Dario IT Solutions Blog

Hi guys,

It was very nice meeting you all yesterday at the re-birth of the Infrastructure & Management User Group.

Below is the presentation for the main subject we talked about – “Windows 2008 R2 Overview”.

We will continue next month, on December 17th with the subject “Active Directory improvements in Windows 2008 R2”.

In the meantime, share your thoughts and interesting finds at the group site – http://www.linkedin.com/groupRegistration?gid=2389097

Have a great weekend and take care!

Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack 2008 R2 has been released to manufacturing (RTM) and will be available to download in the next couple of weeks.

This version of MDOP will include the highly acclaimed Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.5 (also called App-V) but there are a lot of other new and useful upgrades and improvements in MDOP 2008 R2 as well:

Asset Inventory Service 1.5 (AIS)

Asset Inventory Service is a hosted inventory service that scans and analyzes all the applications on customers� desktops and translates inventory data into useful and actionable information. Basically, it�s a company-wide monitor that allows customers to track the software that they have deployed within their organization. With 1.5, customers can now see license reconciliation along with inventory information. This allows them to clearly see if all software deployed within their enterprise is compliant with license agreements. Having deployment and licensing information in one place is critical to software asset management, specifically when looking at true-ups, renewals, and license reallocation. This new version of the service will be available in November 2008.

Advanced Group Policy Management 3.0 (AGPM)

Advanced Group Policy Management 3.0, which enables governance and change controls over the deployment of group policy objects in your IT environment, adds customizable permissions to enforce the use of the Group Policy change management tool within an organization. This new feature gives AGPM administrators the ability to customize the permissions that are set on production GPOs controlled by AGPM. Enhanced Tracking allows customers to use AGPM for compliance with branch specific regulations. The new version of AGPM is compatible with Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista SP1, and offers full support for 64 bit machines, as well as and the newly introduced Group Policy Preferences. It�s a major overhaul that makes AGPM a true �must-have.�

I’ve been asked so many times about the feature differences between Windows 2008 editions in regard to Hyper-V and I want to clarify it once and for all:

SQL Server 2008 has been RTM!! check out the features supported by the Standard edition – at last we can have a low cost SQL cluster…

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc645993.aspx

First of all, OCS 2007 has two options for server license:

1. Standard Server
2. Enterprise Server

Regarding clients:

1. OCS 2007 has a Standard CAL and an Enterprise CAL. At minimum, a Standard CAL is required for each user and the OCS Enterprise CAL is an additive CAL, like the Exchange Server Enterprise CAL.
2. In addition, Communicator licensing is not included in the CAL license or Server licenses for OCS 2007 so a Communication license is required for each user.
3. The feature-content offered by the Communicator application is handled by the Standard CAL. Other OCS 2007 features require an Enterprise CAL.

So to summarize, you must license the Server software, you must license access to the server for each user, and you must license the primary user interface to the server software.

Server pricing:

1. Office Communications Server 2007 Standard Edition         $699
2. Office Communications Server 2007 Enterprise Edition      $3,999

OCS 2007 Standard contains most of the features of OCS 2007 Enterprise, but is limited in terms of storage space, clustering, and highly-available option support. Thus Standard Edition is targeted at companies who can “afford downtime”.

Client pricing:

1. Office Communicator 2007           $34
2. Standard CAL                              $31
3. Enterprise CAL                            $139

Significant features provided by each CAL type are:

Hope all this info help (I tried simplifying it as I could )

I check the licensing of SQL server 2005 for one of our clients which going to consolidate 5 SQL server to one virtual machine running 5 different instances as part of a big DRP project that we design for him.

Licensing SQL server on a virtual machine

According to Microsoft, there is three different approaches:

1. For Standard, Workgroup, and Enterprise, if you decide to license on a per processor basis, you must buy a SQL Server license for each virtual processor.
2. For Enterprise Edition, you can also choose to license all physical processors in a box. This gives you rights to run SQL Server on unlimited number of virtual processors running on the same machine.
3. For Server/CAL mode, for Standard and Workgroup, you must obtain SQL Server licenses for each Virtual Operating System Environment on which you run instances of SQL Server. However, for Enterprise, if you have a Server license for the physical Server, you may run unlimited instances of SQL Server in any Virtual Operating System Environment that you run on that same machine.

For more detailed information please read: Microsoft Virtual Server Licensing Document

Licensing SQL server 2005 Instances

According to Microsoft You can run multiple instances of SQL Server 2005 on a single computer. Multiple instances are used by organizations that have several applications running on a server but want them to run in isolation so that any problem in one instance will not affect the other instances. In SQL Server 2005, you can now run multiple instances with the Workgroup, Standard, and Enterprise editions when they are licensed server/CAL or on a per-processor basis. (taken from: http://www.microsoft.com/sql/howtobuy/faq.mspx)

Were going to use this knowledge for optimizing the license for this customer and save him money along with giving him a more redundant environment.

Follow this link to a very good post about this important topic – http://blogs.msdn.com/ts/archive/2007/02/14/resources-for-diagnosing-ts-licensing-problems.aspx