• Do Zebras get more Spam than Aardvarks?
• Whitepaper on Group Policy Preferences.
• Novell enters the application virtualization market with XenoCode.
• Why too much memory can hurt Exchange Server 2007 performance.
• Microsoft liberalizes desktop virtualization options, but they will cost you.
• VMware ESX is the Industry’s First Hypervisor to be Validated by Microsoft.
• Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.5 RTMs.
• You think Vista is bloated? IE8 consumes more RAM than all of XP.
• The Microsoft Optimized Desktop Strategy by Jeff Johnson, Enterprise Technology Specialist, Microsoft Corporation
• Configuration Manager 2007 R2 Evaluation. New: App-V, Forefront support, Client Status Reporting and more
• Microsoft SharePoint Administration Toolkit v2.0 x86. New: User Profile Replication Engine, MSI is customizable.
• The Blind Men and the Cloud - It was six men of Info Tech - To learning much inclined - Who went to see the Cloud

Submitted by Alex Vovk

Password Expiration Notifier periodically checks all users in the specified Active Directory domain to detect  whose passwords are about to expire in a specified number of days, and then sends customizable notification e-mails to the account owners. The tool also sends summary reports to system administrators by e-mail. Armed with this tool, administrators can proactively resolve password expiration issues for end-users and service accounts.

NetWrix Password Expiration Notifier

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AdapterWatch is a standalone tool that can help troubleshoot network problems. It displays all the information you can think of about network adapters.

There are four tabs: Network Adapters, TCP/UDP Statistics, IP Statistics, ICMP Statistics and General. I tested AdapterWatch v1.04.

The Network Adapters’ tab mostly displays configuration settings such as: the GUID, MAC address, DHCP lease, interface speed or MTU (Maximum Transmission Unit). You will also find some statistical information including: received/sent data, calculated speed and discarded packets. The list is quite comprehensive. Please check out the screenshot for other parameters. What I like about AdapterWatch is that it displays all network adapters in a table. This makes it easy to compare all settings. That’s not possible with the network settings tools in Windows because you can’t open the controls of different network adapters, simultaneously.

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I never really believed that web apps would be a serious threat to Windows. But since I’ve seen icloud, I am not so sure anymore. icloud is the service from a Swedish startup Xcerion. XIOS (Xcerion Internet XML OS) is the operating system on which icloud is based. I had a quick look at the latest beta of version 3. I really am impressed!

I am very enthusiastic about the Web as an information resource and publishing platform, but when it comes to online apps, I usually prefer real programs running on my desktop that store their data and settings in the cloud. However, icloud is quite unlike any other web app I have ever seen. Its key difference from other web-based apps is that you work in an environment that is very similar to a common Windows desktop. When I first logged on to icloud, I thought, it’s just some kind of Terminal Server session which runs in a Web browser. But it’s not.

It is possible to access the source code of the corresponding web page. It’s mostly XML with a little Javascript. You start applications with a double click on the desktop icon just as you would under Windows. The look and feel of the applications is not at all like web applications. You can drag their windows just as on a Windows desktop, you can minimize them to the taskbar, you can resize them, and they can overlap.

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Submitted by Jeffrey Botts

I have found this tool to be invaluable for troubleshooting Exchange issues. Here is a description from the website:

ExInsight is a monitoring and statistics tool that provides a real-time view of the internals of Exchange Server transactions and allows you to evaluate individual user’s usage of Exchange Server.

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• Interview with Mark Russinovich: the future of Sysinternals, Security, Windows
• Windows 7 — Approach to System Performance at the Engineering Windows 7 blog (Microsoft site)
• Xen 3.3 now available. New: Power management (P & C states) in the hypervisor, Shadow3, CPUID feature levelling and more.
• Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 is publicly available. Nice new features. But I doubt that they can stop the Firefox growth.
• Microsoft’s plans about virtualization An interview with Microsoft representatives. Interesting!
• Microsoft delays the Hyper-V Integration Components for Linux, removes the RC version. We are already waiting…
• Comprehensive VMware ESX-Microsoft Hyper-V comparison. This article by Clay Shekleton compares architecture and features.
• Small Business Server 2008 has released to manufacturing (RTMed)

3d Traceroute does what its name implies. It displays traceroute responses in a three dimensional representation: X-axis represents the hops (routers); the y-axis, the response time of the routers; and the z-axis stands for successive probes in time.

While this seems to be just some kind of gimmick, it might turn out to be useful, if you have to track down certain kinds of network problems. For example, if you experience erratic network transfer delays, you can find out easily where the bottleneck is. All you have to do is to probe your destination for some time. The router that causes the delays will stand out in the graphic representation sooner or later.

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You might have already heard about the Virtualization Congress in London taking place October 14-16, 2008. I am glad to announce that Alessandro Perilli, founder of virtualization.info and organizer of this event, has offered a 25% discount to all 4sysops readers.

Many important vendors in the virtualization market will be present. In particular, the three major players, i.e. VMware, Microsoft, and Citrix are sending high-profile representatives. You are probably familiar with Mark Russinovich, one of the founders of Sysinternals. I suppose there are not many at Microsoft who have as much detailed technical knowledge about Windows he does. He describes his keynote at the Virtualization Congress in the video below.

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When it comes to cloud computing, most people think about hosted applications running somewhere in a big data center. Only time can tell if this kind of cloud computing will gain acceptance. It seems to me that things develop very slowly here. But what about renting a complete server in the cloud? Meanwhile, most big web hosts also offer dedicated servers. Prices go down almost every month, and the servers they have are becoming more powerful. Since we are about to buy a few new servers, I compared the prices and considered the consequence of moving some of our servers to a third-party data center.

My experiences

I have been working with rented dedicated and virtual servers on my private projects for a couple of years. My overall experience is quite positive. Administering a server in the cloud is not much different from managing a server in our server room. For most tasks, it doesn’t really matter where the server is located. It could be in the room next door or on the other side of the planet.

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Reducing hardware and power consumption costs might be viable in some scenarios with virtualization technology although the possible cost savings are often exaggerated. However, there are other factors to consider here.

Sophisticated virtualization technology does not come for free. Yes, there are a couple of free solutions available. However, they have important downsides. The most prominent solution is probably VMware Server. You could run it on a Linux host without any license costs. But we all know why VMware offers this product for free. It is not just because of Microsoft’s Virtual Server. The main reason is that they want you to buy VMware ESX after you started to like virtualization technology. You will want to have more performance, more redundancy and many other features that VMware Server lacks. Of course, this is an absolutely legitimate strategy. However, for most organizations it will mean they will pay sooner or later for virtualization technology. These costs certainly also have to be taken into account when it comes to the overall costs of server virtualization.

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