Things have quietened down after the Windows 10 and HoloLens news, and Azure is back to dominating this post.
Windows Server
- Distributed File System Namespace Solution with Hybrid Cloud Storage Deployment Guide: This paper explains how to deploy Microsoft Azure StorSimple, Windows file servers, and Windows Server Distributed File System Namespace to create a global namespace for all the shares created in StorSimple.
- System Center Endpoint Protection support for Windows Server 2003: Microsoft will end support for their anti-malware on W2003 on July 14th in line with W2003 end of life.
Windows Client
- Microsoft Clarifies How the Spartan Browser Will Support Legacy Sites and Apps: The new additional browser for Windows 10 will be compatible all the way back to IE5 via IE11 Enterprise Mode.
Azure
- New G-Series Support in US East 2: Given the growing demand Microsoft is seeing, they accelerated the release of another region, US East 2. You can now deploy G-Series Virtual Machines in either US West or US East 2. They will continue to expand G-series support to other regions based on customer demand and usage.
- Scheduling Azure Automation runbooks with Azure Scheduler: A very useful feature. They also show how to schedule for specific days of the week.
- Troubleshooting Microsoft Azure Storage with Message Analyzer: Microsoft has released a set of Azure Storage specific assets in Microsoft Message Analyzer, including parsers, color rules, charts, filters, and view layouts, to help you diagnose and troubleshoot issues in cloud storage applications.
- Choosing Between Azure VM Series: A post I wrote for Petri.com.
- Creating an Azure AD Lab Environment: A handy start up guide.
Intune
- List of attributes that are synced by Microsoft Intune: Some may need access to this information for compliance checks.
Security
Miscellaneous
- Has Microsoft Changed their Image? A post by me on Petri.com
- New Apple partner IBM prepares for largest corporate layoff in history: 111,000+ people to go at "Much Smaller Blue"
Hi Aidan,
Thanks for the wonderful blog, it has certainly helped me with quite a few of my Windows-related problems. I was wondering if I could ask you about high availability storage in Server 2012 R2?
I have set up a Hyper-V cluster which connects to cluster shared storage via iSCSI. So far it works just dandy, but I do want to get rid of the single point of failure, which is the storage.
I’m having a bit of a hard time visualizing this. I would like to have the cluster shared storage to be highly available, but I’m not sure what approach to take (using Server 2012 R2).
Here is a crude diagram (sorry, Vizio eval ran out): http://i.imgur.com/UHSymfg.png
What is the setup for that shared volume to be highly available? A scale-out file server requires setting up a cluster, which in turn requires shared storage, which brings me back to step one. Is this where storage pools/spaces come in? I just want the cluster shared storage to be highly available by using two different physical servers.
Thanks!
You design your shared storage so it doesn’t have single components that can fail (RAID/Storage Spaces, multiple disk trays, dual controllers, MPIO/SMB 3.0 Multichannel, etc). Beyond that, you need to look at backup and DR replication (see Hyper-V Replica and/or Azure Site Recovery).