Below is a Q & A session about the Private Cloud Managed Service with Director Michael Carter.

Q. Why are you creating this solution?

A. We see this (Private Cloud Managed Service) as a gap in the market. There are a few hosting providers who will provide a customer with a managed service to host specific applications such as office and email, and there are even fewer providers like YourOfficeAnyWhere who will work with a customer to get their line of business application working in the cloud. Below this currently are the numerous rack/server providers who will provide a server with memory/disk space and a windows server license, but this falls short of providing user authentication to a windows system, a terminal server licensing server to manage remote desktop connections, antivirus, Microsoft licenses…… the list goes on.

Q. So what is the solution?

A. We provide a Dell Server with 96GB memory, 8 processor cores and unlimited Windows Server guests or 50% of this – 48GB memory but still with 8 processor cores. We need to standardise on a solution and this type of server configuration fits the bill, however if a customer has different requirements we are more than happy to discuss this with them. The key to this is that the physical server will only host their servers so they are in complete control of their processor and memory allocation to servers that are “guests” of the physical hardware.

Q. So how is this different from all the other cloud server providers?

A. Included in our pricing we will:

• Backup the guest servers
• Provide another server in the cluster of physical servers for failover should the host hardware fail for any reason it will fail to the passive server seamlessly
• Supply credentials to logon to a windows domain (active directory servers) based on your company name and declare the licenses to Microsoft to ensure you are compliant.
• Ensure that antivirus is up to date on the server
• Ensure that security patches are rolled out to servers
• Provide a terminal server licensing server for remote desktop licenses and declare the licenses monthly to Microsoft. Without a terminal server licensing server you cannot run a remote desktop solution.

YourOfficeAnywhere View on cloud offerings

We can also provide any Microsoft license on a monthly rental basis including SQL server CAL’s, Microsoft Office CAL’s, Visio CAL’s and Microsoft Project CAL’s etc. Pretty much any license Microsoft currently supply on the open market we can rent legally on a month by month basis. We provide a Terminal Server licensing server as part of the solution so you can ensure you can connect to your remote desktops. Effectively we are providing all the background infrastructure servers you would require to allow users to remotely connect to a server without having to build and configure these on the server you purchase from another provider. If you have any other licenses required to run your business this just needs to be installed on the Private Cloud Managed Service and activated.

Q. Why shouldn’t I just have a fully managed service?

A. Well you can – the benefit of this solution that will suit “some” customers are that we are giving an element of control back to the end customer. On our managed service a customer cannot stop and restart a server this has to be requested by the customer so we can track this. The memory allocation of customer servers (guests) are managed by YourOfficeAnyWhere because if a customer adds more memory to their server it could affect other guests on the host. If we are providing a physical server which has all of a customer’s guests on it they can provision it how they see fit i.e. processor and memory allocation to each guest on the host. An example scenario is where a payroll server needs 8GB of memory to process the payroll at month end but doesn’t need anything like that during the rest of the month the memory and processor resource for that server can be increased and decreased as required each month by the end customer. YourOfficeAnyWhere will still ensure that antivirus software is up to date and ensure that the guest servers are patched with Windows Update software patches.

Q. OK so what infrastructure servers would I need if I didn’t get a solution from YourOfficeAnyWhere but went to a provider who was giving me just a server, disk memory and a Windows Server license in the “cloud” and what do these servers provide in layman’s terms that I would have to build and provide myself?

A. Quite a few!

• Windows Domain Controller x 2 (for resilience). A Windows Domain Controller (active directory) provides authentication to the system. Once authenticated this provides access to data and applications
• Terminal Server Licensing Server/Remote Desktop Licensing Server. This provides licenses to users to access remote desktops once they are authenticated
• Terminal Server Gateway x 2 for resilience. Provides access once authenticated to remote desktops.
• Anti Virus server – server to provide antivirus updates to all servers and report on compliance
• Windows Update Server – server to provide Windows Updates and report on compliance
• Firewall Server x 2. Firewall to direct requests to the correct server
• Backup Server
• Another physical server. If the host server fails you would want this to fail to another physical host without any (or little) downtime. This requires significant infrastructure in terms of network storage from a tier1 provider such as EMC and resilience physically built into the infrastructure at the network, switch, and power.
• We will also ensure software compliance and declare all the required Windows licenses you need on a month by month basis.

Q. Anything else to add?

A. Yes if anyone has any specific questions that will improve the quality of this blog post please feel free to ask below and we will answer these questions.

For example did you know that Microsoft don’t have any UK data centres and you have no control whatsoever where your email or SharePoint data is stored?  If you are lucky it might be in Southern Ireland or Holland. If not it could be in the USA. This does pose issues for regulated companies where data must be kept within the UK and therefore rules out offerings from Microsoft such as Office 365. Other larger providers such as Rackspace provide other obstacles. Some customers have chosen our platform as Rackspace wouldn’t allow them to visit the data centres they were hosting the customer data in. This is something we will routinely do with our customers if they want to see where their data is stored.

The question that customers should actually be asking is “how safe is my data in the office?” How easy would it be for someone to come in and actually steal the server from the office? How easy is it for a disgruntled employee to take gigabytes of sensitive data or data that would be beneficial to a competitor? Just because you can “see” the data and having a server in the office gives you a warm feeling doesn’t mean that the data is “safe”.

Some of the common questions we are asked regarding resilience and security follow and you should consider when asking a potential provider for pricing “would I be able to come and see your solution before I commit to purchase” – I know I would and “we” (YourOfficeAnyWhere) would let you come and see our solution – we have nothing to hide.

Q. What resilience/security is available at the Data Centre?

A. The data centre is manned by security 24 hours a day and access is only allowed with a photo ID and by pre authorisation by a member of the authorised Cardium team which expires after 24 hours. The building has UPS battery backups and also diesel generator backups to keep the Data Centre running in case of power failure.

Q. How is resilience ensured at the internet network level?

A. Multiple providers provide internet services into both our data centres

Q. How is resilience ensured at the DMZ level?

A. YourOfficeAnyWhere has two separate firewalls so that should one firewall fail the other can be used to service the traffic until the other firewall is replaced. There is a 3rd firewall at Data Centre 2.

Q. What about power failure at the server level?

A. For specific key servers and ApplicationsAnywhere servers there are dual power supplies which are connected to distinct power rings in the Data Centre.

Q. How is resilience ensured on the internal network?

A. All systems that are identified as key to the infrastructure have multiple network cards and these are patched into separate network switches.

Q. What resilience is there at the actual Data Centre level?

A. YourOfficeAnyWhere operates key services out of two data centres. Data centre 1 hosts the majority of servers – email, database and terminal services. Data centre 2 houses an additional backup server (for copies of backups), domain controllers, DNS Servers and a firewall to ensure that key services are available in the case of an absolute disaster at Data Centre 1. Data Centre 2 is available to customers also to provide business continuity of services should Data Centre 1 fail completely. We can provide a PDF document of the infrastructure deployed.

Q. How is logon ensured to YourOfficeAnyWhere?

A. YourOfficeAnyWhere has multiple Windows Domain Controllers at both locations

Q. DNS. How can you ensure you can find “me” or connect to what I need to in the Data Centre via the Internet?

A. YourOfficeAnyWhere has multiple DNS servers that do this, and these are located in both Data Centres.

Q. What about backups if Data Centre 1 burns down?

A. Backups from Data Centre 1 are replicated immediately to Data Centre 2 ensuring that your data is safe if Data Centre 1 burns down.

Q. How can I ensure that I have access to applications if Data Centre 1 is not available?

A. You can request for business continuity services from YourOfficeAnyWhere who will be more than happy to provide you with a cost for this additional service.

Q. What would happen if my physical server fails in the Data Centre?

A. The ApplicationsAnywhere solution (remote desktop/cloud desktops) are housed on a HYPER-V cluster containing up to 16 physical servers. Should a physical server fail, the ApplicationsAnywhere server running on that hardware will fail over onto available resource on another server automatically and bring the system back up. Each server has redundant power, dual quad core processors and 48GB memory using Dell Enterprise Server hardware.

Blog post by Michael Carter YourOfficeAnyWhere

When attempting to download they recieve the following error:

“Error 0x800700DF: The file size exceeds the limit allowed and cannot be saved.”

We were able to repeat the issue using all versions of windows from Windows XP SP2 so set about trying to resolve it. After some investigation we found that a limit for file downloads from cloud storage solution  was implemented by Microsoft to prevent the client computer being forced into denial of service attack. This limit was set to 50MB so when you try to download any file over 50MB the client computer interprets this as a denial of service attack and stops the download.

Note: On Windows Vista or Windows XP the error is different. “Cannot copy filename: Cannot read from the source file or  disk” 

This limit is controlled by a key in the registry. The key is HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\WebClient\Parameters\FileSizeLimitinBytes

The default setting is: 50000000 (50MB)

To allow larger files to be downloaded you need to change the value of this key to match the size of the largest file you wish to download.  To do this you need to do the following:

1. Click Start, click Run, type regedit and then click OK
2. Locate the FileSizeLimitinBytes value and click Modify
3. In the Edit DWORD Value box click to select Decimal option. In the box enter the new value.
4. 
5. Quit the registry editor and restart the computer.

As a guide here are some conversions from bytes to MB:

50000000 bytes = 50MB

100000000 bytes = 100MB

500000000 bytes = 500MB

The ApplicationsAnywhere solution is not just limited to Windows desktop operating systems such as Windows XP, Windows Vista or Windows 7, but can be accessed on Apple MAC OS X and Apple iPad, plus mobile phone operating systems including Windows Mobile, Apple iPhone and Android devices although the screen size of these devices in most cases will be a limiting factor.

The advantage of connecting to a Windows Remote Desktop solution is that sharing data and applications is seamless whether the end user is on Windows XP, MAC OS X or an iPad. Because data is stored centrally in our data centre the shared network drive each customer gets allows all data to be shared amongst all employees (providing they have the permissions to see the data) irrespective of the platform they are using themselves or where they are located in terms of geography. So a user with an Apple MAC OS X can edit an office document in Manchester England which can subsequently be edited by an employee in Spain 5 hours later with only an internet connection and a subscription to our ApplicationsAnywhere solution. The other benefit is that the solution is backed up and more importantly all licenses from Microsoft required to access the servers and run applications are included in the pricing/quotes we supply.

The video is best viewed in HD (720p) and full screen. No sound is required as the video is annotated and describes what is happening at each stage.

When the same customer contacted us again with the very same issue we decided to dig a little deeper and what we found was the application wasn’t actually hanging but had presented the customer with a dialog box. (The kind of Yes/No boxes that most applications present at some point) However, what had happened here is the dialog box had been displayed behind the hosted application rather in the foreground.

Because the application is running as a hosted app rather than a hosted desktop you cannot minimize the application to get to the dialog box, nor can you ALT+TAB or open task manager to get to it because doing this brings up iTunes on your local PC and not the
stupid dialog box that you can’t get to.

As we were helping develop the bespoke SQL based hosted application with the customer we could try various programmatic solutions to try and get round the issue. Unfortunately one of these helped but some investigation revealed that this is a known issue with Windows 2008 remote app that had been around for quite some time without any resolution from Microsoft.   One of the solutions that had been suggested was to change the following registry key:

HKCU\control panel\desktop\ForegroundLockTimeout

Value: 0

What does this mean then: Specifies the time, following user input, during which the system keeps applications from moving into the foreground.

The default setting is 200000 milliseconds which is 200 seconds or just over 3 minutes. If you are as impatient as I am then this is an eternity. Setting the value to 0 will always bring the dialog box to the foreground.

The keen eyed among you will have noticed that this is a user specific setting so needs to be set for every single user that logs into the system and uses the application. If you are using Group Policies then I suggest you use Group Policy Preferences to set this or if you are old school you could create a .REG file that is run each time the user logs into the system.

YourOfficeAnyWhere have now produced a video that shows how Sage Accounts (and this could be ACT!) can be used as either a Remote Application or accessed via full desktop.

The video describes the differences between the two options and it is down to the customer to decide how they want to access their copy of Sage. Note that we build a dedicated server for each customer that uses our systems in our state of the art data centre in Manchester. At the time of this post we have in excess of 1,500 users connecting remotely into their servers to run their apps, and this isn’t just Sage, we host all sorts of systems including Microsoft SQL Server Databases, Microsoft Access Databases, Office Applications, Email and documents.

If you are an IT company please see our reseller page for information on reselling our solution to your customers so you can generate monthly revenue and not miss out on the massive opportunity that is “cloud computing”.

The video doesn’t require sound and is best viewed in full screen HD.

I have just been emailed by a colleague from Microsoft who says they have a customer with a few distributed users (work from home/on the road) and they have opened up an office in Southern Ireland. He asked “What is the YourOfficeAnyWhere USP against Office 365?”

My answer follows:-

• Applications, Applications, Applications! The applications a customer may want access to from multiple locations are not provided or resolved with the Office 365 solution. Office 365 is a one size fits all solution but as we all know businesses are all different shapes and sizes and one size doesn’t fit all. Customers don’t just run office applications such as word and excel, and if they do there is potentially another issue……..
• Internet connectivity. Customers with more than 10-15 users in one location and a relatively small internet connection (2-4mb) will see performance issues opening large documents (and saving them) or sending a large email to “all internal staff” of the company

 Applications

If the customer has applications that users need to access remotely away from the office, for example accounts software, line of business applications with a database back end, CRM applications which are not available over the web and need to work on a company network (for example Sage ACT!) our (Microsoft) solution “web enables”  applications that are usually tied to the company’s internal network and can’t be accessed easily once you are not in the same office as the server and data. I.e. the application needs a fast network to run satisfactorily and Internet access doesn’t provide this at the moment. Office 365 does not address the millions of different applications businesses rely on on a day to day basis.

 Access or SQL database applications  are a good example where SME businesses have developed these over time, become completely reliant on them for business processes, expanded to multiple locations but VPN connections are no good from remote locations as these applications expect RPC at 100mb un-contended and not 2mb (ADSL) shared. These businesses want to be able to access the information from anywhere but don’t want to spend £50K to develop on a web platform? We have many customers where we have published applications for them as a remote application which they click on and it launches as if it is a local application even though it is running in the data centre.  The solution above requires just 64K of bandwidth per user to run as the only data being transferred over the Internet is the screen changes.

 Bandwidth

If there are lots of users in one location then Office 365 is going to hammer band width so they either need a very good ADSL line with decent up and down speeds which is potentially costly or high speed internet might not even be available

A 2 MB email with an attachment to 20 internal company  users is 2mb out 40mb back in using Office 365. On our solution the email is routed internally to Outlook running on the remote desktop so this doesn’t affect the customers ADSL connection or bandwidth. To send this it requires just the 64K ADSL connection (mentioned above) and the email is sent internally on our gigabit network. 

ADSL upload speeds are typically 250K to 500K so saving a large document to an Office 365 system (SharePoint)  is going to be slow. This is even more problematic with multiple users in one location. Using our hosted desktop solution this is no longer a problem because saving a document in word or excel is saving to the server at gigabit speed rather than 250K

The YourOfficeAnyWhere solution is like having your own server on your own internal network in terms of the Internet bandwidth used, without having to purchase it, back it up, patch it and replace it in 3 years time!

Oh and finally Microsoft don’t have any data centres in the UK if this is a problem (you want to know where your data is) then it isn’t a problem on the YourOfficeAnyWhere platform as our data centre is in Manchester.

Blog Post by Michael Carter YourOfficeAnyWhere.

Background

We were contacted by one of our resellers last week as he needed to apply a Sage patch for all his users (around 10) on his hosted Sage platform. Firstly he wanted to know how he could get the users to do this as they are not administrators – this is a security step we take for all our hosted applications and hosted desktop customers which reduces the risk to viruses and malware as the users can’t install anything on the remote desktop without contacting either us or their reseller who manage their server and applications. Secondly he was concerned that this would be time consuming installing the patch for all the users. At this point I was confused but after speaking to the reseller over the phone I then realised that he was missing something about the solution we offer.

The Solution

In a usual client server environment the PC’s have the Sage software installed (in the case above this would be 10) and the Sage data is saved on a server. To update all software would required each PC to be visited and the patch applied hence the reseller thought this would have to be done for all users on his cloud computing/hosted desktop. However this is NOT the case and something that we had overlooked as a massive selling point/advantage to customers that we just took for granted. In our hosted remote desktop/hosted terminal server environment there is only one copy of the executable (in this case Sage.exe) and once the patch is applied this is applied for every user on the system – the next  time a user launches the hosted cloud application they will get the application with the patch applied. So 10 users running Sage needs just one update on the system for everybody to get the fix. Something we took for granted but is a massive bonus for systems and applications that are patched/fixed on a regular basis.

Technical bit here – stop reading now if you aren’t interested in how it works!

Although there is only one copy of the application executable when we interrogate the system what we actually see on the server are multiple copies of the executable running under the name of each user on the system. E.g. user1/SBDDesktop.exe, user2/SBDDesktop.exe etc. So the system runs multiple copies of the application (in this case Sage) but there is only one copy of the application and associated DLL’s to update for the administrator of the system.

Hopefully this has explained one of the major advantages of our hosted applications and cloud computing desktop solution that we just take for granted.

This was only affecting them and it had only starting this morning. The shortcuts are delivered using Group Policy Preferences along with their drive mappings so the first thing I checked was to see if their drives were being mapped. A lack of drive mappings would indicate an issue with the GPO.  The drives were being mapped OK so the next stop was the event log.  The following event was logged:

Log Name:      Application
Source:        Group Policy Shortcuts
Date:          11/10/2011 13:59:30
Event ID:      8194
Task Category: (2)
Level:         Error
Keywords:      Classic
User:          SYSTEM
Computer:    �
Description:
The client-side extension could not remove user policy settings for ‘Policy Name Here {C928243D-09BB-4D45-8BAD-563AA82A02B2} ‘ because it failed with error code ’0x8007000d The data is invalid.’ See trace file for more details.

A quick Google returned a number of results but the most promising was this one posted by Tom Popov. However there was still some work to do as my issue was to do with shortcuts not power options.

First step was to browse to C:\Program Data\Microsoft\Group Policy\History. Inside this folder there are is a list of all the group policies with preference settings that are applied to users who log into the server.  There should be a folder with the same GUID ID as the the GUID listed in Event ID 8194. 

Drilling down into this folder reveals a further list of cryptic folders. The list is the SID’s of all the users who log into the server and get the preferences applied to them. In my case the list was a reasonable size (around 25 folders).

Next I had to find the SID for the user who had reported the issue.  The easiest way to do this is using the registry editor.

1. Open Regedit

2. Browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion \ProfileList

3. Scroll through the list of SIDs (left hand pane) whilst looking the “ProfileImagePath” in the right hand pane. When you see the user you want. Bingo. Make a note of the last 5 numbers of the SID and return to the Windows Explorer window

Armed with the correct SID I then browsed through the folder structure until I came across Shortcuts.xml. Normally this file contains a list of all possible shortcuts that could be applied through the group policy preferences but for the user in question this file was zero bytes. I simply renamed the file and ran GPUPDATE /Force and the user’s drive maps were restored.