DR | Aidan Finn, IT Pro

Microsoft News – 27 March 2015

Welcome to the Azure Times! Or so it seems. Lots of Azure developments since I posted one of these news aggregations.

Windows Client

Reducing Windows Deployment time using Power Management: Saving up to 50% of time.

Azure

Creating a Recovery Plan for Hyper-V VM failover to Microsoft Azure: A post I wrote for Petri.com
Getting the Most Out of Azure Site Recovery: A post I wrote for Petri.com
Microsoft Azure uses Error-Correcting Code memory for enhanced reliability and security: With details on testing for an exploit called "Rowhammer" .
Protecting large data disks using Azure Site Recovery: How to overcome the issue that Azure has with data disks larger than 1 TB. Also check the comments on "write order consistency".
New additions to the Azure VM PowerShell DSC Extension: The Azure PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC) Extension team has announced some new additions to provide a seamless experience for using DSC on Azure Windows VMs.
Allocation Failure and Remediation: Weird crap that can happen when creating, starting, or resizing a VM or adding new web instances.
How to Create an Azure RemoteApp Template: A post I wrote for Petri.com
Create an Azure RemoteApp Template from an Azure VM: A post I wrote for Petri.com
Introducing RemoteApp PowerShell Cmdlets and SDK: Very useful for automating the provisioning of RemoteApp app collections
Announcing the Preview of Disaster Recovery for VMware Virtual Machines and Physical Servers to Azure using ASR: DR in the cloud via Azure is COMING to vSphere.
Azure VM OS drive limit has octupled: Meaning that you can migrate or replicate those badly configured VMs you created on-premises.
New troubleshooting Remote Desktop connections topic: Figure out why you can’t RDP to an Azure VM.
Announcing Azure App Service: Lots of stuff merging in with Websites.
How to Create a Hybrid RemoteApp Collection: A looong post by me on Petri.com
Backing Up Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines: A much needed feature on Azure finally arrives, even if it is a little ropey on day #2.
Azure AD Connect Preview 2 is available: I’ve used Preview 1 to quickly connect on-prem AD to AAD for demo labs.
What’s the best way to connect to Office 365 and Azure? Some stats on what people are actually doing.

Office

Announcing the Office 2016 IT Pro and Developer Preview: Announcing he IT Pro and Developer Preview of Office 2016 for the Windows desktop.

Office 365

Get ready for Skype for Business: Lync is rebranded and a new client is in preview.
Office Delve—discover exactly what you need, when you need it: A machine learning-based way of finding stuff has gone live.
ExpressRoute for Office 365: Bringing Azure’s hybrid WAN to O365.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft. MDT,Deployment,Azure,Cloud,Cloud Computing,Hybrid Cloud,DR,Networking,Storage,PowerShell,Scripting,RDS,Backup,Office,Office 365

Microsoft News – 13 March 2015

Quite bit of stuff to read since my last aggregation post on the 3rd.

Windows Server

Enable and Use Remote Commands in Windows PowerShell: For when you get the error “Unable to connect to the server using Windows PowerShell Remoting”.

Hyper-V

KB3031598: Hyper-V host crashes and has errors when you perform a VM live migration in Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2. Wait before deploying, as with all hotfixes, unless this issue is breaking stuff for you (test and decide).
Update Emulex VMQ Issue – They finally did it: It’s only taken 1.5 years for Emulex/HP to sort this disaster out. Choose better hardware 🙂
Best practices for migrating a datacenter from VMware to Microsoft Hyper-V: From the System Center Virtual Machine manager team.
Checking and Correcting Virtual Hard Disk Fragmentation: By Ben Armstrong
How Hyper-V Backup Got Better in 2012 R2 (but now requires a SCSI controller): By Ben Armstrong
Hyper-V and "Event ID: 58 – The disk signature of disk 2 is equal to the disk signature of disk 0": By Ben Armstrong

Windows Client

Sluggish Tablet Market Will See Some Windows 10 Gains This Year: By 2019, IDC expects Android to lead with 62.9 percent of the tablet market. iOS will show weaker growth (23.0 percent), while Windows will gain "significant share" (14.1 percent) yet still remain in third place, according to IDC.
Microsoft to accelerate its release pace for Windows 10 preview: Microsoft appears to be on the verge of releasing an updated Windows 10 preview build. And this time, the company says, it’s serious about picking up the pace.
MDT 2013 Update 1 Preview – What’s Changed: In case you missed it at, the new preview of MDT 2013 Update 1 is now available for download from the Connect website. This new release works with the new ADK preview for Windows 10, which is available on the download center.

Azure

New A10/A11 Azure Compute Sizes: Two new high-spec standard A series VMs
Reduce RTO by using Azure Traffic Manager with Azure Site Recovery: Using Microsoft’s load balancer to failover name resolution of external services from primary site to Azure. Clever stuff!
Simplifying Virtual Machine Troubleshooting using Azure Log Collector: The Azure Log Collector extension can collect and upload logs from Cloud Service instances or Virtual Machines without requiring to log into the remote Virtual Machine.
Introducing Email notifications for Azure Site Recovery: Email notifications are a new feature for Azure Site Recovery that allows you to easily monitor the replication health of your protected virtual machines.
Azure Active Directory Solutions Architecture White Paper: This white paper describes the Microsoft Azure Active Directory Identity and Access Management solutions offered to customers of Azure, Office 365, Intune, Microsoft CRM and all Microsoft Online services.
Azure AD Conditional Access preview updated: Now supports On-Premises and Custom LOB apps: Conditional Access is powerful policy based evaluation engine that lets you create access rules for any Azure AD connected application. More sensitive apps can be assigned stricter policies, such as requiring Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) from a registered device while less sensitive apps can have more open policies.
Final Word on IOPS in Azure: Striping multiple data disks.
Planned Maintenance – Azure Style: How Microsoft does maintenance.
ADFS Publishing via Azure Traffic Manager: He doesn’t say but I think the endpoint of Damian’s post is to make a geo-resilient ADFS farm.
New Active Directory Assessment Intelligence Pack in Azure Operational Insights: Designed to assess the risk and health of AD environments on premises, in the cloud or hybrid, it will scan weekly, and present information as a monthly rollup. The report provides a prioritized list of recommendations tailored to your environments.
Replicating Hyper-V Virtual Machines to Microsoft Azure: A post I wrote for Petri.com
5 Reasons Why I Like Microsoft Azure RemoteApp: An edited post of an article I wrote for Petri.com
How to preserve the drive letter for protected virtual machines that are failed over or migrated to Azure: Azure use will the next available drive letter for the temp drive.

Office 365

What’s new: February 2015: Lots of new stuff.

Intune

March updates coming this week to Microsoft Intune: Should be live now.
Conditional Access for SharePoint Online with Microsoft Intune: With this feature, you can restrict access to SharePoint Online to only those users who have enrolled their devices in management with Microsoft Intune and are compliant with IT policy.

Miscellaneous

Revenue and usage numbers for Microsoft’s most important new business: Following up the revelations of the not-so-secret methods of sales to hit targets.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Hyper-V,Windows Server 2012 R2,Networking,Hardware,System Center,VMM,Windows 10,MDT,Deployment,Azure,Cloud,Cloud Computing,Hybrid Cloud,DR,Storage,Active Directory,Remote Desktop Services,Office 365,Intune

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.

System Center

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!

Azure

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.

Office 365

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.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Windows Server 2003,Azure,System Center,VMM,Storage,DR,PowerShell,Scripting,Linux,Office 365

Microsoft News – 24 February 2015

Here is the latest news in the world of Microsoft infrastructure:

Hyper-V

Hyper-V receives Red Hat certification: Add RHEL 7.0 to the list on WS2012 R2 Generation 1 and Generation 2 VMs, along with WS2012 and W2008 R2 SP1.

Windows Server

Storage Spaces Performance Tuning: A post I wrote on Petri.com

System Center

Windows Azure Pack vNext: A post by Azure MVP Marc van Eijk.
Support for SQL Server 2014 with System Center 2012 R2 Update Rollup 5: Here is the current and planned state of SQL 2014 support in System Center, assuming the latest UR is installed

Azure

Azure Site Recovery Now Supports SAN-to-SAN Replication: A post I wrote for Petri.com
Microsoft Azure Site Recovery Hyper-V Requirements: A post I wrote for Petri.com

Office 365

Microsoft Changing Its Retention Policy for Deleted Office 365 E-Mails: Deleted e-mails always will be recoverable.
Automated Hybrid Troubleshooting Experience: A new automated troubleshooting experience for hybrid Office 365 deployments.
Extended email retention for deleted items in Office 365: With this update, the length of time items remain in the Deleted Items folder is extended to indefinitely or according to the duration set by your administrator < Certain headlines don’t mention that bit!

Miscellaneous

Tales from Tech Support: A competition by Microsoft to find the funniest/worst in IT.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Hyper-V,Windows Server 2012 R2,Virtualisation,Windows Server 2012,Windows Server 2008 R2,Linux,Storage,System Center,WAP,SQL,Azure,Cloud,Hybrid Cloud,Cloud Computing,DR,Office 365,Exchange

Microsoft News – 19 February 2015

Here’s the latest in the Microsoft world. Shame on Lenovo for pre-installing adware that is a man-in-the-middle attack. Crapware must die!

Hyper-V

Hyper-V Backup doesn’t interrupt running virtual machines (anymore): A post on the improved backup in Hyper-V, moving to a file-based backup.

System Center

Manage Tenant Database Workloads with Resource Governor in Azure Pack: As of the Azure Pack Update Rollup 5 release, WAP administrators can now use the functionality of SQL Server 2014 Resource Governor in WAP to manage tenant workloads on the same SQL Server.

Azure

New updates to Cloud App Discovery: Improvements to the third most actively used feature of Azure AD.
New features in Azure Backup – Long term retention, offline backup seeding and more: The official announcement of the Feb 9th update to the agent, plus features with DPM 2012 R2 UR5.
Microsoft Azure Site Recovery Bandwidth Requirements: A post I wrote for Petri.com
Enterprise-Grade Array-Based Replication and Disaster Recovery with ASR and System Center – Now Generally Available: With System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) and Azure Site Recovery, our customers can get seamless end-to-end storage array-based replication and disaster recovery.

Office 365

Office everywhere, encryption everywhere: An update on availability and security.
Microsoft Adds Management Capabilities to Outlook Apps for Android and iOS Devices: Microsoft this week announced some new IT controls for its Outlook apps running on Android and iOS devices.

Microsoft Partners

Practice Accelerator – a Microsoft Partner Network Training asset for IT managers: An online, interactive training that provides managed partners with Microsoft Consulting Services-defined deployment best practices and guidance, to help you grow profitable businesses around a specific Microsoft solution.

Miscellaneous

Microsoft adopts first international cloud privacy standard: Microsoft Azure, both Office 365 and Dynamics CRM Online are ISO/IEC 27018 compliant.
Latest innovations in Office 365 compliance: Following on from above.
Lenovo Accused of Installing Adware on New PCs: Crapware must be stopped.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Hyper-V,Virtualisation,Backup,System Center,Cloud,Cloud Computing,Hybrid Cloud,DR,Storage,Office,Office 365,Security

Microsoft News – 23 January 2015

If you’ve just emerged from a cave or from under a rock, then you might like to read about Windows 10 and HoloLens. It’s been amazing to see how in “90 minutes”, the image of Microsoft has done a 180 degree turnaround. The carefully orchestrated and timed announcements on Wednesday were very effective.

System Center

Multiple domain names and themes on a single Tenant portal: More WAP-tastic extensibility.

Windows Client

Microsoft Provides a Much More Complete Look at Windows 10: Paul Thurrott
Windows 10 will be Free Upgrade for Windows 7 and Windows 8 Users: MSFT wants everyone to have the best access to online services.
Hands-On with Microsoft HoloLens: Paul Thurrott had an hour with the augmented reality headset.
Windows RT Will Not Be Upgraded to Windows 10: As I predicted quite a while ago, Windows RT went the way of Windows for MIPS processors.
The next chapter of Office on Windows: Universal touch-first apps included in Windows 10 for free (phone and small tablets – license probably limited to personal usage).

Azure

Setting up Active Directory for a Disaster Recovery Environment: Talking about how to get AD up and running consistently in your DR site.
Best Practices for Process Server Deployment when Protecting VMware and Physical Workloads with Azure Site Recovery: Getting the InMage Process Server configured for your replication from vSphere.

Office 365

New Office Visio Stencil: These stencils contain more than 300 icons to help you create visual representations of Microsoft Office or Microsoft Office 365 deployments including Microsoft Exchange Server 2013, Microsoft Lync Server 2013, and Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013
Azure RMS Migration Guidance: The Azure RMS Migration guidance contains a whitepaper with step-by-step guidance and links to cmdlets and tools to migrate on-premises Active Directory Rights Management Services (AD RMS) server key and templates to Azure Rights Management services (Azure RMS) while preserving access to protected content.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Windows 10,WAP,Cloud,Cloud Computing,Hardware,Azure,DR,Hybrid Cloud,VMware,Office 365,Active Directory,Office

Windows Server Technical Preview – Replica Support for Hot-Add of VHDX

Shared VHDX was introduced in WS2012 R2 to enable easier and more flexible deployments of guest clusters; that is, a cluster that is made from virtual machines. The guest cluster allows you to make services highly available, because sometimes a HA infrastructure is just not enough (we are supposed to be all about the service, after all).

We’ve been able to do guest clusters with iSCSI, SMB 3.0, or Fiber Channel/FCoE LUNs/shares but this crosses the line between guest/tenant and infrastructure/fabric. That causes a few issues:

It reduces flexibility (Live Migration of storage, backup, replication, etc)
There’s a security/visibility issue for service providers
Self-service becomes a near impossibility for public/private clouds

That’s why Microsoft gave us Shared VHDX. Two virtual machines can connect to the same VHDX that contains data. That disk appears in the guest OS of the two VMs as a shared SAS disk, i.e cluster-supported storage. Now we have moved into the realm of software and we enable easy self service, flexibility, and no longer cross the hardware boundary.

But …

Shared VHDX was a version 1.0 feature in Windows Server 2012 R2. It wasn’t a finished product; Microsoft gave us what they had ready at the time. Feedback was unanimous: we need backup and replications support for Shared HDX, and we’d also like Live Migration support.

The Windows Server vNext Technical Preview gives us support to replicate Shared VHDX files using Hyper-V Replica (HVR). This means that you can add these HA guest clusters to your DR replication set(s) and offer a new level of availability to your customers.

I cannot talk about how Microsoft is accomplishing this feature yet … all I can report is what I’ve seen announced.

Technorati Tags: Hyper-V,Virtualisation,Windows Server 2015,Storage,Failover Clustering,DR

Microsoft News – 2 January 2015

Welcome to the “Happy New Year 2015” edition of my Microsoft News posts. I hope you have a nice time off from work – it FLEW by for me; I could do with a holiday to recover from my holiday.

Here’s the news from over the past week or so:

Hyper-V

5 Hyper-V Skills You Need To Learn for 2015: An article I wrote for Petri.com
About Hyper-V Virtual Processor Limitations: An article I wrote for Petri.com

Windows Server

VPN Interoperability guide for Windows Server 2012 R2: This document covers the working configurations for some of the popular third party VPN devices that can be deployed to work with Windows Server 2012 R2 VPN. The configuration for a Windows gateway is also included to server as a guideline for an interoperable deployment with the third party devices.

Azure

Microsoft Makes Azure Disaster Recovery For SMEs and Branch Offices: A post I wrote for Petri.com
Using Azure Storage on Linux: An update for Linux users on how to use Azure Storage
Running Critical Application Workloads on Microsoft Azure D-Series Virtual Machines: How to use these VMs that place their temp drive on host-local SSD storage. There is also a whitepaper.
Choosing Microsoft Azure Storage for IaaS: An article I wrote for Petri.com
Deploying a Microsoft Azure Storage Account: An article I wrote for Petri.com

Miscellaneous

The Top 7 Microsoft News Stories of 2014: An article I wrote for Petri.com

You Do Not Need To Run SCVMM To Replicate Hyper-V To Azure

If you follow Microsoft then you are used to December being a dead month. So I checked my Twitter feed last night and was stunned by some big Azure announcements.

The most important of the announcements to me was the change that is being made to Azure Site Recovery (ASR), AKA DR in the cloud. Previous to last night, you need to run SCVMM on premises to replicate Hyper-V to Azure. This baffled me:

You had to install the protection agent on each host/cluster node anyway
SMBs, the companies that are most likely to use ASR, cannot afford System Center
There is a low adoption rate of SCVMM with System Center/Hyper-V customers

The feedback on this was given – and Microsoft made a change. Last night they announced the general availability of Disaster Recovery (DR) to Azure for Branch offices and SMB feature in our Azure Site Recovery (ASR) service … AKA ASR without SCVMM. This will allow you to replicate Hyper-V VMs into Azure without using System Center on premises.

The hosts must be running WS2012 R2 Hyper-V. Replication is done using Hyper-V Replica. You get centralized replication monitoring and orchestration as a part of the service. And you get the one-click test, planned and unplanned failover types.

THIS IS FRAKKING GREAT NEWS!

Why am I so excited? The original releases of ASR were targeted at customers with System Center licensing. Those are mid-large customers and are likely the ones that already have DR sites. Adoption rates were going to be low. The customer base that needs ASR are the SMBs that run Hyper-V hosts on-premises. That is a huge breadth market. Microsoft partners can enable those customers via Azure in Open licensing – buy some credits ($100 value each), try out ASR with no long term CAPEX or contractual commitments, and see what it can do for your business. And then give your insurance company a call to see what having a remote DR site will do for the company’s insurance premium.

Technorati Tags: Azure,Cloud,Hybrid Cloud,Cloud Computing,DR