Get your SQL Server 2008 here, maybe

I actually thought that SQL Server 2008 had already been released.  There’s been so much discussion about it that I really didn’t realize when I saw the news earlier in the week that it was available that it was really new.  Well, it is.  Of course, you have to be a MSDN or TechNet subscriber to get it now, as it is only being distributed through that channel.  Next week it will be added in to the Volume Licensing channel, which is where most businesses will be able to get it.  And then general retail availability will come in mid-September.

As for whether this release matters or not, that depends.  If you’re running a data warehouse or a major BI system, you’ll probably benefit from some of the improvements that SQL 2008 offers.  But very few people need the benefits at that scale.

If you’re interested in centralized management of your SQL environment via policies, you’ll really love SQL 2008.  This is actually where I think the most value will come from in the new version of the product.  It is now possible to define policies and have them enforced either live (via triggers) or in a reporting manner, where violations will be identified on a schedule or manually triggered basis.  You can force backup dumps to be on a different logical volume using a policy, force the split of data and log files, specify rules for of table naming, encryption and many other things.  Even better, the policies are all manageable via PowerShell and the policy definitions are just XML files, so they’re portable between environments.  That’s great news for people like me who like to adhere to best practices across a variety of sites.  Start with the template pre-configured and then adjust from there as necessary.  That’s a beautiful thing.

Oh, and as long as you have one SQL 2008 server in your environment you can actually apply many of the policies to older versions of SQL, both 2000 and 2005.  Not everything works on the down-level clients, but a lot of things do.

I expect that the uptake on SQL 2008 will actually be slower than the uptake for Vista, which is hard to imagine.  Unlike Vista there are no consumers who are going to push SQL 2008 numbers up.  Then again, unlike Vista there are some compelling business features in SQL 2008, so that will help drive uptake.  Still, application vendors have to certify their apps on the new SQL platform and that often takes a while to happen. 

More SQL coverage from Technology Update available here.

Oh, and this wraps up the major releases of the 2008 “Wave” of products, so now Microsoft will have to come up with something else big to drive media frenzy.

Moving beyond Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence systems are all the rage in just about every data-intensive industry these days.  The idea of getting behind the numbers and actually being able to produce forecasts based on trends and historical data is the holy grail for armies of business analysts.  Of course, the data is just that – data.  There are numbers but not necessarily answers.  And so even as many organizations struggle to get a handle on whatever bits of information they can glean from the BI systems, folks are starting to talk about the next steps in the evolution of the field.

The goal is to try to suss out the “why” part of the details when a query is put together.  A recent column addresses this issue with a few interesting observations  Among them, this:

To provide greater value, BI tools must evolve in two ways. They must enable users to answer deeper, sometimes “fuzzier” questions about the enterprise. Then they must make it possible for general business users to easily obtain information.

And this:

Capabilities like entity extraction and fuzzy search, long staples of unstructured search engines, have put these types of discovery activities entirely within reach.

In other words, the searches can be stacked, with the sales data generated from the BI system combined with a search engine “fuzzy” query of anything that might be useful for details about activities during the time period covered.  BI data can’t account on its own for some natural disaster event or the loss of a major customer or supplier.  Combining that data with the other information, however, can help an organization figure out if they are falling apart (loss of a major client) or dealing with an anomaly, and they can make that decision much more quickly and easily if the search process actually pulls up the relevant information at the time.

So it looks like the BI space is going to be pretty busy over the coming years with new developments.  Certainly worth keeping an eye on it.

SQL Server 2008 hits Release Candidate status

As part of the 2008 wave of product releases (including Server 2008 and Hyper-V) SQL Server 2008 has been released to the public in its final beta format as Release Candidate 0.  The updates available in SQL Server 2008 do not seem to be particularly significant unless you are running major data warehouse systems, but at least they are able to finally get one more of the product wave almost out the door.  At this point the good news is that it would seem that all the 2008 products will actually be released in 2008.

SQL Server is a key component in the Microsoft architecture.  It is the backbone of SharePoint deployments today, and many thought that Exchange 2007 would be SQL based rather than continue to use the JET database engine.  And the same thoughts are being tossed about regarding the next version of Exchange server.  There are also rumblings from Bill Gates of all people that SQL server may become the backbone of Active Directory, allowing for enormous scalability and more resilient replication options, or so they hope. 

No matter what, SQL 2008 is a big release from Microsoft’s point of view, and this step is a significant one towards increasing the value of the product.  Whether it really matters for the rest of us – or even if vendors support it in a reasonable timeframe which they didn’t do for SQL 2005 – remains to be seen.

Microsoft's vision of virtualization -- Part 1

I had the great fortune to attend a presentation from Microsoft earlier this week where we spent a couple hours with one of the senior engineers in their server group discussion the future of the server OS, focusing specifically on virtualization. For the most part it was a discussion on serve virtualization, but there was some discussion of the desktop as well. We covered a ton of information and I can't get it into a single coherent post so I'm going to split it up over the next few days. Check back for more on virtualization management and some of the desktop bits later in the week.

Moving from "installation" to "configuration"
Microsoft is moving to adapt the VHD format, making it much more flexible for application deployment in addition to server OS virtualization. The goal seems to be a result that is a bit like a WIM in that it can be edited and updated, but also to have applications that can be delivered as VHDs to end users. These wouldn't be demo VHDs that have an OS install and then the application on top of that. Microsoft would expect that the end-user would provide a VHD or physical server install for the base OS and then be able to layer the application VHD on top of that. It sounds a bit like the SoftGrid platform but for servers instead of workstations. We'll see what comes of it, but it is definitely interesting. Not having to wait while a bunch of DLLs and other binaries copy from the install media would definitely be a nice change, though waiting for the one big VHD file probably isn't all that much faster in the long run. Still, the idea is that we would be focusing on configuring the applications rather than installing them.

Hyper-V and the other Hypervisors
Hyper-V is really close to being released, and it seems to have some very interesting benefits as a hypervisor option. I still maintain that it isn't a competitor in the Enterprise space (and the MS guy agreed, several times) yet, but it is clear that Microsoft is moving that direction with great haste, and good things will be coming in the next few product cycles. So, what are the good and bad things?

Hardware Drivers (good)- Microsoft's approach to the hardware situation is a bit different than VMware's (and similar to Xen's). Rather than writing a driver to emulate a specific hardware model (think the LSILogic SCSI controller in VMware), Microsoft has "synthetic drivers" for their hardware. The synthetic drivers can operate with driver code written by the hardware vendors to run in the guest OS sessions. This approach allows for a lot of flexibility for hardware support, both from a breadth of supported hardware as well as the features that can be supported. For example, if you're looking to host a VDI environment and buy a super-powerful video card to handle all sorts of fun UI features, you cannot take advantage of those features unless the guest OS can see the underlying hardware and leverage the power that it has. Synthetic drivers expose a framework that lets that happen. It requires the hardware manufacturers to write the drivers, but that should happen soon enough. The synthetic drivers also requires an OS that is aware of the virtualization platform, also known as an "elinghtented" OS. Fortunately, all the current Windows versions (XP SP3, 2003 SP2, Vista SP1, 2008) are enlightened, so that isn't a barrier.

Data Protection (good) - The VSS integration in Hyper-V takes the idea of snapshots to the next level. Currently, any VSS-integrated backup tool can tell a server that it is going to take a backup snapshot and the files would be quiesced for the snapshot. In a virtual environment, however, that doesn't do a lot of good. The VHD file would be quiesced, but without visibility into the guest OS there is no way to ensure that the applications inside the VHD will be aware that a backup is happening. This leaves you in a crash-consistent state - as if you pulled the plug on the server. Hyper-V exposes a new VSS service in the guest OS sessions. This service allows the host session to tell the guest that a VSS-aware backup is running. Any VSS-aware apps in the guest then quiesce, improving the reliability of the system when you recover it from the snapshot of the VHD. This is very useful for Active Directory, Exchange, SQL and SharePoint servers, as they are all VSS aware.

Host Migration (not as bad as I thought) - One of the major issues I have with Hyper-V as an Enterprise solution is that it doesn't allow for a Vmotion-type migration of a running system in a live state. They do have a "Quick Migration" however, that is a big step ahead of having to shut the server down, migrate it to a new host and then power it back up. The Quick Migration flushes the RAM state to disk, stops processing and then loads the RAM state on the new host and resumes processing. There is still a window where the guest OS is unavailable, but it is still better than having to shut the guest all the way down and power it back up. This would require a 1:1 ratio of VM to LUN, which is going to drive the storage guys crazy; see below for why.

Disk Management (good and bad) - The good news is that Hyper-V allows for pass-through disk access (same as RDMs in VMware), in addition to direct-attached storage, FC, iSCSI and ATA support. The pass-through doesn't have a huge performance benefit - only ~5% - but if you're doing pass-through it is almost always for management, not performance. The bad news is that the NTFS file system is really unhappy when more than one host tries to write to a volume at the same time. This means that if a VHD guest is active on a host and then you want to move it to another host you have to move all the VHDs on the same LUN. Essentially this means that each VHD has to be on its own LUN to maintain the flexibility that you need. Compared to the VMFS-3 file system from VMware this is a huge limitation. The good news is that the Windows Server guys are working on this, but it isn't going to happen until at least R2 of 2008, and probably not until the next version of Server.

That's pretty much what we talked about on the server virtualization front - or at least the parts that I found interesting and took notes on. Look for workstation virtualization notes tomorrow and management stuff heading into the weekend on Friday.

Report from the 2008 Wave launch event

Every time one of these events comes along I get my hopes up that it will be useful, educational or even slightly entertaining. And every time I go home disappointed. Today's even was no exception.

Maybe I should've known something was up when they sent a Technical Fellow to give the keynote rather than a C-series exec. Don't get me wrong, the guy spoke well and was truly excited about the technology, but the fact that it was lesser material meant it didn't rate one of the big wigs. The keynote was nothing new, much less groundbreaking. They focused on the rationalization of IT, which is Microsoft's big push these days. Basically the goal is to move from IT being a cost center to a strategic value in any organization. This is done via lower TCO and more efficient systems, as well as increased manageability and control of the systems. It looks like the 2008 products will deliver on this, but it just isn't that sexy for a major launch event. Or maybe it is because the vendor "showcase" was horrible. Just the usual faces (AMD, Intel, Citrix, Novell, Nortel, EMC, etc.) and nothing exciting at all from any of them.

They also did a couple demos, including showing off the Hyper-V virtualization platform, IIS7, Terminal Services, SQL Server and a bunch of AD/GPO stuff. Some notes on each are below.

Hyper-V
Hyper-V is pretty slick, especially the integration with the various other Microsoft technologies like PowerShell and the Systems Center Operations Manager (nee MOM) tool. Being able to provision guest systems via PowerShell is very slick. So is the self-service portal for end-users requesting the VM and admin approval. I know that VMware has similar deployment tools available, but so will Microsoft, so VMware will be losing that advantage. VMware still has several other advantages, like Vmotion, that Microsoft doesn't, so Hyper-V will likely remain a dev environment tool for at least this revision, but progress is being made and VMware won't be alone out there forever.

Active Directory & Group Policy
This seems to be the main area of improvement for the Server platform, at least from an IT manager's perspective. The new Group Policy management tools have some great new features, including search filters and the ability to comment individual settings within the GPOs (and also search on the comments). They also allow for default template policies to be defined and then used to deploy actual policies within an organization. Microsoft has also integrated the Desktop Standard package that they recently purchased to allow for the management of many more settings and preferences, not just the pieces that have historically been part of GPOs. Policies can now control drive mappings, environment variables, shares, ini files, etc. This is a great improvement from a manageability perspective.

On the Active Directory front a number of changes have been implemented in the overall architecture. AD services now run as a service on the server, so you can stop the service and perform maintenance on the system (NTDSUtil) without rebooting the server into AD restore mode. Additionally there are some new options in AD Users & Computers to help prevent the accidental deletion of OUs and to provide access to most attributes of all objects, avoiding the need to use ADSIEdit. Password policies are no longer global; they can be applied to individuals, groups, OUs or any other collection of users you can manage to identify. Microsoft has also introduced the concept of AD snapshots to allow rollbacks should things go awry, including reversing of schema changes.

There is also the read-only domain controller. I mentioned it previously and it is actually better than I had thought. It can be configured to not cache any authentication data if you're really worried about it being compromised. But if the authentication data is cached and then the server is lost there are some very useful options. When you delete the object from AD you have the option of resetting the user passwords for any accounts that were cached on the server and/or generating a list of the users so that you can manually deal with the situation. Ironically, the read-only domain controller is a throwback to the good old days of the NT4 backup domain controllers that everyone celebrated the demise of, but that's a whole different post waiting to happen.

IIS7
The new incarnation of the IIS platform has a couple great features for operators of web server farms, but very little for the occasional web server operator. One nice feature is the ability to have a custom configuration file that all web servers base their metabase configuration on. This helps prevent the "new" server being misconfigured and breaking web apps. Also included are some new security models that allow for users to be granted admin rights for a specific web app rather than the whole server. Nice features, but nothing groundbreaking if you aren't running a hosting service.

Terminal Services
Much progress was made in the application presentation capabilities for Terminal Services. There is the new "Gateway" functionality that is comparable to the Citrix Web Interface + Citrix Secure Gateway/Citrix Access Gateway. Individual apps can be published and presented to end users through links (including a nice SharePoint module similar to the WISP from Citrix) and are accessed via an RDP connecction tunneled through SSL, allowing access from just about any network connection (no firewall issues) and the seamless window for the app. The other big deal about Terminal Services is that it means all the apps have to run on the 2008 systems. It is supposed to be relatively similar to Vista from an application compatibility standpoint, which is either really good news or really bad news, depending on whether your apps work on Vista. The UI isn't the Vista UI, so that will be interesting in terms of how the user experience plays out.

SQL Server 2008
Much like the IIS7 improvements, the SQL Server 2008 updates are targeted very much at organizations that heavily leverage SQL server services. Among the improvements are the ability to control CPU utilization on a per-database level and compliance policies that can be defined and tested against to ensure that all DBs are configured correctly. It doesn't look like the policies can be used for enforcement, but auditing isn't a bad start. The Business Intelligence pieces of SQL Server 2008 are also rather improved. The integration with the other Microsoft platforms - namely Office 2007, SharePoint and PerformancePoint - is very slick, which is great if you're using the data warehousing features.

Clustering
There are some interesting new features available in the clustering area. The presenters were real big on all the new wizards and checks that make cluster setup easier. I never really found it all that complicated, but I guess it can be. The 2008 version will support GUID Partition Table drives (>2TB volumes) and will also support geo-clustering without requiring the various nodes to remain on the same IP subnet. This is a big improvement in Exchange 2007 clustering for folks looking at the Standby Continuous Replication (SCR) option, as it now allows SCR to happen without spanning subnets across the WAN. There will be support for some cluster configurations in the Hyper-V environment, as well as several new migration tools to help move from 2003 to 2008 and from standalone systems to clusters.

So there was plenty of useful information, but nothing all that astonishing. Considering that it was a PR event more than anything else, I guess I shouldn't be surprised.

Delay announced in the Microsoft 2008 "Wave"

The launch party is scheduled, and once a party is scheduled there's no going back, at least not in Microsoft's world. They've been talking for a while about the delays in the various components of the 2008 "Wave" of products, including Hyper-V (though that one is closer to on track again). This time they're looking at delays of another product that was already not going to actually ship until mid-year, SQL Server 2008.

Most 3rd party products manage to not be certified on the SQL platform for a few months after the release anyways, so this mean mid-2009 deployments, at the earliest, for a lot of platforms. In the mean-time, folks who bought SQL Server 2005 and SA should still get the '08 version as part of their benefits, though there is always a chance it will slip even more.