The positive highlight for me is the excellent TechNet article on managing tiered Storage Spaces. The lowlight was the unannounced price changes in Azure – (A) it was unannounced (B) there was no notice, and (C) it means that customers cannot plan; customers hate each and every one of those, especially the latter.
Hyper-V
- Resource Metering in Hyper-V: A post that I wrote for Petri.com.
- Importing a Virtual Machine with an Incompatible Saved State: A nugget of info from Ben Armstrong.
- Clustered Hyper-V Virtual Machine Prioritization: A post that I wrote for Petri.com.
- “Error applying Hard Drive changes” on Generation 2 VMs: Another nugget of info from Ben Armstrong.
Window Server
- Monitor Storage Tiers Performance in Windows Server 2012 R2: AWESOME article. More please!
Windows
- The September 30th Microsoft Event: Paul Thurrott (on Windows Weekly) confirmed that this event will not be streamed. Major mistake in my opinion. The attendees are a small set of media, and the subject matter is Windows “Threshold” in the enterprise. Sure … let’s not let the IT pros who will make the recommendation see the event. That’s reeeealllly sensible. Let the Windows 8 insanity continue.
Azure
- Azure VM price changes: The general purpose instances went up in price (fractions of a cent per hour) and the memory intensive instances went down. At least that’s the case for Europe North. There was no announcement from Microsoft – I found it by accident. Thanks to Arto Roth (@artoroth) for the confirmation.
- Microsoft Azure StorSimple Getting Started Guides: This should prove useful for both StorSimple customers.
- Azure Automation – Controlling Runbook Streams for Testing and Troubleshooting: This post will cover some concepts and best practices for controlling runbook streams that will help you debug and troubleshoot your runbooks.
- Enabling CDN for Azure Websites: Enterprise functionality made easy & affordable.
Office 365
- Launch documents and get started right away with the new Office 365 home page: Microsoft is launching a new home page for O365 – I still have the old one.

Licensing
- SPLA Audit start to finish: SPLA is based on an honour system – but audits have become a way of life with such licensing programs.
Miscellaneous
- Larry Ellison has "Retired" as Oracle CEO – Or has he? The San Francisco Chronicle asks this question.