Microsoft News – 26 February 2015

In today’s cloudy link aggregation I have news on Windows Server (2003 end of life to Azure), Private Cloud bugs, Azure, and Office 365.

Windows Server

Be Prepared for Tomorrow’s Business: Prioritize Your Windows Server 2003 Migration: Although 75% of IT professionals are aware that support for Windows Server 2003 is ending July 14, 2015, there are still a lot of questions about just how urgent the need to move is.

Hotfix for known issues in Update Rollup 5 for System Center 2012 R2 Virtual Machine Manager: Whoda thunk it? An update rollup from Microsoft has issues. How weird!!!! But instead of making it too easy by withdrawing and re-publishing the offending update, they’ve released a hotfix. Hmm how fantastic for anyone that charges by the hour and thinks of looking for the update!

Microsoft Azure Disaster Recovery Replication Methods: A post I wrote for Petri.com
Enabling Hyper-V to Azure DR Replication: A post I wrote for Petri.com
Create and pre-configure Azure virtual machines the easy way with PowerShell: Yet another post on this subject. I haven’t tested/looked at the code but I have yet to see a fully working example, anywhere.
Sunny and Swarmy in Azure: Microsoft is joining Docker, Inc. in announcing the beta releases of Docker Machine and Docker Swarm on Azure and Docker Machine support on Hyper-V.

Utilizing Office 365 Staged Migration to Mitigating Risk: A very low risk alternative to the cutover scenario if the Hybrid configuration is not an option.