Tag: Microsoft

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

Windows Server

Windows Client

System Center

Azure

Office 365

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

Microsoft News – 2 February 2015

The big news of the last few days was the announcement that the next version of “Windows Server and System Center” won’t be released until 2016. This is quite disappointing.

Windows Server

Windows Client

Azure

Licensing

  • IaaS Gotchas: Compliance gotchas as it pertains to providing infrastructure as a service.

Microsoft News – 28 January 2015

Things have quietened down after the Windows 10 and HoloLens news, and Azure is back to dominating this post.

Windows Server

Windows Client

Azure

Intune

Security

Miscellaneous

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

Windows Client

Azure

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.

Microsoft News – 20 January 2015

I’ve let the news build up a little bit. I think the holiday lull is starting to lift.

Hyper-V

Windows Server

Windows Client

  • Windows 10: What We Know So Far: I’ll give a hoot about Cortana when it works outside of 4 or so countries. Microsoft should either fix that limitation or move the developers to something more important than a gadget feature.

System Center

Azure

Office 365

Intune

Events

  • #GlobalAzure Bootcamp 2015: The 2015 #GlobalAzure Bootcamp kicks off on April 25th and you can participate and organize a location too!

Miscellaneous

Microsoft News – 6 January 2015

A few little nuggets to get you back in the swing of things. And yes, I have completely ignored the US-only version 1.2 Azure Pricing Tool that suffers from “The Curse of Zune”.

Hyper-V

Windows Server

System Center

Windows Client

Azure

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

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

Miscellaneous

Microsoft News – 19 December 2014

We’re getting close to Christmas and Microsoft is starting to wind down for the year. Here’s a mostly-Azure report for the last few days.

Hyper-V

Azure

Miscellaneous

Hyper-V Does Support Nested Virtualization

Actually, no, Hyper-V does not support nested virtualization but there’s nothing like a little bit of link bait to celebrate the holidays 🙂

We were topping up our Microsoft partner competencies in the office this morning. A part of that shenanigans is to site “online sales assessments”. For the Datacenter competency (including Azure, Hyper-V and System Center) the exam asks 44 questions in a sales scenario. Some of them are legit questions about product, solutions, and licensing. But most of them are either:

  • Complete bolloxology
  • Random collections of words that were copy/pasted from the Microsoft Partner Network by a loudmouth

Let me give you one example. Why does Microsoft position Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V as a more open solution than VMware? As you might have read on my site, the correct answer is that Microsoft has contributed quite a bit of code to the Linux kernel to make it natively functional on Hyper-V. This includes hot-VHDX resizing, live backup of running Linux VMs, and support for Dynamic Memory for Linux guests, all making Hyper-V the best hypervisor to run Linux on.

But no, that’s not the correct answer in the eyes of the Microsoft partner network. No; they believe that Hyper-V supports other hypervisors. Remember that Azure is based on Hyper-V so that is actually the SAME hypervisor. This incorrect correct answer implies either that Hyper-V can live migrate VMs to/from other hypervisors such as vSphere, or that Hyper-V supports nested virtualization. Of course, neither of these is true.

image

And there is yet another example of why Microsoft’s entire examination process (including the MCP certification process) is not taken seriously by anyone outside of the staff of the Microsoft Partner Network, HR departments, and head hunters.

Feedback Matters Once Again In Microsoft

Microsoft has changed – and I’m not just talking about the obvious stuff that’s in the headlines. Two years ago I saw a pre-beta product and gave feedback to the PMs that this product needed serious changes. I was ignored (FYI, I was not alone in my opinions and in giving this feedback). 18 months ago, I saw a beta release and I gave the same feedback to PMs. I was ignored. 12 months ago the product was released. I blogged about the issues, was quoted by some big tech press names, and suddenly I was Mr. Popular with the PMs and marketing folks. I gave my feedback and I was ignored. 6 months ago the product went through some big changes, but the issue was still there. I commented on it, and once again the marketing folks and PMs were all over me. I gave my feedback … and I was ignored.

But …

A few months ago I found out that someone listened. Enough people like me spoke up. And maybe my market predictions had come true – not that anyone would ever admit that! The product was going to change. And guess what – that change did arrive.

Thank you to the team involved.

The Microsoft that I’ve been working with has changed a lot in the last 24 months. The secrecy of the Sinofsky era is over. Stuff that me and other MVPs have fed back to product groups is being listened to – I wish I could share those stories!!! I’m certainly not saying we design anything. And I’m not saying that everything we feedback is done. But I do see a correlation between feedback and product changes.

If you have feedback then give it to Microsoft. Please don’t make the mistake of telling some local rep – they probably will forget it straight away. Your feedback need to go to the product groups. Microsoft announces forums for feedback every once in a while – I blogged about one yesterday. Take advantage of those. MVPs like myself and Didier Van Hoye actively request feedback before we go to the MVP Summit in Redmond to meet those PMs – take advantage of that too. I might be a jerk in dealing with some comments on this site, but I note the constructive ones and take those ideas to Microsoft.

Microsoft has changed a lot. It was extremely noticeable when we MVPs were last there. It’s a fantastic change – it was by far the most engaging experience I’ve had in Redmond. They really want our feedback to avoid the issues that we saw in the past. So take advantage of this and get the product that you want.