OnQ

On Intel

I have to admit that when I heard Apple was releasing a new series of Macs based on the Intel chip, I was a little befuddled. For years, one of the claims to fame of the PPC and G-series CPUs is that they ran circles around the Intel equivalents in terms of performance. Soon enough, I started hearing about how Apple had, once again, done a fabulous job of porting their entire solution to a completely different hardware structure (ala Motorola 68000 CPU architecture to PPC architecture) in a way that was seamless to the end user. Then there were reports that you could actually install Windows XP and run it on one of the Intel-based Macs, some reports indicating that Windows even ran better on an Intel-based Mac than on your average name-brand Windows-only PC.

Then two announcements caught my attention. The first came from Apple, introducing a public beta of a software known as Boot Camp. The second came from a company I had previously not heard of called Parallels, announcing a solution that would allow you to run non-Mac operating systems in a virtual environment on Intel-based Macs.

Needless to say, my curiosity was piqued, and I started my research. That, combined with several queries from my mixed environment clients, prompted me to acquire an Intel-based Mac and do my own research. What follows are my initial observations of the solutions.

First off, the hardware. I purchased a new Mac Mini (my other Mac Mini has done really, really well for me, and I frankly didn't want or need an iMac or another notebook) with the high-end configuration. I actually made my purchased from Small Dog Electronics in Vermont and had them bump the default 512MB of RAM up to 2GB. This is one area where I do have to take issue with Apple on their default hardware configurations - there is just not enough RAM in the base system. And if you're planning on running multiple OSes on the box, you really need to max it out. So I did.

I went through the Mac setup out of the box, and it followed the same setup process as my other Mac Mini that I purchased last year. The OS X 10.4 setup runs just the same on the Intel hardware - there were no extra or different steps I had to follow because of the Intel setup. In fact, the system seemed to run a little faster through setup than my last Mac Mini did. (No, I haven't done any actual performance testing between the two boxes, just a "feel" thing based on my use of the original Mini for over a year.)

I then went and registered for the 30-day trial of Parallels Workstation for Intel-based Macs. I have not, and probably will not, install and test Boot Camp, and here are the reasons why:

1. Boot Camp is a multi-boot solution, not a virtualization solution. This means that if you want to run a Windows application, you have to reboot the workstation and bring it up in Windows. Conversely, if you're running the Windows side of the Mac and need to run a Mac application, you have to reboot into Mac mode to get there. My experience with multi-boot solutions is that you're spending more time rebooting between the two (or more) platforms than you are actually working, because you're often not in the "right" side when you need to run a piece from the other side. However, if you only ever want to run Windows on your Intel-based Mac, then Boot Camp is the tool for you.
   
2. Boot Camp works best with multiple partitions, so that your Mac data is on one partition and your Windows data is on the other. My Mini has a single partition, and right now I'm not interested in repartitioning/rebuilding so that I can have a clean separation of data. Yes, you can use a single partition for installing Windows through Boot Camp, but if you want to quickly remove everything related to Windows (because of a failed install, want to wipe out and start over, whatever) it's harder to do with everything installed on the single Mac partition.
   
3. If you do not install Windows correctly while booted in Boot Camp, you can wipe out everything on the hard disk, forcing you to rebuild the entire Mac from the recovery DVDs. I'm just not ready to make that leap quite yet.

At some point I will test whether you can install Windows onto an external drive (Fire wire - I couldn't stand the performance hit of trying to run an OS off a USB drive) using Boot Camp, but that's not tops on my priority list.

I really wanted to take a look at Parallels workstation for a couple of reasons. The biggest is that Microsoft Virtual PC for Macintosh will not run on the Intel-based Mac. To be honest, I've been less than impressed with Virtual PC for Mac since Microsoft bought it from Connectix, but it's really been the only option thus far. The chances that Microsoft will try to develop a build of VPC for Mac that will run on the Intel chipset are, in my opinion, pretty slim. The other reason I was interested in Parallels was the price point: $49.99 for a single license. You can, in fact, pre-order the Mac version before the final release for $39.99, which is even more attractive than the list price of $129.99 for VPC for Mac. In both cases, you will need a legit license of Windows to install with the product. Microsoft does offer versions of Virtual PC for Macintosh that are bundled with an OS, but it costs more, and still doesn't run on the Intel-based Macs.

So I downloaded the 30-day trial of Parallels and went through the setup process. I've used a number of virtualized interfaces before, including Microsoft's Virtual PC (for PCs as well as Macintosh), Microsoft's Virtual Server, VMWare, and a few older solutions that are no longer available, and I will say that the installation for Parallels Workstation, like just about any other Mac software install, was simple and straightforward. In about two minutes, I had the software installed and ready to go.

Given that most people who are Mac fanatics are probably going to go straight into the install process without reading any documentation whatsoever, I decided to do the same. There's a nice PDF that comes with the Parallels install that I have yet to open. So I launched the application and got started. I went through the new Virtual Machine (VM) wizard, selected the OS I would be installing, set the path to the virtual hard disk file, and upped the RAM allocation from 256MB to 512MB. Again, it seems that Parallels missed the mark with the default RAM allocation for Windows XP, but MS says you can run XP in 128MB, so 256MB must be nice. Given that this is virtualized and probably will be slower because of it, I didn't want lack of RAM to add to the performance issues. Hence the increase to 512MB. I inserted the XP install CD and started the install process.

Twenty minutes later, I had a fully-installed XP workstation that had already been activated over the internet. No funky drivers needed for the install, no special configuration needed. And as I started downloading security updates from MS, I noticed that the performance of the XP box is pretty peppy. In fact, it actually seems a little faster than the Dell Optiplex GX260 I'm using as my PC workstation.

I did a few quick and unscientific benchmarks on the box after I got the security updates installed, and the performance of the XP in Mac is really, really good. I compared an OWA connection to my mail server in IE with Parallels versus Virtual PC on my old Mac Mini, and the difference is night and day. In fact, testing OWA against my Dell workstation showed that the Dell is slower than the VM on the Mac.

So far, I'm very impressed with what I've seen. Next, I'll be loading my regular software suite and seeing how it performs under that load. But right now I'm thinking that my desired situation, having one box on my desk running both Mac and Windows applications instead of having a dedicated Mac and a dedicated PC, is going to work very nicely. I can sure stand to get rid of the clutter of multiple keyboards and mice on my desk, too.

On ISA

In case you hadn't figured it out yet, Amy Babinchak rocks. Earlier today I was working with a client trying to get ISA 2004 installed on his SBS server. We kept running into this error:

"The wizard cannot install ISA Server 2004. Try to install it again by restarting this wizard. If the problem persists, see http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/sbs/support for additional help and support."

The client had run into trouble the first time he tried to install ISA 2004, and he couldn't get around it quickly, so he uninstalled and waited until we had time to work together. We looked at a couple of things, but I was expecting to troubleshoot ISA issues after the install, not installation problems.

I had just seen Amy pop on IM, so I pinged her and gave her the quick summary. She pointed me to a post she made regarding a similar problem: http://isainsbs.blogspot.com/2005/10/isa2004-installation-fails-during-sbs.html. So I took a quick peek...

On the surface, it looked like it described the problem we had exactly. Even the errors in the sbsisa2k log file were identical. I skipped down to the solution listed in the post (and Amy said the same thing in our IM conversation) and looked at the possibility that the performance counters were indeed corrupt. However, when we loaded perfmon, we didn't see the behavior described.

Next I looked deeper into the ISAWRAP log files and found the real issue - the installer could not write temp files into a path in the user's My Documents folder. We had just relocated the share for the Users Shared Folders object on the server and had forgotten to log out and back in to recreate the link to the My Documents folder in the new location. Once we logged out and back in, the ISA installer ran fine.

Most of the issues the client had seen the first time he installed ISA 2004 on the server were not present after we restarted the server and began testing the behavior on the client workstations. However, one key item did - Outlook would not connect to the Exchange server. Let me clarify though - Outlook running in a remote session on a Terminal Server would not. Outlook running from a console logon on the terminal server would. Once we finally dug deep enough to identify that yes, in fact, it was something related to ISA, I was able to find KB 897716. We downloaded and installed the update, and Outlook started working.

Another day, another few ISA lessons learned..

On Updating

Sometimes installing the latest and greatest isn't the best move to make. I've followed this mantra for years when it comes to NIC drivers on workstations and servers, and I almost always test updates before rolling them into production.

Apparently, that didn't help when it came to updating my blogging software. Here's what happened:

I've been running Movable Type for a little over a year now. When I first installed Movable Type to run the Lessons Learned blog, it was right after they released version 3.0, and the installation went really smoothly. Over the next nine months or so, there were several updates released for Movable Type. The "upgrade" process wasn't a really smooth one, so I passed on several of the updates. I did finally break down and upgrade to 3.15 to try and help cut down on some of the comment and trackback spam on the blog, but eventually just turned off comments and trackbacks altogether.

When I set up OnQ with Movable Type, version 3.17 was available so I installed that. The installation went well, but I still didn't see a need to update Lessons Learned. However, about a month ago, Movable Type 3.2 was released, and it had some significant feature changes. So, this past weekend, I opted to upgrade to 3.2 from 3.17, especially since the upgrade process looked much simpler than before.

That's where I was wrong.

Through no fault of the Movable Type install, once I got the new code up on my site, it failed to run. The codebase changed the way it operates IIS servers, which is what WebHost4Life, the hosting service I'm using for this site and a few other, runs on. Fortunately, I'm smart enough to do a complete backup of the blog data and the Movable Type installation before I get started just in case something goes horribly awry. Unortunately, I burned several hours trying to realize what was going on.

So, the blog is back online (well, it was never actually off-line, I just couldn't add any posts to it) and I'm moving forward again. Is there anything I could have done differently to make the transition to the new software easier? Not really. But I certainly need to remember that everything is not always as easy as it seems, and what looks to be a 30-minute process might take a little longer.

On Redundancy

OK, I've figured out that my hosting site is in Los Angeles. And it's down because of the power blackout in LA. Not all of their sites, only about half. Guess which half I'm in...

So I've found out the hard way that my web host (http://www.webhost4life) doesn’t have redundant sites. Bollocks. I'm going to have to really have a chat with them about this…

On Access

One thing I've learned on this trip to Seattle is that it's amazingly easy to get internet access from just about anywhere. The Marriott Town Center rooms had both wired and wireless access in each room (and we got a discounted access rate with the conference, too), Microsoft provided amazing wireless access to the conference attendees at their Executive Briefing Center, and I was even able to get internet access at the Seattle Tacoma airport.

Well, sort of. Let me explain:

My wireless detector popped up and found the Cingular wireless network, and when I opened my browser, I got the logon screen to set up my WiFi access account. I got through the process just fine, even entering my credit card number and setting up the account password. But when I tried to access the account, my connection was refused. Finally I gave up and called the WiFi support number – they already had my payment, like hell was I going to pass on getting access. It turns out that the password I selected was TOO secure. Even though they insisted in the signup screen on a password with special characters, I had used two special characters, and the friendly English-speaking phone representative told me to just use one special character. In fact, I should only use the ! as a special character.

Ummm, OK.

Once I finally get online, I realize I can't get to my web site to update my blog posts. Ugh. Thinking it might be related to this silly wireless service, I RDP into another box I manage and tried to load the page from there. Natch. Nada. Nyet.

Hmph. My site is down, and I'm about to be in the air and really can't do anything about it. Well, I will as soon as I land, if it's not back up by then. And no, I'm not hosting that site on an SBS box or even on a box on my local network. I'm paying someone to host it for me. And boy are they gonna hear about this...

On Timepieces

I just realized my watch isn't working.

Oh, sure, it tells me the correct local time (I changed the digital portion to read PDT, but left the analog portion alone) whenever I look at it. But I realized at dinner this evening that there is a chance the time might not be exactly 100% dead accurate.

It's because I'm too far from Colorado.

Yes, I have a watch that syncs itself every night to the atomic clock broadcasting out of Colorado, but it has a limited distance range. Go figure that I'm close enough in Texas to get time synced every morning, but I come to Redmond, WA, which some might claim is a technical Mecca of sorts, and I can't get a signal. To the atomic clock.

I guess I'll wait until I return to Texas to recover those 3 lost nanoseconds...

On Virtualization

I spend a great deal of time working in a test environment, both for my customers and in developing content for the book. Many small business IT specialists do. We also recognize that it's diffcult at best to have one physical machine for every combination of settings needed for testing. Hence, we use some form of virtualization technology so we can run multiple virtual machines on a single physical box.

This past weekend, I discovered a new (to me) tool that has already helped me become much more productive with my virtual setup.

I'm no stranger to virtual technology. I've been running Vrtual PC for the Mac since its second version, back when it was a Connectix product. The ability for a piece of software to completely emulate a different hardware environment and have it be usable was amazing back in the day. I looked at several similar products over the years, including SoftPC for the Mac, several PC and Mac emulators for Sun and Solaris UNIX systems, but I always kept up with Virtual PC for the Mac, becuase it just worked.

Then Microsoft jumped into the foray and bought out the Connectix products. Not too far after that came Virtual PC for Windows, which allowed you to run one or more virtual terminals from your desktop PC. This was a great help for testers, as we could now simulate multiple machine environments with significantly less hardware costs. Virtual PC for Windows did have its limitations, however, as even with a beefy PC, you could still only have a few active virtual terminals before all of them, including the host station, started bogging down.

Introduce Virtual Server. I learned about this product while working at Microsoft. In fact, everyone on my team had one workstation dedicated to running several server environments for comparison and testing. Virtual Server has a nice web interface and remote connection tools so you can view all of the terminals running under VS without working directly on the console.

Virtual Server still has its practical limitations, but the prodict is designed to be able to run multiple server sessios on a single, high-end server box. And it's not too bad about it, either.

Then came the book. To build a test environment for screen captures and process verification, I got a higher-end box (given my budget) with multiple CPUs and loads of RAM so I could set up Small Business Server and three or four workstations in a virtual network all on one piece of hardware. I got the 180-day trial version of Virtual Server (figuring it wouldn't take more than 6 months to finish my portion of the book) and built the environment. In the initial loads, it worked well, although I could tell I was taxing the box when I had the server and four workstations running simultaneously. But it worked well, until I applied SP1 to the SBS server build. Suddenly, I couldn't get things to work right on the SBS node, even with all of the other virtual machines turned off. I eventually broke down and got a separate PC to run a dedicated SBS installation, as the virtual workstations continued to run just fine.

Lo and behold, six months came and went, and I still was not quite finished with the book. The trial of Virtual Server expired, and I was looking at having to completely rebuild the environment. Around the same time, I was having an IM conversation with Susan Bradley, who is working almost as hard as I am on the book project, and she mentions another virtualization product that had been pointed out to her (and she posted about it on her blog as well). So this weekend, when I'm badly neededing to fire up a couple of virtual workstations to capture some data for the book, I checked out this alternate solution. I had actualy heard of VMWare before, back when it was first released as a Linux product and we were giving it a go at Nortel Networks. I'd not used it or even kept up with the product line since I last built a box in 1999. But after reading about the VMWare Subscription, I decided to take the plunge and give VMWare a shot.

Within two hours, I went from knowing nothing about using VMWare to having created a new Windows XP test box connected to my SBS test network and fully patched, all from scratch. And this is without using the really high-end sever product from the VMWare suite.

The real value I see in continuing to work with VMWare is their P2V technology, which captures an image of a physical machine and loads it as a virtual machine. With that, I can load a "copy" of a client's server in my virtual network and perform tests on it to see how it will hold up. This is going to be critical for testing security updates and service packs in a "real world" situation without risking clients' production environments. I already have plans to test Exchange 2003 SP2 on an SBS server using this method once it becomes available.

So for the time being, Hello VMWare, Goodbye Microsoft. At least for virtual technologies on the PC platform. I'm still dependent on MS for Virtual PC for Mac. How ironic is that?