Blog Archives
-
Syndication
-
April 7, 2010
Book Review: “Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services Resource Kit”
By New Signature
Microsoft recently changed the name to “Remote Desktop Server” but the underlying technology is still the same: Terminal Services have been powering remote access to corporate networks for years. In the “Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services Resource Kit” book authors Christa Anderson and Kristin Griffin manage to take a fairly dry topic and keep it both fresh and relevant. From the opening chapter through the end, the pace is quick and the topics covered wide. They have done an amazing job of creating a technical book that can be read cover-to-cover. Although the “Microsoft Presentation Hosted Desktop Virtualization Team” is credited, the book doesn’t feel as if it were written by committee, unlike many other technology books.As someone who’s been skeptical of Remote Desktop Services in the past, the changes made in 2008 (RemoteApp, TS Gateway) were major enough to prompt me to take a second look. The book starts out with a historical review of where terminal services began, providing a solid foundation for those of us late to the game. (more…)
-
March 23, 2010
Book Review: “Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V Resource Kit”
By New Signature
Writing a “Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V Resource Kit” book is a tall order. A book of this nature must be written for two distinct audiences: (1) IT professionals with little experience on the Microsoft virtualization stack, and (2) administrators experienced with virtualization who need more knowledge on the new features contained within Hyper-V 2008 R2. The book does an excellent job of providing value to the first audience, but fails to provide as much value to the second audience.Authors Robert Larson and Janique Carbone (with the Windows Virtualization Team) do a solid job at creating a reference book. However, there are several areas where the authors could improve:
- Hyper-V R2 contains a number of features that make it significantly better than the version that shipped with Server 2008 (which wasn’t even an RTM version). These features are mentioned, at best, in passing during the book. With a mere two pages of “background history” on Hyper-V, the book doesn’t clearly convey how much Hyper-V has matured in the past year.
- Virtualization, and the different vendors in the marketplace right now, stir strong passions between IT professionals. The book is written in an abstract tone that doesn’t address many of the charges and counter-charges hurled between the Citrix, VMWare and Microsoft camps.
- Useful tips such as “don’t use snapshots in production” or “differencing disks are bad so beware” tend to get buried or lost in the mix. Tables of specs that are already out of date do nothing to alleviate this confusion, but this is a problem that any technology book faces.
- An entire chapter is dedicated on managing Hyper-V with PowerShell, but it lacks any mention of the fact that native PowerShell commands only come with System Center Virtual Machine Manager. The solution, to download commands from the Microsoft Open Source CodePlex project, is a laudable one, but why not mention SCVMM as well?
-
March 19, 2010
Book Review: “Windows Internals, Fifth Edition”
By New Signature
As Microsoft has grown larger the Windows operating system has become much more complex, secure and transparent. One of the principal people behind that increased transparency is Mark Russinovich, who launched a company which would end up exposing many of the key features “under the hood” of Windows. His work didn’t go unnoticed, and Microsoft acquried Mark’s company.Since then, Mark has been the driving force behind the “Windows Internals” book series, which goes into greater depth than any work about how Windows works from an operating system perspective. Last June “Windows Internals, Fifth Edition” was released. This book covers both Vista and Server 2008, was released. Co-authored by David Solomon and with assistance from Alex Ionescu this is the ultimate Windows reference book for both software developers and system architects alike.
At over 1,264 pages, it’s impossible to cover every aspect of the book in a single review. It is certainly easy to state that the book is the definitive tome covering all aspects of the Windows kernel: memory addressing, error mechanisms, object management, security architecture, storage, networking, and I/O problems. (more…)
