If you missed our UK TechDays Online event a couple of weeks ago then don’t be sad, the content is now online, on demand.
You’ll need to register to view the content, but if you already registered for the event the registration engine should recognise who you are and let you. Kind of like VIP access to a night club, but without the ugly guy on the door.
PowerShell v3 in Windows Server 2012 opens up way more stuff than ever before for automation. I like my VMs to have a host name that matches the name I give the VM in on the Hyper-V host – that way when I write a PowerShell script to build 50 VMs they get useful names and they can all be created from the same VHD image. So I rename my Hyper-V VMs from my Hyper-V host.
I’ve shown lots of people this script at our UK IT Camps and generally people are all a bit like “why would you want to do that”. Well, personally, I create lots of demo enviornments but as a real IT guy you might want to quickly spin up a cloud.
Lets take a look at some PowerShell:
functionRename-UnknownVM ($VMtoRename,$NewVMName)
{
$vmip=Get-VMNetworkAdapter$VMToRename|whereswitchname-eq"CorpNet"| `
select-expandproperty"IPAddresses"|where {$_-match"^(?:[0-9]{1,3}\.){3}[0-9]{1,3}$"}
$vmHostName=[system.net.dns]::GetHostEntry($vmip)
$vmHostName=$vmHostName.HostName
Invoke-Command-ComputerName$vmHostName-ScriptBlock {
rename-Computer-NewName$args[0]-DomainCredentialcontoso\administrator-Restart } -ArgumentList$NewVMName
}
Rename-UnknownVM
-VMtoRename rdsb-NewVMName rdsb
So what’s happening, lets start at the bottom. Obviously everything is wrapped in a function to make it easy to call in the above RDSB is the name of my VM – it’s the VM name and it’s the name that I want to rename it to. The function then goes and gets the named VM’s network adapter, it then finds just the network interface attached to a named virtual switched “CorpNet”, then we get the IP Address property which is stored as text so we match it on a RegEx. That gives us the IP of the VM.
Next we need to get the current name of the VM so we do that from DNS, we need this because the “rename-computer” cmdlet needs the name, not the IP Address a host to rename it.
Finally I use an invoke-commend script block to remotely execute the rename on the VM and the admin running the script is prompted for a password.
Simples. Actually not so much I’d like to thank Jonathan Noble for his help here.
This post explains how to blog. Great blog posts have a few things in common, notably they are readable, interesting to read and discoverable. Why am I mentioning this? We’ll I’ve been blogging for a number of years now and I keep getting people contacting me to ask what they should write to enter the TechEd Challenge to win a fully funded TechEd Europe Place.
Humans…
The first and foremost thing is to make sure you are writing your article to be read by a human being. Yes it’s true that everywhere you look you’ll find articles that encourage you to write “SEO friendly” content, and there must be some of that, but ultimately your content needs to be understandable by a human being. Actual flesh, skin, bones and brain read great blog posts – not robots. That is what we are after – something that people can read. There are few things here that matter, the first is that you need to remember what you learnt about writing at school, grammar, punctuation and spelling. Obviously you want your post to have the correct spellings in don’t you – there isn’t a lot of excuses with spell check built into the OS these days.
The next thing you need to remember about the spelling, punctuation and grammar stuff is not to worry about it too much. I prefer to read blog posts that are written conversationally, just like this post is. I feel that it portrays much more of the writers personality and if you think that throwing in a bit of slang is a way to get your personality across then do what you need. I also prefer to keep the swearing to an absolute minimum – not that I do day to day – but it can be off putting to read F*** this and that. Chances are that for this competition you don’t want to portray that kind of persona either.
We work in a world where acronyms surround us all the time, it could be VBC, TBC, DNS, DHCP or ACK. Not everyone understands those acronyms so try to expand them the first time you use them for example I’d expand VBC to Visible Butt Crack (VBC) above, and so on. The second time I’d just use VBC. You might also want to link the word to a definition.
Content…
The next step towards a great blog post is the more complicated one. Making it interesting.
We’ve asked for reviews of Windows Server 2012 but to just review the product like the thousands of journos who’ve done the same would be a sub par effort. Those dudes do it every day so to get seen you need to be more creative. How about explaining how you used Windows Server 2012 to solve a problem; how you built your lab; how you won some business; how you replaced VMware; how you replaced Linux; how you hosted Linux vms on Hyper-V; how you love Dedup; how you love DHCP failover and clustering….the world is your oyster. Readers will appreciate your story and so will the judging panel. They will also appreciate inspiration so make sure the post gives them something to go and do after they’ve finished reading it…make them want to comment and subscribe.
Robots + Humans…
Back to the final thing, make it discoverable. Include a density of keywords in your first paragraph – this is that SEO thing which really does matter. Make it obvious in the first 156 chars as to what the post is about…if you are wondering why it’s because that’s what search engines use as the description that people see in results. Do the same with the title, here you have half the char count though, make the title of the article something that people want to click, but don’t link bait. Link bait is something that pertains to be something it’s not.
The final point on making it discoverable, be sure to reuse your keywords throughout the post – this post is about writing great blog posts. I’ve used that phrase enough (there I did it again) that it’s not offputting. If you’re talking about a Windows Server 2012 review, be sure to mention Windows Server 2012 a few times and not WinSvr or 2012.
All that said, you have what you need to enter the TechEd Challenge to win a fully funded TechEd Europe Place.
The keynote speakers list for TechEd Europe has just been announced and the line up is terrific as always! Brad Anderson, Mark Russinovich, Jeffrey Snover and Mark Minasi to name just a few. Of course you’ll want to be there and what better way to get there than to be a part of the UK TechNet team – of course if you make the grade we’ll cover your costs too.
If you do want to get along for free you’ll need to enter into the TechEd challenge to be in with a chance of winning. You can find out more about what’s included by reading this post on the UK TechNet Blog: getting to TechEd Europe for Free.
One of the questions I get asked constantly is about the safety of placing your data into particular environments, so I was quite pleased when I noticed that we’d released the Data Classification Toolkit for Windows Server 2008 R2 which helps you to do one of the basic tasks you’ll have to undertake. Understanding your data. I make no bones about it I think this is one of the key skills for IT Professionals going forward and it’s one of the key ways that you can help your business by providing intelligence to them to help the business make decisions. The pack has the usual US take on it but that’s no bad thing in this case.
I shouldn’t have to say that using the tool doesn’t equate to proper advice from auditors, accountants or attorneys but I just have.
A few weeks ago now we made the following video tour of our Datacentres available for all to see on the GFS website and also on YouTube. At the time I forgot to post it but having just happened across it I thought it worth sharing. I constantly get asked about the size and scale of our DCs and this really shows them off…and yes the Dublin DC is one of the worlds largest DCs at 330,000 square foot or about the size of 3 of the UKs largest Super Markets all under one roof. Why does that matter? Because building and learning about Data Centers at that scale is something few others can do.
Today I went to talk to a group of IT Apprentices at QA’s centre in Birmingham, thanks for a good day guys and especially to Lorette who organised the day. If you aren’t sure what apprentices are then you should find out more about IT Apprenticeships, however this is probably mostly being read by the folks who were there so here’s my deck from the day and some links to some of the things we looked at. Remember all these resources are free.
Free Trial of Office 365
Free trial of Windows Intune
Free trial of Windows Azure
And here too is my previous deck from another apprentices session
I’ve already highlighted how IT departments are going to change over the next few years a few times and what some people in those departments are going to be doing as their roles inevitably change but there are going to be some new roles that appear too. These roles will start to shape how the IT department works for the next few years and, just like all IT jobs are, they’re a response to the changes going on in the business and in the market. As the industry chases the promised befits of cloud like reduced cost and increased agility these roles are going to be the new linchpins (as Seth would say) able to cross boundaries and pull leavers.
They won’t be the only people in the team, they will be new people or people who’ve stepped over from another discipline.
Cloud integration engineer
Linking everything together is going to be critical in the future. I wouldn’t say we’re at cloud version 1.0 yet – we’re probably closer to 0.7 where people are working out how to do cool things, there’s lots of experimentation going on. As we as an industry marches forward we’re turning over more rocks and identifying new bugs that need squashing. Who is doing the squashing though depends upon the type of bug but it’s clear that, as with anything new, we’ve got technology blazing a trail and lawmakers and regulators playing catch up. Add to that mix the fear of vendor lock in that some people have, the fear of giving up “control” and the worries that accompany anything new and you’ve got a mix complex mix of problems to overcome.
That’s where hero number one, the Cloud Integration Engineer comes to the rescue with his super power – connectivity. Cloud integration engineers will be adept at connecting public clouds and private clouds to create the now much touted hybrid cloud, part in your sphere of granular control, part in the sphere of vendor management. These guys will know the technology involved in Windows Azure to a deep enough level to understand how to connect an Azure and an on premises application together (hint they’ll be using Windows Azure Connect). These guys will also know how to throw up an EC2 instance and have it pull data from a SQL Azure database and they’ll know how to connect Exchange 2010 to Office 365 in a coexistence scenario so that the 2000 guys in a field in Devon get fast internal email over their 256k internet connection whilst the field guys get rapid connections where ever they are around the world.
Some will be experts in plumbing finished services (SaaS) together using APIs and code to do magic, others will be PowerShell gurus that can provision 100 mailboxes with a single command, others still will make ninja like use of the tooling. These guys will likely be capable of code but will understand the plumbing of enterprises well enough to make things seamless. They’ll have a better understanding of security than most developers and IT pros but they’ll be connected to the business so they’ll work as guides to security not gate keepers to access.
Cloud operations manager
Operations in the cloud is far simpler than it is with traditional infrastructures, primarily because you don’t need to manage everything at the most granular level. Managing IT Operations in the Data Centre is about managing servers, making sure they’re up, making sure the hardware is working, making sure they have enough memory and CPU for their highest load ( + 15% or so) , for some this will be the old days, but for most it’s today – even if they’re virtualised. Virtual doesn’t make resource management go away – it just changes the economics.
With the cloud you still need to manage resource and ensure availability to some extent – but it is an easier job. You don’t need to make sure that servers have enough memory any more, you need to make a choice about scaling up or out on demand. Scaling up is adding more servers, scaling out is about adding more powerful servers. It takes intelligence to make that call, it takes understanding of the business value of scaling, both the process of scaling and the decision can be automated though. To crystallise that lets take the ever-so-much over used tap metaphor of cloud.
In the tap metaphor we equate supply to a tap, when you turn it on the tap runs and you get the resource you want – cool. However you pay for what you use, so what happens if you’re not doing anything useful with your water, if it’s just running down the drain? If you equate the tap to a cloud service and the water to compute resource you get the picture – especially when you consider that taps get broken, develop leaks or occasionally a rogue plumber installs them. You need to ensure that the capacity you use is being used for business – that’s where the Cloud Operations Manager comes to the rescue with their power of insight.
These guys will be able to use their close business relationship to determine when it’s right to allow the tap to run free, and when it’s time to turn it down. When you’re being DDOS attacked and when you’re seeing a sales boom, when you’re internal users are hammering your SharePoint because the company just announced pay rises or because Bob from accounts accidentally posted his personal photos to the whole company he looks funny.
Cloud Operations Managers will also be watching what’s happening to ensure it’s sensible and complies with policy (which is obviously boring and stifles innovation / agility) but who else is going to make sure that when Bob in accounts leaves he doesn’t take his Docs account with him and oh the company looses all that information – that knowledge, the business intelligence, the competitive edge – just because the employ left taking their personal documents with them in cloud storage. They have the super-power of understanding.
IT Marketing and Communications Officer
Communication is why businesses succeed and fail, you can have a great plan, sound strategy, superb revenue streams but if your team can’t communicate they can’t succeed. When IT is one of the resources in the mix that allows your organisation to get things done communication about it’s benefits is essential. If you’re going to guide your organisation to make the most informed choices and to make the most of what they’ve paid for you need someone to be evangelising the options.
We’ve tried this as an industry before, numerous times over but a skill set that allows your IT department to market it’s wares it’s what’s needed. You need your people to know that they will benefit from using cloud storage because it’s pervasive and lets them access their information anywhere. Previously we as IT guys would probably have said that in terms of “to reduce the load on the file server so that we can save 2gb of storage” – terms that don’t matter to the end user. Marketers are adept at making things relevant to the their market, internally this means translating, explaining and engaging a user community. I’ve seen this done a few times, often under different banners with differing levels of success – however it’s worked best when a marketeer got involved. Essentially these folks will breed cooperation.
Summary
So there we have it, three new roles, superpowers of connectivity, understanding and cooperation, which when you think of it don’t sound that super do they? By the way all of these roles are available on job sites today. Whilst researching I found a role paying £120k per anum doing Windows Azure integration with existing systems, Operations Manager roles that commonly reference SaaS/IaaS/PaaS and private cloud and for the IT Marketing roles are hidden away in specialist recruitment circles – which is always a good sign.
If you think that these new roles will add cost to IT then, sorry, you’re wrong and for two reasons. The first being that they will possibly not be part of IT itself, IT will virtualise these roles into other areas of the organisation to provide deep integration with the day to day reality of what the organisation does. Secondly they’ll be saving money or making it, IT Marketing Officer will be extracting every last penny from the move to cloud based email like Exchange Online, the Cloud Operations Manager will be ensuring things stay on track and costs don’t scale out of control and the Cloud Integration Engineer will be helping make money by doing new innovative stuff – day in, day out – creating competitive advantage.
As an IT Pro how do you get there? Learn. Learn about virtualisation, learn about cloud. We have webcasts, jumpstarts, downloads, resources and you probably have free training hours if you have Software Assurance or an Enterprise Agreement. Us it.
No one can fail to see how much impact the ideas of cloud are having on our organisations and as IT Professionals the most direct impact we feel is on us, on those we work with, on our IT Department. It doesn’t matter whether your “IT”, “IS”, “ICT”, “Information Management”, “IM” or whatever 2 or 3 letter abbreviations you have the cloud is starting to have an impact. Is it bad? Is it good? Two questions that only only time will reveal the answers to but there are changes afoot. It doesn’t matter whether your company has started to embrace cloud yet – eventually it will – in this article I’m focusing on how it’s going to change some of those specific roles in your IT Department.
Before we do that though lets just add some cloud clarity so that we know where we are. The cloud is any technology that enables on-demand rapid provision and release of resources that are highly available and shared between a group of users. For the purpose of this article we’re talking about resources shared between people who do not necessarily belong to the same organisation a.k.a the public cloud. Public cloud is arguably one of the top two technology trends affecting your IT Department today with the second being consumerisation – all those “unmanaged” devices that are popping up and you’re now being required to support.
You are now probably seeing demand for some of the following types of services:
And in addition you’ve probably started to notice that you’re being excluded from conversations. A macro level trend is going on around you, your users have started to be tech savvy enough to make IT decisions without you (or at least they think they have – you’ll obviously have to come to the rescue!) One of the interesting key words just before that bullet is demand the trend of consumerisation has had an impact here and your users are now demanding that you provide them with IT Services on their terms.
If this hasn’t happened to you yet it, will, it probably but someone forgot to tell IT. This trend is most apparent when information starts leaking from your organisation through people emailing stuff home to work on because they have better tools.
Think of a train hurtling down the tracks, if you���re in front of that train the futures not so bright…if you’re on it then it’s a better place. That analogy is very close to home for some IT departments – I say it’s time to get on the train rather than trying to stop the thing with your bare hands. So what does it mean for the life of some of our favourite IT Department people:
The helpdesker (a.k.a. Frontline support analyst)
As the first point of contact in the IT Department the helpdesk staff have always been a linchpin of the team, taking calls, taking flack. It’s part of the job. Most people start out here and learn one of the key skills that’s always seen them through the career they made: customer service. And you know what, this is a growth area with public cloud. Very few public cloud operators will provide end user support, they normally provide level 2 support (which tends to materialise in IT depts as level 3) meaning that they won’t answer user queries such as “how do I do x”, “I’ve deleted this email, how do I get it back”. These folks provide a 2nd key skill too – business knowledge – even if you’ve outsourced your helpdesk you’ll find that the best operators know your business better than the worst. I personally am starting to see a trend of “insourcing” where the helpdesk is being brought home.
The desktop technician (a.k.a. 2nd level support, a.k.a “Dave in IT”)
Desktop technicians are still seen as the face of IT by most end users, even if they don’t see them that often. Most avoid giving out their direct line for fear of being stalked by Sally in accounts who just cannot use Excel – I know I’ve been there for many (joyous) years. Again these folks know the people they help, they provide deep business knowledge and have early warning radar and they combine a level of technical skill that makes most users think of them as heroes but interestingly they don’t get many calls from the younger people in the organisation but they do spend time with them exchanging stories around the coffee/tea/water/cigarette machine/shed. And they’re friends with them on Facebook.
The desktop guys aren’t going anywhere though because the cloud doesn’t take the desktop away, you still need a machine to access it….well not so much. In the future the desktop guys will spend more time working on other peoples kit than the companies. They’ll spend more time ensuring people can work safely for the company with their own kit and less fixing problems as the end users naturally become more adept at fixing problems.
The server huggers
These guys have been the centre of the world for a good few years, they have the hard job – running the infrastructure – occasionally harbouring a small god complex (I am very much guilty). The folks need to make the biggest change to their world, if you are one you need to be learning new skills day after day to keep up. You need to know about virtualisation, what it is and what it isn’t (a magic bullet), you need to know about management technology, you need to know about public cloud platforms and infrastructures and the differences. You also need to start to understand cost models (yuck) and you need to know how to connect both public cloud and private cloud resources. You might not see this right now but people are going outside of your team to get hold of servers to do their job.
There are possibly people within your organisation using a personal credit card to setup a business critical ecommerce system, or store some data in the public cloud…without your governance. It will become impossible to do anything about it because it will be too business critical so you’ll need to focus on connecting and managing it and ultimately on governing it.
The IT Manager
You’re probably going to meetings and being asked for more by the business (or they might have stopped inviting you). Before it’s too late though you need to switch up what your team is doing, get them out from in front of the train and bear their whole weight down on making public cloud work for your business. Why? Because public cloud WON’T work for your business. Not in isolation, you’ve got to couple it to what you do already, those servers and services your IT department is already running at 99.999999% uptime (+ added LOVE). You’re role will be to become the leader of a group of trusted advisors to your business, a group of cloud savvy people who deeply understand the technology and who deeply understand the business.
Every aspect of the business is different the accountants want different things to HR who want different things to marketing and the security guy on the front desk. You can give the accountants systems that don’t require downtime and manual upgrades each year while TAX changes are made – the software provider will do that for you. You can give HR a web based payroll system whereby a huge data send isn’t required every month at pay run time (whilst everyone holds their breath). You can give the security guy secure cloud storage and offload the constant video encoding of security camera footage from his PC to the cloud.
Summary
There are countless more roles and countless better examples but the idea here is to show you that the world is changing. You don’t however need to be under the train since we’re at the right point to get in front and help our businesses make better decisions. There’s no need to loose the technical skills we hold so dear, they just evolve and theirs no need to learn new skills in business analysis or some other discipline it’s just about applying what you know already.
Really the public cloud is a case of learning about the technology and helping your business apply it…that’s the secret sauce. Try Windows Azure, Try Office365 and try what other people offer (then come back 
)
The web has changed and things have moved on, not really a shock, but the evolution of the latest web browsers is changing things. In particular Internet Explorer 9 allows you to take any site you see on the web and turn it into a native application by simply dragging a tab down to the task bar. If you think that pinning a site isn’t overly useful consider some of the stats that the process drives, Huffington post drove views by users visiting their site through pinning up by 11%…now translate that to your SharePoint site, your intranet. Your users could be finding more stuff through the intranet, saving them some time. The cost? a few lines of simple code.
What you need to do
Rather obviously I’m only going to describe the steps for SharePoint 2010, you can probably work them out for other versions just fine.
Open your SharePoint site using SharePoint designer (you’ll need to get SharePoint designer from here if you don’t already have it) and open your site. Then you’ll need to:
So this is the code you need to enter and it needs to go within the <head> and </head> tags, I’d suggest placing this code towards the end of the HTML header.
Now that you know where it goes, lets walk through the code, line by line to understand what it does.
You will also need to create a favicon, I use icoFX which is free and can take a normal image and turn it into an ico file. You’ll also want to do the same thing to create a nice custom icon for the SharePoint site, so simply do that and ensure you save it with a 256×256 pixel size. Finally to make this icon the favicon for your site you’ll need to edit one more line…
<SharePoint:SPShortcutIcon runat=”server” IconUrl=”xxxx”>
Here you need to change the IconUrl value to be the location of the new favicon on your SharePoint server, this will be the same icon that is used on the toolbar and in the top left of the browser window.
Going further
In a future post I’ll show you how to take this simple code and do more with it, isolate it from browsers that don’t support it and create overlays of the icon on the task bar to show you there new things.