Microsoft | Aidan Finn, IT Pro

Microsoft News – 10 December 2014

I’ve included a few videos that Carsten Rachfahl recorded at the MVP Summit in Redmond last November.

Hyper-V

Reviewing My Hyper-V Predictions For 2014: A post I wrote for Petri.com
Hyper-V MVP Carsten Rachfahl interviews Hyper-V PM Ben Armstrong: Good stuff about vNext.

Windows Server

Hyper-V MVP Carsten Rachfahl interviews Clustering PM Elden Chistensen: Good stuff about vNext.
Hyper-V MVP Carsten Rachfahl interviews Mark Minasi: Chatting at the 2014 MVP Summit.

System Center

Microsoft System Center 2012 Configuration Manager Servicing Extension: This new add-on for the Administrator console provides a summary of the Configuration Manager versions in the environment, simplified client targeting, and information on new Configuration Manager related releases.

Azure

Azure HDInsight Introduces Built-in Integration with Azure Websites to do Web Log Analytics: Azure Websites generate web logs that track all HTTP transactions and detailed error logging. These logs are stored in Azure Blobs as non-relational files that are semi-structured. Traditionally, semi-structured files are harder to analyze unless they are extracted and transformed into a relational table/database. Enter Hadoop.

Office 365

Microsoft Said To Be Dropping SharePoint Online ‘Public Sites’ Feature: This will create a stink. Whatever happened to the new Microsoft that consulted with customers and listened to feedback?

Intune

Microsoft Intune App Wrapping Tool for iOS: The tool is a Mac OS command line application that creates a ‘wrapper’ around an app. Once an app is processed, you can then change the apps functionality using an Intune mobile application management policy that you configure.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Windows Server 2012 R2,WIndows Server 2015,System Center,Configuration Manager,Azure,Office 365,Intune

Microsoft News – 9 December 2014

I do not give a flying fiddlers about some wizard Accenture is selling to deploy System Center. Moving on to relevant things …

Hyper-V

Troubleshooting Cluster Shared Volume Auto-Pauses – Event 5120: Focus for this blog post will be auto-pauses.

System Center

PDT 2.65.2620 is now available on the TechNet Gallery: A new version of the System Center PowerShell Deployment Toolkit (for labs) is available.
System Center Technical Preview: What’s New and What’s Missing: According to Greg Shields.

Azure

Multihop Routing in Azure:Create complicated VNet to VNet routing via VPN.
Two Powerful ways to use Azure to Back Up your Enterprise: Direct online backup and via DPM level 100 info.
Static vs Dynamic Routing Gateways in Azure: An important post. My advice -> go dynamic if your on-premises VPN device allows it. Dynamic supports much more (than even this post says).

Intune

New Mobile Application Management Capabilities Coming to Microsoft Intune This Week: A bunch of stuff coming between Dec 9th and 12th.

Licensing

Office 365 and SPLA: This stuff is nightmarishly complicated, and that’s before you consider that it keeps changing.
Microsoft Hints at New Pricing Model for Windows: No details until early 2015.

Miscellaneous

2014 Holiday Gift Guide for System Administrators: I’m one of the contributors.
Virtual Tour of a Microsoft Data Centre: Not bad compared to the real thing.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Hyper-V,Virtualisation,System Center,PowerShell,Scripting,Azure,Networking,Backup,Intune,Office 365,Licensing

Microsoft News – 5 December 2014

It’s December, and not much happens then in the world of Microsoft. However, we do have GA of Azure RemoteApp (RDS in the cloud) on the 11th!

Windows Server

Sizing Volumes for Data Deduplication in Windows Server: One of the most common questions the Data Deduplication team gets seems deceptively simple: "How big can I make my deduplicated volumes?"

Windows Client

Microsoft Details Schedule for Windows 10: News from Paul Thurrott.

Azure

RemoteApp GA coming soon & pricing is revealed: GA is on December 11th. Preview instances will automatically transition to a 30-day free trial. The limit of two app collections and 10 users per instance will continue to be enforced during the free trial period. You can exit the trial to paid service to exceed limitations. Pricing is a little complicated.
Anti-Malware Solutions for Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines: An article I wrote for Petri.com
RD Gateway High Availability with Azure Multi-Factor Authentication: Kristin L. Griffin has published a guide how to configure multiple Remote Desktop Gateway (RDG) and Azure Multi-Factor Authentication servers.

Intune

Conditional Access for On-Premises Exchange using Microsoft Intune: Admins now have the ability to set up conditional access for on-premises Microsoft Exchange Server.
Microsoft Intune Policies For Samsung Knox Enabled Devices: Manage security on Samsung mobile devices.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,WIndows Server 2012 R2,WIndows Server 2015,Windows 10,Azure,RDS,Security,Intune,Exchange,Hardware

Microsoft News – 3 December 2014

It’s been a slow period but there’s some interesting stuff in Azure networking and websites.

Hyper-V

Update for RDCMan: New support for connecting to VMs via Hyper-V
Using RDCMan v2.7 to Connect to a VM: Using the above new feature
Integration components: How Microsoft determines Windows Update applicability

Windows Server

Reduce VDI costs by Enabling Data Deduplication on Windows Server 2012 R2: A post I wrote for Petri.com

Azure

Introducing the Azure Automation Script Converter: Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just take things we’ve already written as PowerShell scripts, or that we’ve grabbed from the PowerShell community, and just import them as is into Azure Automation?
New Updates to DaaS – Diagnostics as a Service for Azure Websites: Recent updates to the DaaS site extension for Microsoft Azure Websites.
New Updates to Support Site Extension for Azure Websites: Microsoft announced more self-service troubleshooting and diagnostics options to Support Portal for Azure Websites. This looks quite useful!
Azure Virtual Network Gateway Improvements: A lot of changes were made to improve hybrid networking.
Using Microsoft Azure Forced Tunneling: A post I wrote for Petri.com

Office 365

What’s new – November 2014: A summary of updates
Azure RemoteApp now supporting Office 365 ProPlus: Don’t ask me about the licensing of it!!!

Miscellaneous

Microsoft Increases Support Costs for IT Pros: Premier, the organization you can blame for faulty Windows Updates, increased costs for technical support.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Hyper-V,Windows Server 2015,VDI,Storage,Azure,Hybrid Cloud,Networking,Cloud,Cloud Computing,Scripting,PowerShell,Office 365

Microsoft News – 24 November 2014

It’s been a slow few news days in the Microsoft world. Stuff I’m not linking to: the infinitely linked webcasts on mobility management and the Reign malware infecting computers in Ireland, Russia, and Saudi Arabia.

Windows Server

Microsoft’s View on Hyper-Convergence: A post I wrote for Petri.com.
Technical Preview Step-by-Step Guide -Storage Replica: Learn to implement this WS vNext feature.

Windows Client

Windows 10 Management Options Coming With New Windows Store: Microsoft plans to add Windows Store management capabilities for organizations using Windows 10 apps "in the coming months."

Azure

Configure Multiple NICs in an Azure Virtual Machine: On Petri.com
Architecting a disaster recovery plan for multi-tier web applications using Microsoft Azure Site Recovery: What it says on the tin.
Importing Windows Azure Cloud Services into Remote Desktop Connection Manager (RDC Man): Third article in a series.

Office 365

Simplification Comes to Office 365 Activation: Cutting out the VLSC/OSA copy/paste key step for Open licensing customers.

Miscellaneous

Growing concern in Ireland over online data privacy: A blog post by Microsoft Ireland MD, Catriona Hallahan, on the USA/Cloud issue.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,WIndows Server 2015,Windows 10,Azure,Networking,Storage,DR,RDS,Office 365,Licensing,Security

Microsoft News – 20 November 2014

There are a lot of upset people because of (1) the Azure outage and (2) how Microsoft communicated during the outage. We had a couple of affected customers. The only advice I can give to Microsoft is:

Don’t deploy your updates to everything at the same time.
Now you know how customers feel when bad updates are issued. Bring back complete testing.
Communicate clearly during an issue – that includes sending emails to affected customers. You’ve got monitoring systems & automation – use them. Heck, you even blogged about how (Azure) Automation could be used by customers to trigger actions.

Hyper-V

Backup Jobs Failing Post Nov Rollup Install: Hyper-V PM Taylor Brown has an update.

Azure

Microsoft Azure Services Hit By Widespread Outages: There’s a lot of anger out there because of how Microsoft reported these issues.
Update on Azure Storage Service Interruption: A little bit of information on the issues of the previous 24 hours.
Create a Multi-NIC VM with a Public IP in Azure: Take advantage of this new feature.

Miscellaneous

An Overview of the Microsoft Cloud Platform System: A post by me on Petri.com about Microsoft CPS.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Hyper-V,Windows Server 2012,WIndows Server 2012 R2,Backup,Azure,Storage,Cloud,Cloud Computing,Networking,Virtualisation,Hardware

Microsoft News – 19 November 2014

Pay attention to the security update for Windows that was released out of band last night. It’s an important one that prevents people from crafting custom Kerberos tickets.

Hyper-V

How to Build Azure-Like Virtual Machines on Hyper-V: A post I wrote on Petri.com

Windows Server

November 2014 update rollup for Windows RT 8.1, Windows 8.1, and Windows Server 2012 R2: This is a big update that you should test and deploy (after waiting a time you deem appropriate).
Introducing Cloud Witness: Leveraging Azure to get quorum for multi-site clusters.
Failover Clustering in Windows Server Technical Preview: A post by me on Petri.com

Azure

Monitoring Azure Services and External Systems with Azure Automation: Using Azure automation to perform checks.
Azure Disk IOPS and Virtual Machines in IaaS: Each disk has storage QoS caps applied to it.
Enabling Multiple Subscriptions to Share an ExpressRoute Circuit: Multiple vNets across multiple Azure subscriptions connected via one ExpressRoute connection for complex deployments.
Microsoft Azure Desktop Hosting: RD Gateway Farm Deployment Guidance Updated To Support Azure Load Balancer Client IP Affinity: What it says on the tin.

Security

Microsoft Releases Emergency Security Update: MS14-068 fixes a serious issue in Kerberos. This looks like one of those "push it out ASAP" (test first, of course) security fixes.

Office 365

Microsoft rebrands Identity Manager (again) and delivers new public preview: And that’s all she wrote on Forefront.
Microsoft Identity Manager Public Preview is now available! Microsoft has released the preview of MIM, formerly FIM.
Microsoft Launches Office 365 Video: Ever feel like there’s a "throw mud on the wall" thing going on?

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Hyper-V,Virtualisation,Azure,Hybrid Cloud,Cloud,Cloud Computing,Windows Server 2012 R2,Windows Server 2015,Storage,Failover Clustering,PowerShell,Scripting,Networking,Remote Desktop Services,Office 365,Active Directory

Microsoft News – 17 November 2014

I’ve had a crazy few weeks with TechEd Europe 2014, followed by the MVP Summit, followed by a week of events and catchup at work. Today, I’ve finally gotten to go through my news feeds. There is a LOT of Azure stuff from TEE14.

Hyper-V

What’s New in Windows Server vNext Hyper-V: A post by me on Petri.com
Cluster Shared Volume Failure Handling: How CSV handles storage failures and how it hides failures from applications.
Updating Integration Components over Windows Update: Microsoft announced that they would be releasing updated integration components over Windows Update from now on.
Windows 10 Technical Preview: Hot Add / Remove of Network Adapter: You can now add and remove network adapters from running Generation 2 virtual machines.

Windows Server

vNext Failover Clustering in Windows Server Technical Preview: A video with clustering master, Elden Christensen.
Storage Quality of Service Guide Released for Windows Server Technical Preview: A step-by-step guide.
RemoteFX vGPU Updates in Windows Server Next: Capabilities that improve the experience for end users in a Windows VDI environment for ‘Engineering/Designer’ application workloads that require OpenGL API support and all graphics applications (DX and OpenGL) that require higher video memory.

System Center

Update Rollup 4 for System Center 2012 R2: Wait 1 month. Trust me.
Update Rollup 8 for System Center 2012 Service Pack 1: See previous. Trust me.

Windows Client

Windows 10 – Making Deployment Easier: Using an in-place upgrade instead of the traditional wipe-and-load approach that organizations have historically used to deploy new Windows versions. This upgrade process is designed to preserve the apps, data, and configuration from the existing Windows installation, taking care to put things back the way they need to be after Windows 10 has been installed on the system. And support for traditional deployment tools.
Windows 10 – Manageability Choices: Ensuring that Windows works better when using Active Directory and Azure Active Directory together. When connecting the two, users can automatically be signed-in to cloud-based services like Office 365, Microsoft Intune, and the Windows Store, even when logging in to their machine using Active Directory accounts. For users, this will mean no longer needing to remember additional user IDs or passwords.

Azure

New Marketplace, Network Improvements, New Batch Service, Automation Service, more: TechEd announcement by Scott Guthrie
SAN Replication based Enterprise Grade Disaster Recovery with ASR and System Center: Enterprises that seek to leverage the snapshot and replication capabilities of their Storage Area Network (SAN) Arrays to enable high performance synchronous and asynchronous replication between their on-premises private clouds can now orchestrate end-to-end storage array-based replication and disaster recovery with ASR and System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM).

ASR SAN replication topology

Announcing the Azure Marketplace: Offers Microsoft Azure Certified and open-source community virtual machine images including SAP, Cloudera, DataStax, CommVault, Veeam, Trend Micro, and Core OS as well as virtual machine extensions including McAfee and Octopus Deploy.
Migrate your Websites to Azure in just a Few Clicks: A new tool from MSFT. See this Getting Started Guide & this video.
Windows Docker Client Demo Highlights Linux Containers on Azure: Docker, CoreOS, and Linux Documentation on Azure.
New Networking features and partnerships for Enterprise scenarios: A whole bunch of announcements: ExpressRoute enhancements include new strategic partnerships, a Meet-Me location in Australia, multi-site ExpressRoute for better disaster recovery, multiple subscriptions sharing the same ExpressRoute circuit, and support for 4,000 routes. We are improving overall security with Network Security Groups for easier subnet isolation in multi-tier topologies, Site to Site Forced Tunneling which sends network traffic back to on-premises for policy validation to meet compliance requirements, and VPN support for Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS). A new high-performance gateway, multiple virtual NICs in a VM, access to VPN operations logs, nested Traffic Manager policies and Azure load balancer source IP affinity demonstrate our commitment to continually enhance Azure networking capabilities.
New – Azure Traffic Manager Nested Profiles: his feature enables you to create more flexible and powerful load-balancing and failover schemes to support the needs of larger, more complex deployments. Note you can also do hybrid site balancing now.
Azure Load Balancer new distribution mode: Adding a new distribution mode called Source IP Affinity (also known as session affinity or client IP affinity).
Azure Site Recovery – Announcing Windows Azure Pack integration and PowerShell Support: As part of update roll up of Windows Azure Pack UR 4.0, now cloud service providers will be able to offer Windows Azure Pack Plan or ADDONS with ASR capabilities. You now have the ASR PowerShell cmdlets for recovery solution between two on-premise hyper-V datacenters available as part of Azure PowerShell 0.8.10 release.
Using VNET integration and Hybrid connections with Azure Websites: This will outline the example of getting WordPress running on Azure Websites with a remote MySQL database and will be covered in two parts.
Microsoft Antimalware for Azure Cloud Services and Virtual Machines: Real time protection from the latest threats, on-demand scheduled scanning, and collection of antimalware events to your storage account via Azure Diagnostics at no additional charge.
Introducing PowerShell support for Azure Site Recovery: PowerShell support for recovery between two Hyper-V sites managed by Azure Site Recovery.
Red Teaming – Using Cutting-Edge Threat Simulation to Harden the Microsoft Enterprise Cloud: How Microsoft performs penetration tests on Azure and Office 365.
Deploying Your Own Private Docker Registry on Azure: In order to ship your containerized applications to the cloud, you use Docker tools to construct a Docker container image. Although the Docker Hub is a paid service for storing private images, Docker respects developers’ needs and provides the open source “Docker Registry” software used to build the Docker Hub. It is designed to store and provide container images, but the best part about it is that you can host your own private registry with it.
Offering Managed DR for IaaS Workloads with ASR and Azure Pack: Service Providers can now offer Managed DR as a premium service to their customers on top of IaaS workloads.
Deploy to Azure Button for Azure Websites: Deploying to Azure Websites from a Git repository just got a little easier with the Deploy to Azure Button.
Azure Websites Authentication / Authorization: Azure Websites Authentication / Authorization allows you to quickly and easily restrict access to your websites running on Azure Websites by leveraging Azure Active Directory.
Encrypting Azure Virtual Machines with CloudLink SecureVM: CloudLink SecureVM Agent which enables for disk encryption for your Azure Virtual Machines.
AzCopy – Announcing General Availability of AzCopy 3.0 plus preview release of AzCopy 4.0 with Table and File support
Create a VM with multiple NICs in Azure: Done using updated version of Azure PowerShell.
Monitoring Azure Site Recovery: The monitoring capabilities of Azure Site Recovery.
Microsoft announces Exchange Support for Azure VM as a Witness Server: As of January 1, 2015, Microsoft will support using an Azure laaS file server VM as a witness server for an on-premises DAG .

Office 365

Enterprise Mobility TechEd Announcements: Lots of stuff.
Configuring AD FS Servers in an Internal Load-Balanced Set in Azure for Office365 Single Sign-On: Third post in a series on how to enable hybrid single using-in solution using a hybrid Azure deployment.
Office 365 Business Users Getting New ‘Clutter’ E-Mail Feature: Don’t know if I’d trust this.
Microsoft To Rename Lync as ‘Skype for Business’ Next Year:

Intune

New Microsoft Intune capabilities coming this week: The Intune team will be rolling out a service update between November 17, 2014 and November 19, 2014 that introduces new capabilities to Intune standalone (cloud only).

Operational Insights

Microsoft Releases Azure Operational Insights Preview: Starting with a limited free option. The preview is available in the Azure U.S. East region.

Licensing

Microsoft to make per-user Windows licensing available to enterprise customers: A popular move.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Hyper-V,Virtualisation,Windows 10,Windows Server 2012 R2,WIndows Server 2015,Failover Clustering,Storage,RDS,System Center,Azure,Hybrid Cloud,Cloud,Cloud Computing,Networking,DR,PowerShell,Scripting,Linux,Security,Exchange,Office 365,Intune,Licensing

Ever Wonder HOW Microsoft Upgrades The Firmware of New Employees? I Have Evidence!

I’ve had a number of friends “go blue” over the years, that is, they joined Microsoft as full time employees (FTEs). All were like me, some things they liked and others they didn’t like at Microsoft … BEFORE they joined the company. Not long after joining, they flew to the mother ship in Redmond for “training” or “meetings” and returned very different people. Everything was awesome; even the dodgiest endeavours by Microsoft were the best things ever.

I and others would joke about our friends having their firmware updated. That was a joke … until now. I have the evidence that something mysterious is indeed happening. I was behind the curtains yesterday, and went to get a Coke from the fridge when I spotted this:

Sparking water made by … Microsoft! Of course, I will be taking this evidence to a lab to be analysed and searched for traces of psychotropic substances. I suspect this may indeed be the actual firmware upgrade that is supplied to unwitting new blue badges when they are transported to Redmond, WA. I shall follow up as soon as the results are in from the lab.

Note: This article is written with my tongue firmly in my cheek. If you are offended or think I am being serious in any way, then please visit a reality consultant.

Microsoft News – 24 October 2014

This is the last of my news posts before TechEd Europe. Expect crazy flurries of news on Tuesday morning during the keynote. I’ll be live blogging so my updates will be there.

System Center

Windows Azure Pack WhitePaper based on Building Clouds: A combination of posts on deploying Windows Azure Pack

Azure

Automate Linux VM OS Updates Using OSPatching Extension: Azure VM OSPatching extension for Linux enables the Azure VM administrators to automate the VM OS updates with the customized configurations.
Using Azure Automation to check health of Minecraft server in Azure: Yeap, there’s a Minecraft VM image in the Azure Gallery

Miscellaneous

Microsoft Announces Record First-Quarter Revenue, Thanks To Cloud And Hardware Growth: Revenues up, profits down a bit thanks to redundancies, and Surface sales double (from 10 to 20 – LOL). Windows Server, System Center, Azure, and Office bringing home the bacon.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,System Center,WAP,Azure,Linux,PowerShell