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Tech-Ed Friday

Ah, the final day. You can feel the zombiness setting in. The relief that the conference is pretty much over. The long lines at the bag check stands (I left mine at the hotel — good thing I did). The tear-down of the expo center is well underway, and we’re scraping the bottom of the snacks barrel.

Pretty much everything that can be given away, has. I’ve even seen the beanbag chairs going by at a regular interval as locals cart those off. It’d have to be locals…I’d like to see someone check a beanbag chair on a plane. I’m sure it could be done, but why?

Which reminds me, i need to check about checking a bike on a plane. More on that later.

Yesterday was a potpourri of many topics. Exchange, Windows Server, MOM, Virtual Server, and SharePoint. Some fascinating stuff in there.

Yesterday was also the night of the attendee party. This year it was at Fenway Park. I’m not much of a baseball fan, but I am a sports fan. I could feel the history as I walked out onto the field, walked past the Green Monster, and sat in the 75–year-old seats. Very amazing.

The concert by Train was pretty good. They did a short set, but it was enough to have one of the Tech-Ed revelers fall off the stage and into the home dugout - stopping the show for about 5 minutes.

You can see photos of Thursday’s action here. They are yet to be titled and categorized.

Today, a little on file & print services, one last session around Vista, then the long cross-country flight home. I will be happy to be back home in my own bed, but the experience at this year’s Tech-Ed was great as usual. Informatative, informational, fun, and entertaining. There were rough spots, as there always are, but I’m glad once again that I was able to attend.

Here’s looking forward to a long overnight flight home, and next year’s event in New Orleans.

Today’s World Cup Picks: ARG, NED, MEX. Tomorrow: POR, CZE, ITA. I think I’ll be 6–0 to Sunday.

Tech-Ed Thursday

Tech-Ed is starting to get its edge.

This is usually about the time that it happens. The days are getting longer, the sessions more repetitive, and the start times are moved up earlier in the morning. People start walking around like tech-zombies muttering phrases like “Vista”, and “Longhorn”, and “Ice Cream Sandwiches”.

And then there’s “that guy”. I wish I had snapped a picture of him. In all reality I wanted to punch him.

I was discussing Exchange 2007’s new features and he fact that I believe that it will be slow on adoption. His exact quote was, “If you can’t sell Exchange 2007’s to your management on the strength of its new stuff, then you should find another job”.

Wow. Ok. I expected more from someone wearing a blue Microsoft shirt. That is what I call losing touch with reality.

We don’t install software because of cool new toys. No company should. We install it because it makes good business sense and saves us money. None of this has been quantified with Ex07. In fact, in some companies, it will be encroaching upon existing infrastructures that may have considerable recent investment. We don’t just decide to throw out something and buy something new because it’s better or has more cool features. Business have to analyze the amount of reward they are going to receive as a result of the investment.

Right now I don’t see the investment in new hardware and software for Ex07 paying off. Yet.

Lastly, don’t get me wrong, I am terribly excited. I’m really, really, really excited about Exchange 2007 and I’m going to be selling it not only to my company but to anyone who will listen. I think the vision is good, and the delivery isn’t perfect, but we’ll get there.

World Cup Picks for today; ECU, ENG, SWE.

Tech-Ed Wednesday

Very much not as exciting of a day given some of the changes at my employer. Be that as it may, back to Tech-Ed we go.

Wednesday is traditionally a change up day and today is no exception. After hitting the Exchange and Office tracks hard yesterday (and learning some really great things), it's time to get a little variety into our lives.

• 10:15 - ARC312
• 2:00 - SVR321
• 3:45 - MSG302
• 5:30 - SEC315

Today's Tech-Ed quirk revolves around the transportation. It's been bad. Really bad. Bad compared to previous Tech-Ed's and other conferences. Today i wound up driving from my hotel instead of waiting for the shuttle because of the scarcity of the buses. Last year in Orlando, for example, you couldn't go anywhere without seeing, being able to ride, or getting a bus (and they were all decked out in SQL/VS 2005 regalia). This year, you are lucky if you can get from the center to your hotel in under 45 minutes. There is seemingly one bus on each route. Add in Boston traffic and you have quite the wait.

Anyway, rant over. Yesterday was wrapped up in SharePoint and Exchange 2007, two products that are obviously leading the next wave of MS products. It seems as though MS is expecting the new feature depth of SP07 and Ex07 to drive sales of Office, Vista, and all other technologies that go with that (thinking of you System Center).

I think there have been some serious mistakes. The Exchange 2007 administrator console. My rant about that is here (guess I'm not done ranting). I was happy to hear in a TLC session yesterday that other admins felt the same way as I did (two guys were downright angry). It's not a matter of resisting change, it's simplicity and that admin console does nothing but add another item to my account admins' desktops. It's like going back to 5.5 with two consoles.

Thumbs up to the SharePoint teams. They got the UI right. Sure, there are little things that I'm finding here and there that are annoyances (why can I make a rule to archive documents by type but can't hold them by type?), but we'll get there.

I'm hearing rumbling about the System Center console around the show floor, so I'm going to check that out for myself today.

World Cup Picks for today (2.5-0 with the Swiss tie yesterday): ESP, KSA, GER (the GER-POL game should be a classic).

MSG 205: Introducing Exchange 2007

I'd love to recap this session, but I can do better than that.

Check out the webcast of the session here.

In summary, there are a lot of serious changes in Exchange 2007. Ones that are going to affect the way we look at Exhcnage's place in the corporate IT environment and it will be an uphill battle to "take over" some of the operations that have been traditionally handled by other groups within IT.

Do I think there is a good business case? Well, that all depends on MSFT's ability to deliver on some of the things they are showing. I predict adoption of 2007 will be slow as companies grapple with the thought of having to change what they are used to.

That's the interesting point. What we are used to is so vastly broken, yet we have come to accept its inferior ways. Ex07 presents the first hints of true unified messaging. One inbox, one common interface, across every platform out there. Ubiquitous access to your information.

In the end, Exchange 2007 is shaping up to be a truly next-generation infrastructure piece of a company. From phone, to fax, to email, to archiving, storage, clients -- the list goes on. What an amazing piece of software. Now we have to try and sell it to management, not on the merits of how great it is to have all of this together (finally), but on its ability to deliver all of this at a lower cost than the broken, yet accepted, systems of today.

MSG 313 – Exchange 2007 Storage Changes

Just got out of an interesting briefing this morning on the storage changes in Exchange 2007. Here are some of the highlights.

Database Counts

• 50 Storage Group Max/Server
• 50 Databases Max/Server
• 5 Database/Storage Group
• Recommend 1 Database to 1 Storage Group mapping. Improves IO coalesence.

Flexible databases

• Databases can be mounted in parallel.
• Databases can be mounted on any server.

No more STM, ExIFS is gone, no more kernel mode drivers.

New: Continuous Replication

• 2 modes: Local (LCR) and Cluster (CCR)
• CCR: create clusters without shared storage infrastructure.
• Save costs by not being on the SAN.

Content Indexing: On by default now to support Office/WDS search features. Runs as a background process and consumes about 5% of database size for index.

Things that stick around: dual-phase commits, random access to the database with fixed page size, ability to coalesce IO operations from RAM to disk.

Things new to 2007 that help those old things: more use of memory (64-bit technology breaks the virtual memory barriers) - nearly unlimited (somewhere in the low TB of RAM).

Database Changes

• 8kb page size
• More use of RAM (900 MB limit in Ex03, > 2 GB cache in Ex07)
• More storage groups = more memory checkpoint depth = more IO coalescence.
• IO Coalesence: 2003 4KB-64KB, 2007 8KB to 1MB,

Transaction Logging

• Generations in the billions
• Logs go from 5MB to 1MB to support continuous replication.
• Improved checkpoint recoveries from single-bit errors.

Value gains

• Increase storage density - use fewer drives & larger drives.
• Diminished reliance on SAN and high speed storage
• 10K RPM drives are ok (15K were required with Ex03).
• High speed not required (iScsi applications instead of FC requirement).
• Goal: reduce cost per mailbox, per GB of storage.

The only downsides to this is some of the same restirctions still remain. They still recommend keeping folder item counts under 5,000. That is an increasingly hard task to do, even with email archiving. MSFT is selling Email Lifecycle Management and rules as the solution to help manage this restriction.