Today I'll cease my third particular person point of view. I am gonna write a bit much more about what I do to help MacBU ship wonderful computer software and supply some coloration about what is it really is wish to operate on Mac software program at Microsoft. Frequently after we have press activities or unique visits from our MVPs I will give them a tour of the Mac Lab and clarify what we do. They've usually discovered it very interesting and so I thought I'd share a virtual tour of our Mac Lab. Let us start:
Lab Door
We start off with all the door. The Mac Lab is about 2000 square feet of strong computer systems. The calendars you see down the facet in the wall we use to mark team birthdays as well as special activities. The CD to the door is an aged Apple Computer software Restore CD in the previous beige Mac Apple made, the Electrical power Macintosh G3.
The "Sandbox" and Plasma display
The very first region in the Mac Lab is what we get in touch with the Sandbox. This is where we maintain all important hardware configurations Apple has introduced that operate our goods. We'll make use of the Plasma screen to, watch DVDs and perform video games, uh er, I mean, do essential teaching presentations. ;-) It's truly quite helpful because absolutely everyone can be in front of a pc and nonetheless begin to see the primary screen and adhere to along. Usually other groups at Microsoft (the video games group, hardware drivers group and in some cases the Windows media group) will come and agenda time within the Mac Lab to check their software program around the various hardware configurations.
Old iMacs and iBooks in the distance
More Macs
We have plenty of Apple hardware. You are able to see here the outdated colourful iMacs in addition to several of the previous iBooks. You can even see two of our Lab Technicians functioning around the backup techniques, but more about that later. Up until a few months in the past we had each significant hardware revision Apple has at any time released since the dawn of time. We even had a section of the Lab we affectionately known as the "Mac Nursery" in which we held all the older Macs heading. We even had an outdated SE/30 and IIci and tremendous high-priced Mac II all linked via PhoneNet managing Spectre, only for entertaining. It can be always tremendous entertaining to boot Phrase one.0 or Excel 1.0 on these aged devices and see just how much factors have changed. On account of lack of room in the Lab we needed to place all of these older machines into storage and recycled the following:
Macintosh (original)
Macintosh SE
Macintosh SE/30
Macintosh Traditional
Macintosh Centris 610 <-- I had this one in my room during high school
Macintosh IIci
Macintosh IIsi
Power Macintosh 7100/66
Power Macintosh 7100/80
Power Macintosh 7500/100
Quadra 650
Power Macintosh G3
Duo Dock with Powerbook Duo 2300c
Power Computing PowerCenter Pro 210
May they rest in peace.
ADIC Backup Robots
One of the realities of doing work with personal computers is the fact that things fall short. A lot more typically then you may possibly believe. We've utilized diverse backup robots, but ever because we moved to ADIC we've by no means had a robot failure. They just make great stuff. We have 3 robots and use Veritas Backup Exec. It functions quite well, when you can see:
Lots of backup tapes
We also do offsite backups just incase "The Big One" hits, but for regular use these tapes function just wonderful, except whenever they never. Recently we had a failure and lost 400 GB of data! We restored it in the tapes then learned that the Mac version from the Backup Exec agent had a corruption bug leading to the restores to become compromised! Veritas folk have been super responsive and so they must have a fresh Mac agent out shortly. Backup computer software and file methods are in the class of software program that just ought to operate, constantly. Alas,
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I'm likely to skip the "Build Lab" segment of our Lab because it can be quite considerably in transition. Perhaps I am going to publish about that later on. For now, on to our automation program,
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Mac Workplace is among these "software from the large" tasks. There is certainly really no way a crew of our dimension would be able to adequately examination all of Office devoid of the usage of automated testing. Each and every day we obtain a new build of Office in the construct machines, we duplicate it to our Xserve RAID connected to our dual G5 Xserve for accessibility by our 249 automation devices. We then run hundreds and 1000s of exams within the new create. Typically we get four builds of Office each and every day: English Ship, English Debug, Japanese Ship and Japanese Debug. We run our entire battery of tests versus all the builds then report any failures to testers by means of e mail. The testers look into the failures, log any bugs and then transfer on to their other duties as testers. This turns out to be extremely effective, if utilised correctly, and over time it enables testers to give attention to factors people do finest, although letting pcs confirm the repetitious and mundane, but essential, testing. It all commenced with our Blue and White G3s decades in the past. In the beginning when testers would upgrade their check machines, instead of recycling the devices, "The Lab" would get them to add them to our automation machine pool. I believe we had about twenty machines to begin with.
Venerable Aged Bluies
After a while we began acquiring Gray G4s...
Speedy G4s
Then we upgraded to some dual proc machines...
Dual G5s
Then Apple give us a unique gift. :-) You would be most likely be really surprised in the charge of running every one of these devices. You will find the apparent electrical energy expenses, but additionally cooling fees and even the physical room fees. Additionally, our system scales, not with CPU horsepower, but with amount of devices. A lot of the tests we run do not run substantially quicker on a dual G5 vs. an individual G4. So when Apple announced the Mac mini it wasn't minutes just before we were contemplating the way to use it for our automation system. The Mac mini has all of the best qualifications:
Low powerLow heatSmallEasy to pack togetherInexpensive
So we received several to check factors out...
Mixed Automation Rack
And then we created the big obtain:
Rack A, B and C = a hundred and fifty Mac minis!
These perform extraordinarily nicely. You could wonder how we control all these Macs. We use two methods: KVM switch box and Apple Remote Desktop. Due to our Lab Manager's excellent partnership with all the IOGear people we've an incredibly reputable answer today. It seemed like it took for at any time to search out a USB KVM switch box that didn't depart the devices "headless" following random reboots. The 8 port USB KVM from IOGear has long been rock sound. So what does it look want to sit before 64 Mac minis? Like this:
64 Mac minis: one keyboard, monitor and mouse
This functions really effectively when you should accessibility the machines physically. Even so, just scanning every Mac for 1 second gets quite old, quite rapidly and Apple Remote Desktop comes to the rescue! When we must see every one of the machines at the moment we just choose them and BOOM! they're there. Additionally, it gives us what I think may be the a single genuine purpose Apple invented the thirty inch Exhibit. ;-)
The thirty Inch Show: Fulfilling the measure of its development.
ARD displays 50 machines at a time and when you possess a able machine, it employs the "cube rotation" influence to maneuver from 1 group of fifty on the up coming. I acquired an image with the impact mid rotation below:
Rotates like butter!
So how does it all operate? Similar to this: On each machine we've two volumes: ChangeOS and Mac OS X. The Mac OS X volume is exactly where we set up the various variations in the OS. We boot on the ChangeOS quantity to free up the Mac OS X quantity for modification. When we set off an automation run we specify the OS edition and language. Every single machine then reboots on the ChangeOS partition, caches the OS .dmg locally and utilizes the asr command line instrument to revive the picture. The instrument that does this work is 1 I wrote (in AppleScript Studio no much less!) called Lab Assistant. We now have photos in the Mac OS from 8.one all the way as much as 10.four.6 in each of the languages our products assistance. It really is a great deal of information which brings me for the backbone of our automation technique:
Our Xserve RAID and XSAN
1 TB
Right now we have just been testing out the XSAN things to find out how we desire to utilize it. This is exactly why you see all of the Xserves. Just one facet in the top Xserve RAID is one TB of data. For any entertaining comparison this total rack that is about seven ft tall is full of aged RAID arrays can also be one TB of info storage. We get in touch with it the large Mac Daddy.
Big Mac Daddy
Other groups at Microsoft have hardware retention policies that force hardware upgrades every single so often, but rather than just "recycling" these server machines, our Lab Supervisor intercepts them around the way out, and we use them for various things, storage, SQL server etc. We actually have a number of the outdated MSN servers in our Mac Lab!
Hallways
When you've got numerous devices to maintain, being able to get behind the machines is extremely crucial.
Lots o' cables!
Top View
We wish to pack in people Mac minis and also the cords get quite dense once we do. The hanging Mac mini box moves when the HVAC is working. If it's not working, we've got to turn off the machines right up until it's fixed.
Our main automation Xserve incorporates a practice of failing in some significant way once a 12 months,
Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010 Key, constantly close to Christmas time. :/ For the very last two decades I've been in charge of fixing it and acquiring it back to operational. Nearly all of our server racks are generic white enclosures, but we do have 1 black Dell rack. As punishment for poor habits, we set the Xserve in the Dell rack. That'll instruct it. ;-) This is what it looks like in the inside of with the rack looking out to the entire world. Inadequate caged servers...
From the server's perspective
Of course our iWork/iLife balance is simply good as you can see through the following:
Tornado Foosball Table
One of our group members purchased this great Tornado foosball table which we use as well as and XBox and XBox 360 to unwind after a difficult days function.
Published!
A although back the Seattle PI in fact did a front page tale within the Mac Business Unit and you also can see through the photo within the Lab it was after we had only the G3s.
Gotta hold the Mission Statement
As you enter the kitchen area we have our MacBU mission statement to remind us what it really is all about. :)
Free drinks needless to say!
Just like almost everywhere at Microsoft, we get all-you-can-drink beverages.
Fun Periods!
Part of our team mantra is the fact that we perform tough,
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The Mac Library
This is just a pretty photograph to represent what is really a much even bigger collection of 3rd Celebration software program we use to test with Office. Most if it's saved on file servers, but this provides you an thought. (There is certainly some old WWDC DVDs if you can find them!)
Printer Lab
More Printers
All related for printer testing
They're beautiful
A huge portion of Office performance is printing,
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I wish that offers you a greater idea about what the Mac Lab is like and what it is prefer to function in the Macintosh Enterprise Unit at Microsoft.
Office 2010 Serial David Weiss A Tour of Microsof
Linear Mode
