Run the following command:
BESUserAdminClient -set_client_auth “-username admin -password adminpasswd -ad_auth -domain admindomain” -set_p clientpasswd

Then run the following command:
BESUserAdminClient -p clientpasswd

Where ‘admin’ is the BESadmin login created at the time of BES installation with password ‘adminPwd’.

You can see if a password has been previously cofiugred by running the following command.

BESUserAdminClient -p clientPwd -status

Microsoft and Citrix have announced a programme to jointly develop desktop virtualisation technology in a move they claim will lead to products that will simplify the way IT departments manage their desktop PCs.
The move is part of a package of measures unveiled by Microsoft which aim to kick-start businesses’ use of virtualisation technology to host applications and data in datacentres and the cloud, rather than on desktop PCs.
“We are trying to enable the mainstream adoption of desktop virtualisation,” says Dai Vu, director of virtualisation solutions marketing at Microsoft. “With companies upgrading from XP to Windows 7, it is going to give people the opportunity to think about desktop virtualisation in its widest sense.”
Microsoft plans to release virtualisation technology in the next service pack for Windows Server 2008, which will aim to give users running a virtual desktop an experience that more closely mirrors the performance of a desktop PC.
Under the deal, Citrix will work with Microsoft to extend the latter’s desktop virtualisation technology to cover a wider range of devices, such as mobile devices and laptops, and a wider range of scenarios, for example making it easier for businesses to run virtualised desktops in branch offices.
Straightforward licensing
Microsoft has also simplified its licensing for virtualised desktop infrastructure, in a move designed to encourage businesses to try the technology.
Under the new terms, businesses will be able use virtual desktops as part of Microsoft’s Software Assurance licence scheme, rather than having to buy separate licences, previously charged at $23 per desktop per year.
Users will also have the right to access their virtual desktop remotely without having to buy an extra licence.
The company has introduced a promotion, dubbed Rescue for VMware VDI, in an attempt to persuade businesses to move away from VMware’s desktop virtualisation technology.
The deal allows customers to trade-in up to 500 licences for VMware’s desktop virtualisation package in exchange for Microsoft VDI and Citrix Xen licences for one year.
Microsoft claims that many business have not used the VMware desktop virtualisation licences.
Another promotion will allow IT departments to buy licences to virtualise up to 250 desktops at a 50% discount.
“Companies are still playing a waiting game. Everyone is waiting for virtualised desktops to take off. $28 will get you started with a virtual desktop. It is very compelling, very easy, and you don’t have to go to the CFO to get it approved,” says Summit Dhawan, vice-president of product marketing for Xen Desktop at Citrix.

Originally developed for x86 machines, support for the IA-64 (Itanium) and POWER5 (Mac) platforms followed. Xen gained wide acceptance in the Linux server market in the 2005 time frame.

The OS Must Be Ported
Xen uses one or more privileged “guest” operating systems for handling the actual device drivers for the hardware. Known as “paravirtualization” and unlike VM environments where the OS runs as is, the OS that runs on top of Xen must be programmed to call Xen virtual drivers, which, in turn, call the real drivers. Linux and versions of Unix were the first operating systems ported to Xen.

Because the real drivers run outside of Xen, the machine can always be booted into a consistent, secure base personality. In addition, a virtual machine (OS and apps) can be moved to another server and continue running in a matter of seconds.

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As a metaphor for the Internet, “the cloud” is a familiar cliché, but when combined with “computing,” the meaning gets bigger and fuzzier. Some analysts and vendors define cloud computing narrowly as an updated version of utility computing: basically virtual servers available over the Internet. Others go very broad, arguing anything you consume outside the firewall is “in the cloud,” including conventional outsourcing.

Cloud computing comes into focus only when you think about what IT always needs: a way to increase capacity or add capabilities on the fly without investing in new infrastructure, training new personnel, or licensing new software. Cloud computing encompasses any subscription-based or pay-per-use service that, in real time over the Internet, extends IT’s existing capabilities.
loud computing is at an early stage, with a motley crew of providers large and small delivering a slew of cloud-based services, from full-blown applications to storage services to spam filtering. Yes, utility-style infrastructure providers are part of the mix, but so are SaaS (software as a service) providers such as Salesforce.com. Today, for the most part, IT must plug into cloud-based services individually, but cloud computing aggregators and integrators are already emerging.

InfoWorld talked to dozens of vendors, analysts, and IT customers to tease out the various components of cloud computing. Based on those discussions, here’s a rough breakdown of what cloud computing is all about:

1. SaaS
This type of cloud computing delivers a single application through the browser to thousands of customers using a multitenant architecture. On the customer side, it means no upfront investment in servers or software licensing; on the provider side, with just one app to maintain, costs are low compared to conventional hosting. Salesforce.com is by far the best-known example among enterprise applications, but SaaS is also common for HR apps and has even worked its way up the food chain to ERP, with players such as Workday. And who could have predicted the sudden rise of SaaS “desktop” applications, such as Google Apps and Zoho Office? read full article

Port-Profile capability in Nexus 1000V is the primary mechanism by which network policy is defined and applied to virtual machines. A port-profile can be used to define configuration options as well as security and service level characteristics. Virtual-Service-Domain (VSD), on the other hand, is a feature within the Nexus 1000V that allows for grouping of one or more port-profiles into one logical domain. The VSD capability allows for services that work in conjunction with Nexus 1000V, such as a virtual firewall entity like vShield, to be integrated into the virtual environment and accessed by the individual domains. This seamless service integration in conjunction with the Nexus 1000V can be used to provide more granular security policies within a virtual environment.

As mentioned above, any set of port-profiles can be functionally separated using a Virtual-Service-Domain. This VSD can then be used to direct traffic to any service or entity within the environment. In the following design, the VSD is used to move a group of virtual machines behind the vShield which is the virtual firewall entity within VSphere. The VSD feature set allows insertion of the vShield virtual appliance in the forwarding path between protected guest virtual machines and the physical network outside of the ESX host. To accomplish this, two areas of configuration are required:

•The port-profiles that identify outside and inside virtual ports of the vShield appliances

•The port-profiles which home guest virtual machines which require firewall protection

The virtual switch ports on the Nexus 1000V that connect to the unprotected (outside) and protected (inside) interfaces of the vShield are marked with a given VSD name configuration and the administrator can selectively mark port-profiles homing guests to participate in the newly configured VSD. If no VSD configuration is tagged onto a port-profile, the traffic continues to forward normally. Figure 7 depicts the logical location of vShield within the host. Continue

In a corporate environment, Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 clients locate an Autodiscover service running on a Client Access Server by directly querying the Active Directory directory service and locating relevant Service Connection Points (SCPs). This is shown in the following diagram:

Figure: Using Outlook 2007 to locate an Autodiscover service

For Internet users, Outlook 2007 will attempt to locate and connect to an Autodiscover service based on the e-mail domain of the user. For example, for the user johnc@alpineskihouse.com, Outlook 2007 will automatically try to connect to the following URLs in turn:

• https://alpineskihouse.com/autodiscover/autodiscover.xml
• https://autodiscover.alpineskihouse.com/autodiscover/autodiscover.xml
• http://autodiscover.alpineskihouse.com/autodiscover/autodiscover.xml

To actually retrieve Autodiscover settings from one of these URLs, SSL is required, and therefore, a valid security certificate is installed for the Web site that matches the site name. Also, note that the last URL cannot be used for retrieving Autodiscover settings.

Without a Hosting solution for Autodiscover, each hosted domain would require a unique SSL certificate and set up a unique, new Web site which is impractical. Therefore, there is a solution for hosted environments that negates the need for multiple SSL certificates and unique Web sites per hosted domain.

To support Autodiscover in a hosting environment, the solution is to create a single Web site (separate from the SSL-enabled Autodiscover Web site) that will redirect users to the actual Autodiscover service. Then, instead of having to create a unique SSL-enabled Web site for each hosted domain, all that is required is a DNS record that points to this separate Web site.

I would take issue with the suggestion that multi-tenant applications means “multiple instances of the same package that can be executed on the same machine”; that’s virtualisation, and doesn’t require any particular magic at all. However it is grossly inefficient from an operational viewpoint – it means if I have 1000 customers for my cloud-based Exchange service (e.g.) I have to separately manage 1000 instances of Exchange.

A true multi-tenant application is a *single* instance application, albeit horizontally scalable on a massive scale, which is aware that there are multiple distinct entities using it and which is able to create very robust chinese walls between them, as well as effectively manage their resource utilisation. From the customer’s perspective it’s the same as virtualisation, insofar as it appears to him that he has exclusive use of the application instance, but from the service provider’s perspective it scales much much better. There’s only a single instance to manage, and I don’t have to worry about how to distribute resources amongst the various instances. When I add more capacity its available to be shared by all customers (subject to whatever QoS policy I may apply to individual customers). These aspects are critical for keeping the costs down.

You don’t have the time, money or manpower to run your own messaging environment, it may be time to consider hosted Exchange

I’ve decided to join Gold’s Gym. With the high upfront costs of fitness equipment, I figured this was a cheaper and better solution than trying to go it alone. Gold’s experienced certified personal trainers are helping me design and implement a fitness plan. With their support, I’m reaching my goal. But if the service ever goes south, I can always leave, because I have the pay-as-you-go plan.

The Gold’s Gym approach isn’t all that different from a hosted Exchange service provider. At the fitness center, as in the data center, you’ll find some expensive hardware. This is why it quickly becomes all about selling gym memberships or Exchange seats—that expensive hardware is a fixed cost. As is the case at Gold’s Gym, hosted Exchange service providers normally employ experienced Microsoft Certified Professionals to help their customers. And similar to how Gold’s Gym offers free weekly passes, hosted Exchange service providers offer free monthly trials.

Having spent the past four years in the hosted Exchange world, I’ve seen how it can provide a compelling benefit to small, medium and even some large enterprises.

What is Hosted Exchange?
Hosted Exchange is a fully managed service—designed, implemented and supported by a service provider. Although it’s rarely differentiated, there are two offerings: multi-tenant, also known as shared hosted Exchange, and single-tenant, also known as dedicated hosted Exchange. For this article, I’ll focus on the much more common multi-tenant offering, where two or more isolated tenants (customers) share the same Active Directory and Exchange infrastructure.

Typically, shared hosted Exchange solutions are large-scale and highly centralized. In addition, they’re built on a high-performance, high-availability infrastructure (hardware-based load balancers and SSL accelerators, redundant routers and switches, redundant servers, and Storage Area Networks). AD is deployed in a single forest, single domain, and single site configuration with an Organizational Unit (OU) assigned to each tenant. For redundancy, at least two Global Catalog servers and at least two Exchange front-end servers are deployed. All Exchange back-end servers are Exchange virtual servers, clustered.

Exchange is deployed in a single Organization with a Recipient Policy, Global Address List, Address List, Offline Address List and a top-level public folder within the root public folder tree, assigned per tenant.

Isolation from other tenants is achieved with Security Groups and Access Control Lists, and by stamping rarely used attributes. For example, the msExchQueryBaseDN attribute on all user objects in a tenant is set to the distinguishedName attribute of its assigned OU. This limits Outlook Web Access-based Address List searches to the members of their OU. Nearly all shared hosted Exchange solutions are deployed with a service management system. This system—typically a Web portal—gives end users, customer administrators, resellers and the wholesaler a central point of access to provision and administer the service.

Finally, hosted Exchange service providers claim their service is cheaper and better than what could be built and maintained in-house. They argue that your total cost is reduced because you share the same infrastructure and applications with other tenants. At the same time, reliability, security and scalability is improved because the service is handled by folks whose core business is designing, implementing and supporting Exchange.

Why Hosted Exchange?
In addition to the “better and cheaper” claim, which all outsourcers tout, two factors are making hosted Exchange a legitimate option for many small, medium and even large enterprises.

* The market is maturing. The role and value of a hosted Exchange service provider is better understood now than it was four years ago when Exchange 2000 first shipped. And if you’re facing a decision on whether to upgrade your existing messaging systems to Exchange 2003, you may never find a better time to consider the hosted option.
* The technology is getting better. Perhaps the most apparent technology improvement is the ability to connect to Exchange servers over the Internet with RPC over HTTPS using Outlook 2003. Prior to this, service providers published MAPI with ISA Servers, deployed VPNs, or ran with fixed RPC ports. RPC over HTTPS finally delivers an efficient standard for the industry. When published through ISA, it truly provides secure Exchange access over the Internet.

Hosted Exchange also benefits from the native mobility features within Exchange 2003. The features are a significant improvement over deploying Exchange 2000 with Mobile Information Server, a step some providers took to offer mobility with Exchange 2000. Full access to e-mail, calendar and contacts through Server ActiveSync and Outlook Mobile Access on a Windows Mobile Pocket PC Phone or a Smartphone is hard to overlook.
In addition, Outlook Web Access for Exchange 2003 offers the ability to create custom OWA Themes, giving providers an opportunity to further brand their service offering. The ability to modify the appearance and the functionality of OWA by using segmentation was available in Exchange 2000; but now, with the improvements in OWA such as forms-based authentication with HTTP compression, customizable logon page, and Spell-check, it’s worth the effort.

To wit: We are often asked about whether cloud-based collaboration (email, team sites, instant messaging, Web conferencing, social computing, etc.) works best on multi-tenant, dedicated solutions, or both. The answer is both, but trending towards multi-tenant. Our clients are interested in both multi-tenant and single-tenant or dedicated cloud solutions — as long as the price is right.
We just had another of our regular cloud research meetings at Forrester. In these meetings, we cut across our research organization to examine cloud computing from every angle.
Compared with even just a year ago, it’s amazing how important and pervasive cloud computing analysis (as opposed to cloud computing guesswork) has become in our research calendar.
You can see the existing cloud/SaaS research here and our planned research here. As the meeting host, I mostly listen, probe, and take notes, but ocassionally I get to jump in with a thought.
To wit: We are often asked about whether cloud-based collaboration (email, team sites, instant messaging, Web conferencing, social computing, etc.) works best on multi-tenant, dedicated solutions, or both. The answer is both, but trending towards multi-tenant. Our clients are interested in both multi-tenant and single-tenant or dedicated cloud solutions — as long as the price is right.

he future of cloud-based collaboration is clearly multi-tenant for two economic reasons:

1. Multi-tenant enables the fundamental economic benefits of a shared resource. We can see this in the price war going on in email right now — a 50% price cut in the last 12 months with multi-tenant cloud email. The floor on email cost keeps dropping, fueled by the better economics of multi-tenant solutions and high capacity utilization.

2. Multi-tenant is a much faster way to deploy improvements. With multi-tenant, Gmail can add features overnight; Exchange only once every three years. Multi-tenant Cisco WebEx gets a quarterly update; IBM Lotus Sametime can’t (though LotusLive.com can). Because there is a single instance of the code in a multi-tenant cloud solution, the innovation is continuous, incremental, and globally available.

Multi-tenant is also the path that every major cloud collaboration vendor is on. Microsoft, for example, is running Exchange Online for $5/mailbox/month in a multi-tenant solution that now scales past 25,000 seats. Salesforce.com and Google have always been multi-tenant. And Cisco WebEx Mail and IBM LotusLive.com are also multi-tenant from their core.

So when does a dedicated (single-tenant; servers dedicated to you) solution make sense?

1. If you aren’t yet comfortable with the security assurances of a multi-tenant solution. This is what keeps most companies away from the cloud at all. It’s the number one concern in our surveys of IT decision-makers around the world.

It’s also what led Google to build a dedicated data center for government workloads. At least there, the government data won’t mix with the data of the hoi pollois. But this is mostly about getting the security assurances nailed down. I view it as a short-term limitation.

2. If your content & collaboration application must be highly customized and integrated tightly with other applications. This doesn’t apply to most collaboration solutions today. But for SharePoint or Notes applications it does. And while it has kept SharePoint off of Microsoft’s solution so far, even SharePoint will go multi-tenant in 2010 with a sandbox to keep your custom application walled off from other apps. We also expect some Lotus Notes and Connections features to show up on the multi-tenant LotusLive.com in 2010.

3. If you workload won’t run in a virtual machine. Okay, so this is a bit down in the technical weeds. But applications do run on silicon. And limitations around memory, buffer space, processing speed, and the like define what kinds of things you can actually run in a virtual machine, hence in a multi-tenant cloud. For more on this, see Frank Gillett’s report on scale-out workloads.

Disagree? Agree? Have other thoughts? Please share.

Ted Schadler serves Information & Knowledge Management professionals. His primary research objective is to help clients select and implement real-time collaboration tools and understand the impact of emerging technologies on information workers. His work includes research on real-time collaboration tools, the economics of cloud-based collaboration, the effect of mobile devices on enterprise collaboration, and the future of virtual worlds in the enterprise.

Forrester Research, Inc. is an independent research company that provides pragmatic and forward-thinking advice to global leaders in business and technology. Forrester works with professionals in 19 key roles at major companies providing proprietary research, consumer insight, consulting, events, and peer-to-peer executive programs. For more than 25 years, Forrester has been making IT, marketing, and technology industry leaders successful every