Tag Microsoft

Historically I’ve been pretty bad about announcing the CWUG here on PKGuild – Today is no exception!

Tonight is the CWUG in Chicago! 77W Wacker and all that goodness.
We’ll actually be kicking off with a tour of the MTC (Microsoft Technology Center) and all of the goodness which surrounds that. – Here is the information, which is also posted on our Portal

July Meeting
Monday, July 21st Microsoft Office, 77 West Wacker, downtown Chicago
Register Now!

4:30 p.m. MTC (Microsoft Technology Center) Tour!
5:00 p.m. – 5:30 p.m. Dinner/Networking
Windows Vista Gadget Contest Submission Deadline
5:30 p.m. – 6:15 p.m. Room Introductions/Meeting Kick Off
6:15 p.m. – 7:30 p.m. First sessions
Session 1: Automating Windows Desktop Deployments with OSD360 – presented by CyniOS Technologies
Session 2: Windows Live – production software and a look at some of the betas
7:30 p.m. – 8:30 p.m. Windows Home Server – PC backup and restore (Live demo!)

Hope to see you folks tonight!

*Update – Be sure to check out the free Training Courses for 70-652! *

5 Free Virtualization Training Courses for the Holidays! (HyperV)

and

How much does Free Microsoft Learning Cost? (Hint: Free!)

Now continue to this old post :)

You’re signed up, you’re in the beta! with 12 days left to take the test!
You get out there, study study study… wait, what am I supposed to study?

Well, first of all you decide to check out that Microsoft E-Learning I mentioned before here:
https://www.microsoftelearning.com/eLearning/courseDetail.aspx?courseId=92459

And let me tell you, this E-learning is very useful, if you’ve never touched ESX, XenServer, or Hyper-V.
If you’ve played with Hyper-V at all, and read the help file you will find it isn’t ALL that useful.
I’m not saying don’t give it a whirl, give it a try… But do NOT expect that to be your keys to the kingdom. You’ll be lucky if it can be used as a dowsing rod to find the moat!
(Wait, do castles even have keys?!)

Okay, so what do I do now?

Here is the first and most important thing you should do.
Read this: Test Information and Support

If ever there was a time in your life to read something like this, read it, look at it, read it again.
Go line by line, if there is something you do not understand (WTF? winrm?!) Learn about it, read about it, study it. Because that little bit of guidance there is one of the first things you ought to do, as you’ll be on a tough road without it.

Now it is pertinent that you get face time, hardcore time spent playing with the following:

That’s right! New Mastery in the form of a “Master” Cert.
It is rumoured to be above the current MCITP, and equally above the old-school MCSE, yet below (and a pre-requisite) of the MCA (Architect).

It will be offered in 3 varieties.

It is covered at an EXTREMELY high-level here at Microsoft Certified Master Program
And also is briefly mentioned here on Trika’s Blog

There is a little bit of depth to be found here:
http://www.microsoft.com/learning/mcp/master/products/default.mspx

However, outside of these high-level ideas of it, and its very narrow focus on a set of core technologies (Hey, where is my MOSS Mastery?!)

It appears to be just another Certification to join the pile – definitely a precursor to the MCA with these requirements:

To achieve Master certification, candidates must fulfill the following training requirements:

And if history has shown us anything, when you have ‘class attendance requirements’ that usually translates into “This is going to cost you some serious $$$” Not only from ‘attendance’ but also from your inability to be producing revenue or working as you’re going to classes.

Perhaps this is trying to go the way of the “Masters” programs available within the ‘Educational’ community, but today you can phone that in, and the technology and extreme depth this is looking to promote is not something earned in the classroom – It’s earned in the trenches.

Who knows how this will be implemented, we’ll certainly find out as time moves on – Adoption is key though – Look at the CCIE Program for Cisco…

This pains all of us.
Which are the right drivers to use, download and install?

Constant complaints and gripes about what driver should we load, and what insane device is screaming with a yellow exclamation point – wanting to be installed!

Our good friends at Microsoft have (had) the answer!

The Microsoft Update Catalog!

Okay, so I’m here, and I have a search bar… So.. what do I fill in there?

This is where Device Manager comes into play. – Find yourself a driver or object which is suspect or in general you want to check out. – Wireless Drivers are always a challenge..

What you’ll want to do, is find the Hardware Id’s – this is where the cake is at!

At this point, take advantage of the shortest field available, and go as far as the first & – Such as:
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_4227

After searching, you’ll find it will return a large number of results. (21 results)

If you’re looking for a bit more granularity, try one of the slightly longer entries there.

By searching for PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_4227&SUBSYS_10108086 now, we’re able to 11 results.

This can be very beneficial if you’re trying to do things such as – Run Windows Vista 64bit, use Windows Server 2008 as a workstation, and a number of things. This will further enable you to take advantage of the hardware that may be present without having to rely upon the OEM hardware manufacturers to provide you media they tend to never get around to.

So, this is often a debated question – Is my machine capable of doing Hyper-V?

Well, let the doubt be cast to the wayside a bit.

AMD Processor Utility to Check compatibility
Intel Checker (by GRC) to check compatibility
As seen in this screen shot as well

This alone will not dictate whether you can support Hyper-V as a lot of it falls upon your BIOS and whether the features exist there to enable. However, just to get past that initial conversation of “Is my processor supported” we have the following link and table.

Intel Core 2 Duo Processor Specification

As you can likely tell, all things being equal – All things are NOT equal!

From a validation perspective, all of the rules which apply to Microsoft’s Hyper-V should also apply to Citrix XenServer.

More on this later…