Microsoft News – 16 February 2015

I was away on vacation for a little bit, photographing eagles in Poland. And then I came back and had to dive deep into Azure Site Recovery to prep a training class.

I’m back in the normal swing of things so here we go …

Hyper-V

• Getting Hyper-V Integration Components via Windows Update: A post I wrote for Petri.com
• Hyper-V and Wireless networking: Ben Armstrong explains why your Wi-Fi NIC or DHCP might not be working correctly with Hyper-V virtual machines.
• Troubleshooting Hyper-V Networking: A post by me on Petri.com
• Hot Memory Resize with Windows 10: You can hot-resize memory of vNext guest OS VMs with static memory.
• Memory Demand in Windows 10: You can easily see actual memory usage of a guest OS VM with static memory.
• Docker on Ubuntu on Hyper-V 2012 R2: Application containers in virtual machines.

Windows Server

• Using PowerShell to select Physical Disks for use with Storage Spaces: Using PowerShell speeds up your deployment.
• New version of Microsoft Assessment and Planning 9.2: Get information for a migration or upgrade.
• Why 1.6 million people will miss Microsoft’s Windows Server 2003 date with fate: Article I was interviewed for on The Register.

Windows Client

• Microsoft Announces FIDO 2.0 Support Coming to Windows 10: Fast IDentity Online (FIDO) Alliance – transitioning away from passwords and to a stronger form of identity.

System Center

• Hyper-V local storage available for placement in SCVMM: Avoid VMs being accidentally placed on host-local storage, e.g. the D: drive on bare-metal-deployed hosts.
• Cumulative Update 4 for System Center 2012 R2 Configuration Manager: Now available.
• Some disks are not enumerated when you try to add them to a Data Protection Manager disk pool: When you have disks that are physically attached to a server that is running Microsoft System Center 2012 Data Protection Manager (DPM 2012 or DPM 2012 R2), the disks are displayed in Disk Management as expected, however when you try to add them to the Data Protection Manager disk pool, Data Protection Manager may not enumerate some of the disks.
• How to work with Hyper-V network virtualization and Hyper-V replicas in VMM 2012: Although VMM 2012 does not manage Hyper-V replicas natively without ASR, you can still use Hyper-V replica PowerShell cmdlets to automate Hyper-V replica-related operations. Such operations include failing over a VM by using a Hyper-V replica but without using ASR.
• Update Rollup 5 is released for System Center 2012 R2: Exercise caution and read ALL of the installation instructions.

Azure

• Exploring the Azure RemoteApp User Experience: With Azure RemoteApp, you can run Windows applications in the cloud and deliver them to your users on iOS, Mac OS X, Android in addition to Windows, and Windows Phone.
• Managing On-Premises Systems with Azure Automation: Thanks to the Windows PowerShell Remoting feature, Azure Automation can not only manage your Azure resources at an infrastructural level, but also reach inside VMs and execute commands. Think of this as SMA in the cloud, without having to install WAP.
• New set of Hybrid Cloud Test Environments: A set of topics for hybrid cloud test environments are now published.
• Replicate Azure Pack IaaS Workloads to Azure using ASR: he integration of ASR and Azure Pack also enabled Service Providers to offer DR as a value added service, opening up new review streams and the ability to offer better Service Level Agreements (SLA) to their end customers.
• Managing Traffic for Workloads in Azure: Huge solution, a few clicks.
• Load balancing workloads in Azure: Expensive solution made affordable and easy by Azure.
• New Azure Backup update supports offline disk shipment and increases the number of backup copies and retention policies in Windows: Seriously good update.

Office 365

• What’s new – January 2015: Office has gone x-plat and more.

Intune

• How to Set Up Per-App VPN using Microsoft Intune: IT Professionals can specify which managed apps can use VPN on an Intune managed iOS device and makes the connection experience seamless for the user by abstracting the steps taken to connect to a VPN server when accessing corporate documents.
• February update to Microsoft Intune: New Intune standalone (cloud only) features were made available as part of this service.

Miscellaneous

• Proposed bill limits reach of US search warrants on overseas servers: Proposal to save US owned public clouds from bankruptcy caused by ill-thought-out spying.