Azure

Microsoft News – 23 January 2015

If you’ve just emerged from a cave or from under a rock, then you might like to read about Windows 10 and HoloLens. It’s been amazing to see how in “90 minutes”, the image of Microsoft has done a 180 degree turnaround. The carefully orchestrated and timed announcements on Wednesday were very effective.

System Center

Multiple domain names and themes on a single Tenant portal: More WAP-tastic extensibility.

Windows Client

Microsoft Provides a Much More Complete Look at Windows 10: Paul Thurrott
Windows 10 will be Free Upgrade for Windows 7 and Windows 8 Users: MSFT wants everyone to have the best access to online services.
Hands-On with Microsoft HoloLens: Paul Thurrott had an hour with the augmented reality headset.
Windows RT Will Not Be Upgraded to Windows 10: As I predicted quite a while ago, Windows RT went the way of Windows for MIPS processors.
The next chapter of Office on Windows: Universal touch-first apps included in Windows 10 for free (phone and small tablets – license probably limited to personal usage).

Setting up Active Directory for a Disaster Recovery Environment: Talking about how to get AD up and running consistently in your DR site.
Best Practices for Process Server Deployment when Protecting VMware and Physical Workloads with Azure Site Recovery: Getting the InMage Process Server configured for your replication from vSphere.

Office 365

New Office Visio Stencil: These stencils contain more than 300 icons to help you create visual representations of Microsoft Office or Microsoft Office 365 deployments including Microsoft Exchange Server 2013, Microsoft Lync Server 2013, and Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013
Azure RMS Migration Guidance: The Azure RMS Migration guidance contains a whitepaper with step-by-step guidance and links to cmdlets and tools to migrate on-premises Active Directory Rights Management Services (AD RMS) server key and templates to Azure Rights Management services (Azure RMS) while preserving access to protected content.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Windows 10,WAP,Cloud,Cloud Computing,Hardware,Azure,DR,Hybrid Cloud,VMware,Office 365,Active Directory,Office

Microsoft News – 20 January 2015

I’ve let the news build up a little bit. I think the holiday lull is starting to lift.

Hyper-V

Hyper-V Script to move everything off of a physical disk: Drain anything that is located on a particular disk.
Announcing DSC resources to deploy Hyper-V converged virtual network: This is an interesting third-party offer. I am wary of deep integrations such as this because I am worried about lock-ins that prevent upgrades when/if there are significant changes from Microsoft.

Windows Server

You are invited to participate in the Windows Server 2003 Modernization offering: The Partner Technical Services team is excited to share a new initiative focused on helping you migrate from Windows Server 2003 before end of support.
Work Folders for iOS – iPad App Release: Great add-on for iOS, giving businesses their own version of DropBox based on WS2012 R2 file servers and Workplace Join.
Win2012R2: STOP 0x133 and STOP 0x9E caused by too many NBLs in a DPC: Microsoft has been seeing an increase in STOP 0x133 (on non-clustered) and 0x9E (on clustered) cases, where the root cause is that there are too many NBLs indicated in a DPC. This causes the DPC watchdog timer to expire, resulting in mentioned STOP errors.
Announcing Message Analyzer 1.2: I really dislike this replacement for NetMon. It’s too difficult to use, even after you’ve sat through a briefing. My advice to Microsoft: start from scratch … again.

Windows Client

Windows 10: What We Know So Far: I’ll give a hoot about Cortana when it works outside of 4 or so countries. Microsoft should either fix that limitation or move the developers to something more important than a gadget feature.

System Center

Configuring VMM logical switch with bandwidth limit virtual port: Enable VM QoS.
Monitoring Text and CSV log files in System Center Operations Manager: Very useful.
Cluster overcommit algorithm in System Center 2012 R2 Virtual Machine Manager: This article describes four approaches for the System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) cluster overcommit algorithm in Microsoft System Center 2012 R2 Virtual Machine Manager.

Azure

Try ExpressRoute Free of Charge with this Promotion: Microsoft launched a promotional offer for Azure ExpressRoute, making it easier to get started with fast, private network connections between your on-premises environment and Azure.
New Application Insights functionality on Azure Websites with the Application Insights Website extension: This feature is designed to help development teams get 360° views of their applications across Availability, Performance and Usage with fast & powerful troubleshooting, diagnostics and usage insights.
Saving Money with Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines: In this article I will look at some methods you can employ to save money when you deploy virtual machines into Microsoft Azure.
Microsoft Azure App Enables Workplace Join Connections for Android Devices: Give controlled Android users access to on-premises resources with a hybrid cloud service.
Azure AD Workplace Join, now with Android Support: The official announcement.
Connect servers directly to Operational Insights: Easy to set up from-the-cloud server management.
How to easily spin up an Azure AD Premium Trial: So you’d like to demo Azure AD to your customers or want to get the feel of it? Perhaps you have Azure via MSDN and would like to spin it up on the fly for a demo environment?

Office 365

Participate in the Office 365 Practice Accelerator for SMB offering: A new initiative focused on helping Microsoft partners learn the fundamental deployment principles and processes that lead to repeatable successful deployments of O365 for Small and Medium customers.

Intune

Enrolling iOS Devices Via Apple Configurator In Microsoft Intune: A step-by-step. Been a while since I did this, but it was easier than enrolling Windows Phone!

Events

#GlobalAzure Bootcamp 2015: The 2015 #GlobalAzure Bootcamp kicks off on April 25th and you can participate and organize a location too!

Miscellaneous

Paul Thurrott’s last post on WinSuperSite.com: It’s the end of an era for that important site. But Paul continues tomorrow on thurrott.com.
Blue Whale Web Partners with Paul Thurrott to Launch Thurrott.com Technology News Site: So I am now a work colleague of Paul Thurrott!!! Thurrott.com has launched as a sister site of Petri.com and Paul is also writing news articles for the site.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Hyper-V,Virtualisation,PowerShell,Scripting,Windows Server 2003,Active Directory,Networking,Windows 10,System Center,VMM,Operations Manager,Failover Clustering,Azure,Cloud,Cloud Computing,Hybrid Cloud,Office 365,Intune,Events

Microsoft News – 14 January 2015

Here’s the Microsoft updates from the last few days.

Windows Server

Advances in Active Directory since Windows Server 2003: Features that people have been asking for since 2003 … some have been there since Windows Server 2008!

System Center

Windows Azure Pack and it’s licensing: A post by MSFT employee (and co-author on the last Hyper-V book), Michel Luescher.
Microsoft Updating Intune and SCCM with an Eye Toward Windows 10: Mobility seems to be the focus.
Step-By-Step: Building A System Center Virtual Machine Manager Lab Part 1: Start to learn VMM
SCOM – New Windows Server OS Management Pack Available – BUT BEWARE!: A warning from Kevin Greene about a new (and recently pulled) update to the Windows Server OS management pack.

Azure

Azure Data Center Migration just got easier: It’s still a hack, so it’s not as simple as it should be.
AzCopy – Introducing synchronous copy and customized content type: AzCopy 3.1.0 and 4.1.0-Preview are now released.
Microsoft Azure Reaches New Industry-Leading Cloud Compliance Milestones: Compliance stuff.
Migrate Linux VMs to Azure with Migration Accelerator: Microsoft announced support for the migration of Linux physical and virtual machines to Azure.

Office 365

What’s new – December 2014: Quite a few things, despite the end of year holidays.

Technorati Tags: Windows Server 2015,Active Directory,Windows Server 2003,WAP,System Center,Intune,Configuration Manager,VMM,Private Cloud,Cloud,Cloud Computing,Operations Manager,Azure,Hybrid Cloud,Linux,Office 365

Microsoft News – 9 January 2015

3 big announcements from Azure last night plus a useful Hyper-V reporting script feature today.

Hyper-V

Hyper-V Reporting Script: A post by Ben Armstrong promoting a very useful script by Hyper-V MVP Serhat AKINCI

System Center

Hyper-V NVGRE Gateway Toolkit: An alternative way to deploy Hyper-V NVGRE gateways
Have a say on the future of System Center: A survey on System Center.
Azure Pack Tenant portal extensibilities – Part 1: This series of posts is going to talk about a certain set of extensibilities that Microsoft enabled for Azure pack to support different reseller-type functionalities.

Azure

Azure Storage to start disabling SSL 3.0 on February 20th, 2015: Protecting against the SSL 3.0 vulnerability. You need TLS 1.0 or higher to continue.
Azure is now bigger, faster, more open, and more secure: Azure Key Vault helps customers safeguard and control keys and secrets using HSMs in the cloud, with ease and at cloud-scale. Furthermore, customers can deploy an encrypted Virtual Machine with CloudLink SecureVM with the master keys in Key Vault. The "Goliath" G-series VMs have gone GA. And an image of a Docker-enabled Ubuntu VM is in the Marketplace.
Largest VM in the Cloud: G-series sizes provide the most memory, the highest processing power and the largest amount of local SSD of any Virtual Machine size currently available in the public cloud.
Introducing Docker in Microsoft Azure Marketplace: Microsoft announced the first Ubuntu image fully integrated with the Docker engine available for fast deployment from the Microsoft Azure marketplace.

Security

Evolving Microsoft’s Advance Notification Service in 2015: We’re getting less information. Is this a good or a bad thing? I don’t know yet.

Technorati Tags: Hyper-V,Windows Server 2012 R2,Virtualisation,Networking,System Center,VMM,Cloud,Hybrid Cloud,Private Cloud,Azure,Storage,Security

Microsoft News – 6 January 2015

A few little nuggets to get you back in the swing of things. And yes, I have completely ignored the US-only version 1.2 Azure Pricing Tool that suffers from “The Curse of Zune”.

Hyper-V

Setting up Port Mirroring to Capture Mirrored Traffic on a Hyper-V Virtual Machine:A handy but rarely discussed feature
Large Scale VDI deployment using Hyper-V with Storage Tiers and Data Deduplication: Need some help planning a large scale, highly efficient Personal Desktop deployment that leverages Storage Tiers and Data Deduplication?

Windows Server

WorkPlace Join vs. Domain Join: The new way (personal and mobile client devices) and the old way of authenticating machines against Active Directory.
Case Studies on Storage Spaces, Scale-Out File Servers with SMB3 or both: Need some proof?

System Center

Deduplication of DPM Storage – Reduce DPM Storage Consumption: DPM does not do deduplication of its own storage; instead a virtual DPM places data storage (VHDX files) on deduplicated SMB 3.0 (only) volumes. This is the only supported scenario.
Azure Pack Wiki Available Via OneNote: Courtesy of Hyper-V.nu

Windows Client

Microsoft is building a new browser as part of its Windows 10 push: Say by bye to IE

Azure

Use Microsoft Azure Backup with Recovery Services: An article I wrote for Petri.com on how to backup PCs to Azure

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Virtualisation,Hyper-V,Networking,VDI,Remote Desktop Services,Storage,Active Directory,Windows Server 2012 R2,Failover Clustering,System Center,DPM,Cloud,Cloud Computing,Private Cloud,Windows 10,Internet Explorer,Azure,Backup,Hybrid Cloud

Microsoft News – 2 January 2015

Welcome to the “Happy New Year 2015” edition of my Microsoft News posts. I hope you have a nice time off from work – it FLEW by for me; I could do with a holiday to recover from my holiday.

Here’s the news from over the past week or so:

Hyper-V

5 Hyper-V Skills You Need To Learn for 2015: An article I wrote for Petri.com
About Hyper-V Virtual Processor Limitations: An article I wrote for Petri.com

Windows Server

VPN Interoperability guide for Windows Server 2012 R2: This document covers the working configurations for some of the popular third party VPN devices that can be deployed to work with Windows Server 2012 R2 VPN. The configuration for a Windows gateway is also included to server as a guideline for an interoperable deployment with the third party devices.

Azure

Microsoft Makes Azure Disaster Recovery For SMEs and Branch Offices: A post I wrote for Petri.com
Using Azure Storage on Linux: An update for Linux users on how to use Azure Storage
Running Critical Application Workloads on Microsoft Azure D-Series Virtual Machines: How to use these VMs that place their temp drive on host-local SSD storage. There is also a whitepaper.
Choosing Microsoft Azure Storage for IaaS: An article I wrote for Petri.com
Deploying a Microsoft Azure Storage Account: An article I wrote for Petri.com

Miscellaneous

The Top 7 Microsoft News Stories of 2014: An article I wrote for Petri.com

Mark Twain’s Advice on Microsoft Azure

I’ve been doing Azure events since August and I’ve come to the conclusion that there are 3 types of people in the audience:

Want to learn now – a small percentage of the audience
Have a small measure of interest but never try anything out – maybe over half of the room
Are only attending to learn how to compete with Azure or their boss forced them – everyone else in the room

I’m guessing the breakdown is similar at most cloud IaaS events. And I’ve not forgotten the those who are hoping that the US government kills off the cloud and wouldn’t attend a cloud event if it was the only place to be inoculated against the zombie apocalypse. And let’s not forget those clock punchers who make up the sad majority of IT pros and haven’t tried to learn anything since 2004.

O365 gives us a great track record that we can use to predict the future of Azure. We are in early days of Azure and uptake looks slow. But it was like this with BPOS/Office 365 before O365 became the norm for email here in Ireland. A few disruptors decided to skill up on Office 365 and those Microsoft partners shook up the market. They became the industry experts and they took business from their competitors:

By being the only resellers around that implemented a solution that customers wanted
By having developed skills over time that allowed them to take customers away from competitors that were doing a bad job

The time to learn Azure is now. Don’t procrastinate. Don’t be the moron that thinks “the cloud will never work for my customers” or “my customers are too small for Azure”. Take some advice from Mark Twain:

The secret of getting ahead is getting started.

So you’re serious about Azure but the scale of it scares you? That’s fair. That’s why Microsoft has taken a very targeted approach with Azure-based solutions via Open Licensing. And it’s why I’ve been delivering Azure technical training on a monthly chunk-by-chunk basis. The Mark Twain quote actually covers this too:

The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and starting on the first one.

If you’re starting with Azure, find an on-ramp solution like online backup or DR, and use this to supplement your existing skills. Learn the basics of storage and virtual networking.

Technorati Tags: Azure,Cloud,Cloud Computing,Hybrid Cloud

Microsoft News – 19 December 2014

We’re getting close to Christmas and Microsoft is starting to wind down for the year. Here’s a mostly-Azure report for the last few days.

Hyper-V

6 Hyper-V Predictions for 2015: An article I wrote for Petri.com
Hyper-V MVP Carsten Rachfahl interviews Microsoft’s Jose Barreto: They talk about storage in Windows Server vNext. If you hear loud voices outside then that might be me and Didier Van Hoye 🙂

Azure

Revoking and Reinstating Client VPN Certificates for Azure Point-to-Site VPNs: This article steps through the process of revoking and reinstating user certificates for Azure Point-to-Site VPNs by using the Azure PowerShell module and the Azure Service Management REST API.
Grow Your Cloud Business Delivering Solutions and Services to Small and Midsize Customers with Microsoft Azure: Find an in-person, web-delivered or on-demand delivery that works for you by visiting this site.
Stretching Those Azure Dollars: I’ve mentioned many times that one can save a fortune in Azure by shutting down VMs when they aren’t required. Here’s the step-by-step to do exactly that.
Using Microsoft Azure Online Backup: A post I wrote on how to back up Windows laptops/PCs/tablets using Azure Online Backup.
Azure Automation: Run tasks on Azure Virtual Machines – without opening ports: There may be times, however, when a corporate or security policy does not allow you to have an open PowerShell endpoint on your Azure VMs.

Miscellaneous

Microsoft begins war against fake phone tech support scams: FINALLY!!!

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Hyper-V,Virtualisation,Azure,Cloud,Cloud Computing,Hybrid Cloud,Networking,Backup,Security

Microsoft News – 17 December 2014

Things have settled down a little after last week’s surprise Azure announcements.

Hyper-V

Another Update on the VMQ Issue with Emulex and HP: MVP Hans Vredevoort has the latest news for poor HP blade customers running Hyper-V.

Azure

Azure AD Connect – One simple, fast, lightweight tool to connect Active Directory and Azure Active Directory: A new preview tool to make life easier because the menu just got too big and complicated. There will no longer be separate releases of Azure AD Sync and Azure AD Connect. And we have no future releases of DirSync planned. Azure AD Connect is now your one stop shop for sync, sign on and all combinations of hybrid connections.
Azure Backup – Announcing Support for Windows Client Operating System: Support for backing up data to Azure from Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 machines.
Authoring Integration Modules for Azure Automation: Expanding Azure Automation. Heavy stuff.
Using Chef, Puppet and Docker for managing Linux VMs: This post provides information on creating Linux VMs in Azure and using tools like Chef, Puppet and Docker for managing Linux VMs.
Simplified workflow to configure backup to Azure from DPM: No need to create self-signed certs with Update Rollup 4 for System Center 2012 R2 Data Protection Manager. Please read the FAQ.
Active Directory from on-premises to the cloud – Azure AD whitepapers: Identity management, provisioning, role management, and authentication are key services both on-premises and through the (hybrid) cloud.

Office 365

How to Configure S/MIME in Office 365: This post is for people who want to move from on-premises to Exchange Online and want to continue to use S/MIME.

Microsoft Partners

How to activate Microsoft Azure internal-use rights licenses? And Experience Azure: Discover and use those IURs. You can’t sell it if you don’t use it.

Licensing

Price increases in 2015!! SPLA/hosting licensing costs are going up. Hosters will have no choice but to pass that on to their customers.

Miscellaneous

Microsoft’s ‘Arcadia’ team is building a streaming app and game service: Sounds interesting.
Apple and Amazon (and others) back Microsoft in data row: Lots of interested parties are filing statements with the courts in support of Microsoft’s stance against the US government.
Business, Media and Civil Society Speak Up in Key Privacy Case: Official statement by Microsoft.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft. Hyper-V,Hardware,Virtualisation,Networking,Azure,Cloud,Cloud Computing,Hybrid Cloud,Active Directory,Backup,PowerShell,Scripting,Office 365,Licensing

Microsoft News – 12 December 2014

It’s December, the month when Microsoft employees normally head away for a long vacation and nothing much happens. Or so we thought. Azure went wild last night, releasing loads of new features either into preview or GA. Oh yeah, loads of December updates from Microsoft have problems.

Windows Client

Microsoft ready to show off Windows 10 mobile SKU on January 21: Day-long event with some content being streamed live online. This is where the consumer stuff will be launched.

System Center Virtual Machine Manager

Error ID 1602 occurs and the Microsoft System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager Console does not start: Unable to connect to the VMM Management server server_name. The Virtual Machine Manager service on that server did not respond. Verify that Virtual Machine Manager has been installed on the server and that the Virtual Machine Manager service is running.

Azure

Premium Storage, RemoteApp, SQL Database Update, Live Media Streaming, Search and More: Scott Guthrie’s announcements about new Azure services in December.
Cloud + Enterprise Release Announcements for December 11, 2014: More on those announcements.
New Premium Storage-Backed Virtual Machines: Use SSD-based storage accounts for fast VMs
High-Performance Storage for Azure Virtual Machine Workloads: More on Azure Premium Storage. Here you will find mention of a new “DS” (not D) series VM with read caching to enhance storage performance (Premium or standard/Shared).
Wrapping up the year with a boat load of Azure AD news: Azure AD might finally become interesting to me.
Application Proxy General Availability and many more new additions: Taking the WS2012 R2 functionality, Azure Active Directory can now provide single sign-on and secure remote access to all kinds of web applications hosted on-premises.
Azure RemoteApp Now Generally Available: Some comments from the RDS team
Azure Backup now supports 64-bit editions of Windows client operating systems: After you apply this update (version number: 2.0.8694.0), 64-bit editions of Windows 8.1, Windows 8, or Windows 7 Service Pack 1 (SP1) now will support Microsoft Azure Backup.

Miscellaneous

KB 2553154, 2726958 clobber Excel ActiveX; KB 3011970 Silverlight, KB 3004394 Root Cert pulled: Just assumed that any update released in December is faulty – it’s easier that way.

Technorati Tags: Windows 10,SCVMM,System Center,Storage,Azure,Cloud,Cloud Computing,Hybrid Cloud,RDS,Active Directory