In the last days I got my new machine for work, a Lenovo ThinkPad X1. As usual I always want to work with the latest and greates technology, that’s why I have chosen to set up the ThinkPad X1 with Windows 8.

Even in Developer Preview state Windows 8 runs very stable and brings a lot of cool new features which I can use for my daily work. I love the new PowerShell versions and Internet Explorer 10. But the best and the biggest feature for me, is the integration of Hyper-V 3 in Windows 8. So I don’t have to use VMware Workstation or VirtualBox to run virtual machines on my notebook for testing or presentations. I also can simply use the VHD (or VHDX) format to play with virtual machines or even boot them via boot from VHD.

The downside of the Windows 8 Developer Preview is missing .NET framework 3.5, but I think the Windows 8 beta, which should be released by the end of February, should fix this.

Maybe some people have realized that I am a big fan of business style notebooks. And what would be better business design than the ThinkPad series. Lenovo tried to combine good old ThinkPad values with new design features, and in my opinion succeeded. I really like the ThinkPad design in this very slim chassis. It looks elegant and business “high-class”.

The build quality of the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 is like you would expect it from a ThinkPad. It feels great and very robust. Keith Combs describes it in his review ”The ThinkPad X1 is build like a tank.  It’s probably the most solid notebook I’ve ever had in my hands.” and I have to agree with him.

More information on the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 here.

Last week I got my Nokia Lumia 800 and even I already have read a lot of articles and reviews about it, I am impressed about the beautiful design and the build quality.

The first problem noticed was the battery life. My HTC Titan had something like two days of battery life and the battery of my Lumia 800 was empty after just one day. At the same day I also got the Windows Phone update (7.10.8107.79) and I deactivated the Exchange Push for my work mail account. Now the battery life seems to be the same or better than on my HTC Titan.

Now the Lumia 800 (3.7-inch screen) cloud be a bit bigger for me (the Lumia 900 with a 4.3-inch Screen could be perfect). I also miss the Internet Sharing feature, but there should be an update soon to activate this feature.
Overall I really like the Nokia Lumia 800 and it will be my main phone for the next months.

In the last days Lenovo showed pictures of the Lenovo ThinkPad T430u for the first time. The ThinkPad T430u is a 14-inch ultrabook which will be release in 2012. There is not a lot of information about the specs of the T430u but it will use one of the new Intel Ive Bridge CPUs and should also be available with Nvidia discrete graphics options.

This could be a very interessting notebook option for business users. My hope for the T430u is that it will bring a great high-resolution display option. But we will see it later this year or maybe at CES 2012.

More Information about the T430u on theverge.com.

The first things I tried with the new Cisco UCS C200 M2 servers was the CIMC (Cisco Integrated Management Controller). CIMC is the remote out-of-band management solution (IPMI) provided with Cisco servers, it’s basically the same like HP iLO or Dell DRAC.

One of the biggest advantages is that CIMC is included for free, so there is no extra license you need for extra features like KVM or stuff like that.

After working some hours with the CIMC I was really happy, no problems at all everything worked as expected. From the design it’s like the Cisco UCS Manager but better . I think it is much easier to use and much faster (it’s not Java).

Keyfeatures

• Web based front-end
• KVM and Virtual media
• Change BIOS Settings
• Active Directory connector
• SNMP
• IPMI (Very interesting with the Bare-metal deployment in SCVMM 2012)
• SSH
• Health Monitoring

Today my two new virtualization nodes from Cisco arrived. For my Microsoft Hyper-V lab I needed two new nodes and I got a really good offering for two Cisco UCS C200 M2 High-Density Rack-Mount Servers.

The whole Cisco server series is optimized for virtualization and offers very cool features like a buildiin Cisco Integrated Management Controller (without extra charge) and Ciscos Extended Memory Technology which allows to use up to 192GB RAM.

Technical Specs

The Cisco UCS C200 M2 server is a high-density, 2-socket, 1 rack unit (RU) rack-mount server built for production-level network infrastructure, web services, and mainstream data center, branch, and remote-office applications.

• Up to two Intel Xeon 5500 or 5600 Series multicore processors
• Up to 192GB of industry-standard double data rate (DDR3) main memory
• Up to eight 2.5-inch or four 3.5-inch internal SAS or SATA disk drives; up to 8 terabytes (TB) total
• Built-in RAID 0 and 1 support for up to four or eight SATA drives; RAID 0 and 1 support for up to four or eight SAS or SATA drives with optional mezzanine card; and RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10 support for four SAS or SATA drives and RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, 50 and 60 support for eight SAS or SATA drives with optional LSI MegaRAID card
• Two half length Gen 2 PCIe slots-one full height x16 and one low profile x8 PCI Express-two integrated Gb Ethernet ports, and one 10/100 Mbps Ethernet management port for accessing the controller
• Front- and back-panel interface with video, two USB, and serial port connections

More Information on Cisco.com

Hardware

The Hardware makes a really good first impression.

One of my next posts will be about the CIMC (Cisco Integrated Management Controller) which I really started to like.

Two years ago I created my first real IT Lab with some HP ProLiant ML110 G5. I used this in the past years to test new products and projects. The Lab at this time was very limited, no storage, no cluster, not much RAM and weak CPU performance. Not much help if you work a lot with Hyper-V Clusters and System Center products.

I was looking around for some time now to find a cheap offer for new servers. In the last week I found a offer from Cisco with c200 M2 servers and I couldn’t resist to buy two of the for my Hyper-V Cluster nodes. The offer was a special deal which was even cheaper than building the servers by my own, at this point thanks to my former employer Atlantis Informatik AG.

Now what I will do is creating a new Hyper-V Cluster friendly environment with two Cisco C200 M2 Hyper-V nodes, one HP ML110 G5 as Storage Server and one of my old HP ML110 G5 servers as Hyper-V Server which all my Management servers and Active Directory will run on.

If you want to know more about Hardware you can use for a Hyper-V Lab I recommend the posts of Carsten Rachfahl on hyper-v-server.de (german).

Hardware Configuration

Hyper-V nodes:

2x Cisco C200 M2 - Intel Xeon 5620 2.4GHz Quad Core, 16GB RAM, Remote Management, IPMI, 6 Networkports

Storage Server:

1x HP ProLiant ML110 G5 – Intel Xeon E3110 3.0 GHz Dual Core, 8GB RAM, 4x 500GB Raid 10, 3 Networkports

Management Hyper-V node:

1x HP ProLiant ML110 G5 – Intel Xeon E3110 3.0 GHz Dual Core, 8GB RAM

Exactly one year ago I got my first Windows Phone. Since then a lot has change and Windows Phone has really improved.

After the first update, called NoDo, I could leave my iPhone 4 behind and change to the HTC 7 Trophy. Of course the hardware was nowhere near the iPhone 4 but the Windows Phone OS was just great. Now one year later there is a lot of good Windows Phone hardware out there and the Windows Phone OS has improved with Mango.

I am sure there will be a lot more great Windows Phone stuff in the future.

I know I said the Nokia Lumia 800 would be my next Windows Phone, but after Nokia announced that the release date of the Lumia 800 in Switzerland would be Q1/2012 I could not resist to buy a HTC TITAN.

I also know there are a lot of good HTC TITAN reviews already out, but I think maybe I can add some useful information for some people and help them decide. I don’t wanna talk to much about the Windows Phone software, because everyone knows already that Windows Phone 7.5 is a great phone OS.

Hardware

I was an iPhone user for a long time. Last year I decided to buy my first Windows Phone which was a HTC 7 Trophy. The Trophy was not really a great hardware device, it felt cheap and the camera and the screen were really bad. To be fair it was the cheapest Windows Phone at this time.
Now with the TITAN, HTC made a really big step in terms of build quality and features of the device. The HTC TITAN feels like a real high quality phone.
Now as you can see and read it is one of the biggest devices out there. With a 4.7-inch screen, 131.5mm height and 70.7mm width it sounds like a huge phone, but if you compare it to other phones it not a lot more to carry around. I compared it to a bunch of other phones like the 4-inch Samsung Omina 7, 4.3-inch Samsung Galaxy S2 and the 4.3-inch HTC Desire HD. And it really does not matter if you have a HTC Desire or a HTC TITAN to carry around. It actually feels really light in your pocket and does not use that much space because it is just 9.9mm thick.
I never was a fan of big phones, and I was not sure if the HTC TITAN wasn’t too big for me. But after the first days I really started to like the size and it isn’t a problem at all.
you want to compare different phones in size you can use www.phone-size.com.

Camera

One of the best features of the HTC TITAN is the great camera. In all reviews everyone mentioned the great camera of the HTC TITAN and it sure is. It’s not just the quality of the images, it has also some extra features like burst shots and panorama shot which allows you to create beautiful panorama pictures.
If you want to compare different cameras you can do this on digitalversus.com.

Performance and battery life

You cannot really say something bad about the performance of the HTC TITAN because it is the fastest Windows Phone device at this moment. This is not only because of the 1.5GHz CPU, which is the fastest CPU in a Windows Phone at the moment, it also because of the new flash storage HTC build in which makes App launching and taking pictures a lot faster.
Even with this huge screen the TITAN has a better battery life than my HTC Trophy before. I could use the HTC Trophy for one day and the HTC TITAN runs about 1.5 days without recharge.

Display

The 4.7-inch display is huge and the Super LCD display steps up to the AMOLED displays from Samsung. Now the only bad thing you could say about the display is the low resolution, but this is not HTC fault. All Windows Phone devices require a resolution of 480×800 which makes it easier for developer.

Overall

Even I would like to get a device with a smaller screen, I think the HTC TITAN is at the moment the best Windows Phone you can get here in Switzerland. Nokia will release their Windows Phones in Q1/2012 in Switzerland and Samsung did not announce an European version of the Samsung Focus S, which makes the HTC the one and only flagship device in Switzerland.

+ Great Screen Quality
+ Good battery life
+ Good performance
+ Very Good camera
+ Good build quality

- Maybe to big for some people

Important Hardware Specs

• 1.5GHz
• 4.7-inchSuper LCD display 800 x 480
• 8 megapixel dual-LED flash
• Video recording 720p at 30fps
• Cellular quadband UMTS / HSPA (14.4Mbps) quadband GSM
• WiFi 802.11 b/g/n
• Memory 512MB RAM
• 16GB internal storage
• 1,600mAh Battery

Pictures

HTC TITAN Ad

Other Reviews

Winrumors.com
Engadget.com

Today Nokia released their first two Windows Phone devices, the Nokia Lumia 800 and the Nokia Lumia 710. I am really looking forward to get a Nokia Lumia 800 as soon as possible. I think this is one of the first phones which can be compared to the iPhone in terms of design (Of course besides the Nokia N9).

Nokia Lumia 800 specs:

• 1.4GHz Qualcomm MSM8255
• 3.7-inch curved AMOLED Gorilla Glass 800 x 480
• 8 megapixel dual-LED flash
• Video recording 720p at 30fps
• Cellular quadband UMTS / HSPA (14.4Mbps) quadband GSM
• WiFi 802.11 b/g/n
• Memory 512MB RAM
• 16GB internal storage
• 1,450mAh Battery

With the Developer Preview release of Windows Server 8 which Microsoft released at BUILD, Microsoft showed the new integrated NIC Teaming feature. Basically you could do NIC Teaming before but you had to use software and driver from network card or server vendors which was sometimes a little bit of a pain.

Now with the integrated NIC Teaming features in Windows Server 8 you can team network cards even if they are from different vendors. I am sure this will make lives of Hyper-V Engineers a lot easier.