February 2008 - Posts
Video speaks for itself. This should really put those who keep complaining about their situation (me included) to shame.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnLVRQCjh8c
My last statement to Microsoft about the so called minority geeks who uses windows 2008 on their laptop with Hyper-V. If you are going to tell us that Hyper-V is meant for server only operation, hence you disable the sleep functionality on the laptop running windows 2008, you fix your virtualisation story on vista, expecially to support x64 platform, and give me the ability to move my virtual machines from a Hyper-V machine to virtual server / virtual pc, which every you choose to improve. And this support, I ask that you do not provide 6 months or longer down the road, but immediately, or 1 month after Hyper-V goes into rtm. Yes, Hyper-V is great virtualisation story for server operations, and there is a marked improvement over virtual server, and I'm pleased with the x64 support. But I love my sleep functionality more than Hyper-V virtualisation. If I am to run Hyper-V 24/7, I won't choose a laptop to host it! And when I run Hyper-V, I only use it if I need to have access to server applications, which is not 100 percent of the time!
If you can't let the laptop sleep with virtual machine running in Hyper-V, can you explore the following instead of disabling sleep totally?
- display a message that sleep mode is not support when virtual machines is running, during installation, or when a sleep is intiated
- allow sleep to happen when there is not virtual machines running
- allows sleep to continue and let the owner handle the risks themselves
If I am ever forced to use vmware, I will not switch back to your virtualisation story.
I don't know how much stronger this minority geek can say to you. But you are not leaving a lot of option for me.
To readers: Do leave your comments. I'm sure some of you will want the sleep function, while others would think what the hell do I want windows 2008 on my laptop...
Especially if you are going to move between Hyper-V and Hyper-V / Virtual Server.
First of all, if you need to move virtual machines from one hyper-v to another hyper-v, you need to do an export before you can import it back into Hyper-V. I didn't read the documentation with regards to what export does (currently don't have time), but recently, I need to make a copy of the virtual machine (no, snapshot is not what I wanted), and I used the export function and import it back into hyper-V. First, I see two virtual machines with the same name. The only thing that allows me to differentiate which is which is the creation date. I noticed that the screen resolution has changed.
I don't like the export functionality at all. If it is copying the VHD, and create a configuration file which Hyper-V can understand and import, why can't we just copy the entire folder which has the configuration file and vhd and add it into another Hyper-V machine as an existing virtual machine? I like the way virtual pc and virtual server is handling virtual machines now. Virtual Server keep failing on me, and I have to do a re-install every two months or so. All I need is just to add existing machines, and I'm good to go. Every release of Windows 2008, I don't do upgrade (as upgrade failed on me before), but clean install. But Hyper-V does not allow me to add existing machines. I have to export first. And I don't remember I need to export in vmware as well!
Moving between Hyper-V and virtual server is another thing. First, if you intend to move to virtual server (because there is not other option for virtualisation on client other than virtual server and virtual pc), don't create a IDE harddisk bigger than 129gb. Second, your virtual machine may not work well when moving back to virtual server. I had a MOSS 2007 that was created in virtual server. Moved it to Hyper-V to do my development. Yesterday, I had to move it back to virtual server as a backup demo virtual machine, just in case I'm at the mercy of broadband on mobile. Straight off copying the vhd over, the virtual machine doesn't boot. Duplicate the virtual machine in Hyper-V to uninstall the Integration Service component, and copy it to virtual server again, also doesn't boot the thing. Give up, as I'm running late.
Another plea to Microsoft. Please don't forget the virtualisation story on Vista! You are not leaving a lot of option for the minority geeks who are still supporting you! Now that Windows 2008 does not have the sleep function when installed on a laptop, I have two less reason to stick to Hyper-V, and use VMWare now!
P.S. In response to this post about why sleep is not available. I don't see why the host need to save the state of the running virtual machine. Why can't the sleep function put the virtual machines into pause state, and save the memory state of the host?
Email address of each document library depends on the incoming email settings you have configured in central admin, especially the email domain the farm will use. If you have configured AD integration, whenever you have enabled a incoming email feature for a list or document library, it will create a contact entry in AD, which would place an entry in exchange contact list. After the address list gets updated, the email gets listed in the address book in Outlook, allowing users to email content into the document library without requiring them to remember the email address.
I don't know about you, but I live and breathe in my Outlook (which is why Dynamics CRM has an edge over the rest of the CRM product isn't it?). I'm receiving so much information in my outlook that I need some good way to start to capture these information. Plus the fact that my harddisk is running out of space. Hence I thought of using incoming email feature to allow me to post content into my SharePoint knowledge database behind my firewall, not accessible via the internet because Starhub blocks port 80, and port 443 is already used by another application.
The following values are ficticious. My internal domain is litware.intranet. Internet domain is litware.internet. Central administration allows me to configure two values for the domain, as shown in the screenshot below.
As the label put it, the first settings is SMTP mail server for incoming email. I interpret it as the FQDN for which the virtual smtp server is set up at. Hence I gave the internal fqdn, which is sharepoint.litware.intranet. Then, there is a label that says email server display address, and the format of the text box implies the email domain which will be shown to the users. So I set that to sharepoint.litware.internet. Then it is time to configure Exchange to route email from sharepoint.litware.internet. Sharepoint.litware.intranet is taken care of with a MX record in the intranet dns. Combined knowledge has a white paper on how to configure Exchange to route the email here. I used the Exchange 2007 paper, but the security settings mentioned wasn't enough for SharePoint to write to the OU. After some tweaking, the whole set up finally works, with email routed to SharePoint and my custom email handler works perfectly, or so I thought.
Looking at the contact list in Exchange, I realised that all the email domain is wrong! Instead of using internet domain, it is using the intranet domain. With Steve Smith and Kevin Laahs's help, I began playing with the settings by first changing the SMTP mail server setting to the external domain. Email routing wasn't affected at all, but new email contact for new email enabled document is showing the correct email address. Then I realise that SharePoint doesn't talk to the smtp server, since the external domain is not resolvable internally, and internet will resolve to my exchange. It just monitors the drop folder. Misleading huh? At least to me, it is...
Having solved the problem, my emailed enabled knowledge library is working, enabling me to file documents and tag them at the same time. I've done a poll on how people are using incoming email, but response wasn't very positive. So the next few posts, I will probably be writing about how my solution works, but I won't be sharing the source code. If you are interested, you can contact me to bounce ideas, or I can get my company to be involved in a consultancy exercise. (I don't earn extra, since I work for the company, not own it)
P.S. Do you know that MSN Space allows you to use email to upload images and post blog posts?