Vol. 12, #45 - Nov 19, 2007 - Issue #651 Trying To make Sense Of The New W2K8 Pricing Editor's Corner Microsoft Virtual Machine: 28 Bucks Upcoming Sunbelt Archiving Seminar In NY, NY Quotes Of The Week Admin Toolbox Admin Tools We Think You Shouldn't Be Without Tech Briefing Windows Licenses For Refurbished Computers Update: Maxtor Drives Contain Password-Stealing Trojans Vision Of The Future: Samsung Shows Off WiMax Devices Agencies Issue Final Rules on Identity Theft Red Flags Windows Server News Trying To make Sense Of The New W2K8 Pricing Microsoft Hires Supercomputing Guru WServer Third Party News New Version Of CounterSpy Enterprise New Ninja Success Story: Fremont Public Schools WServerNews FAVE Links This Week's Links We Like. Tips, Hints And Fun Stuff. WServerNews - Product of the Week Get Rid Of Your Old Second Generation Exchange AV Instantly Reduce Your Exchange Message Store 80% Sunbelt Exchange Archiver (SEA) improves performance, productivity and allows you to comply with legal and regulatory retention requirements, within budget! SEA allows you to handle many email problems in one fell swoop. You are ready for lawsuits, get an 80% smaller message store, faster backups, end-user self-service for lost email, built-in HSM, quicker disaster recovery and much more. Get a quote and compare SEA cost versus Symantec Enterprise Vault. http://www.wservernews.com/071119-Sunbelt-Exchange-Archiver Editor's Corner Microsoft Virtual Machine: 28 Bucks Well, the old truism proves itself again. When committees make decisions, usually the outcome looks gruesome. Then you add lawyers in the mix, and things get really confusing. Redmond released the pricing for W2K8, and it's a mess. W2K8 has virtualization (un)bundled, and you can buy the OS with and without Hyper-V (its new name). I tried to make some sense out of it for you. Read all about it in the Windows Server section below. Upcoming Sunbelt Archiving Seminar In NY, NY We'd like to invite you to attend the following seminar: "Implementing an Effective Email Archiving Strategy for Exchange" - Join Sunbelt and Mike Osterman, president and founder of Osterman Research, Inc., for an engaging discussion on how an effective email archiving strategy can help you deal with the issues resulting from growth in email storage and new discovery and privacy requirements. The seminar will also include a live product demonstration on how Sunbelt Exchange Archiver can help you achieve all this and more. Hosted at Microsoft in New York, NY on Thursday December 6th. Register here: http://www.wservernews.com/071119-SEA-NY-Seminar Quotes Of The Week "Happiest of people don't necessarily have the best of everything; they just make the most of everything that comes along their way. -- Karen S. Magee "There seems to be an innate quality in humans to want to serve others. Those who fulfill that need tend to lead the happiest lives." -- Eva Gregory And thank you for being a WServerNews subscriber. Please tell your friends about us. They can subscribe here: http://www.wservernews.com/subscribe.cfm Hope you enjoy this issue of WServerNews! Warm regards, Stu  |   Email me: feedback@wservernews.com Admin Toolbox Admin Tools We Think You Shouldn't Be Without Extend Active Directory to your UNIX, Linux, Mac, web and database platforms. View the webinar replay. http://www.wservernews.com/071119-Extend-Active-Directory Holiday special –15% off retail. rDirectory, myPassword, mPowerTools. A hot new, easy way to webify your AD, plus Presence! Download it now. http://www.wservernews.com/071119-rDirectory Event Log and System Health Monitoring. Feature Rich, Affordable, Award Winning. Free Light & Full Featured Trial Version: http://www.wservernews.com/071119-Event-Sentry Getting sick and tired of running old-style AV? Switch to CounterSpy Enterprise which will be a -single- agent that does AV and spyware in-one: http://www.wservernews.com/071119-CounterSpy-Enterprise Tech Briefing Windows Licenses For Refurbished Computers If you've ever bought a "refurbished" computer, especially from a local PC shop, you may have found yourself with an "illegal" copy of Windows without even knowing it - at least, until you went to download an update and got a message questioning the authenticity of your operating system. Ouch. Redmond has recently started a program aimed at making that happen less often, allowing refurbishers to buy Windows licenses at a bulk rate. We hope that will translate into fewer customers unintentionally running pirated software. Read more at these two links: http://www.wservernews.com/071119-Windows-Licenses http://www.wservernews.com/071119-Refurb-Licensing Update: Maxtor Drives Contain Password-Stealing Trojans ComputerWorld reported that Seagate Technology LLC has shipped Maxtor disk drives that contain Trojan horses that upload data to a pair of Chinese Web sites, the Taiwanese government's security service warned this weekend. The Investigation Bureau, a part of the Ministry of Justice that's responsible for both internal security and foreign threats, said it suspected mainland China's authorities were responsible for planting the malware on the drives at the factory. "The bureau said that the method of attack was unusual, adding that it suspected Chinese authorities were involved," a story posted by the English-language Taipei Times reported Sunday. "Sensitive information may have already been intercepted by Beijing through the two Web sites, the bureau said." More at: http://www.wservernews.com/071119-Trojans-Drive Vision Of The Future: Samsung Shows Off WiMax Devices Samsung Electronics has unveiled four new data networking terminals for use on the commercial WiMax network operating in Seoul. While the devices are specific to the South Korean market, they provide a glimpse of the kind of things consumers overseas might be able to get their hands on in the near future as WiMax is launched in other countries. More at: http://www.wservernews.com/071119-WiMax-Devices Agencies Issue Final Rules on Identity Theft Red Flags The federal financial institution regulatory agencies and the Federal Trade Commission have sent to the Federal Register for publication final rules on identity theft “red flags” and address discrepancies. The final rules implement sections 114 and 315 of the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act of 2003. The final rules require each financial institution and creditor that holds any consumer account, or other account for which there is a reasonably foreseeable risk of identity theft, to develop and implement an Identity Theft Prevention Program (Program) for combating identity theft. All institutions must comply with the new rules by November 1, 2008. These final rules implement sections 114 and 315 of the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act (FACTA) of 2003. Part of this is scanning for malware: http://www.wservernews.com/071119-CSE Windows Server News Trying To make Sense Of The New W2K8 Pricing Redmond gave more details this week about a bunch of products we will see in 2008. It announced pricing and licensing details for W2K8, "absolutely on schedule" due for release in Feb 08, and announced the final commercial name for Viridian. It will now be called 'Hyper-V'. Not very imaginative, but who is counting. Here is where it gets interesting. Redmond will release five W2K8 versions: Standard, Enterprise, Datacenter, Web Server and a version for Itanium-based systems. I guess you'd like the good news first: the various flavors will cost about the same as their W2K3 predecessors. (Redmond claims says the average price increase is 1 percent.) No major price increase despite a wealth of new features and functionality. All good and well up to now with these 5 flavors: Windows Server 2008 Standard without Hyper-V: $971 (with five CALs) Windows Server 2008 Enterprise without Hyper-V: $3,971 (with 25 CALs) Windows Server 2008 Datacenter without Hyper-V: $2,971 (per processor) Windows Server 2008 for Itanium-based Systems: $2,999 (per processor) Windows Web Server 2008: $469 Now, six months after the W2K8 launch, Redmond plans to release Standard, Enterprise and Datacenter versions incorporating its new Hyper-V code. Now we are at eight... still with me? So let's look at some prices. To make it 'apples-to-apples', these numbers are for a one-off purchase of a perpetual license. (If you have a volume licensing deal, it will be lower.) When the versions that include Hyper-V become available, prices are as follows: Windows Server 2008 Standard: US$999 (with five Client Access Licenses) Windows Server 2008 Enterprise: $3,999 (with 25 CALs) Windows Server 2008 Datacenter: $2,999 (per processor) Microsoft also said it will release a stand-alone hypervisor for running other operating systems, called Hyper-V Server, priced at US$28 regardless of the number of processors. If you have a machine that doesn't have Windows at all, then you could buy Hyper-V in order to run instances of say Linux or Sun. And 28 bucks should put some pressure on VMware when this stuff hits the street. Now, up to now we have 8 flavors and one stand-alone Hyper-V, making it nine SKUs. The problem I see (and I'm not the only one) is that Redmond is creating a fork in the windows server line similar to Vista and O2K7. And you -do- get to pay for management tools that they could have thrown in if they were smart. So, remember we were at nine SKUs right? I'm re-listing them here in a slightly different sort order: Windows Web Server 2008: $469 Windows 2008 Standard: $999 with five Client Access Licenses (CALs) Windows 2008 Standard without Hyper-V: $971 with five CALs Windows 2008 Enterprise: $3,999 with 25 CALs Windows 2008 Enterprise without Hyper-V: $3,971 with 25 CALs Windows 2008 Datacenter: $2,999 per processor Windows 2008 Datacenter without Hyper-V: $2,971 per processor Windows 2008 for Itanium-based Systems: $2,999 per processor Hyper-V Server: $28, no parent OS included Seems still relatively reasonable, right. Well, there's more. First of all, you see that there's only 28 bucks difference between the SKUs that have Hyper-V and the ones that have not. Why would they even ship versions without it? I guess that this is where the lawyers came in, trying to preempt Europe's legal problems due to bundling. But here comes the clincher: it gets more complicated. Why? They are actually selling different 32-bit and x64/64-bit versions of most of this list, except for W2K8 for Itanium which of course is 64-bit only. And to add some more twists, Hyper-V is only available on the x64 flavors of the system. Has your head started to spin? So depending on how you count, there are some 15 or 16 different SKUs. Now, remember that they will wait 180 days before they ship Hyper-V. That means those SKUs including it will not ship either. And then there is one last thing to keep in mind. The tool to manage all these Virtual Machines (the Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) that I talked about in an earlier issue) will be sold separately. At the moment, VMM works only with Virtual Server 2005 R2. They are going to update it for the new Hyper-V, and guess what, you are going to pay for it again...yup you heard that right, for people that are not on 'Software Assurance' it's a paid upgrade. Gee. So there you have it. I hope this attempt to clarify things helped a bit. Write me if you would like more articles about this topic. More W2K8 news at this new Microsoft page: http://www.wservernews.com/071119-W2K8-Pricing Microsoft Hires Supercomputing Guru Network World reported that with Advanced Micro Devices and Intel duking it out on the multi-core processor front, and server and PC makers pushing ever more scalable systems, Microsoft Corp. is looking to stay in lockstep. Its latest move is hiring Dan Reed, director of Renaissance Computing Institute (RCI) as Microsoft Research's director of scalable and multi-core computing. RCI is a collaborative venture of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Duke University, North Carolina State University and the state of North Carolina. Reed will report to Rick Rashid, Microsoft's senior vice president of research, who has said that Microsoft needs to make sure its software works on multicore systems used by enterprises and in the data centers of large service providers. Mark my words, when Microsoft hired Dave Cutler, Digital Equipment's chief VMS architect, it was clear what Gates' long term plans were. So do not act surprised when you see a new Redmond Windows Supercomputer five years from now. WServer Third Party News New Version Of CounterSpy Enterprise We have just made CSE version 3.0.2668 available on our website. This is a minor update which is designed specifically to address several reported problems having to do with reports not returning correct information. This build can be downloaded from here (direct to exe): http://www.wservernews.com/071119-CSE-Download Upgrading from versions 1.8, 2.x, and 3.0 are supported, simply download and run the install in place on the CSE server. The agent version included with this download is 2.0.1306, the same as the original RTM of 3.0. Note that there is one known issue with reporting when using SQL with Windows Authentication as the reporting database. If you are using this configuration the charts located in reports will not work by default. There is a workaround that can be done. Changing the CSE service to run as a windows account w/ local admin rights on the CSE server and rights to the SQL database will correct the problem. We are working with the charting vendor to get this resolved and will post an update when available. New Ninja Success Story: Fremont Public Schools Fremont Public Schools was experiencing far too many spam messages in its users’ email in-boxes. The influx of unwanted messages was taking up needed space on the district’s servers and also requiring too much time and resources of the IT staff. The school system’s existing AV software from another vendor wasn’t offering ample spam protection and it “…took forever to move messages from one box to another because it was client-based rather than server-based,” said Rick Webb, network engineer for Fremont Public Schools. Webb added, “Using Ninja frees up our time here in IT as well as our users’ time. Now, none of us have to go through 150 messages a day checking, clicking and deleting. People can get right to the business of the day without weeding out all of the junk.” Here is the full story: http://www.wservernews.com/071119-Ninja-Success-Story WServerNews FAVE Links This Week's Links We Like. Tips, Hints And Fun Stuff. This Apple ad is also very entertaining. You have to give it to them, their marketing is superb (QuickTime): http://www.wservernews.com/071119-Apple-Ad Ninja Parade Slips Through Town Unnoticed Once Again: http://www.wservernews.com/071119-Ninja-Parade Animator vs. Animation by *alanbecker, a really cool little animation: http://www.wservernews.com/071119-Animator-vs-Animation Billy Chasen encased his exploded iPod in Resin... and it still works: http://www.wservernews.com/071119-Resin-iPod Funny ad from Toyota Australia about upgrading one's mode of transportation: http://www.wservernews.com/071119-Toyota-Prius-Donkey Cannes Gold Medal winning ad from France: “Football gets people talking” http://www.wservernews.com/071119-Cannes-Gold-Medal This particular Dilbert is perfect! :) http://www.wservernews.com/071119-Dilbert The world's first radio-controlled jet airplane using thrust vectoring - directing the thrust from its main engines in a direction other than parallel its longitudinal axis - allowing it to perform amazing maneuvers, just like the "real" Mig 29: http://www.wservernews.com/071119-RC-Mig29 Top Gear found a way to play soccer with cars: Volkswagen Fox versus Toyota Aygo: http://www.wservernews.com/071119-Car-Soccer When construction workers get bored only good things can happen: http://www.wservernews.com/071119-Bored-Construction-Workers It's 1994. Who knew that in the day of Windows 3.1, AOL and 9600 baud modems, the world of national security was such a struggle? From "24" - unaired pilot: http://www.wservernews.com/071119-1994-24 HiDef video of Earth rising and setting over the Moon's horizon, taken by the Japanese probe "Selene" as it orbited the Moon at a distance of 62 miles: http://www.wservernews.com/071119-Moon-in-HiDef WServerNews - Product of the Week Get Rid Of Your Old Second Generation Exchange AV Yeah, it may work OK. But the yearly maintenance is scandalously high. You can spend your valuable IT budget on something better than that. Get Ninja for your Exchange AV. It is cheaper than Trend, McAfee or Symantec and true third generation, integrated, policy-based antispam, AV, disclaimers and more. It's very little money if you take advantage of the competitive upgrade program. Try Ninja for 30 days. You will be amazed how easy it is to set up and run: 50% less admin time than the others! http://www.wservernews.com/071119-Ninja-Email-Security