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Tech-Ed Diary – Day 4

We have started the day with a session about SharePoint 2007, Notes from the Field: Achieving High Availability with SharePoint. As its name describes the session has been focused on how to achieve high availability in our SharePoint farms, many information and tips have been provided during the session and it could be impossible to include all of them in this blog but I will include the link to the presentation as soon as Microsoft publish it on the web.

One of the ways to achieve high availability is the redundancy and one of the most interesting information provided on this session has been the redundancy that you can implement in a MOSS server depending on the server role:

  • Web-Front End
    • Software load balancing – NLB
    • Hardware load balancing
    • Round-robin DNS – Not recommended
  • Query
    • Yes (unless sharing server with index role)
  • Index
    • One per SSP
  • Excel Calculation Services
    • Yes
  • Windows SharePoint Services Search
    • No (but each WFE can run its own instance)
  • Central Administration
    • Yes
  • Database
    • Failover clustering
    • Log shipping
    • Database mirroring

The second session has been the first one of other of the “legends” on Microsoft: Mark Russinovich. He is famous for the Sysinternals tools created by him and for the book wrote with David Salomon “Windows Internals” (certainly, the 5th edition will be published next February). The Case of the Unexplained… has been the session title.

TechEd08_6

During the presentation he has demonstrated how to fix system issues (application crashes, blue screens, system hangs, etc.) using some of the free tools that you can download from Sysinternals and Windows debugging tools sites. Tools like:

  • Process Explorer – process/thread  viewer
  • Process Monitor – file/registry/process/thread tracing
  • Autoruns – displays all autostart locations
  • Strings – dumps printable strings in any file
  • Spy++ – Visual Studio tools
  • Windbg – application and kernel debugger

Following with the experts sessions we have attended to a panel discussion named Panel Discussion on Security Threats and the Impact on Today’s IT. Brian Komar (President of IdentIT Inc.), Jesper M. Johansson, Mark Russinovich, Steve Riley and Mark Minasi talked about several topics related to security and respond to the people questions, the discussion was moderated by Michael Anderberg and Michael Kalbe (Microsoft evangelists).

Using MOSS 2007 to Create Rich Internet Facing Publishing Sites Using Web Content Management session. On this session we could see how to build rich publishing sites with MOSS 2007 using the publishing functionality provided by it. As you know Content Management Server application has been “absorbed” by MOSS 2007 (so you can’t find a Content Management Server 2007 version in the market, the last one is the 2002 one and the next is MOSS 2007). The session has been focused on three points:

  • Authoring (rich client, web parts, controls,…)
  • Branding (master pages, layouts, template governance…)
  • Controlled Publishing (workflow, content deployment,…)

The way in a MOSS 2007 page is rendering would be the following:

  • Page example.aspx is requested
  • Page layout associated with example.aspx is retrieved
  • Master page associated with site is retrieved
  • Controls (as web part for example) in page layout render content from page’s fields into the page

The final result is the example.aspx page with all of its components: banner, navigation panel, title, web parts, images, etc., etc. Master page is the page template associated to all site, this master page load the common parts of all site pages, as for example, the corporate banner, logo, search box, CSS references, etc. while the page layout is the “Publishing template” that defines the components that all the pages using it should have, for example, an image on top-left, date on top-right, a body text on the middle, a title above the body text, etc. These page layouts are created with the Content Management functionality.

Other way to authoring pages is using the Smart Client Authoring component, a server-side component that convert Word and InfoPath documents into MOSS 2007 web pages. It works with two items, Paths that connects source with destination site collections and Jobs that control what content is copied when.

On this link you can see some examples of MOSS 2007 sites customized using the Publishing features, they are incredible.

Anatomy of a hack has been the second session provided by Jesper Johansson on Barcelona.

In this occasion the topic was the “phishing” techniques used by hackers to make you crazy and finally to get your money and run. He has explained real cases and shown some screenshots of these phishing tools in action, the majority of them would be detected as a fake for any IT people but for the customers it is very complicated to know when they are using a fake application or accessing to a fake site (for example the bank sites).

Very interesting session about security. His book Protect Your Windows Network – from perimeter to data includes a chapter with the same title and dedicated to the same topic, don’t forget it.

We have decided to finish the day attending to the second session of Mark Russinovich (yes, today has been the Experts day) about virtualization on Windows Server 2008: Inside Windows 2008 R2 Virtualization Improvements and Native VHD Support.

The virtualization on the second release of Windows 2008 includes several innovations like:

Live Migration: Moves a VM from a server1 to server2. First, the Configuration is moved, then memory modules are moved to server2 and system is control what modules are changed on the server1 after move it to server2, when all the modules have been moved, the changed modules are moved again and immediately the State is moved too. Now, we have the VM running on the server2 and customer didn’t notice anything (in theory).

Clustered Shared Volumes: implements hybrid sharing for LUNs. One node owns the storage namespace and metadata and other own storage backing and individual files data.

Other new functionality are Network Virtual Machine Queues, Hypervisor Power Management, Second Level Address Translation or Native VHD.

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