I took a break from these posts last week while I was at TechEd, and then had work catch up to do this week. Let’s get back a rockin’. There is a distinct tendency towards cloud and automation in the news of the last week. That should be no surprise.
- Microsoft Enhancing Office 365 ProPlus Management Capabilities: Click-to-run updates will be faster. Admins can selectively block updates. And more …
- Announcing Windows PowerShell Desired State Configuration for Linux: If you run a large data center with lots of admin driven deployment then you should look at DSC. And wait for it … DSC is now a CTP release on Linux!
- PowerShell DSC for Linux, Step by Step: Put the DSC for Linux into action.
- Why SPLA? Why would you go with the Microsoft Services Provider License Agreement (SPLA) instead of OEM or volume licensing? That is followed by the SPLA level 200 FAQ.
- An IT Pro’s Perspective of TechEd 2014: My take, on Petri, on how Microsoft related to IT pros at the TechEd NA 2014 keynote.
- Choosing a sign-in model for Office 365: Native, DirSync or ADFS & DirSync? Learn the differences.
- PowerShell DSC Blog Series – Part 3, Testing DSC Resources: Testing PowerShell Desired State Configuration resources during the authoring process.
- Deployment–At last, a GUI for PDT!!! Benedict Berger and Kamil Kosek from Elanity Network Partner have produced something they call “PDT GUI”. It will load and edit Variable.xml files using a very nicely designed simple GUI. It doesn’t yet allow for all PDT possibilities – some of the advanced scenarios such as clustering are not included (yet) – but it really is an excellent way to get started with PDT without the fear of XML.
- Description of Update Rollup 2 for System Center 2012 R2 Data Protection Manager: The UR2 for DPM 2012 R2 is fixed … allegedly. Don’t go rushing it out!
- Driver file copying goes slowly during bare-metal deployment in System Center 2012 R2 VMM: When you use System Center 2012 R2 Virtual Machine Manager (VMM R2) to provision a physical computer as a virtual machine host (also known as bare-metal deployment), it may take longer than expected to install matching device drivers. No fix shared yet.
- System Center Advisor Preview Opened Up: Anyone can sign up now.
- Deploying SQL Server 2014 with Cluster Shared Volumes: CSV is now a supported storage file system for SQL Server 2014 failover cluster instances (FCI).