Today, Sun released VirtualBox 2.0, a major revision to the (partially open source) desktop virtualization software. I have long used VirtualBox on my Windows machines as my virtualization product of choice due to its compactness, functionality, and low impact on the host system. Although I’m happy with VMware Fusion on the Mac, I intend to try out VirtualBox there, too, to see how it compares.

If you haven’t already tried VirtualBox, you ought to. It works very well, virtualizing Windows and Linux guests on Windows, Linux, Solaris, and Mac hosts with respectable performance. One thing I really love about it is that it doesn’t bog down my Vista system like VMware with installed drivers and services. It just installs and works and gets out of the way when you’re not using it.

VirtualBox supports shared folders, USB, and has guest additions for Windows and Linux to provide resolution independence and performance boosts. The new 2.0 version adds 64-bit guest OS support for 64-bit hosts along with performance and stability fixes. The Mac version now has a native look and feel and better networking, too.

One really interesting twist for folks interested in desktop virtualization (aka VDI on VMware) is integration with remote desktop protocol (RDP). VirtualBox guests can be configured to act as RDP servers, with thin(ish) clients accessing them over a network and even sharing their USB devices seamlessly. I’m getting pretty excited about the desktop virtualization concept - I’ll be keeping my eyes on companies like stealthy Old Road Computing Virtual Computer to see what they’re up to!

Confirming my observation of longish Windows boot times, Microsoft engineer Michael Fortin today blogged about the booting improvements scheduled for Windows 7.

He rightly points out that there are really three different “boot times” to consider:

1. Boot
2. Resume from sleep
3. Resume from hibernate

Note that the Microsoft definition of “boot (1)” only gets us through desktop launch and background task execution. It does not include my number one boot annoyance, namely “what the heck is Windows doing for two minutes after booting that makes it still totally unusable?!?”

According to Microsoft’s analysis, my “boot (1)” time of 80 seconds is longish, but within the standard deviation from the mean of 30-40 seconds. I’m glad, though, that Microsoft is working on this, and doubly glad that they recognize the “other perceptions that users deem as reflecting boot time, such as when the disk stops, when their apps are fully responsive, or when the start menu and desktop can be used.”

And I’m glad they’re considering resume time, too - this morning it took my PC 16 minutes to be usable after I woke it up! Seriously - there’s the desktop, now let’s listen to the disk chug and get nothing done for over a quarter of an hour at the start of my day! While waiting, I turned on the Mac and read my mail in Entourage - not exactly the outcome Microsoft would have wanted, I bet. Here’s hoping Windows 7 brings the improvements that Mr. Fortin is clearly working on!

With Windows Server 2008 appearing in (surprisingly) 2008, and Windows 7 (client) scheduled for 2010, some folks grew mighty confused about the possibility of a Windows 7 Server appearing shortly thereafter. Even Microsofties talked about something called “Windows 7 Server” in blogs, newsgroups, and conferences.

So would there be a major Windows Server update just two or three years after the last major version? And what impact would this have on the masses that still haven’t moved from Windows Server 2003 (or even 2000)?

Thankfully, the Group Product Manager for Windows Server, Ward Ralston, has clarified the issue. There will be no Windows 7 Server. Instead, we will see an update to Windows Server 2008 called (unsurprisingly) Windows Server 2008 R2 which will incorporate any server-side enhancements needed for Windows 7 clients. Ralston’s comments about a 2/4 schedule of minor/major updates leads me to assume that the next major Windows Server update will come in 2012 at the earliest and will probably share whatever the post-Windows 7 client codebase becomes.

See the official Microsoft Windows Server Roadmap for more details, and note that Windows Storage Server 2008 is noted for release this year. I can’t wait to get my hands on that!

Although it’s been available for a while now, Windows Server 2008’s storage changes aren’t widely reported. TechTarget’s Dave Raffo wrote a piece about it today, Windows Server 2008’s hidden storage features, including some quotes from me, but it’s still less than clear.

So let me sum up:

1. Server Message Block (SMB) 2.0 is probably the biggest news.  Microsoft re-worked this protocol for Vista and 2008 to reduce chattiness, combine multiple commands in a single packet, and allow larger packets.  This should improve performance for just about everyone, but is only in those two operating systems right now.
2. The excellent multi-path I/O (MPIO) driver from Microsoft is also included right out of the box, including device-specific modules for both iSCSI and Fibre Channel.  This is the first version of Windows to come with MPIO, though it’s available with the iSCSI initiator and OEM drivers for other versions.
3. As in Vista, Server 2008 allows you to shrink NTFS filesystems on the fly.  It’s not quite as flexible or forgiving as some third-party tools, but it’s certainly easy to use!  Just go into the disk administrator snap-in and try it for yourself.
4. Windows finally has the option to leave new LUNs alone instead of trying to mount them.  This was one of those things that gave Windows a rep as a bad neighbor in SAN environments.
5. NTBackup is gone, replaced by a new Server Backup MMC snap-in.  I haven’t tried it, but I hope it’s better than the one that comes in Vista!  I ended up keeping NTBackup around on my laptop…
6. A new MMC snap-in called Storage Explorer lets you manage WMI-compliant SAN devices.
7. The Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) and DFS interfaces are improved and are now scriptable.
8. Server 2008 now automatically aligns filesystem boundaries with storage, which was one of those dark and secret skills us storage guys used to share amongst ourselves.  This can increase performance in high-I/O environments.
9. NTFS (in both Server 2008 and Vista) now has symbolic link support, just like UNIX and Mac OS X.  Note that this got mangled in the TechTarget article.
10. NTFS was also tuned and tweaked a bit for better stability and crash recovery.

Update: I have created another page for custom drive icons in Mac OS X

If you’re like most people, you have accumulated a large number of removable USB storage devices over the years, from flash-based thumb drives to external hard disks.  I have seven of these things sitting on my desk or in by laptop bag right now!  But Windows XP and Vista uses the same icon for all of them, adding a few seconds of examination every time I try to select one.  Icon confusion can cause problems too, like the time I accidentally saved a presentation to my big desktop backup drive instead of the thumb drive I headed out of the office with!

Before: Everything looks like a generic external book type thing.

But I’ve stumbled on a great method to create easy to locate the right drive using free software and the power of Google.  I create a custom drive icon that looks like the physical drive in Windows, so I can see which is which at a glance.  Here’s how!

After: Aah, now I can see which removable drive is which.  Shame about that iPhone icon, though…

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Imagine there was someone many people loved to hate, but grudgingly loved just the same because of their incredible prowess. In Red Sox Nation, that would be Alex Rodriguez, who we follow year after year with a mix of admiration, envy, and anger as he seems to make all the right moves for the wrong team. Lots of IT people feel the same about Microsoft, whose runaway success is only slightly tempered by occasional schadenfreude when a misstep is made. In our little corner of the world, storage pros have even more reason to wonder how Microsoft can continue to make good move after good move.

It wasn’t always like this - be thankful if you don’t remember FTEDIT! But ever since Windows 2000, Redmond has made improvement after improvement, remaking “bad (SAN) citizen” Windows into Martha Stewart. But unlike the latter, Microsoft hasn’t called much attention to its skills, and this is a shame…

Take iSCSI - Microsoft was an early supporter of the protocol, releasing an excellent software iSCSI driver as a free download. They also bundle a limited (but continuously-improving) volume manager with all modern versions of Windows. Then there’s VSS, which is the first hardware-independent (even hardware-free!) snapshot API I know of. I’ve written articles (1, 2) on Windows storage technologies which go into these in more detail.

But one question that came up in my virtualization seminar made me realize that I forgot one key piece of Gates-tech: MPIO. See, Microsoft has also been bundling a free hardware-independent multipath I/O driver in server editions of Windows since 2003, but lots of folks haven’t gotten the memo. It’s good stuff: A generic driver with device-specific modules (DSMs) for different storage array and network types. MPIO handles transparent multi-path failover (for availability) and load balancing (for performance).

If you have iSCSI, you simply must try MPIO since Microsoft’s own free DSM supports about everything you need, and compatibility is required for logo support. And if you’re on Fibre Channel, you’re probably in luck, too, since most major vendors provide DSMs for their arrays (but some might not be free, I’m told).

So there you have it. Another excellent (and free!) Microsoft product that you (probably) never heard of, cutting out proprietary solutions (at least for Windows Server…)