I attended the Microsoft product launch event in Atlanta yesterday.  Been traveling all day today, so just not getting a chance to type up a post about it. Overall, it was a great experience.  Got to see and learn about lots of cool new features in Window Server 2008 that I haven’t had a chance to test yet.  Also talked to several interesting vendors.  Here’s a few random thoughts:

• Freebies are always nice.  I walked away with a full copy of Windows Vista Ultimate and limited or trial versions of several other products.
• Overall, the speakers were really good.
• The exhibit hall was like way crowded in the morning.  Hard to have a serious conversation with the vendors do to the number of people present.  Got a little better later in the day.
• Network access protection is interesting - can check certain aspects of a machine, such as antivirus and firewall status and only allow access to servers if certain criteria are met.  Optionally, traffic to servers containing sensitive data can be IPSec protected.  Awesome concepts, but I have a feeling it’s going to be difficult to manage and create headaches for users and IT staff.  I might play with it a bit if I can find time.
• TS RemoteApp is really nice.  We already have a couple of servers running it and will roll it out in our production environment really soon for Shelby and EMS.
• I really, really like Terminal Server Gateway and Web Access features.  Combined with RemoteApp, it seems like the perfect solution for users to access certain apps from their home computers.  Basically, the user logs into a web site and it presented with a Windows desktop looking screen with icons for apps and servers they can click to connect to.  All the traffic gets tunneled over SSL, which makes me less concerned than opening RDP to the outside.  It can also be hidden behind an ISA server (which we already use for remote Exchange access) for additional security.  I really think this is the answer to some of my remote access woes.
• I thought the web server session was boring.
• MS has come a long way with their virtualization products.  In my opinion, it’s still not up to par with VMware though.  There’s still no live migration ability.  There’s still a host OS involved (I think about how many times I have to reboot windows servers vs how I never have to reboot ESX).  There’s no way to resize a virtual hard disk (seems really odd to me, VMware has had this for years).  Give it a couple more years, and HyperV might be the way to go.  I’m not convinced yet though.

Jason Powell beat me to it.  Check out his post here. And the official Dell/Equallogic press release here.  I’m looking forward to seeing what this can do.  We already use application aware SQL snapshots on our SAN, and it’s great to be able to recover a single database from a volume snapshot.

I’m curious what level of granularity this new tool will allow.  I question how usefully it would be to restore an entire datastore (which I think is what this tool does), since I already have methods to do that.  I guess even restoring at the datastore level, it would be a plus to have it integrated with the SAN.

I just installed the Xirrus WiFi monitor gadget and thought it was kind of cool. Shows all available access points and their relative location on a “Radar Screen” with signal strength, SSID, MAC Address, etc. Nothing to see here at the house but my own AP. Will have to play with it some more at the office.

As we become more and more mobile remote access becomes more and more important.  It’s easy for people who have church-issued laptops.  We have a Cisco IPSec VPN that works great.

But, what about users without laptops who need access to certain apps and services?   There’s several options available, but I’m not convinced any of them are great:

• Connect to VPN and install apps (Shelby, EMS, etc) on home computer.  Obviously, this is very difficult to support and can be slow.
• Connect to VPN and Remote Desktop to their own computer.  I have a couple of users who do this now and it works.  Maybe it’s the best way to handle it since once they’re in, the experience is the same as at the office.  It usually requires a phone call to walk the user through the RDP setup, but it’s not too bad to deal with
• Terminal Services gateway.  I have reservations about opening any MS product up to the internet.  I guess it could be hidden behind an ISA server with RADIUS authentication - we already do this for OWA access to exchange.  Combined with WIndows 2008 RemoteAPP, this could be a very good option, especially since it wouldn’t require a VPN client.  May be a security concern.
• VPN client + RemoteApps - would be easy for the user - I just need to give them a couple of RDP files.  What about accessing Word, Excel, etc?
• Cisco WebVPN - this is cool because it allows the user to log into a web interface and access CIFS file shares.  A bit of a pain to setup and manage though, and doesn’t really allow for the user to access apps.
• VPN client + terminal server - eliminates need to RDP to a workstation, but user may need apps not available on the terminal server.

At this point, I’m kind of leaning toward just allowing users to RDP into their own workstation over a VPN connection.  Anyone have any better ideas?

I started reading “i am no but i know I AM” by Louie Giglio a couple of days ago and have a few random thoughts/reflections.  None of these are new, but it’s always nice to be reminded.

• It’s easy to become so obsessed with our own story that we are totally blind to the God story happening all around us.
• The story already has a star, and the star is NOT ME.
• God is big, really big - and I am really small.  I am just a mere dust particle in a vast universe, yet God loves and prizes me and knows everything there is to know about me - AWESOME!
• God chooses ordinary people to play significant roles in his story.  And, he often chooses the lease among us to accomplish amazing things.  It is absolutely awesome that he has chosen me to play the roll I play in growing his kingdom!
• I am not sent alone.  In fact, God is doing all the work, but he often chooses a human vessel as an ambassador.

Joseph Sangl is speaking at Avalon Church in McDonough, GA next Sunday and teaching his Financial Learning Experience class later that afternoon. Avalon Church is right in my backyard, so I’ll definitely be there. I’ve been working hard at becoming debt free for the last few years (and am amazingly close to being there), so I’m looking forward to the opportunity to learn from Joseph.

Yesterday was an incredible day. We started out at Perimeter where Tony showed me his intranet site for displaying Shelby data as well as Syncra. Jarrod Barden from Newspring Church, Errol Conner from Fellowship Technologies, and Justin Moore joined us (and probably others I’m forgetting. We did a quick tour of Perimeter, then headed over to Garrison’s for lunch.

After lunch, we headed over to First Baptist Atlanta and met up with several others. Justin did a great presentation on Asterisk. You can see his slides and calculator here. I’ll leave the transcripts to one of the guys who took really good notes.

After the Asterisk discussion, we headed over to Paetech for a discussion with some of their team as well as a switch tour. It was cool to get to see their behind the scenes operations as well as chat with some of their team.

Finally, Errol stopped by Johnson Ferry for a little while and I had the opportunity to have a great conversation with him about managing our data. I stayed at the office a while after Errol left to finish up a few things. It was a long day, but an awesome one. Wouldn’t it be great if we could all get together more often?

This week has been absolutely crazy.  We have lots of change going on right now, people and computers moving around everywhere.  We had a major hardware failure affecting our Bookstore Manager the other day (recovering from that involved a 16 hour day).  There are lots of projects on the radar screen that require planning.  On top of all that, it seems the normal day to day support requests have been coming in a slightly higher than normal volume that last few days.

Fortunately, I’m close to being caught up and can see the light at the end of the tunnel.  It’s an awesome feeling, though, to know the Lord is by my side every step of the way (Psalm 16:8).  I’m looking forward to getting away for a little while today to visit Tony Dye at Perimeter, then hopefully a nice, laid back weekend.

I was just looking at our internet bandwidth usage.  It’s amazing (and possibly a bit scare) how dependent on the internet we have become.  A little over a ago, we just had two T1’s (which were maxed out most of the time).  Now, we’re on 10mbps ethernet, and consistently over 50% utilization.  As we add more staff, remote sites, and expand wireless coverage, bandwidth usage has just exploded.  Amazingly, it’s most legitimate traffic too.  I just generated a couple of graphs showing usage over the last week.

The last year or so, we’ve been moving full force at doing lots of cleanup and building an enterprise-class infrastructure.  There’s still a ways to go, but now it’s time to develop a solid IT strategy.  I’ll be making several updates along that journey, but one of the bigs things that’s came up is what do we do when things don’t go right?  A big issue is: What do we do if there’s a major power outage and we have to shut everything down and bring it back up?

Now, last year, we had the opportunity to install a 15KVA UPS that’s capable of running our entire server farm, network core, and phone system for about 2 hours.  We rarely have an outage that long, so we haven’t had to do a full shutdown/startup in quite a while.  During the last year or so, as we’ve implemented technologies such as SAN storage and Virtualization, it seems our infrastructure has gotten considerably more complex with lots of systems being interdependent on each other.

Here’s a short list of dependencies that come to mind:

• Exchange, Blackberry Server, SQL Server, Virtual Center, and VPN all require Active Directory to be up.
• Virtual Center obviously needs the ESX servers up to function.
• Virtual Center and Blackberry Server use the SQL server.
• Blackberry Server depends on Exchange being up.
• The ESX cluster, Exchange, and SQL server all require SAN storage.
• The SAN requires the core switches be functional before it comes online.

As you can see, the dependencies quickly get complex.  If you have to shutdown everything, what order do you do it in?  How do you bring it back up?  I’ll be documenting all of this over the coming weeks and hopefully actually doing a test at some point.  More updates to come.