Beyond internal consumption, all data points to Exchange evolving into a better workload to run within virtualization.  Much of that can probably be attributed to Microsoft’s own virtualization technology, but Exchange on ESX benefits just the same.  Performance gains out of ESX 4 make for a good combination with the improved I/O for Exchange 2007.   Initial data for Exchange 2010 continues the trend of making Exchange a better workload in general and making it more appropriate to virtualize.

Primarily, the session was a presentation of lab work dones to measure the work loads using load generators and test environments.  Those numbers are good to create best practice documents, but sometimes real world experience trumps these experiments.   So by ‘eating their own dogfood’, I think VMware is endorsing the solution whole heartedly.  No more, yes it should work with no problems.

But in the real world, we all realize there will be problems from time to time, and so support is a big issue.  Microsoft, for its part, does not endorse running much of anything in a virtual machine.  Of course, we all know it works – just look at Microsoft education services – all of their coursework is done in VirtualPC.

The session also covered support options, wisely, as that is a major barrier for adoption.  Avenues for support include a Microsoft Premier support contract, which gets you support in any configuration; Microsoft support via the SVVP (Microsoft Server Virtualization Validation Program) with ESX 3.5 U2, Win 2008 and Exchange 2007; or support through an OEM like HP, etc., who are large enough to be able to offer their own support based on experience.

The session also focused on ways to establish resiliency and failover.  This discussion covered Single Copy or Failover Clusters – the traditional MCSC clustering technique, Cluster Continuous Replication (CCR) for Exchange, VMware Fault Tolerence and protection utilizing VMware HA.  I have a chart below that outlines some of the benefits and drawbacks from each method:

Ultimately, though, of the many solutions offered, there is no one correct way to implement this. It ultimately depends on your needs and which configuration most benefits your scenario. But the session provided lots of practical information for helping make those determinations for your real-world deployment.

Now, a month later, I have a lot of reconciliation to do to catch up in Moneywell.  The thing I am struggling with most in the software are duplicate transactions and how to easily find them.  Running balance is how I’ve always been able to check and make sure everything is on track from day to day, and although the daily totals are in Moneywell, I’m finding it hard to find errors.

And, part of this is self-inflicted (see, really sensing a theme here).  I like to prepopulate my transactions in my financial program and so there are transactions for up to a month in advance in Moneywell.  So when the real transaction downloads and the dollar amounts don’t match from my guestimate transaction, my balances go wonky.

The other thing I miss from Microsoft Money is my bill reminders – my recurring transactions in Quickbooks speak.  I’ve used these to remind me of annual and quarterly bills, plus my monthly transactions. Its kept me honest with the trash company and even helped me make sure I never overdraw the account on a month-to-month basis.

So, back to the drawing board.  I need to carve out some time this week in the evening to get things caught up in Moneywell.  I really believe the software has a lot of promise for me and for my family’s finances.  I need to give it an honest try!

I initially had problems and had dimissed Moneywell because I could not connect to my primary bank.  After perusing the Quicken Financial Life forums (I was a beta tester), I found the issue – I was not using the correct username and password.  To work with my bank, I needed to provide my member number and PIN to authenticate – not my website username and password.  Worked that out, and now automatic updates are all set.

After that hurdle was cleared, I found out that already had too many transactions for the trial version.  So, rather than importing and trying anything else, I decided to see how some of the features work.

First, I looked at the categorizations.  These were preserved from Microsoft Money perfectly.  I used the “Loose QIF” export which preserved long category names and transaction titles and Moneywell imported all this information correctly.  I was also able to see graphs by category and subcategory.  One thing different from Microsoft Money is that each subcategory is really a category of its own.  So, as cleanup, I will most likely be combining categories and renaming some.

The category list is excellent when you’re searching for a particular transaction.  If you knew it was from my remodel project, hit my Household:Remodel category and you’d be looking at just those transactions in the account selected.  That’s got a leg up on Microsoft Money already.

The other thing Moneywell includes throughout is search.  And how handy is that for quickly locating a transaction at Lowes or Wal-Mart.  The one gotcha I found was in my method of import.  If I left Moneywell setup the account from my bank online, it would create a Starting Balance transaction.  Once I imported my QIF export from Money, the Starting Balance would throw the totals off – but a quick search, delete and we were back to balanced.

I’m a big fan of the envelope system (Dave Ramsey advocates this system) and Moneywell is based around that system of budgeting.  I really like the way that budgets “Spending Plans” are setup.  That’s a nice, logical system compared to the cumbersome budgets in Microsoft Money – especially the last 3 revisions.  And I know is it essentially the same thing, but a spending plan just sounds better than a budget.   I haven’t completed my budget, but I’ll post about that experience once I tackle that.

In Money, I could never get my budgets to line up and match the reports after I created them.  I also had this problem with extra income showing up in my budgets that wasn’t there.  The extra income was from a previous job, yet Microsoft Money kept bringing it over year after year.

Transfer transactions were an expected problem.  But Moneywell performs better in some respects.  The virtue of the categories, there is a Transfer category preserved from the Money exports.  That makes it easy to identify and remedy the transfer transactions.  The process is two step, however.  You have to identify the transfer transaction, click on each transaction and assign the transfer account – and then you have to go to that account and merge the duplicates.  That merge process is a little tedious, but there is merge functionality in the program – I just need to find out how to initiate a merge.  I have seen it when importing QIF files.

So after my testing, I went ahead and purchased Moneywell – and so far, it feels like Money well spent.  I still have a number of bank accounts to add and lots of cleanup to do.  I also haven’t added my mortgages or investment accounts – so no way of knowing how it will do tracking those – something Money did pretty well.

Any of these companies who could write a Money to {insert product} conversion program could have a really great opportunity to pickup new customers, in my opinion.  But with a small market share, I’m not sure it will happen.

Microsoft Money was the one product that I haven’t found a suitable alternative for on the Mac.  And having years of data in its proprietary format doesn’t help, either.  Really, there are great Mac software options, including Quicken for Mac (maybe Quicken Financial Life sometime soon), Moneywell or Moneydance.

My problem is getting my data converted into these products and preserving my budget categories and some of the data consistency I’ve worked hard to put together.  My one gripe across the board with the Mac based money management products is that they don’t offer the seamless online tie in and automatic downloads that Money does – even Quicken.  With Quicken 2007, even though my bank is listed as an automatic download option, my bank’s enhanced security defeats the product’s download function.  Same goes for Moneywell. (UPDATE: Thanks to my Quicken Financial Life beta forum, I was able to find the magic recipe to get online updates working on QFL and Moneywell with my primary bank!)  Mint.com can do it, you should be able too.

What Mint.com doesn’t do it account for my history – my years of prior data.  Same with Quickens Online solution.  I also didn’t like their categorization.  In the least, Quicken online should be able to upload QIF files of all my data to setup my accounts.  I pray that this feature soon comes.

So, I’m stuck.  I have to find something between now and June 2011 when all my much-loved, automatic services go dark.  I’m searching… more soon…

Apple grew and their market share expanded during the Vista years.  They didn’t explode with growth, though I have to say 30%, 60% and 90% increases in year-over-year product shipments sounds pretty close to explosive.  Apple seemingly did the expansion in a controlled way, meaning that they were able to maintain their high level of service, quality and ensure that the customer’s experience was superb, something that has helped them grow steadily since Steve Job’s return in 1997 (well, in the 2000′s at least).

“Capitalizing” [using the macworld.com author's implied definition] on Vista’s opportunity could have been really detrimental to Apple.  Had it grown with 500% increases year over year, there would have been no way to control many factors and growing that fast would cause quality issues and support issues.  That would have tarnished the brand and all it has come to represent and quickly moved Apple into a simliar category with Microsoft.

Speaking of the early 2000′s, it wasn’t very long ago that the tables were turned and Apple was struggling.  Dell on the other hand was exploding and was the tech darling for many in the industry.  Fast forward a decade and it is Apple who has woo’d all the attention and Dell who is now struggling against its small margins and stiff competition (IBM, HP, etc.).  When companies lose their core focus and branch out into peripheral areas (like Gateway and Dell both did), outsource their support and let their quality slip, they get into problems.

The support issue alone is a really difficult to accomplish, regardless of who is answering the phone (and from what country).  This is a point that Apple consistently ranks high on with customer satisfaction surveys.  A tech company must have competent people on the other end of the line, or else the customer loses.  After a while, the company loses because the customers will find a more reliable source.  Customers have choice, even with a vendor who is the only to manufacture their operating system.

And that seems to be another of Apple’s strongest points – the focus on customer experience.  The thing they understand best, from the top down, is that a customer will pay for a superior experience – something that works better, works smarter and is more intuitive to use.  A lot of us, myself included, lose sight of that in our day to day jobs.  That’s my two cents, anyways.

• Partitioned the drive using Boot Camp Assistant.  Install takes up about 9GB, so you’ll want at least a 20GB partition.  I chose 32GB.
• I had to burn the ISO to a physical disk to get it to install – couldn’t figure out how to use the ISO to install Windows 7 into the Boot Camp partition.
• Once Windows 7 install launches, the BootCamp partition was inaccessible to me – I had to click advanced options and format the partition to make Windows 7 recognize it.
• Once installed, Apple drivers are missing.  Insert the Mac OS X Install DVD to launch the Windows installer with all the necessary drivers.
• If you have the latest generation of MacBook Pro or MacBook with the NVidia 9600GT video cards, you’ll need to go to NVidia’s website and download their latest driver bundle:  http://www.nvidia.com/object/notebook_drivers.html.
• Installing the video drivers made a huge difference on my Windows Experience score.  Original, “out of the box” score was 1.0 due to the generic video drivers.  Installing the NVidia bundle took me to an Experience score of 3.0 – with the disk transfer rate being the lowest thing now.  The video scores are  now a 6.2 for Graphics and 5.4 for 3D and gaming!  All other scores, except disk transfer, are 5 or higher on the MBP.
• Once you rerun the Windows Experience scoring after installing the NVidia drivers, Aero automatically enables.
• Figured out how to get VMware Fusion to boot my Boot Camp partition in a virtual machine.  Fusion automatically discovers the Boot Camp partition and places it in the Virtual Machine Library window…  Pretty good!
• VMware Fusion needs a cleanly shutdown copy of Windows in Boot Camp to create its VM profile.  If the Windows copy in Boot Camp was not shutdown successfully, Fusion will fail to create its VM profile, will alert you and you will need to boot back into Windows via Boot Camp and shutdown cleanly.
• It appears that VMware Fusion or Boot Camp installed MacFuse on my system to make the Boot Camp partition accessible.   Which one?? Does anybody know off hand?
• Network drivers could not be located once Fusion finally booted Windows 7.  After researching on the VMware Fusion message boards, the work-around for this is to change the VMX file for the Boot Camp VM to have

  ethernet0.virtualDEV = "e1000"

  http://communities.vmware.com/thread/186740

• The VMX file for the Boot Camp VM is located in

  ~/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/Virtual \
  Machines/Boot Camp

  http://communities.vmware.com/thread/80062

Update: I did a bad thing and I didn’t cite my sources for the information I found.  I have added links to the VMware community threads and other links to give credit where credit is due…

So far, I have to say, I’m impressed.  The OS is responsive and quick.  The boot time was impressive and so far, it looks to be a huge improvement over Vista, even in its beta form.  Everything that I have seen so far is in line with what I’ve been reading.  Some are already giving it the real what-for by using it as their day to day OS and its working well.  It runs on par with Windows XP and has all the enhanced functionality of Vista.

The few visible enhancements, including the Microsoft Dock improved task bar is a good implementation, although its slightly awkward.  Like Apple’s Dock, you can drag often used applications to the it and pin them to the dock for quick launch.  What is nice about this is that you no longer have two IE icons on your taskbar – one under the QuickLaunch icons and one as the running.  Plus, as most users have encountered, the taskbar gets cluttered so easily with lots of applications open in Windows XP.  The “new” taskbar makes this much cleaner by only representing each application running with an icon instead of the entire title of the application.  Something that the taskbar has over the Dock is the live preview.  With multiple IE windows open, I can mouse over the taskbar and a preview will appear for all the open IE windows and I can scroll through them to find the one that I want.  To me, that’s very useful, particularly at work where most of our applications are transitioning to the web.

It takes some getting used to the rearranged control panels, but I think Microsoft has improved up on this with real world language being presented with each section that describes what you can easily do in that section.  These shortcuts really help those of us who have stuck with XP and sworn off Vista.   I am interested to get some real applications running under Windows 7 for testing.  I also need to work out the native Apple drivers for my hardware and see if I am able to get my experience score higher.  On my first run, without the real Apple drivers loaded, I got a experience score of 1.  I am no able to test any of the Aero features or right click currently, but I know all this is because I am running it on the Mac and not the shortcomings of the OS.

There will be more to come soon.

Thanks for your interest in the Windows 7 Beta. The volume has been phenomenal — we’re in the process of adding more servers to handle the demand. We’re sorry for the delay and we’ll re-post the Beta as soon as we can ensure a quality download experience.

I’m glad they noticed…  But their comment – phenomenal?  A blind man could have seen this in a crystal ball – c’mon people, be prepared…

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/dd353205.aspx

Number one, their site sorts the patches by date, lists the issue addressed and gives enough description to determine if this patch applies to you – all from one web page.  Microsoft is quite capable of doing this same thing, but their knowledge base and procedures for posting these does not have one simple and efficient interface to find the gobs of patches they release.

Number two, I think that a line I heard while in Colorado Springs from an HP guy holds true.  VMware is a technology company that understands technology and tech workers.  They understand our struggles and that’s why you see experimental features introduced early and quickly into their products, even before q/a testing is completed.  That’s why you see patches quickly and often as bugs are located and squashed.  And you compare that with Microsoft and my general idea is that they just don’t get it.  Sysadmins struggle to keep up with products and updates – I know I do.  I’m inindated with information on a daily basis and sometimes patches are low on the list, regardless of how important the patch may be.  Plus there is the danged if you do, danged if you don’t thing with Microsoft patches.  Sometimes they screw up more than they fix – there has been that track record.

Then there is the whole private patch problem.  Microsoft will acknowledge a problem but not release the patch to the world.  You have to contact them after finding a knowledgebase article,  contacting your congressman, promising him your first born and then signing the 150 pages of legal documentation with Notary.  Ok, maybe its not actually THAT bad.  But, why would a software company find an issue, release a patch and then keep it private so that you must actually contact them for the patch and then only provide it to you with a time sensative, password-protected zip file?

Now, even after all that, there is the issue of Live Search and its inability to locate the correct knowledgebase articles in the first place.  Google is a much better search of Microsoft’s own knowledgebase, in my opinion.

All conditions aligned, its tough to get what you need out of Redmond.  And I think Microsoft has an obligation to its customers to step up and do a better job.

A few months back, Symantec also made the sales pitch for their managed service which collects a list of all vulnerabilities as they are found, along with the patches to correct them.  Its sad when third party vendors have to become information agregators just to get the job done.  But the Symantec solution isn’t perfect either.  The Symantec service appeared to be security related, so I assume we’d be out of luck if we were looking at driver conflict type errors which had been corrected by Microsoft for MPIO, for instance.

I will say, maybe its not fair to compare some companies to Microsoft, but given the number of aquisitions and the number of product lines offered, I do think VMware is a more fair comparison than most.  They are supporting a wide variety of product, but their procedures and practices are producting better results.  And their information is easier to find and more readily available, it seems.