Looks like after Microsoft cuts VUE out of the party, Citrix decides to invite them over. I just got this in my inbox earlier this week:

Dear Citrix Learner:

We are contacting you to communicate an important change in the delivery of Citrix exams. Effective August 31, 2009, Citrix certification exams will be delivered exclusively through Pearson VUE testing centers and will no longer be available through Prometric testing centers.

You may still register for an exam and redeem exam vouchers with Prometric until July 31, 2009; however, scheduled exams must be completed in a Prometric testing center by August 30. Beginning August 1, any unused Prometric vouchers will be valid in the Pearson VUE system. The current Citrix exam registration process with Pearson VUE is unaffected by this transition, and will continue as normal.

With the transition to a single-vendor relationship, Pearson VUE and Citrix plan to work more closely together to focus on key areas such as exam security and marketing programs that raise awareness of the value and integrity of Citrix certifications. This will also allow Citrix to increase the scalability and coverage of its certification programs, ultimately adding to its recognition and value.

This is important news for anyone who's currently in progress with their certification. If you click through to the FAQ site with more information, you'll find that you can register for a Citrix exam with Prometric until July 31, 2009 and take scheduled exams at Prometric testing centers until August 30, 2009.

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Posted by Greg Shields | Remote Applications, Resources for Admins | Permalink | Comments (0)

Year #2, for the recordbooks.

Funny, but I've got to remember to add that MVP award's emali address to my Safe Sender's list. Today is my re-up day for the MVP, and by the time 11:00a came around I was starting to wonder if the ol' email would come. It did at exactly 9:26a this morning and was automatically and unceremoneously dropped straight into the Junk Mail folder. Silly, Outlook.

Nevertheless, thanks again to all of you who keep reading what I have to write, and coming to see what I've got to say. Whether its Remote Desktop Services, where my MVP focus lies, or any of the Microsoft technologies I love to talk about, its you that makes this job so much fun to do every day.

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Posted by Greg Shields | Administrivia | Permalink | Comments (0)

Over at the Concentrated Technology blog, I wrote up my experiences with taking the 70-680 MCTS exam titled "Windows 7, Configuring". In short, I found the exam to be ridiculously easy in its content, structure of questions, and level of knowledge required to be successful.

In fact, if you click on over to the landing page, you'll find that I refer to the exam as embarrasingly easy. Its level of maturity in the structure of the quetsions themselves has devolved dramatically from the heydays of the MCSE.

I can happily report that I passed the beta exam, which is something that's supposed to be hard to do. Beta exams often give you triple, quadruple, or more the questions normally found on the "regular" exam. I received my "Congratulations" email in the mail this past week.

So if you're considering certifying on Microsoft's newest desktop OS, or starting down the road of the MCITP, don't be too concerned about these entry-level MCTS exams. Without going into any of the details, you'll find that its content should be trivially easy for all but the newest of IT professionals.

Get Microsoft's details on the exam at: http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/exam.aspx?ID=70-680&locale=en-us. Next up for me are the three exams I need to upgrade my MCSE 2003 to an MCITP 2008.

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Posted by Greg Shields | Resources for Admins | Permalink | Comments (1)

...and knowing that this sentiment is coming from none other than InfoWorld's Roger Grimes gives it even more weight. Grimes writes:

Talk about a turnaround. It's always hard to recognize the larger, slow-moving paradigm shifts as they happen. But after a decade of bad press regarding its commitment to software security, Microsoft seems to have turned the tide. Redmond is getting consistent security accolades these days, often from the very critics who used to call it out. Many of the world's most knowledgeable security experts are urging their favorite software vendors to follow in the footsteps of Microsoft.

Haters will always continue hating, but the technical press is giving a lot of favorable coverage to Microsoft's successful efforts to make itself a computer software security leader.

He goes on to review some of the recent comments from other news outlets like SANS, CNET, and ComputerWorld, all of whom are recognizing the sea change with Microsoft and security.

Read the quotes at http://www.infoworld.com/d/security-central/pigs-fly-microsoft-leads-in-security-200?source=IFWNLE_nlt_daily_2009-06-19. And don't forget that I've been telling just that story here in this community since Vista's release.

You can say you're sorry now.

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Posted by Greg Shields | Security | Permalink | Comments (0)

Another nice freebie out of StarWind Software. The company who brought you the first no-cost software-based iSCSI solution for Windows Failover Clusters, Hyper-V Clusters, and even ESX shared storage upps the ante with another free tool. This tool assists administrators who need to migrate virtual machines between VMware and Microsoft disk formats.

StarWind's site reports the tool has a few other goodies as well:

StarWind Converter is a downloadable V2V conversion tool for virtual machines. You can use it to convert VMDK to VHD files and VHD to VMDK as well as to IMG file which is a native StarWind format. This is a very simple but useful file conversion tool that will convert virtual hard drive images from VMware's VMDK format into the Microsoft's VHD format. It is a sector by sector copy operation from one format to the other. It does not modify the source image and will leave it so you can continue to use it.

The unique feature of the free StarWind V2V Converter is that it allows IT administrators to easily migrate any virtual machines from direct attached storage to shared storage on the network in one quick and simple step. Therefore anybody can move VMDK or VHD images safely to shared storage, allowing for virtual server clustering, therefore ensuring high application and VM availability. This also means that system administrators will be able to use advanced VMware features such as VMotion, VMware HA, DRS and VCB now that they moved VMDKs to shared storage.

Get your copy at: http://www.starwindsoftware.com/converter

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Posted by Greg Shields | Virtualization | Permalink | Comments (0)

Finishing off this week of RTP e-book highlights is a brand new e-book that I've been writing titled The Definitive Guide to Application Performance Management. Familiar with PerfMon? Imagine a PerfMon that hooked into every...single...aspect...of your business IT environment -- networks, servers, mainframes, even the users themselves. I talk about that reality in this 10-chapter book. Here's the blurb:

If one of your servers went down today, would you know about it? Probably. But if an obscure service on a small server that is part of a much larger solution started transacting at a slower rate than normal, would you? Perhaps not. If that obscure service is responsible for a critical activity in your business, its slight reduction in performance might be a big deal that you need to know about!

The Definitive Guide to Application Performance Management offers a comprehensive look at Application Performance Management (APM), an industry-leading mechanism for monitoring business services and applications. APM looks at every facet of the IT infrastructure, from the services to the users themselves, to gain a holistic understanding of what's going on in your business applications. Using APM, you can quickly dive into the root causes of problems within your infrastructure. You will understand the level of impact associated with those problems, and will recognize and quantify the overall health of your IT infrastructure and business services.

Chapter 1: What is Application Performance Management?
The goal of this first chapter, and indeed this guide as well, is to help you understand the critical need for managing your applications' performance and behaviors. Chapter One will document the problem with today's traditional monitoring solutions and explain why APM is an effective solution. It will discuss an introduction to APM and where it fits into the environment.

• Chapter 1: What is Application Performance Management?
• Chapter 2: How APM Aligns IT with the Business
• Chapter 3: Understanding APM Monitoring
• Chapter 4: Integrating APM into your Infrastructure
• Chapter 5: Understanding the End User's Perspective
• Chapter 6: APM's Service-Centric Monitoring Approach
• Chapter 7: Developing & Building APM Visualizations
• Chapter 8: Seeing APM in Action
• Chapter 9: APM Enables Business Service Management
• Chapter 10: The APM Cheat Sheet

Sound interesting? SIgn up to be notified about the release of all 10 chapters, one month at a time, at http://nexus.realtimepublishers.com/dgapm.php.

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Posted by Greg Shields | O/S Features & Troubleshooting, Remote Applications, Resources for Admins, Systems Management & Monitoring | Permalink | Comments (0)

No time for a full e-book? That's one reason why RTP develops so many of these easily-approachable Essentials Series. In a few short pages we can bring you a concise view of information that might not ever make its way into a full e-book. In this new Essentials Series, Dan Sullivan presents an interesting look at database security, focusing on the role of database activity monitoring. Here's the details.

Network professionals and database administrators both play critical roles in protecting information assets, ensuring a secure environment, and maintaining compliance with regulations. In the past, network and database security practices were fairly independent but that is no longer the case. In today's increasingly complex security environment, network professionals and database administrators must coordinate their activities and share information. This Essential Series outlines best practices for database activity monitoring and describes how to implement an increasingly important technology for meeting business needs that span the networking and database management arenas.

Article 1: Data Discovery and Classification in Database Security
Databases are highly complex and essential components of today's businesses. Simply knowing what databases are running in your environment is a more difficult task that it may appear because of informal practices among developers and departments working "under the radar" of IT management. This article describes how to conduct the first step in database activity monitoring: discovering what database are in an organization and what type of data is in those systems.

Article 2: Database Assessment and Management in Database Security
After conducting a database discovery operation, the next step on the road to effective database activity monitoring is to conduct a vulnerability assessment. The object of this step is to provide information about weakness in those databases and to prioritize the need for mitigation.

Article 3: Mitigating Risks and Monitoring Activity for Database Security
The final article in this series describes a framework for implementing ongoing monitoring and control. With an understanding of what databases exist in an organization and their vulnerabilities, it is time to assess the business value of each database and mitigate the risks on those of value and decommission others. This article describes how to implement database activity monitoring procedures to preserve the benefits realized by conducting discovery, vulnerability assessment, and mitigation tasks. The benefits of a formal database activity monitoring process include improved security monitoring, more efficient compliance reporting, and better monitoring of database and application integration.

Get your copy of this quick but useful Essentials Series at http://nexus.realtimepublishers.com/esrdam.php.

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Posted by Greg Shields | Resources for Admins, Security | Permalink | Comments (0)

Also new to RTP is Chapter 3 of the e-book Understanding Data Protection from Four Critical Perspectives by Rebecca Herold. This unique e-book looks at the issues surrounding data protection from the perspectives of four different stakeholders. The result is a useful Rosetta Stone between the types of people commonly reponsible for keeping your data safe. Here's Rebecca's synopsis of the entire e-book:

Too many times publications about data protection are written in such a way that only readers with a deep understanding of information technology (IT) can get value from reading them. The Shortcut Guide to Understanding Data Protection from Four Critical Perspectives is written to serve as a "Rosetta Stone" of data protection for all levels of corporate staff. Each chapter is written in such a way to explain the importance of data protection so that four major roles throughout the enterprise, spanning from executive to IT, will understand. The target audiences includes 1) corporate business leaders (CxO, legal counsel; and other roles with holistic business responsibility), 2) compliance professionals (internal auditors, privacy officers, compliance officers, etc.), 3) IT operations (technology architects, engineers, programmers, and others involved with implementation issues), and 4) security personnel (staff responsible for all aspects of information security and safeguards, including technologies and related options).

...and here's her blurb for Chapter 3...

Chapter 3: How Information Security Leaders Need to Address Data Protection Within the Business Context
A few years ago, in a large financial services organization that had around 15 different business units selling different products and services, the marketing folks got what seemed like a great idea to feed people's growing appetites for new technologies. They decided that they would give a free Blackberry phone (not nearly as common as they are now) to all brokers that reached a specific sales goal for the upcoming month.

To the marketers' great joy, almost all of the approximately 800 brokers met their goal! Along with the Blackberrys, the marketers sent instructions along with this magical and delightful gadget that described how the brokers could synchronize their email with the device. They advised in the instructions that the brokers should not try to do the synchronization until 9:00am PST on a specified Monday so that they would be sure to have staff on hand from any of the time zones in case the brokers had problems. Sound like good preplanning?

That Monday came, and mysteriously the response time of a section of the corporate network not only ground to a standstill but also the call center was flooded with calls, primarily from brokers saying that the synchronization did not work. The brokers basically inadvertently performed a nicely coordinated Denial of Service (DoS) attack

Chapter 3 offers insight on leading practices organizations need to follow to help ensure an effective privacy program as well as to help demonstrate due diligence.

Get your copy of this e-book at http://nexus.realtimepublishers.com/sgudp.php.

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Posted by Greg Shields | Resources for Admins, Security | Permalink | Comments (0)