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EA2631 Virtualizing Exchange 2007 session recap

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

Deja vu.  Well, almost.  I sat in on a simliar session last year and I wondered what has now changed with vSphere being available and what new expectations could be had for virtualizing Exchange and I found answers.  First of all, as the speaker put it – VMware has eaten their own dogfood and virtualized Exchange 2007 for their internal consumption.  With approximately 55,000 mailboxes, that is an impressive feat itself.

Beyond internal consumption, all data points to Exchange evolving into a better workload to run within virtualization.  Much of that can probably be attributed to Microsoft’s own virtualization technology, but Exchange on ESX benefits just the same.  Performance gains out of ESX 4 make for a good combination with the improved I/O for Exchange 2007.   Initial data for Exchange 2010 continues the trend of making Exchange a better workload in general and making it more appropriate to virtualize.

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AppleDatacenterHome TechSoftware

Moneywell, I’ve all but abandoned thee

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

Yeah, seems like today is a day of #fail for me.  I realize today scanning over my blog content that I’ve all but abandoned my new buddy Moneywell.  Its very close to a month since I used it last and although I really like the software, its different and I’m having troubles with that.  I am still finding myself relying on Microsoft Money and its darned running balances.   Habit is hard to break.

Now, a month later, I have a lot of reconciliation to do to catch up in Moneywell.  The thing I am struggling with most in the software are duplicate transactions and how to easily find them.  Running balance is how I’ve always been able to check and make sure everything is on track from day to day, and although the daily totals are in Moneywell, I’m finding it hard to find errors.

And, part of this is self-inflicted (see, really sensing a theme here).  I like to prepopulate my transactions in my financial program and so there are transactions for up to a month in advance in Moneywell.  So when the real transaction downloads and the dollar amounts don’t match from my guestimate transaction, my balances go wonky.

The other thing I miss from Microsoft Money is my bill reminders – my recurring transactions in Quickbooks speak.  I’ve used these to remind me of annual and quarterly bills, plus my monthly transactions. Its kept me honest with the trash company and even helped me make sure I never overdraw the account on a month-to-month basis.

So, back to the drawing board.  I need to carve out some time this week in the evening to get things caught up in Moneywell.  I really believe the software has a lot of promise for me and for my family’s finances.  I need to give it an honest try!

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AppleDatacenterHome TechSoftware

Moving from MS Money to Moneywell

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

I think that I have settled on Moneywell as my software of choice for Mac money management.  I really like how this software is setup for an envelope system style of managing your money.  I also like that it imported my QIF exports, although there is no way for it to preserve transfer transactions between accounts.

I initially had problems and had dimissed Moneywell because I could not connect to my primary bank.  After perusing the Quicken Financial Life forums (I was a beta tester), I found the issue – I was not using the correct username and password.  To work with my bank, I needed to provide my member number and PIN to authenticate – not my website username and password.  Worked that out, and now automatic updates are all set.

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AppleDatacenterHome TechSoftware

Microsoft officially kills Money (updated)

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

I’ve been a loyal Microsoft Money user since 2004 – well, maybe 2003.  My transaction logs go back to mid-2004, but I think I decided to start over with a new data file in 2004.  I’d played with MS Money since 2003 sometime, but I seriously approached it in 2004.  Yesterday, I learned, Microsoft will be killing the product.  It will no longer be for sale at the end of this month and automatic services for the product will go dark in two years.

Microsoft Money was the one product that I haven’t found a suitable alternative for on the Mac.  And having years of data in its proprietary format doesn’t help, either.  Really, there are great Mac software options, including Quicken for Mac (maybe Quicken Financial Life sometime soon), Moneywell or Moneydance.

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AppleDatacenterSoftware

Did Apple lose its chance to capitalize on Vista?

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

I read a Digg for an article over at macworld.com entitled Apple has squandered the gift that was Vista.  I’m not sure I agree with the author’s perspective.  In fact, I think what Apple did might have been a very smart play.  After reading the piece, the author’s view seems to be that because Apple still has less than 10% of the market share and that it didn’t introduce a netbook or business laptop (??) that they somehow failed to capitalize on the opportunity left by Vista.  Let me offer a different perspective.

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DatacenterStorageVirtualization

Con-call to discuss VMware View

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

Not long ago, we did a demo of VMware’s VDI product at HTC.  To be honest, we were underwhelmed at the time.  Fast forward to December and VMware remedied that problem with the release of VMware View.  We are just in the beginnings of the trial for the View 3.0 product and we haven’t gotten our first virtual desktop running under it, but already our expectations are set pretty high.  

Yesterday, we had a conference call with our VMware partner and some of VMware’s technical and sales resources.  We talked specifically about the packages available with the View product line and what the two basic packages buy us.  First, VMware is offering an Enterprise and a Premier bundles of the VMware View software.  Enterprise is basically the upgraded version of VDI.  Premier on the other hand includes the features we were looking forward to utilizing – namely thin provisioning, View Composer and maybe even VMware ThinApp.  

Going into the virtual desktop foray, we knew that storage was likely our biggest hurdle.  We knew that the SAN storage is much more expensive than the SATA drives we currently bundle in desktops, so our gigabytes will become a premium in the virtual world.  The thin provisioning/linked clones technology is huge as we drive further down this road.  I think that this technology has the potential of cutting our storage utilization by 1/10th of the estimated need we projected in November.  

All that said, we were concerned about the price point from VMware for the product, especially once I saw that we needed the Premier bundle, but VMware surprised us with the list price being only $200 per virtual desktop with a buy in as low as 10 virtual desktops in a starter pack.  I have not seen our actual quote from our partner, but I assume we may get some sort of price break, but the value of the bundle is great in my eyes.

The bundle includes not only the license to run 10 virtual desktops, but also an ESX server license – not just the free hypervisor, but he full VI3 enterprise license, and it includes a copy of VirtualCenter Foundations (a scaled down, 3 ESX only version of vCenter).  Our thought is to purchase two of these 10 user starter bundles, which will give us two ESX servers on which to run our virtual desktops and two hosts to provide some level of redundancy for our virtual desktops – with a cluster utilizing HA, DRS and VMotion. 

We still must cross the Microsoft licensing hurdles.  And, I read earlier this week that Microsoft has again changed their licensing, so we’ll see what impact that has on us, but for now, we’re making progress.  Should be an interesting week next week looking into thin provisioning with my co-worker.  I’m pretty excited.

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AppleDatacenterSoftwareVirtualization

Updated Windows 7 install notes for MacBook Pro owners

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

In the process of installing the Windows 7 beta, I have come across a few things that don’t quite work well out of the box on my MacBook Pro.  Here are some notes from my experiences that may help someone else:

  • Partitioned the drive using Boot Camp Assistant.  Install takes up about 9GB, so you’ll want at least a 20GB partition.  I chose 32GB.
  • I had to burn the ISO to a physical disk to get it to install – couldn’t figure out how to use the ISO to install Windows 7 into the Boot Camp partition.
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Windows 7 Beta update – its installed

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

I had much better luck today getting a installation key and copy of the Windows 7 Beta from Microsoft.  I have just installed it in a BootCamp partition on my MacBook Pro and so far, I’m impressed.  I decided to put it into BootCamp to get real performance metrics since VMware Fusion would have a certain amount of overhead.  And as a BootCamp partition, I should be able to run it as a VM in either Parallels Desktop or Fusion.

So far, I have to say, I’m impressed.  The OS is responsive and quick.  The boot time was impressive and so far, it looks to be a huge improvement over Vista, even in its beta form.  Everything that I have seen so far is in line with what I’ve been reading.  Some are already giving it the real what-for by using it as their day to day OS and its working well.  It runs on par with Windows XP and has all the enhanced functionality of Vista.

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DatacenterSoftware

Microsoft take down Windows beta download, adding servers

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

I just checked in again for the first time since about 6:00 on the Windows 7 Beta download – got this message from Microsoft:

Thanks for your interest in the Windows 7 Beta. The volume has been phenomenal — we’re in the process of adding more servers to handle the demand. We’re sorry for the delay and we’ll re-post the Beta as soon as we can ensure a quality download experience.

I’m glad they noticed…  But their comment – phenomenal?  A blind man could have seen this in a crystal ball – c’mon people, be prepared…

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DatacenterSoftware

Windows 7 Beta downloads crashes Microsoft servers

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

In a sure sign that the world wants something better than Windows Vista, downloads for the new Windows 7 beta has brought Microsoft’s web servers to a screaching halt.  In trying to download the beta since its release about 45 minutes ago, I have encountered only “Server Too Busy” messages when trying to login to download the beta.  I will continue to try downloading the beta through the afternoon, but as for now, I don’t think anyone is having much luck.  Great job Microsoft…

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/dd353205.aspx

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