Microsoft - Aidan Finn, IT Pro

Microsoft News Summary – 14 July 2014

After a week’s break in Finland, I am back with news from the last 10 or so days. It was a busy period!

Setting up a Highly-Available VMM 2012 Environment: This article will guide you through the recommended way to setup and configure a typical, highly available (HA) System Center 2012 R2 Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) installation.
Introducing Microsoft Azure File Service: Learn about this SMB 2.01 shared configuration/settings/diagnostics feature.
Persisting connections to Microsoft Azure Files: Making the authentication survive logouts.
Virtualization Fabric Design Considerations Guide: This guide details a series of steps and tasks that you can go through to design a virtualization fabric that is able to host many virtual machines. Throughout the steps and tasks, the guide presents options available to you to meet functional and service quality requirements.
Windows Azure Pack Infrastructure as a Service Jumpstart: This clashes with the much more important presentation by me with Petri and sponsored by Veeam.
Using deduplication for Hyper-V Replica out-of-band (OOB) initial replication: A hack to squeeze more VMs into your removable media.
Azure Site Recovery – case of the “network connection failure”: A handy tip for the few that can run ASR.
Step-by-Step: RemoteApp Hybrid Deployment–Part 1: Deploying the managed RDS in Azure.
Introducing Microsoft Azure StorSimple: Introducing the new niche scenario tiered storage models THAT ARE NOT A SAN REPLACEMENT – they are a supplement for the storage of suitable data.
Free ebook – Rethinking Enterprise Storage: A Hybrid Cloud Model: How the Microsoft Cloud OS is and the needs of cloud computing scale and availability have changed the needs and capabilities of storage in the enterprise and hosting environments.
Best practices for setting up Remote Desktop Licensing (Terminal Server Licensing) across Active Directory Domains/Forests or Workgroup: This article provides information on the questions around the supportability (or recommended approach) of setting up Remote Desktop (RD) Licensing across domain, forest or workgroups.
System Center 2012 Configuration Manager SP1 and System Center 2012 R2 Configuration Manager now support Microsoft SQL Server 2012 SP2.
"Not enough disk space" error when you run a V2V conversion to a CSV in Virtual Machine Manager: When you try to perform a virtual to virtual (V2V) conversion to a cluster shared volume in Microsoft System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager, the cluster that you selected may have a placement rating of zero stars (unacceptable). File this under FFS.
Beware Keyloggers at Hotel Business Centers: The U.S. Secret Service is advising the hospitality industry to inspect computers made available to guests in hotel business centers, warning that crooks have been compromising hotel business center PCs with keystroke-logging malware in a bid to steal personal and financial data from guests.
6 Important Things To Know About Microsoft’s New Volume Licensing Program: The program for >250 users that is replacing Slect Plus, MOSA, and MBSA, is slowly being rolled out worldwide.
Create a NIC Team Inside of a Hyper-V Virtual Machine: A post by me on Petri.com
Using the Microsoft Azure IaaS Cost Estimator Tool: A post by me on Petri.com
Pinning a File in Tiered Microsoft Storage Spaces: A post by me on Petri.com
Pause and Drain Actions on Windows Server 2012 R2 Clusters: A post by me on Petri.com
Live Exporting Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V VMs: A post by me on Petri.com
Evolving Office 365 plans for small and midsized businesses: Renaming and repackaging of SME O365 plans. This is a confusing read to most – MicroWarehouse Ltd customers in Ireland should talk to Nicole to get a breakdown.
Nadella Outlines Microsoft Organizational Changes: Major engineering and organizational moves will be made by Microsoft over the next month, according to CEO Satya Nadella.
Microsoft Enhancing Azure Management, Expanding U.S. Locations: Microsoft is adding improvements to its Azure Portal preview, which are expected to arrive next week.
Report: Windows, PCs to Rebound in 2015: PC sales to increase in 2015, but tablet sales to pass those of PCs for the first time, according to Kool-Aid distributor, Gartner.

Technorati Tags: System Center,VMM,Failover Clustering,Azure,Cloud,Cloud Computing,Storage,Networking,Hyper-V,Hybrid Cloud,DR,RDS,Licensing,ConfigMgr,Security,Office 365,Microsoft,Hardware

Microsoft News Summary – 4 July 2014

Not much news for you to read today:

Deploying a Non-Clustered Hyper-V Host for Production Workloads: The final part in my series on how to get a non-clustered host up and running.
Azure Cost Estimator Tool: Have you ever wondered what it would cost to run a traditional on premise or virtualized machine in Azure?
Planning Failover Cluster Node Sizing: Considerations on planning the number of nodes in a Windows Server Failover Cluster
Office 365 price increase ahead for some enterprises: Microsoft is increasing the price of Office 365 for customers with Enterprise Agreement contracts by roughly 15 percent.
Deploying a Non-Clustered Hyper-V Host for Production Workloads: The final in this series I wrote for the Petri IT Knowledgebase.
Conficker is still the most common form of malware found in enterprises and small businesses: This is professional negligence and should be a sacking offence from the board down.

Technorati Tags: Windows Server 2012 R2,Hyper-V,Virtualisation,Azure,Cloud,Cloud Computing,Failover Clustering,O365,Licensing,Security

Microsoft News Summary – 3 July 2014

After a month of neglect, I have finally caught up with all of my feeds via various sources. Here are the latest bits of news, mixed up with other Microsoft happenings from the last month.

Deploying a Non-Clustered Hyper-V Host: Enabling the Hyper-V role: The second in my series on the Petri IT Knowlegebase
How to Enable Office 365 Multi-Factor Authentication: A handy demo video.
What’s new in Office 365 in June: The changes keep a’ comin’.
Microsoft Aims To Commoditize Hardware with Software-Defined Storage: What does Redmond Magazine have to say about WS2012 R2 storage?
How can we improve Microsoft Azure Site Recovery Service? My hints: 1) Remove the need for VMM 2) support generation 2 VMs. 3) Support all Azure-supported guest OSs 4) Support VHDX files larger than 1 TB.
Mellanox Cranks InfiniBand Bandwidth Up To 100: How do I convince my boss that I need this in the lab for SMB 3.0 and Live Migration?
Capacity planning for API and management portal machines: Size your Windows Azure Pack (WAP) installations.
Move a VM to a different Vnet on Azure: It’s not quite as easy as it should be, and this guide shows you how to do it.
Deploy RemoteApp on Azure: Learn how to deploy this preview Azure service
Configure VNet to VNet Connectivity in Azure: A handy guide on this new feature; connect two vNets, maybe in different regions to have a single service.
Why Column Size does matter with Storage Spaces: Few have dared to talk about columns in Storage Spaces. Michael Rueefli has blogged on why they matter. There is a conflict between performance and affordable expansion.
Configuring a File Share Witness on a Scale-Out File Server: You can’t just fire up a share on an SOFS for a file share witness for a client cluster; you need to disable CA on the share.
Security Guide for Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012: This guide provides instructions and recommendations to help strengthen the security of computers running the Hyper-V role on Windows Server 2012.
Windows Azure Pack High Availability – Lessons Learned: From the WAP Master, Marc van Eijk
Microsoft Releases Preview of Azure AD Application Proxy Service: Azure AD Application Proxy extends Microsoft’s cloud-based authentication service to an organization’s internal Web apps and services.
EU rebukes US over Microsoft email in first test of privacy: Microsoft is resisting an FBI warrant to retrieve data from an Outlook mailbox that is on servers in Dublin, outside of the US jurisdiction, inside Europe, but US law only recognizes the nationality of the server owner (USA).
Microsoft Releases SQL Server 2012 SP2: This went GA in early June. Take care – make sure your products (even Microsoft ones) support the service pack.
Microsoft Execs Define IT’s Role in a Hybrid Cloud World: Microsoft needs to bring IT pros on board for Azure to be a success – alienating them does not help.

Technorati Tags: Windows Server 2012 R2,Windows Server 2012,Hyper-V,Virtualisation,Office 365,Storage,Storage Spaces,Azure,DR,Networking,RDS,Failover Clustering,Cloud,Cloud Computing,Active Directory,SQL

Microsoft News Summary-2 July 2014

It’s been a long times since I posted one of these! I’ve just trawled my feeds for interesting articles and came up with the following. I’ll be checking news and Twitter for more.

What Is Microsoft Azure RemoteApp? Learn about this new RDS offering in Microsoft Azure
What are Hyper-V Virtual Machine Integration Services? My post on the Petri IT Knowledgebase
What are Hyper-V Extended Port ACLs? My post on the Petri IT Knowledgebase
Killing A Frozen Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Virtual Machine: My post on the Petri IT Knowledgebase
Performing Out-Of-Band File Copies to Hyper-V Virtual Machines: My post on the Petri IT Knowledgebase
Hyper-V Router Guard and DHCP Guard Explained: My post on the Petri IT Knowledgebase
Getting Started with Microsoft Azure Automation: Automation via PowerShell is the future. Learn how Microsoft Azure does it.
How to Deploy a Non-Clustered Hyper-V Host: Part 1 of a series by me on the Petri IT Knowledgebase.
SQL 2014 Licensing Update: The objective of this article is to review the publicly available documentation available on SQL Server. LOTS of changes, particularly for license mobility within server farms.
Cluster Shared Volume Performance Counters: This gargantuan post covers performance monitoring of a CSV.
Announcing the Data Classification Toolkit for Windows Server 2012 R2! A kit to help you control access to files.
Recommended hotfixes, updates, and known solutions for Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V Network Virtualization (HNV) environments: This article documents recommended hotfixes, product updates, and known solutions that are currently available for Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V Network Virtualization (HNV) environments.
VDS Basic Provider event ID 1 is logged on a Hyper-V guest operating system: A KB article for when you have W2008 R2 or Windows 7 running as a guest OS and you get Event ID 1 from the source of System/VDS Basic Provider.
FIX: Backups are unsuccessful when you use Microsoft Azure Online Backup: When you try to back up data by using Microsoft Azure Online Backup, the backup process is unsuccessful.
Update rollup package adds features to Microsoft Azure Online Backup in System Center 2012 SP1 DPM and in Windows Server 2012: This article describes an update rollup package that adds the following features to the Microsoft Azure Online Backup for Microsoft System Center 2012 Service Pack 1 (SP1) Data Protection Manager (DPM) on a computer that is running Windows Server 2012.
ODX file transfers run slower than expected in Windows Server 2012: Microsoft is currently investigating some performance improvements for the TRIM and the UNMAP commands. However, this functionality is very dependent on the storage vendors’ implementation. Therefore, you should make sure that your storage software and firmware are up to date.
Emulex driver and firmware update: The latest news from Hyper-V.nu on the shockingly awful lack of responsiveness to a critical failure by Emulex, affecting most blade customers trying to use WS2012 R2 Hyper-V.
Ubuntu 14.04 in a Generation 2 VM: Canonical released Ubuntu 14.04 was the first Linux release to support running inside of a Generation 2 virtual machine. Note that CentOS 7 and RHEL 7 have also joined the generation 2 VM club.
Allowing non-Administrators to control Hyper-V–Updated: It’s really easy to delegate Hyper-V administration rights on WS2012 and WS2012 R2 Hyper-V
How to get the best disk performance with Linux on Hyper-V: Based on information from Best Practices for running Linux on Hyper-V.
Can you run Windows Server 2012 R2 on Windows Server 2008 R2? No.
Azure Site Recovery – FAQ: Pay attention to the details. This service might not be for you unless some serious changes are made by Microsoft.
The VMM team wants you…to tell us what you want: Be nice 🙂
VDI VMs deployed through RDS do not appear in the VMM 2012 console: After you create Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) based virtual machines (VM) in new Collections by using Remote Desktop Services (RDS), the VM intermittently fails to show up in the System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager (VMM 2012) console.
Contribute your feature suggestions for Windows Azure Pack! A smaller audience, but still …
Public IP Address Requirements within a Windows Azure Pack environment: Giving VMs access to the net.
Operations Manager team – Looking to talk to Storage, Network or Application Administrators: These areas need development in the monitoring space.

Technorati Tags: Azure,Hyper-V,Windows Server 2012,Windows Server 2012 R2,Virtualisation,Cloud,Cloud Computing,SQL,Licensing,Failover Clustering,Storage,Backup,Networking,System Center,Hardware,VMM,Operations Manager,RDS,VDI,Linux

Microsoft News Summary-4 June 2014

A few bits and pieces from the last 24-48 hours:

Steve Ballmer outbid Ellison, Oprah, and David Geffen to buy an NBA team for $2billion: He’s all in on the skyhook shot now. He’s not the first ex-Softie to buy a franchise. MSFT founder Paul Allen owns the Seattle Seahawks (*cough* *spit*) and the Portland Trailblazers NBA team. Both teams are in different divisions in the same conference. I can imagine what the bets will be like in some private room in Bellevue, WA or somewhere nearby.
Step-by-Step: Configure VNet to VNet Connectivity in Azure: Learn how to implement the new Azure feature to connect two virtual networks.
Volume licensing or SPLA? Should you use SPLA or volume licensing?
Adding more external IP´s to your WAP NVGRE VM´s: Use PowerShell to add more public IP addresses to your SDN VMs
Failing KB2919355 Update for Windows 8.1: How to force this update to install.
Azure Guest OS Family 1 Retirement Information: W2008 images will be retired on September 2, 2014. There is no "upgrade"; you have to migrate your services to newer guest OSs.
From Inside the Cloud: Who has access to your data within Office 365? Answering a question about security, procedure and compliance.
Desktop virtualization deployment overview: Start of a 4-part series discussing hybrid Remote Desktop Services (RDS).

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Azure,Networking,Security,Licensing,Windows 8.1,Office 365,RDS

Microsoft News Summary-3 June 2014

It was a bank (national) holiday weekend here in Ireland. I was also attending and speaking at E2EVC in Brussels, where I talked about designing and building Hyper-V over SMB 3.0 storage – that seemed to go down well to a full room.

Here’s a break down of the news from a slow weekend:

2012R2 iSCSI Target Settings for Configuring a Specific Network: A useful way to control which NIC the iSCSI target uses for iSCSI traffic.
Automatic Start and Stop Actions for Hyper-V Virtual Machines: My post on Petri IT Knowledgebase
300 Level SPLA Licensing: Licensing scenarios that can literally drive you NUTS because if interpreted wrong, it can cost you and your company money.
What’s new in Office 365 – May 2014: May has brought a slew of updates to both mobile apps, like OneNote and Lync, and web experiences, like optimizations for OneDrive for business, Office 365 admin experience, and developer APIs.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Storage,Networking,Hyper-V,Virtualisation,Licensing,Office 365

Microsoft News Summary-30 May 2014

Greetings from Belgium where I will be presenting a Hyper-V over SMB 3.0 session (designing & implementing a SOFS) at E2EVC, a community virtualization conference. Here is the Microsoft news of the last 24 hours. It appears that the momentum to signing up to support and partner with Azure is growing.

KB: Configuring and Troubleshooting Operating System Deployment in System Center 2012 Configuration Manager: While there are no simple guides to implement something as powerful and complex as OSD, this article describes the step-by-step process for configuring System Center 2012 Configuration Manager (ConfigMgr 2012) to capture an existing Windows image, then walks you through creating a Client Package and Task Sequence to deploy and install that image.
TechEd NA 2014 Interview: Microsoft GM Mike Shutz Discusses End User Computing and More: Part 2 of my interview with Mike Schutz, where I start of by asking “should IT pros fear the cloud” and then move into end-user management and mobile device management.
Recreate a Virtual Machine in Microsoft Azure: Learn how to quickly recreate a virtual machine configuration in Microsoft Azure without having to reinstall or back up the virtual hard disk.
Understand OData Services with Windows Azure Pack IaaS: This topic provides basic information about what OData is and how it works. This is extremely important because IaaS for Windows Azure Pack is offered through an OData service, specifically by Service Provider Foundation through the Service Management API. If you are new to OData, it would benefit you to read this entire topic.
Microsoft Azure users to get access to Salesforce tools: Microsoft Azure users will soon get access to Salesforce.com’s customer management tools, following the announcement of a new strategic partnership between the two firms.

Microsoft News Summary-28 May 2014

It’s been a slow few days for news. Here’s what popped up overnight.

Deploy a Windows 8.1 Image Using MDT 2013: This topic will show you how to take your reference image for Windows 8.1, and deploy that image to your environment using the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT), and MDT 2013 specifically.
Microsoft Surface-branded Miracast dongle leaks: Unconfirmed rumour that MSFT is making a miracast device. I have a 3rd party one – could not make it work with Windows.
Script Browser & Script Analyzer 1.2: The best way to learn scripting is to reuse examples. This add-on helps you browse and use such examples of PowerShell in the built-in ISE editor.
How to create a hybrid deployment of RemoteApp: A solution where you can connect your on-premises network to the hosted RDS service via a site-to-site VPN.
Scott Guthrie – Lots of Azure Stuff Launched: A list of the new features of Azure from the new head of Server & Tools, as launched at TechEd.
Persisting connections to Microsoft Azure Files: This post will concentrate on how you can create a persistent connection to an Azure File share so that after a VM reboots, the share will be available for your scheduled tasks, applications, or logged in user.

Technorati Tags: Deployment,Windows 8.1,MDT,PowerShell,Scripting,Azure,RDS

Microsoft News Summary-23 May 2014

1,000,000 IOPS from Hyper-V VMs using a SOFS? Talk about nerd-vana!!! Here are the links I found interesting over the last 48 hours:

TechEd 2014: What’s New for IT Pros: My summary from TechEd on Petri. Note that I forgot to include Trend Micro/Symantec/Microsoft offering guest OS AV, and Tm offering at-rest data encryption.
3 Tips for Working with the Active Directory Administrative Center (ADAC): I wonder what percentage of admins have ever even opened this tool that includes some of the features they’ve wanted for 10+ years.
How to troubleshoot the “Needs Attention” and “Not Responding” host status in System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager: Agreed, this happens way too often.
Quickly Recovering Replication on Hyper-V: How to force Hyper-V Replica to resync and restart replication after a long outage or connection issue.
Gathering Recent Events for a Specific Hyper-V VM: Troubleshoot a specific VM on a Hyper-V host.
Hyper-V Replica Replication Health Mailer: A PowerShell script which mails the replication health in a host or in a cluster in a nice dashboard format. It gets the status of the replicating VMs and their foot print on CPU and in Memory.
Hyper-V UNMAP Does Work With SAN Snapshots And Checkpoints But Not Always As You First Expect: How SAN snapshots impact UNMAP in ways that you might not initially expect.
How Storage Spaces Responds to Errors on Physical Disks: Essential reading for those doing Storage Spaces.
Achieving Over 1-Million IOPS from Hyper-V VMs in a Scale-Out File Server Cluster Using Windows Server 2012 R2: Go crazy with Storage Spaces in a SOFS.

Technorati Tags: Event Notes,Active Directory,System Center,VMM,Hyper-V,DR,Storage,Storage Spaces,Virtualisation,Failover Clustering,Windows Server 2012 R2