Windows 9 Preview Slated for September 30th

The rumor mill has been working overtime with regards to the what, how, why, and when of Microsoft's upcoming Windows 9 client OS, which has also been given the Microsoft codename of 'Threshold.' Thanks to some solid reporting by Tom Warren over at The Verge (and some of his sources), we now know that Microsoft is planning a press event in late September to release some additional details about Windows 9.

So what exactly will Microsoft be discussing at the Windows 9 preview event? Warren suggests in his post that it isn't likely that the final name from the product will be announced then, but that Microsoft may release an early technology preview that will give "...developers a first look at the new mini Start Menu in Windows 9, alongside the removal of the Charms bar feature and several UI changes."

There are some other features that have been rumored for Microsoft's next update to the Windows client, including a version of the Windows Phone 'Cortana' voice assistant technology. Warren mentions that Microsoft may release an early technology preview version of Windows 9, primarily for developers, soon after the September 30th press event.  Warren's information aligns well with an earlier report by Mary Jo Foley that indicated that a tech preview of Windows 9 would be available in late September and that the preview would be available to end users as well.

Expected New Features in Windows 9

While detailed information on what new features Windows 9 will contain is still hard to come by, here's a summary of features that are more than likely to find their way into the next release of Windows.

• Revised Start menu: This was initially shown at the Microsoft BUILD developer conference earlier this year in a very enigmatic presentation by Microsoft's Terry Myerson. During BUILD, Myerson said that Microsoft would " be making this available to all Windows 8.1 users as an update. We think [there will be] a lot of happy people out there." While Myerson's vague comments seemed to indicate that the new Start Menu would be included in an update to Windows 8.1, the consensus is that this feature will show up in Windows 9.
  
• More improvements for desktop users: Besides the omission of the start menu, the duct-taped together feel of the the new "Modern" touch-based Windows UI with the traditional Windows desktop in the first release of Windows 8 wasn't well-received by consumers or corporate IT departments alike. Microsoft has taken some steps at improving this in the several updates to Windows 8.1, but we should expect Windows 9 to boot to desktop by default for mouse and keyboard users, and to the touch-based Windows UI for touch-based tablets.
  
• Cortana voice assistant: Tom Warren has mentioned that this feature might make its way from Windows Phone to Windows 9, and I think it's a smart move. Windows Phone is still struggling for smartphone relevance against Android and iOS, and moving one of the most promising new features of the platform to the desktop (and laptop) can only help both Windows Phone and Windows 9, in my opinion.
  
• Virtual Desktops: News of this feature comes to us from Brad Sams at Neowin, who suggests that Microsoft will be adding virtual desktops to Windows 9, not unlike the same feature used in Mac OS X and in Ubuntu. This should also help improve Windows usability on the desktop, which many users and IT staff think is long overdue.
  
• Removal of the Charms bar: The Charms bar is a Windows 8 feature that nobody seems to like: It's confusing, it's not very intuitive, and it looks like it will be heading to the recycle bin when Windows 9 ships. Mary-Jo Foley has more info on the rumored demise of the Charms bar over at ZDNet.
  

Controlling SMB Multichannel in Windows Server 2012 R2

In "Managing SMB Multichannel in SMB 3.0," I discussed managing SMB Multichannel and explained how SMB chose NICs for data transfer if there was more than one option between the SMB client and the SMB server. Sometimes SMB 3.0 might choose NICs that you didn't want it to use or it might use too many NICs.

In this article, I'll explain how to control SMB multichannel and avoid those potential issues throughout design. I'll also show you how to limit the bandwidth that SMB 3.0 can use when NICs are shared.

Controlling SMB Multichannel through Smart Design

In the first article of this series, I showed a problematic example design. You can review this example design in the image below. The design was deployed by System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) administrators that thought they needed a physical management NIC. When the hosts were tested, the administrators found that all SMB 3.0 storage traffic went through the management NIC, instead of the intended, management OS virtual NICs.

Refer to the first article in this series to learn how SMB 3.0 chooses available paths from the SMB client and the SMB server, along with learning detailed information on NIC ordering.

The best way to prevent SMB 3.0 from using the physical management NIC is to design the host correctly. When designing the logical switch, you can actually designate a virtual NIC as the management NIC. It's a bit tricky to do in the SCVMM console, but it can be done. You can even dispense with the physical NIC that was being used for host management. So not only will you get higher bandwidth storage networking, but you will also have a cheaper and simpler design.

SMB 3.0 Multichannel Constraints

The above all-converged design is nice because it is much simpler and software defined, which includes fewer drivers and firmware dependencies. But there is a catch! What will happen if the management, clustering, and SMB NICs of the hosts are all on the same VLANs as the file server's respective management, clustering, and storage networks?

SMB 3.0 will determine that there are multiple paths between the hosts and the storage, namely every management OS virtual NIC, and it will use every single one of them! Yes -- SMB Multichannel will aggregate the management, clustering, and SMB virtual NICs to access the file server's storage!

We do not want this. We need to apply controls to guarantee cluster communications and management accessibility of a host, even if the storage resources are being maximized. This is why Microsoft gave us a control called SMB Multichannel constraints, which is managed using PowerShell. The New-SMBMultichannelConstraints cmdlet is used to add a new restriction on different NICs that are used by the local server to access a designated file server. You can have different rules for different servers. SMB Multichannel is used in two ways in the above design:

• Storage: SMB1 and SMB2 are intended to be used for accessing SMB 3.0 storage.
  
• Redirected IO: Cluster1 and Cluster2 should be used whenever the Hyper-V cluster needs to redirect storage IO for whatever reason.
  

Using this requirement, I would create two SMB Multichannel constraints:

New-SmbMultichannelConstraint -ServerName Host2,Host3,Host4 -InterfaceAlias Cluster1,Cluster2

New-SmbMultichannelConstraint -ServerName SOFS1 -InterfaceAlias SMB1,SMB2

SMB 3.0 Bandwidth Limits

SMB 3.0 has evolved quite a bit since the release of Windows Server 2012 (WS2012). Windows Server 2012 R2 (WS2012 R2) can use SMB 3.0 for storage, redirected IO, and Live Mirgration on 10 GbE or faster networks.

This convergence of roles on the SMB 3.0 protocol lets us introduce higher speed networks, possibly even with Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA,), to make the most of the investment by limiting the costs of top-of-rack (TOR) switch ports. A design that I really like is shown below:

Two non-teamed RDMA capable NICs (rNICs) are used for multiple roles:

• Cluster communications, including redirected IO
  
• Storage
  
• Backup
  
• And SMB Live Migration
  

Normal QoS rules cannot stop Live Migration from starving storage of bandwidth or vice versa because there's no way to differentiate SMB 3.0 from SMB 3.0. This is why we have Set-SmbBandwidthLimit, which requires the SMB Bandwidth Limit feature to be enabled in Server Manager. You can configure three types of traffic with this cmdlet:

• VirtualMachine: Hyper-V over SMB storage traffic.
  
• LiveMigration: Hyper-V Live Migration based on SMB.
  
• Default: All other types of SMB traffic.

With the following example, I can limit Live Migration and SMB storage traffic consumption from the NICs:

Set-SmbBandwidthLimit –Category LiveMigration –BytesPerSecond 8 GB

Set-SmbBandwidthLimit –Category VirtualMachine –BytesPerSecond 10 GB

Now you should have the ability to control which NICs are used by SMB 3.0, along with the ability to control the bandwidth consumption of the protocol in its various use cases.

Enable Telnet Client in Windows 8 and Server 2012

The Telnet client is one of the most basic connectivity and management tools that any IT professional needs, and this article will show you how to enable Telnet client in Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8. The Telnet client not only lets you connect to a remote Telnet server and run applications on that server, but is also useful for testing connections to remote servers, such as ones running web services, SMTP services and others.

Using the Telnet client is simple enough and the use of Telnet clients has been covered in several different articles on the Petri IT Knowledgebase. The idea is that once the user has logged on, they can use a command prompt interface that can be used as if it had been opened locally on the Telnet server's console, and any command the user types is sent to the Telnet Server and executed there. The output from that command is sent back to the Telnet client.

Telnet Client Options

Note: There are many Telnet client tools, where many of them are freely available on the Internet. There are even smartphone and tablet versions that you can download from Google Play or the Apple Store, depending on the OS version on your mobile device. For example, PuTTY is one of the most used apps, as it can perform many types of remote connections, including to Telnet servers.

How to install the Telnet Client for Windows 8 and Server 2012

The Telnet client is a feature that has been included with Microsoft operating systems since Windows NT. However, it is not enabled by default for later OSs, where this started back with Windows Server 2008/Vista. So unless you are going to use a third-party tool to assist you when you perform your remote connection and connectivity troubleshooting work, you want to enable Telnet client on your machine. Just in case you need it.

There are several methods for installing or enabling the Telnet client in Windows Server 2012/R2/8.

Install the Telnet client from the GUI

There is a difference between Windows Server 2012/R2 and Windows 8.

1. In Windows Server 2012/R2, open Server Manager from the taskbar icon or from the Start page.
2. Click "Manage" and then "Add Roles and Features".
3. Click "Next" four times until you get to the "Select Features" page.
4. Click to select the "Telnet Client" feature. Click "Next".
5. Click "Install".
6. You can click "Close". No need to wait for the installation to complete.
7. In Windows 8 open Control Panel and click on "Uninstall a program" under "Programs".
8. Click on the "Turn Windows features on or off" link.
9. Click "OK", and the feature will be installed.

Install the Telnet client from the Command Prompt

1. Open the Command Prompt window with elevated permissions (Run as Administrator).

Opening the command prompt

2. In the Command Prompt window type:
dism /online /Enable-Feature /FeatureName:TelnetClient

3. Once command finished, Telnet client will be installed.

Install Telnet client from Windows command prompt

Install the Telnet client with PowerShell

1. Open the PowerShell window with elevated permissions (Run as Administrator).

Install the Telnet client with PowerShell

2. In the PowerShell  window type the following line:
Import-Module servermanager

3. Then type:
Add-WindowsFeature telnet-client

VMware Management Tools

Any VMware administrator worth his or her salt has a grab bag of useful tools and scripts to make administration easier, so much so that this list of tools usually follows them between jobs. Below is a list of what I'd consider to be 10 essential VMware management tools I personally use on a day-to-day basis as a VMware administrator.

1. RVTools

RVTools is a tiny free tool that allows an administrator to easily interrogate and report on a VMware infrastructure. It will collect just about all the information you require, displaying it in a series of useful tabs. What is exceptionally useful is that RVTools allows the export of the data in both CSV and Excel formats for manipulation of data if needed.

It is an ideal way to get a list of virtual machines in a cluster or vCenter in one easy step. It lets someone do exactly the same with hosts and pretty much every reportable item you could possibly need. It gives loads of information, perhaps too much, about a host, cluster or VM in an easily exportable list. One really useful function is that RVTools has a special tab for problem machines that will show any machines that don't meet VMware best practice or have serious issues, such as inconsistent machine names, large snapshots, zombie virtual machines and many other potential issues.

2. PowerShell

Every administrator, like it or not, is going to have to get used to Windows PowerShell. PowerShell is a key component in running anything but the smallest VMware farm. It provides a key part of VMware automation infrastructure. It allows admins to quickly create small scripts to perform frequently performed tasks all the way up to huge automation scripts to migrate entire clusters to new homes.

If you are running Windows 2008, then you will already have PowerShell installed. As proficiency increases, you can build small and useful scripts. A typical example of a PowerShell script I use frequently is to check that all datastores in the cluster are available to all the hosts. Having tens of LUNs per cluster, it saves time and reduces the margin for error. It is small time saving scripts like this that separate good admins from great admins. [Download PowerShell]

3. vCheck Daily Report

The vCheck daily report script is created by Alan Renouf and several members of the VMware community with one key goal in mind. That goal is to provide a daily health check for VMware infrastructure. It is free to download and use. It will require a small amount of customisation for specific environments, such as the email delivery settings and access settings but it is well worth it. The key takeaway from this is that it can be used to get an easy to understand report that highlights and points out issues with the infrastructure.

What is even better is that where there is a deviation from best practice it will report that. Reporting includes virtual machine faults, hardware faults, DRS, HA and many others. This script is worth its weight in gold. It is all about reporting issues and errors where as RVTools is all about reporting numbers. 

4. WinSCP

WinSCP is a very useful Windows implementation of the classic SCP (Secure Copy Protocol) tool that most Linux machines have installed. It is one of those tools that is handy when an admin just needs to upload directly to a datastore, or the actual host filesystem itself. Sure, it is possible to use the upload feature built in the vSphere client, but sometimes, for example if you need to upload a fix to the actual hypervisor level storage that is not available from the client. [Download WinSCP]

5. PuTTY/DCUI Command

PuTTY, the secure shell client is a key component to any administrator's armory that gets used frequently. PuTTY can be used to troubleshoot the server without having to use ILO/DRAC and the slow and awkward interface that comes with them.

It is even possible to get the full-on console experience using PuTTY when there is a need to configure some options on the console. Once logged in as root using PuTTY, use the command "dcui" to get the same text based menu as would be seen on the console. The PuTTY console also allows use of the command line tools that come with the VMware host and if needs be, manage the virtual machines directly. I frequently use it when I need to migrate virtual machines between infrastructure that is not directly connected to both source and destination and also to get around firewall issues. [Download PuTTY]

6. PowerGUI

Using the default PowerShell Integrated Environment (PSE) is not an experience to relish. I just don't use the PSE. I can, however, wholeheartedly recommend PowerGUI by Dell. Quest was the company that created PowerGUI, and Dell recently purchased Quest.

It is a fully integrated IDE that has autocompletion and plug-in modules to extend the functionality. The VMware community has additional plugins to expose VMware functionality. There is a pro version that has version control and a few other features that are overkill to most admins. [Download PowerGUI]

7. PowerCLI

PowerCLI is an essential part of scripting sauce that extends the functionality of the PowerShell environment. To use the scripting environment with VMware, you need to create a VMware account to download the tool for free. We've also published a PowerCLI getting started guide that will help get you up to speed quickly. [Download PowerCLI]

8. Virtual vCenter Mobile Access (vCMA)

Virtual vCenter Mobile Access is not really production ready, but it is a handy tool to manage the infrastructure from an iPad. It is not a tool you would use every day, it allows for rudimentary management of an environment in a pinch. [Download vCMA]

9. VMware Converter

Any seasoned administrator is going to be using the VMware converter tool frequently. As the name implies, it allows an admin to convert other physical and virtual platforms and import them into the vCenter infrastructure. Using the converter tool does more than just importing a machine into the infrastructure. The converter allows an administrator to resize the disks, alter the memory and number of CPUs prior to import. Other nice features include the ability to install VMware tools as part of the import process and also power on the imported virtual machine after it's complete. [Download VMware Converter]

10. vMA Management Assistant for Linux admins

The vMA is a godsend for Linux administrators who wish to manage the vSphere infrastructure using Linux-based tools. As every VMware admin knows, the move from ESX to ESXi left behind the RH based console that was replaced with a very small and rudimentary hypervisor shell. [Download vMA Management Assistant]

 

To stop all the Linux guys from deserting VMware, the clever VMware guys and girls created the vMA. The vMA is essentially a pre-packaged Linux system that allows an admin to run Linux and Perl commands against the vSphere environment. For those that don't like Powershell, Perl can be used in its place, with all the SDK elements exposed. It gives the Linux lovers a chance at automation.