So there are plenty of posts around the web about how to get the best performance out of Virtual Machines. I thought I’d jot down what I do. I use VMs mostly for running training and demos- so my usage approach is optimized that way.

First let me say I am a Virtual PC guy. I’ve tried VMWare, I’ve tried Hyper-V, I’ve tried Virtual Server 2005 R2. In the end I just find VPC 2007 SP1 the best balance of performance and convenience. I use VMs mostly for presenting and I do so off a less than uber grunty machine- I run my VMs on a Lenovo x61t Notebook- it’s not the fastest machine in the world but it is tiny, light and versatile- all grat for regular travellers like me. My Vista Index looks like this

You’ll note I’ve invested in the important things- 300GB 7200RPM HDD and 4GB of RAM. Despite only being a 1.6Ghz Processor it still gets a 4.5.

Anyway, I digress. So here’s how I run my VPCs.

I do some basic Host machine tweaks per: http://support.microsoft.com/Default.aspx?id=840193
Basically this is just configuring my Virus Scanner (CA eTrust) to ignore VPC and my VHD and other related files.

I follow some of the guest tweaks that Andrew Connell has collated here.

My key secret is my drive configuration.
I put my VHDs onto a fast Flash key. I’ve got a 32GB Patriot XT and I just got an OCZ ATV 32GB. Both are fast reading drives at about 30 Megabytes per Second..
I then configure my VMC so that the *.vmc file is on my primary HDD spindle (the 7200RPM drive above) and I turn on Undo disks. This means that all the write traffic is on the 7200RPM platter and the read access is split between this main drive and the thumb drive. The result is great performance. I’ll probably swap my primary drive to an SSD later this year which will probably mean a bit of a rethink.

YMMV.. but this works well for me.

From www.tripit.com

7 Trips
73,600km traveled
18 Cities visited
9 Countries visited and it’s only March…

I should add a couple of extra cities this month (LA and Vegas) and should hit 100,000km by month end pretty easily.

w00t!

So back online afterthe Blackout.. and whaddayaknow… they delayed it

Internet copyright law delayed

So I’m finally on the homeward stretch of a tour around Asia presenting on Microsoft CRM technology- currently sitting at the airport at Singapore waiting to get on my flight to Sydney. Will be my first flight on an A380 so I pretty buzzed!

I just posted a comment over on Cactus’ site where she’s having a whinge about Air New Zealand.
I’m sorry but I’ve tried a bunch of the *A carriers and while NZ is not perfect it’s the best of the bunch I think. As for calling out Singapore Airlines as a shining light- I’m sorry but until they fix the following that aren’t playing the game in my book

• Checking in *A Gold card holders at their business counters @ Changi T2 and T3- instead of having a special area to hide them away in.
  

  In your place from the moment you step through those big glass doors.

  The ‘Special’ Gold Card Holder check in area. Note the tape fences to keep the Economy Class flying ‘swine’ in check!

  Reserved for Proper Premium Service passengers only. No cattle here.

• 
   
  
• Allowing *A gold card holders to use their business class lounge at Changi T2 and T3 the same way that every other bloody Star Alliance airline does for their frequent flyers. Instead *A Gold members get a ‘special’ lounge without showers and the other niceties one might expect. Back in the days before T3 they used to claim it was due to ‘space requirements’ but with the move to T3 this ‘excuse’ is categorically a complete load of bollocks- It’s peak time in the lounge right now with all the long haul flights leaving over the next couple of hours and the place is empty.
  
• Updating their priority boarding policy and priority boarding signs to make it clear that they actually give a shit about being part of a global alliance rather than just paying it lip service.
  
  Star Alliance?!? What’s that?

For my next post, you’ll get my feelings on the behaviour of another behemoth of the Alliance, the perpetually bankrupt, United Airlines.

Deep down I really just want to fly on Spice Jet!

I hope the inflight service is as Spicy as it sounds! Though without the naked Cacti as I’m sure they’re sans a J cabin that would be up to standard.

While I have posted before that I don’t agree entirely with the approach taken by the Creative Freedom people. I do, like almost every blogger, from almost every political persuasion, think that this is a poor piece of legislation.

Nikki Kelly Nikki is a paddling friend from way back and her son Sam is about the same age and Anna Kaituna Calder, the daughter of some other great paddling buddies.

Almost inspires me to jump back in a slalom boat…. if I had time

I pine to go and live by the Kaituna river!

Nikki Kelly Shows Why She Is So Inspirational

So I’ve been doing a bunch of presenting around the Cloud Recently and also starting to discuss it as a platform with a number of our customers.

I thought I’d put together a blog post on some of the key reading I’m getting people to do to come up to speed.

http://berkeleyclouds.blogspot.com/2009/02/above-clouds-released.html
Is an academic white paper out of Berkeley. Well worth a read and I’d probably start your journey here.

It’s also important, no matter which platform you choose, that you have a good understanding of how to build horizontally scalable systems and that you understand why and how to partition your stateful data tier.
I quite like the recent O’Reilly book Beautiful Architecture  for an overview of this with worked examples

Other stuff that’s worth reading include:

The Primer on Scale from Wikipedia is useful
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale_out#Scale_vertically_vs._horizontally

Choosing Partition Keys
Some Thoughts on Choosing Partition Keys in Windows Azure's Table Storage

And Also from Dare: On ‘Trusting’ The Cloud
Asking should we trust the cloud is like asking should we trust horseless carriages

If STS’s, IP’s RP’s and other identity acronyms are Dutch to you then Vittorio’s article on Claims is well worth a read
Claims and Identity, On-Premise and Cloud Solutions

So I’ m doing a world tour (well a tour of Asia) running some ‘training’ events around Microsoft CRM. I call them ‘training’ events because it’s not really possible to train people to do much in a half day event- what they’re really about is exciting people about the potential of building line of business applications on top of Microsoft CRM.

I did a bunch of Intergen Twilights on this very topic last year but the BAWT events are a full half day looking at everything from WPF to Silverlight to UC/OCS and even Windows Azure. We’ll be following these up with a cool two day training course in April and May so if you’re not already involved in the Metro  program for CRM you best be signing up!

I’m currently in Bangalore, flying out to Hong Kong tonight where we are running the event Friday morning, then Singapore on Monday, Sydney on Wednesday and Auckland on Friday.

If you’re based in Shanghai or Beijing then Jian Sun, one of my colleagues at Intergen, will be presenting the course in Mandarin Chinese in these cities in early March.

Looking at my tripit stats I’ve done 13 cities in 7 countries so far this year.

So this has been REALLY frustrating me. Any time my machine sleeps the Wifi doesn’t work on resume and I have to reboot.

Given the propensity of Windows 7 to sleep given any chance whatsoever (power saving madness!) this became quite infuriating. It' seemed to happen on both my machine, an HP and a Lenovo- with different drivers on each.

In the end I’ve traced it to the Virtual Machine Network Services feature on the WiFi adapter:

Disable this and everything works really well again. These get installed with Virtual PC 2007

Hopefully this helps and has sufficiently GoogleJuicy keywords in the title!

So I’m replying to a post over on OpenXMLDeveloper.org and the file upload feature isn’t working. So I thought I’d just upload the file here.

So one cool thing I’ve noticed on my morning walks/runs is they’ve started putting biciyle compatible cattle stops on the Skyline walkway. These allow bikes to pass, but stop stock moving between paddocks. Thus far I’ve seen one on the actual Skyline track and one where the track drops down into Karori Cemetary via the new track that’s been built.

So I’ve ‘gone native’ with Windows 7 and it’s now my primary OS.

If you want the answer without reading all the crap I went through- scroll down to the heading.

I got my Thinkpad x61t up and running with most of the drivers just using the Lenovo Updater utility.

The ones I’ve struggled with are the UMTS Cellular card and my fingerprint scanner. This post is about how I solved the UMTS card issue.

1. Unpack the MSI file you download from Lenovo at C:\DRIVERS\WIN\WWANUMTS\Driver\MC877xx.msi by using something like
   msiexec /a MC87xx.msi /qb TARGETDIR="c:\temp"
2. Ensure that all your other drivers are up to date: I needed to install the various Intel AMT drivers from here first because it just wasn’t even detecting that I had a mini PCI card without these.
3. Browse to the Minicard device in Other Devices in Device Manager, right click, update driver software and browse to the Vista x64 folder that you unpacked in step one.
4. You may need to go back to Other Devices a few times to install the Modem Driver, Serial Port Driver(s) and Network Adapter Driver in that order
5. Eventually you’ll be able to open the Sierra Wireless 3G Watcher and get a signal for your carrier
   
6. From there it’s plain sailing