No responses
There used to be quite a bit of pain involved in creating a robust installation process for a multi-architecture device driver (x86, x64, IA64). But things have advanced over the years and I feel compelled to recommend my favorite; WiX plus DPInst.
WiX or Windows Installer XML (WiX) tool-set is a great open source project which provides a clean and clear way of generating MSI databases using XML to define the installation components and user interactions. It does a very good job but does take a little time to learn. I prefer it to the all of the commercial Wizard based tools because I write code. I don’t use wizards. It is also much easier to debug than any other tool I’ve used. It is easy to correlate the setupapi.log entries with what you’ve declared in your XML and there is a very active mailing list with lots of helpful folks responding to your questions. I recommend it for any installation development project.
I use WiX in conjunction with DPInst to create short, simple, robust, and reliable installs for device drivers. So do many other people (this has caught on). I highly recommend both. If you’re creating installations for device drivers just please use DPInst. It will save you so much hassle. Even if you have to interesting things after you’re driver is installed such as rebuilding driver stacks for supported devices, let DPInst install the driver(s) and then do your extra work after that in a DLL you can invoke from WiX. The DLL will run inside the Windows Installer process so it will have the proper access to get your extra tasks accomplished. Now, safely rolling those back if something fails is a bit tricky, but hey, you don’t have bugs in your code, so don’t worry ;-).