Microsoft opens Live Mesh Preview to more users and Mobile Mesh released!

Microsoft announced witnin the last week or so that they will be opening up the Live Mesh Tech Preview. You can sign up directly, with no waiting list, if your country/region is the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, or New Zealand.


To sign up see
https://www.mesh.com/Welcome/LearnMore.aspx

Paul Thurrot describes live mesh in this way "Under the Live Mesh paradigm, users create a "mesh" of interconnected devices, including PCs, Macs, various mobile devices, and a Web-based desktop. (In the current prerelease version, only PCs and the Web desktop are enabled.) You can synchronize folders (and their contents) between all of these devices, providing you with anytime-anywhere access to your data. Live Mesh also provides PC remote control functionality, so you can use your PC when away from home, for example, over the Internet."

I have been testing the service for several months. If you install Silverlight on your system you can back up all of your pictures to the Mesh "cloud" and view them as a slide show for example. As well as upload your music and play it from online Mesh folders with the silverlight plugin. Mesh lets you open Microsoft Office files directly from your online folders also.

Also of note MOBILE users can connect to their Mesh account now. See the blog entry here about Mobile Mesh

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Watch out with ADOBE ACROBAT READER 9 on a domain with Vista user roaming profiles

Update: In researching this issue I came across an AWESOME step by step for installing Adobe written by Aaron Parker, that includes an MST of the recommended settings. All I can say is Aaron, you da man!http://blog.stealthpuppy.com/deployment/deploying-adobe-reader-9-for-windows

There also is a greate admin template to set up Adobe Acrobat to work so it opens OUTSIDE the browser. I had to do two things to get Adobe Acrobat to work on Vista. Logged on as an admin, go to the Adobe reader executable on the hard disk in the program files/adobe/9.0/reader folder and right click on it and choose properties. Then choose the compatibility tab and choose set compatibility for all users and choose Windows XP SP2 from the drop down. Apply. I then had to open Adobe reader, choose edit/preferences. Click on Internet in the side menu and uncheck the open in browser box. Hope this helps.

NOTE: If you have a solution to this please post in the comment section! Thank you.

I'm putting this out there everywhere I have a presence in hopes that Adobe will get off it's butt and fix this problem. If you install Adobe 9 acrobat reader on Windows Vista on a domain and use roaming profiles for users, be it mandatory or not, Acrobat Reader will crash and will not run. It gives errors in modules annots.api and also msvcr80.dll. Note that this is NOT an IE only thing, Acrobat reader crashes when run by itself, with Firefox and Apple Safari browsers as soon as the account is set to roam.

As soon as you give the user admin priveleges the program will run. I've tried turning off UAC, still broke, I've tried running adobe reader in compatibility mode, still broke, I've tried running adobe as administrator settings still broke. I've tried changing access on adobe folders to give users full control, still broke. Giving a user administrator priveleges is NOT an acceptable solution. Further having to mess around with Dep and Windows Security features is NOT an option. If Adobe wants to play with the big boys and try to consider it's product an "industry standard" they have to write it correctly.

I am not the only one having this issue there are posts all over the internet including the below samples IN the adobe forums.
http://www.adobeforums.com/webx/.59b5db5d
http://www.adobeforums.com/webx/.59b5ea2a
http://www.adobeforums.com/webx/.59b5c646

Citrix admins have also reported issues with it crashing and getting it to work~
http://www.adobeforums.com/webx/.59b5f923
However I did find an installation script for Adobe 9 on Citrix
here Though I have not tested this so I do not know if it works.

My recommondation is don't install Adobe Acrobat 9 in a Vista domain until Adobe addresses this issue!

NOTE: Local non admin user profiles CAN run Adobe. If you make it a roaming one that is when you have issues.

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Citrix Provisioning Server 5.0 (Project Charles) enters Release Candidate Status

Well I am now allowed to blog about the upcoming release of Citrix Provisioning Server 5.0.

Quickly though if you don't know what Citrix Provisioning Server is or does, take a look at this video. The video shows 150 desktops being provisioned with Windows XP, then changed to Windows Server, different versions of Linux and Vista instantly with a few mouse clicks. Which a better quality version can be downloaded from here to justify buying it to your boss. (note I suggest you right click on the above link and choose save target as and save the video to your local drive to view it)

Provisioning Server is also the magic behind Citrix Xenserver. So it is good idea to start learning about it if you want to use it to provison your servers.

I have been beta testing this product for several weeks and can tell you that it is spectacularly different than the 4.5 (1.0) product that Citrix purchased from Ardence and renamed.

Version 5.0 can be considered a grown up version of the 4.5 (really 1.0) product! While PVS 1.0 was a simple click install with few choices in the console for changing things and proprietary vdisk, version 5.0 begins to build standards and look like a product that is truly ready for the enterprise!

PVS 5.0 Datacenter version adds management improvements such as Role Based Administration that grant admin access rights based on Active directory group membership. Farm partitioning is available that allows the management of large server farms with the ability to group several provisioning server hosts, servers and vdisks into separately managed sites.

And the best part the new UI is a Microsoft Management console Snap in that lets you integrate PVS with your existing mmc's!

New in this version is the ability to use Microsoft Virtual Hard disks (VHD) for the vdisk and also customers can use Microsoft SQL Server for the backend database. There is also Windows 2008 streaming functionality that enables provisioning of physical and virtual W2K8 servers including the ability to stream Microsoft Hyper V to bare metal servers making it possible to dynamically configure servers to run a single, dedicated workload or be virtualized to run multiple workloads.

For a sneak peak at the console click here

PVS 5 introduces the concept of sites and stores. Stores are A logical name given to a physical storage location for vDisks. The store is used by all Provisioning Servers within a farm to refer to a shared storage location.

Sites is a container that groups a vDisk Pool, PVS Servers and Device Collection. A site can represent a physical or logical location… Citrix designed the GUI so you the administrator can create a hierarchy that makes sense to you!

The addition of sites and stores give administrators the flexibility to set up multiple PVS in multiple sites and locations and use multiple storage areas.

PVS 5 also introduces High Availability options among many other great new features.

As I test and learn more I will post here.

There seems to be a PVS 5 at Citrix here and Here is Pete Downing's video Gus Pinto recorded from a few months back at Citrix Synergy talking about PVS 5.0

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Hyper-V deployment Guide is now available for Download

Microsoft has released a guide for deploying Hyper-V that is now available for download at:

http://download.microsoft.com/download/8/1/5/81556693-1f05-494a-8d45-cdeeb6d735e0/HyperV_Deploy.doc

The 30 page guide contains

• Overview of Hyper-V
• Before You Install Hyper-V
• Hardware Considerations
• About Virtual Machines and Guest Operating Systems
• Install the Hyper-V Role on a Server Core Installation of Windows Server 2008
• Install the Hyper-V Role on a Full Installation of Windows Server 2008
• Install and Configure Hyper-V Tools for Remote Administration
• Configuring Virtual Networks

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VMware ESXi now available (Free)

You can now download the new free VMWare ESXi Hypervisor.
See
https://www.vmware.com/tryvmware/login.php?eval=esxi&t=1

VMWare's press release on this is here:
http://vmware.com/company/news/releases/esxi_pricing.html

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Citrix Announces Project Kensho

Citrix yesterday announced Project Kensho a slew of Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF) Tools.
See
http://www.citrix.com/English/NE/news/news.asp?newsID=1679371&ntref=hp_article_headlines_US

Also see the Microsoft Virtualization Team blog for some additional info about the above as well as info on a new Offline Patching tool for VM's.

http://blogs.technet.com/virtualization/archive/2008/07/16/vm-standards-offline-patching-tools.aspx

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Link Pick: Hyper-V maximum support configurations

While surfing and trying to read more about Hyper-V I came acros Nick MacKechnie's blog post on the Maximum Supported Configuration for Hyper-V. Nick works at Microsoft New Zealand. Good stuff to have handy when you are ready to start building a Hyper-V environment.

http://blogs.msdn.com/nickmac/archive/2008/07/04/hyper-v-rtm-maximum-supported-configurations.aspx

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