Microsoft - Aidan Finn, IT Pro

Microsoft News – 24 November 2014

It’s been a slow few news days in the Microsoft world. Stuff I’m not linking to: the infinitely linked webcasts on mobility management and the Reign malware infecting computers in Ireland, Russia, and Saudi Arabia.

Windows Server

Microsoft’s View on Hyper-Convergence: A post I wrote for Petri.com.
Technical Preview Step-by-Step Guide -Storage Replica: Learn to implement this WS vNext feature.

Windows Client

Windows 10 Management Options Coming With New Windows Store: Microsoft plans to add Windows Store management capabilities for organizations using Windows 10 apps "in the coming months."

Azure

Configure Multiple NICs in an Azure Virtual Machine: On Petri.com
Architecting a disaster recovery plan for multi-tier web applications using Microsoft Azure Site Recovery: What it says on the tin.
Importing Windows Azure Cloud Services into Remote Desktop Connection Manager (RDC Man): Third article in a series.

Office 365

Simplification Comes to Office 365 Activation: Cutting out the VLSC/OSA copy/paste key step for Open licensing customers.

Miscellaneous

Growing concern in Ireland over online data privacy: A blog post by Microsoft Ireland MD, Catriona Hallahan, on the USA/Cloud issue.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,WIndows Server 2015,Windows 10,Azure,Networking,Storage,DR,RDS,Office 365,Licensing,Security

Microsoft News – 20 November 2014

There are a lot of upset people because of (1) the Azure outage and (2) how Microsoft communicated during the outage. We had a couple of affected customers. The only advice I can give to Microsoft is:

Don’t deploy your updates to everything at the same time.
Now you know how customers feel when bad updates are issued. Bring back complete testing.
Communicate clearly during an issue – that includes sending emails to affected customers. You’ve got monitoring systems & automation – use them. Heck, you even blogged about how (Azure) Automation could be used by customers to trigger actions.

Hyper-V

Backup Jobs Failing Post Nov Rollup Install: Hyper-V PM Taylor Brown has an update.

Azure

Microsoft Azure Services Hit By Widespread Outages: There’s a lot of anger out there because of how Microsoft reported these issues.
Update on Azure Storage Service Interruption: A little bit of information on the issues of the previous 24 hours.
Create a Multi-NIC VM with a Public IP in Azure: Take advantage of this new feature.

Miscellaneous

An Overview of the Microsoft Cloud Platform System: A post by me on Petri.com about Microsoft CPS.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Hyper-V,Windows Server 2012,WIndows Server 2012 R2,Backup,Azure,Storage,Cloud,Cloud Computing,Networking,Virtualisation,Hardware

Microsoft News – 19 November 2014

Pay attention to the security update for Windows that was released out of band last night. It’s an important one that prevents people from crafting custom Kerberos tickets.

Hyper-V

How to Build Azure-Like Virtual Machines on Hyper-V: A post I wrote on Petri.com

Windows Server

November 2014 update rollup for Windows RT 8.1, Windows 8.1, and Windows Server 2012 R2: This is a big update that you should test and deploy (after waiting a time you deem appropriate).
Introducing Cloud Witness: Leveraging Azure to get quorum for multi-site clusters.
Failover Clustering in Windows Server Technical Preview: A post by me on Petri.com

Azure

Monitoring Azure Services and External Systems with Azure Automation: Using Azure automation to perform checks.
Azure Disk IOPS and Virtual Machines in IaaS: Each disk has storage QoS caps applied to it.
Enabling Multiple Subscriptions to Share an ExpressRoute Circuit: Multiple vNets across multiple Azure subscriptions connected via one ExpressRoute connection for complex deployments.
Microsoft Azure Desktop Hosting: RD Gateway Farm Deployment Guidance Updated To Support Azure Load Balancer Client IP Affinity: What it says on the tin.

Security

Microsoft Releases Emergency Security Update: MS14-068 fixes a serious issue in Kerberos. This looks like one of those "push it out ASAP" (test first, of course) security fixes.

Office 365

Microsoft rebrands Identity Manager (again) and delivers new public preview: And that’s all she wrote on Forefront.
Microsoft Identity Manager Public Preview is now available! Microsoft has released the preview of MIM, formerly FIM.
Microsoft Launches Office 365 Video: Ever feel like there’s a "throw mud on the wall" thing going on?

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Hyper-V,Virtualisation,Azure,Hybrid Cloud,Cloud,Cloud Computing,Windows Server 2012 R2,Windows Server 2015,Storage,Failover Clustering,PowerShell,Scripting,Networking,Remote Desktop Services,Office 365,Active Directory

Microsoft News – 17 November 2014

I’ve had a crazy few weeks with TechEd Europe 2014, followed by the MVP Summit, followed by a week of events and catchup at work. Today, I’ve finally gotten to go through my news feeds. There is a LOT of Azure stuff from TEE14.

Hyper-V

What’s New in Windows Server vNext Hyper-V: A post by me on Petri.com
Cluster Shared Volume Failure Handling: How CSV handles storage failures and how it hides failures from applications.
Updating Integration Components over Windows Update: Microsoft announced that they would be releasing updated integration components over Windows Update from now on.
Windows 10 Technical Preview: Hot Add / Remove of Network Adapter: You can now add and remove network adapters from running Generation 2 virtual machines.

Windows Server

vNext Failover Clustering in Windows Server Technical Preview: A video with clustering master, Elden Christensen.
Storage Quality of Service Guide Released for Windows Server Technical Preview: A step-by-step guide.
RemoteFX vGPU Updates in Windows Server Next: Capabilities that improve the experience for end users in a Windows VDI environment for ‘Engineering/Designer’ application workloads that require OpenGL API support and all graphics applications (DX and OpenGL) that require higher video memory.

System Center

Update Rollup 4 for System Center 2012 R2: Wait 1 month. Trust me.
Update Rollup 8 for System Center 2012 Service Pack 1: See previous. Trust me.

Windows Client

Windows 10 – Making Deployment Easier: Using an in-place upgrade instead of the traditional wipe-and-load approach that organizations have historically used to deploy new Windows versions. This upgrade process is designed to preserve the apps, data, and configuration from the existing Windows installation, taking care to put things back the way they need to be after Windows 10 has been installed on the system. And support for traditional deployment tools.
Windows 10 – Manageability Choices: Ensuring that Windows works better when using Active Directory and Azure Active Directory together. When connecting the two, users can automatically be signed-in to cloud-based services like Office 365, Microsoft Intune, and the Windows Store, even when logging in to their machine using Active Directory accounts. For users, this will mean no longer needing to remember additional user IDs or passwords.

Azure

New Marketplace, Network Improvements, New Batch Service, Automation Service, more: TechEd announcement by Scott Guthrie
SAN Replication based Enterprise Grade Disaster Recovery with ASR and System Center: Enterprises that seek to leverage the snapshot and replication capabilities of their Storage Area Network (SAN) Arrays to enable high performance synchronous and asynchronous replication between their on-premises private clouds can now orchestrate end-to-end storage array-based replication and disaster recovery with ASR and System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM).

ASR SAN replication topology

Announcing the Azure Marketplace: Offers Microsoft Azure Certified and open-source community virtual machine images including SAP, Cloudera, DataStax, CommVault, Veeam, Trend Micro, and Core OS as well as virtual machine extensions including McAfee and Octopus Deploy.
Migrate your Websites to Azure in just a Few Clicks: A new tool from MSFT. See this Getting Started Guide & this video.
Windows Docker Client Demo Highlights Linux Containers on Azure: Docker, CoreOS, and Linux Documentation on Azure.
New Networking features and partnerships for Enterprise scenarios: A whole bunch of announcements: ExpressRoute enhancements include new strategic partnerships, a Meet-Me location in Australia, multi-site ExpressRoute for better disaster recovery, multiple subscriptions sharing the same ExpressRoute circuit, and support for 4,000 routes. We are improving overall security with Network Security Groups for easier subnet isolation in multi-tier topologies, Site to Site Forced Tunneling which sends network traffic back to on-premises for policy validation to meet compliance requirements, and VPN support for Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS). A new high-performance gateway, multiple virtual NICs in a VM, access to VPN operations logs, nested Traffic Manager policies and Azure load balancer source IP affinity demonstrate our commitment to continually enhance Azure networking capabilities.
New – Azure Traffic Manager Nested Profiles: his feature enables you to create more flexible and powerful load-balancing and failover schemes to support the needs of larger, more complex deployments. Note you can also do hybrid site balancing now.
Azure Load Balancer new distribution mode: Adding a new distribution mode called Source IP Affinity (also known as session affinity or client IP affinity).
Azure Site Recovery – Announcing Windows Azure Pack integration and PowerShell Support: As part of update roll up of Windows Azure Pack UR 4.0, now cloud service providers will be able to offer Windows Azure Pack Plan or ADDONS with ASR capabilities. You now have the ASR PowerShell cmdlets for recovery solution between two on-premise hyper-V datacenters available as part of Azure PowerShell 0.8.10 release.
Using VNET integration and Hybrid connections with Azure Websites: This will outline the example of getting WordPress running on Azure Websites with a remote MySQL database and will be covered in two parts.
Microsoft Antimalware for Azure Cloud Services and Virtual Machines: Real time protection from the latest threats, on-demand scheduled scanning, and collection of antimalware events to your storage account via Azure Diagnostics at no additional charge.
Introducing PowerShell support for Azure Site Recovery: PowerShell support for recovery between two Hyper-V sites managed by Azure Site Recovery.
Red Teaming – Using Cutting-Edge Threat Simulation to Harden the Microsoft Enterprise Cloud: How Microsoft performs penetration tests on Azure and Office 365.
Deploying Your Own Private Docker Registry on Azure: In order to ship your containerized applications to the cloud, you use Docker tools to construct a Docker container image. Although the Docker Hub is a paid service for storing private images, Docker respects developers’ needs and provides the open source “Docker Registry” software used to build the Docker Hub. It is designed to store and provide container images, but the best part about it is that you can host your own private registry with it.
Offering Managed DR for IaaS Workloads with ASR and Azure Pack: Service Providers can now offer Managed DR as a premium service to their customers on top of IaaS workloads.
Deploy to Azure Button for Azure Websites: Deploying to Azure Websites from a Git repository just got a little easier with the Deploy to Azure Button.
Azure Websites Authentication / Authorization: Azure Websites Authentication / Authorization allows you to quickly and easily restrict access to your websites running on Azure Websites by leveraging Azure Active Directory.
Encrypting Azure Virtual Machines with CloudLink SecureVM: CloudLink SecureVM Agent which enables for disk encryption for your Azure Virtual Machines.
AzCopy – Announcing General Availability of AzCopy 3.0 plus preview release of AzCopy 4.0 with Table and File support
Create a VM with multiple NICs in Azure: Done using updated version of Azure PowerShell.
Monitoring Azure Site Recovery: The monitoring capabilities of Azure Site Recovery.
Microsoft announces Exchange Support for Azure VM as a Witness Server: As of January 1, 2015, Microsoft will support using an Azure laaS file server VM as a witness server for an on-premises DAG .

Office 365

Enterprise Mobility TechEd Announcements: Lots of stuff.
Configuring AD FS Servers in an Internal Load-Balanced Set in Azure for Office365 Single Sign-On: Third post in a series on how to enable hybrid single using-in solution using a hybrid Azure deployment.
Office 365 Business Users Getting New ‘Clutter’ E-Mail Feature: Don’t know if I’d trust this.
Microsoft To Rename Lync as ‘Skype for Business’ Next Year:

Intune

New Microsoft Intune capabilities coming this week: The Intune team will be rolling out a service update between November 17, 2014 and November 19, 2014 that introduces new capabilities to Intune standalone (cloud only).

Operational Insights

Microsoft Releases Azure Operational Insights Preview: Starting with a limited free option. The preview is available in the Azure U.S. East region.

Licensing

Microsoft to make per-user Windows licensing available to enterprise customers: A popular move.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Hyper-V,Virtualisation,Windows 10,Windows Server 2012 R2,WIndows Server 2015,Failover Clustering,Storage,RDS,System Center,Azure,Hybrid Cloud,Cloud,Cloud Computing,Networking,DR,PowerShell,Scripting,Linux,Security,Exchange,Office 365,Intune,Licensing

Ever Wonder HOW Microsoft Upgrades The Firmware of New Employees? I Have Evidence!

I’ve had a number of friends “go blue” over the years, that is, they joined Microsoft as full time employees (FTEs). All were like me, some things they liked and others they didn’t like at Microsoft … BEFORE they joined the company. Not long after joining, they flew to the mother ship in Redmond for “training” or “meetings” and returned very different people. Everything was awesome; even the dodgiest endeavours by Microsoft were the best things ever.

I and others would joke about our friends having their firmware updated. That was a joke … until now. I have the evidence that something mysterious is indeed happening. I was behind the curtains yesterday, and went to get a Coke from the fridge when I spotted this:

Sparking water made by … Microsoft! Of course, I will be taking this evidence to a lab to be analysed and searched for traces of psychotropic substances. I suspect this may indeed be the actual firmware upgrade that is supplied to unwitting new blue badges when they are transported to Redmond, WA. I shall follow up as soon as the results are in from the lab.

Note: This article is written with my tongue firmly in my cheek. If you are offended or think I am being serious in any way, then please visit a reality consultant.

Microsoft News – 24 October 2014

This is the last of my news posts before TechEd Europe. Expect crazy flurries of news on Tuesday morning during the keynote. I’ll be live blogging so my updates will be there.

System Center

Windows Azure Pack WhitePaper based on Building Clouds: A combination of posts on deploying Windows Azure Pack

Azure

Automate Linux VM OS Updates Using OSPatching Extension: Azure VM OSPatching extension for Linux enables the Azure VM administrators to automate the VM OS updates with the customized configurations.
Using Azure Automation to check health of Minecraft server in Azure: Yeap, there’s a Minecraft VM image in the Azure Gallery

Miscellaneous

Microsoft Announces Record First-Quarter Revenue, Thanks To Cloud And Hardware Growth: Revenues up, profits down a bit thanks to redundancies, and Surface sales double (from 10 to 20 – LOL). Windows Server, System Center, Azure, and Office bringing home the bacon.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,System Center,WAP,Azure,Linux,PowerShell

Microsoft News – 23 October 2014

It’s the calm before the storm of announcements from TechEd Europe 2014.

Window Server

Step-By-Step – Creating a Windows 2012 R2 Lab in Azure: Do it on a budget.

Desktop

Windows 10 – Security and Identity Protection for the Modern World: With this release Microsoft will have nearly everything in place to move the world away from the use of single factor authentication options, like passwords.

Azure

Instance-Level Public IP Address: VMs now can have dedicated public IPs and not rely just on the cloud service VIP.
Migrate Azure Virtual Machines between Storage Accounts: It’s not pretty but the supplied PoSH will abstract that for you.
WebJobs goes into full production: You can start uploading tasks to run in your web hosting plans.

Events

What to Expect at Microsoft TechEd Europe 2014: An article by me on Petri.com

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Azure,Windows 10,Cloud,Cloud Computing,Networking,Storage,Events

Microsoft News Summary – 22 October 2014

Hyper-V

Hot Add & Remove Static Memory in a Hyper-V vNext Virtual Machine: You can do this in vNext.

Windows Server

SmbStorageTier.ps1: A simple way to pin files to tiers in Scale-Out File Servers

Azure

Azure’s getting bigger, faster and more open: G series super-RAM VMs, premium storage, CoreOS Linux, Docker, and Cloudera coming to Azure.
5 Ways to Move Virtual Machines into Microsoft Azure: An article I wrote for Petri.com.
Attaching disks to a VM in Azure: Yes, you can.

System Center

System Center Advisor Just Got Even Better: The SC Advisor team are doing their own hard work to make it better and better each week.
Microsoft Partners with Dell on New ‘Cloud in a Box’: The so-called Azure is actually WAP/SysCtr/Hyper-V on Dell h/w.
Cloud Platform System (CPS) – Azure Innovation Now in Your Data Center: The official statement.

Microsoft Partners

Signature Cloud Support Benefit Overview: How competency-holding partners can get free support for Azure and Office 365

Miscellaneous

Microsoft’s Patch Problems Continue: Sigh.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Hyper-V,WIndows Server 2015,Storage,Azure,Cloud,Cloud Computing,System Center,Hardware

Microsoft News Summary – 8 October 2014

Welcome to today’s cloud-heavy Microsoft news compilation.

Windows Server

What’s New in Remote Desktop Services for the next version of Windows Server? RDS in the next version of Windows Server builds on a strong foundation (WS2012 and WS2012 R2) and adds support for the scenarios included in this post.
Whitepaper – Building High Performance Storage for Hyper-V Cluster on Scale-Out File Servers using Violin Windows Flash Arrays: Got lots and lots of money? I mean LOTS of money. Then this is a whitepaper for you, talking about Violin’s All Flash Array and Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 Scale-Out File Server Cluster.
Technical Preview Step-by-Step Guide – Storage Replica: Storage Replica (SR) is a new feature that enables storage-agnostic, block-level, synchronous replication between clusters or servers for disaster recovery, as well as stretching of a failover cluster across sites for high availability. Synchronous replication enables mirroring of data in physical sites with crash-consistent volumes ensuring zero data loss at the file system level. Asynchronous replication allows site extension beyond metropolitan ranges with the possibility of data loss.
Introducing the next version of Web Application Proxy: Read about additional functionality that has been added to Web Application Proxy and AD FS as part of Windows Server next version Technical Preview.

Windows Client

Console Improvements in the Windows 10 Technical Preview: Lots of improvements in CMD command prompt

Azure

Introducing the Azure Automation Runbook Gallery: The time it takes to create functional, polished runbooks is a little faster thanks to the new Azure Automation Runbook Gallery.
More Changes to Azure by Scott Guthrie: Including support for static private IP support in the Azure Preview Portal, Active Directory authentication, PowerShell script converter, runbook gallery, hourly scheduling support.
Microsoft Certification Test Tool Preview for Azure Certified: The Microsoft Certification Test Tool for Azure Certified is designed to provide an assessment of compliance to technical requirements as part of the Azure Certified program. The test tool includes a wizard style automated section and questionnaire section to assess characteristics of a Virtual Machine image running in Microsoft Azure and generate results logs. More information on the Azure Certified program is available.
Announcing Support for Backup of Windows Server 2008 with Azure Backup: Due to feedback. Please note that this is x64 only and that there are system requirements.
Hybrid Connection Manager ClickOnce Application: ClickOnce installer for the Hybrid Connection Manager.
D-Series Performance Expectations: The new D-Series VMs provide great performance for applications needing fast, local (ephemeral) storage or a faster CPU; however, it’s important to understand a little about how the system is configured to ensure you’re getting an optimal experience.
Cloud App Discovery – Now with Excel and PowerBI Support: One of the top customer requests was to be able to perform analytics on the data collected in tools like Excel and PowerBI. Now you can take cloud app discovery data offline and explore and analyze the data with tools you already know–Excel and PowerBI.
A new region will open in India by the end of 2015: It makes sense; there are 1 billion people and some big corporations there.
Microsoft Azure Speed Test: Which Azure region is closest to you (remember that Internet geography is different to the planet’s geography. For example, where I work is a few miles from Europe North (Dublin), but the test shows me that Europe West provides me with lower latency (beaten, obviously, by CDN). My own testing using Azure Traffic Manager with geo-dispersed websites has verified this.

Office 365

One-Time Passcode for Office 365 Message Encryption: With the release of One-Time Passcode. With One-Time Passcode, you don’t need to sign in with a Microsoft account to view an encrypted message.
Accelerate your Office 365 adoption: Microsoft introduces the Office 365 Customer Success Center: A new website designed to help customers drive adoption and business value.
Delivering the first chapter of Groups in Office 365: Take a look at this video to learn how Groups brings people together to enable better communication and collaboration across Office 365.

Miscellaneous

Can Google Cloud Platform Win the Cloud Battle Against AWS and Azure? Petri’s Jeff James interviews Brian Goldfarb, head of product marketing for the Google Cloud Platform.
US says it can hack into foreign-based servers without warrants: Therefore, we can hack US servers without warrants. Right?
Symantec Said to Explore Split Into Security, Storage Cos: Someone please call 2008 and let them know.

Technorati Tags: WIndows Server 2015,RDS,Storage,Hyper-V,Storage Spaces,Virtualisation,Failover Clustering,Windows 10,Azure,Cloud,Cloud Computing,Hybrid Cloud,Scripting,PowerShell,Networking,Backup,IIS,Office 365,Security

Microsoft News Summary – 6 October 2014

The big news today is that HP is “planning” to split. No, not leave, but divide into two.

Hyper-V

Hyper-V did not find virtual machines to import from the location . The operation failed with error code ‘32784’: Didier Van Hoye reminds you that you should have tested your rollback plans and not made assumptions.

Windows Server

Getting started with Windows Volume Replication? here are two main scenarios for Storage Replica in the Windows Server Technical Preview. This is one of the more interesting features in Windows Server vNext for me.

Office 365

What’s New – September 2014: What did MSFT do last month?
Announcing availability of new Office 365 plans for small and midsized businesses: Here’s the official announcement. There is A LOT of confusion out there. Customers of MicroWarehouse can talk to Nicole to get the facts that even MSFT don’t have!

Miscellaneous

HP to split into two companies, one focused on PCs/printers and one on enterprise computing: A story that the WSJ started on Sunday

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Hyper-V,Virtualisation,WIndows Server 2015,Office 365,Hardware,Licensing