Thank You For Choosing Shaw – 15Mbit Extreme

A number of years ago, well before MPECS Inc. was conceived, we had an ISP connection that was cable based and was extremely fast for the day. Then along came Shaw.

Since things went sour back then Shaw has come _a long way_ to bringing both their services and their customer service levels up. Since we have a few clients that are fortunate enough to have cable access in their businesses we have had our fair share of working with Shaw over the years. Thus we were able to see the improvement in their services and customer service firsthand.

So, as of today we switched out our home 3Mbit DSL connection for a Shaw Extreme 15Mbit connection and boy oh boy is there a tangible difference in the way our Internet runs here:

That is 1.29MB/Second with the rate bouncing up and down between 1.56MB/Sec and 1.24MB/Sec. The download is a test download of Windows XP Mode from Microsoft.

This is a Call of Duty: United Offensive demo game download from Activision.com:

This one bounced around between 2.30MB/Sec down through 1.84MB/Sec with it settling in at close to the 2MB/Sec mark.

Now, this is all fine and dandy since the time here is just around when kids will be coming home from school. Since cable Internet is a shared pipe, the real test of the new setup will be to run the above download tests during “peak” usage times to see if we still have those speeds.

With speeds like this, ADSL service seems almost stone age at 6Mbit . . . though one of our local DSL providers has just started offering 15Mbit speeds.

And one more thing, with a Windows Home Server sitting on our network beside our old SBS 2003 R2 box there are no issues with Shaw’s dynamic IP as our homeserver.com DNS has already changed to the new IP address.

Our home network is a prime candidate for Microsoft’s new SBS 2011 Essentials “Aurora” product when it RTMs. This is because our local Outlook clients here connect to our company’s Exchange servers instead of the local SBS 2003 R2 Exchange 2003 to keep things simple. Monique and I share calendars, task lists, contacts, and more via Outlook and Public Folders.

We will probably end up running SBS 2011 Essentials on one of HP’s new MicrosServers or maybe building a small box to run the OS. We have not had any time to test the product in its beta form yet.

UPDATE: I managed to finger fumble publish the post in WLW.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer

.CA Agency CIRA Is Down For Maintenance

We need to make some changes to one of our .CA domains and are looking to register one. When we went to our registrar of choice DomainsAtCost.ca to manage our domains we saw the following after logging in:

Please be informed that CIRA, the .CA registry, is currently closed for a 24 hour maintenance period from October 12, 2010 at 9 AM until October 13, 2010 at 9 AM Eastern.

So, it looks as though we are on hold for our .CA needs at the moment.

The Cloud

While Cloud vendors may be a little more conscious of their user’s needs and try to run maintenance at a time when their services use is at its lowest, this situation brings cause for pause when it comes to evaluating how a Cloud service can either benefit or hurt our client’s operations.

An honest evaluation of the Cloud service and the costs to our client’s business if the service is down must be taken so that our client can evaluate the risks to their business as clearly as possible.

Once those risks have been evaluated and approved we can move forward with setting them up with a hosted Exchange and SharePoint environment (we are partnered with Own Web Now for this service), or even go so far as to serve SBS 2008 and Windows 7 desktops to them via SPLA licensing on our servers.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer

The Cloud looks to be kewl ...

There have been some excellent posts on the forthcoming Coud initiatives by Microsoft and others:

• David Overton: Why Microsoft Partners should embrace S+S and still deliver on premise solutions
• Vlad Mazek: Time to build your own bridge
• David Schrag: Information Technology Consultant, Contractor, or Vendor?

David Overton gives an excellent explanation of the ins and outs of Microsoft's vision for Software plus Services (S+S).

Vlad's post is his initial reaction to the announcements, with his followup posted in David Overton's comments for the above post.

David Schrag does an awesome job of speaking to the business aspects and direction of an I.T firm. While not necessarily S+S focused, the article is great for a business owner to work on their own vision of their firm.

For us, the move to the Cloud for many products and services we have come to take for granted only seems natural.

We signed the SPLA because we perceive a need for providing Cloud based services to our smaller clients.

Our post on Terminal Services RemoteApps should really help to clarify where the Cloud will fit in. Cloud based service providers that utilize RemoteApps have a killer app in their hands. No need for dedicated TS desktops, just email an RDP or MSI file to the new user and away they go.

Perhaps something like AuthAnvil to provide some additional security for their services.

Our clients do not need a completely decked out server/client infrastructure to accomplish one's daily business needs anymore ... at least that is where things are going.

We do have a few clients with very specialized Line of Business Applications that may not fall into the need for the Cloud yet, but it won't be long before those LoB vendors may be offering Cloud based services.

What does this mean for us?

It means that we will still need to implement some soft of client/server setup. At this point, the robustness of that setup may take a number of steps back as the only real local services being served will be file, print, DNS, DHCP, and a few other oddball server services.

But, our management of those systems will definitely not be on par with what they are today.

So, that means that we need to take stock of how the vendors we work with are looking to implement their Cloud S+S and find a place to fit in.

For some, the changes may be sad or disheartening news ... for us, it presents a whole new series of challenges and adventures!

There will always be a way to provide products and services for a fee to earn a living for us and our employees. The way to discover them is to have a good ear with the vendors, other service providers, and your employees.

If we need to reinvent ourselves, then so be it.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists

*All Mac on SBS posts are posted on our in-house iMac via the Safari Web browser.

Virtualization - Server, Desktop, Performance, and the Future

We do a fair amount of client and internal virtualization setups.

For our clients, virtualization gives us a single system setup that can provide a number of desktop OS virtual machines for Group Policy managed Remote Web Workplace accessible desktops.

A little while back, our Edmonton Microsoft User Group (previous blog post) brought in Kai Axford to speak on various aspects of computer security with a focus on virtualization.

A number of really good points were made.

When it comes to virtual machine performance, the one thing Kai said that still stands out today: The more spindles (hard drives) the server has, the better the VM performance.

We have a number of low utilization setups where a simple RAID 1 volume configured in a 1U Xeon X3000 series Quad Core works really well.

For one of our clients, there is an employee expansion drive that goes beyond the limits of their current location. It is fortunate that they are at the end of their 2 year cycle for the implementation of new hardware and a refresh and re-purposing of their existing hardware as we have some flexibility for our solution proposal.

In their case, we spoke about utilizing the Remote Web Workplace (RWW) and dedicated desktops for people to work from home on (virtualized XP Pro or Vista Enterprise). We also spoke to some of the new RWW features that will be available in SBS 2008 such as Terminal Services Application publishing, so it was pretty easy to see the gears turning in the business owner's head as we went through the various remote access solutions we could implement today and next year.

Currently, they have a 1U Xeon 3000 series dedicated desktop that one of our primary technical contacts utilizes. So, it was not much of a step to develop that setup into a virtualized desktop solution for many more users.

For the hardware, we settled on the newer SR1550ALR 1U dual Intel Xeon 5000 Dual/Quad Core series chassis with the Intel SRCSASRB RAID controller that gives us the capability to run 8 2.5" SAS or SATA drives for our primary virtualization requirements. Since we are looking for capacity and performance, this configuration with the new 320GB 7200RPM Seagate Momentus SATA drives would make a good fit.

This setup will host a number of very active desktop OS VMs along with the possible addition of a server OS VM next summer. Out of the box we will install Windows Server 2008 full version with the Hyper-V role enabled.

This winter when SBS 2008 is released, we will initiate our client's Software Assurance benefits for their SBS 2003 R2 Premium Open Value Agreement to obtain the required media, keys, and updates to the Microsoft Volume Licensing Portal.

These Software Assurance Benefits will give us the flexibility to work with an additional inexpensive 1U for our client's ISA needs, or implement another VM running a server OS and ISA installed therein.

The Software Assurance Benefits will also enable us to look into implementing a cold backup setup for SBS disaster recovery purposes.

And finally, in this particular client setup, we will be able to utilize either the SR1550AL or the soon to be backup server to host a VM setup for the SBS 2008 migration process next summer.

We believe that our goal to provide a solution that will enable our client to expand their numbers today, and also provide the flexibility to implement upcoming technologies based on the new hardware being installed as well as the existing hardware being refreshed has been met. And, our client believes the same.

One other very important point: The new hardware and licensing setup will also give us some flexibility to implement solutions based on the upcoming Cloud solutions from Microsoft and others.

A couple of SBS migration related links:

• Migrating to Windows Small Business Server 2008 from Windows Small Business Server 2003
• Migrating to Windows Small Business Server 2008 from Windows Small Business Server 2008
• Windows Small Business Server 2008 Migration Help

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists

*All Mac on SBS posts are posted on our in-house iMac via the Safari Web browser.