Welcome from Cairo!

I'm visiting Cairo as a judge for the Imagine Cup 2009 competition. We arrived on June 30 and entered the blast furnace that is Cairo. It's a dry heat, as opposed to Florida, so even though it may be 104F it's tolerable (don't ask my wife or kids, though).

The first two days we spent touring Cairo with a guide. Day one we took a city tour and visited the Egyptian Museum, Coptic Cairo, the Citadel, and the Kahn El Kalili bazaar. Day two we visited Giza to view the pyramids. Both days were amazing!

Today, I started to prep for the Imagine Cup IT Challenge. I met the two captains, Rand Morimoto and Chris Amaris, in the IT Challenge room. Rand is the owner of CCO (the company I work for) and Chris is the CTO. Valÿ Greavu is the other judge from Romania and is arriving tonight. The four of us will be administering and judging the 24 hour competition. 5 hours of judging happens after the 24 hour competition, so the competitors and judges will have been up for 29 hours.

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Upgrade to Windows 7 for $49.99!

Today, Microsoft announced a fantastic deal for current Microsoft customers. You can now pre-order Windows 7 Home Premium Upgrade for $49.99 or Windows 7 Professional Upgrade for $99.99 from select retail partners. The offer ends July 11th in the U.S. and Canada, and on July 5th for Japan or while supplies last

As a way of saying thank you to our loyal Windows customers, we are excited to introduce a special time limited offer! We will offer people in select markets the opportunity to pre-order Windows 7 at a more than 50% discount. In the US, this will mean you can pre-order Windows 7 Home Premium for USD $49.99 or Windows 7 Professional for USD $99.99. You can take advantage of this special offer online via select retail partners such as Best Buy or Amazon, or the online Microsoft Store (in participating markets).

This is a great deal for this fantastic operating system. Take advantage of it!

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Windows 7 Pricing and Upgrade Program Information Released

Today, Microsoft released its pricing model for Windows 7, the much anticipated operating system that will replace Windows Vista.

The estimated retail prices for upgrade packaged retail product of Windows 7 in the U.S. are:

• Windows 7 Home Premium (Upgrade): $119.99
• Windows 7 Professional (Upgrade): $199.99
• Windows 7 Ultimate (Upgrade): $219.99

And the estimated retail prices for full packaged retail product of Windows 7 in the U.S. are:

• Windows 7 Home Premium (Full): $199.99
• Windows 7 Professional (Full): $299.99
  
• Windows 7 Ultimate (Full): $319.99

This means that Windows 7 Home Premium full retail product is $40.00 less than Windows Vista Home Premium today.

General availability of Windows 7 is scheduled for October 22, 2009 worldwide.

For those who need a new PC now but still want to get Windows 7, the Windows 7 Upgrade Option Program starts tomorrow, June 26th. Anyone who buys a PC from a participating OEM or retailer with Windows Vista Home Premium, Business or Ultimate on it will all receive an upgrade to the corresponding version of Windows 7 at little or no cost. The Windows 7 Upgrade Option Program will be available until January 31, 2010 – and it's global. For more information on taking advantage of the Windows 7 Upgrade Option Program, visit www.windows.com/upgradeoffer.

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Imagine Cup 2009 Worldwide Finals

I'm honored to be one of four judges for the Imagine Cup 2009 Worldwide Finals in Cairo, Egypt. This is the second time I've been a judge, the first being last year in Paris.

This year's finals will run from July 2-9, 2009.

The object of the IT Challenge competition is to highlight the art and science of developing, deploying, and maintaining IT systems that are efficient, functional, robust and secure. IT professionals have a base set of tools and techniques, but still have to work through customer needs and configurations that require an intimate understanding of how the pieces fit together. They also need to know how far the systems can be pushed before they will break, and how to make the systems highly available, so that they are always available.

Competitors will have 24 hours to complete a real-world scenario. The competition will involve almost the entire stack of Microsoft technologies, where competitors will actually implement their solutions.

I'll be blogging about the competition and our travels to Cairo and London here. If you would like to see real-time updates, you can follow me on Twitter. We leave on Sunday and will arrive in Cairo Monday, June 29.

Looking forward to a great time!

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Is it down for just me?

Here's a great tip I got from my friend and co-worker, Pete Handley.

Have you ever gone to a website, found out it was down, and wondered if it was just you? Check out http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com. You enter a website to check and it'll tell you if it's down for everyone or just you!

Simple and elegant!

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Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack Level at RTM

You may have known that Windows Server 2008 RTM shipped as Service Pack 1. This is because the Windows Server 2008 code base is shared by Windows Vista, and Windows Vista was at SP1 when 2008 shipped. Windows Server 2008 SP2 was released on May 26, 2009 and was the first service pack you can actually apply to Windows Server 2008.

Unlike Windows Server 2003 R2, which was based on the same code base as Windows Server 2003 SP1, Windows Server 2008 R2 is based on an entirely different code base (Windows 7). The Windows 7 code base is derived from Vista, but is actually a seperate kernel. This change in strategy was required to address challenges that 2008 R2 faced, such as hardware platforms with many processor cores and new power saving features that couldn't be addressed by keeping the same kernel as Server 2008.

For this reason, Windows Server 2008 R2 RTM will ship as service pack level SP0, not SP1.

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Failure of FSW Causes Cluster Group to Failover

The following information was written for Exchange 2007 CCR mailbox clusters, but it pertains to any clustering solution that uses the Windows Server 2008 Node and File Share Majority cluster quorum configuration.

How Does Node and File Share Majority Clustering Work?

Exchange 2007 CCR uses two clustered Exchange mailbox nodes, called a Clustered Mailbox Server (CMS). In order for Windows to know which node is active, it utilizes a File Share Witness (FSW) to maintain quorum. The FSW is a network share on a third computer (typically a Hub Transport server in the normally active node's physical site). The active node writes information to files in that share and locks them for writing, preventing the passive node from writing to the FSW and taking quorum. It always take two out of three votes to maintain quorum.

If the active node becomes unavailable, the passive node can write to the FSW and the cluster group fails over. In the case of a total site failure where both the active node and the FSW are offline, both the cluster group and the CMS will fail since there is no quorum (there's only one vote).

What Happens When the FSW Becomes Unavailable?

When the FSW fails, the active CMS node remains active (does not fail over) because there are still two votes (the active and passive nodes). However, the cluster group will fail over to the other node. This is because File Share Witness resource in Windows Server 2008 is configured to fail over the cluster group when the FSW fails, as shown below.

There really is no reason to fail over the cluster group when the FSW becomes unavailable. It also takes 15 minutes to an hour for the FSW cluster resource to come back online even after the FSW share is available. Here's how to fix this behavior:

• Open the Failover Cluster Management console
• Add the cluster name, if necessary, and select it
• Double-click Cluster Core Resources in the middle pane to expand it
• Right-click File Share Witness (\\servername\sharename) and select Properties
• Click the Policies tab
• Clear the checkbox for, "If restart is unsuccessful, fail over all resources in this service or application"
• For optimal restart performance, change the "Period for restarts (mm:ss)" to 1 minute and "If all the restart attempts fail, begin restarting again after the specified period (hh:mm)" to 1 minute, as shown below:

This configuration will cause the cluster group to remain on the currently active node if the FSW resource fails. It will also attempt to bring the FSW resource to online once every minute.

This is my current best practice for configuring the File Share Witness resource failure policy.

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