Office 365

Microsoft News Summary – 17 September 2014

Microsoft’s patch woes continue. A September update for Lync was pulled this week. Please: do not approve updates immediately; wait 1 month and let some other mug find the bugs for Microsoft.

Azure

Scale is never a problem with Azure Websites: Starting today, Azure Websites supports above 10 load balanced instances.

Networking

Announcing the Message Analyzer 1.1 Release: The completely indecipherable replacement for Network Monitor has just been upgraded to v1.1. I find this replacement for NetMon to be a complete mystery and the UI looks like something Symantec would come up with (random). It’s no wonder WireShark remains the #1 choice.
Introduction to Message Analyzer 1.1: A YouTube video to give you a high-level introduction to Message Analyzer 1.1. Includes a run-through of the UI and an overview of general features.

Deployment

WDS multicasting deployment results in corrupted installation images on cluster nodes: Hotfix – Windows Deployment Services (WDS) multicasting deployment may result in corrupted installation images (Microsoft Windows Imaging (.wim) file format images), and this situation causes the installation to fail on cluster nodes.

Azure Active Directory Sync is now GAAzure Active Directory Sync is now GA: According to this Microsoft post, AAD Sync is Microsoft’s new "one sync to rule them all".
Microsoft Azure Active Directory Sync Services: This AD to WAD synchronisation tool went GA on Monday and is a replacement for DirSync.

Miscellaneous

Round two of Microsoft layoffs coming September 18: More of the 18,000 are about to receive their notice.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Azure,Cloud,Cloud Computing,Networking,Deployment,WDS,Failover Clustering,Office 365,Active Directory

Microsoft News Summary – 11 September 2014

More Azure changes. Keeping up with this is difficult!

Azure

More changes announced: VPN Support for Azure Websites, Scalable CMS in the app gallery, role-based access control, and more stuff were announced yesterday.
Update for Azure Backup for Microsoft Azure Recovery Services Agent: The agent now supports weekly backups with 120 retention points, and 9 years of retention (one recovery point every 4 weeks). You can use this version of the agent together with the Microsoft Azure Site Recovery service to protect virtual machines that are running on Windows Server 2012 R2 CORE SKU and Microsoft Hyper V Server 2012 R2 into Azure.

Office 365

Microsoft Unveils Office Delve for Office 365: A new content discovery tool that looks like Flipboard. It’s a bit "eh" for me.
Patching Office 365 with System Center Configuration Manager 2012: Take some control over Office Click to Run using SCCM.

Legal

Microsoft refuses to hand over foreign data, held in contempt of court: AFAIK, Microsoft (as well as every other US-owned cloud operator) needs the higher US courts to agree that data held in MSFT clouds is not MSFT-owned, and therefore outside of the jurisdiction of US agencies unless the actual owner is American and subject to US laws.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Azure,Backup,Cloud,Cloud Computing,Hybrid Cloud,Office 365,System Center,Configuration Manager

Microsoft News Summary – 22 August 2014

Here’s the latest news from the Microsoft wires. More new services have popped up on Azure, mostly for devs, but the SQL AlwaysOn template should be a massive time saver.

Hyper-V

Manually Install a Guest OS in a Hyper-V Virtual Machine: A post by me on Petri.com

Azure

New DocumentDB NoSQL Service, New Search Service, New SQL AlwaysOn VM Template, and more: All of these improvements are now available to use immediately (note that some features are still in preview).
Azure Automation Capabilities in Depth: The Azure Automation PowerShell Cmdlets: Whether you want to use Azure Automation completely headless, or you’re just looking to script a few key actions like bulk runbook import, the Azure Automation cmdlets are for you.
WordPress Troubleshooting Techniques on Azure Websites: You may run into some issues with your WordPress websites and might want to troubleshoot them. This post will review some common issues and discuss the best techniques to resolve them.
Automate Linux VM Customization Tasks Using CustomScript Extension: CustomScript extension provides even more power for customizing your VM, it can run your scripts during or after provision; it can also run on any Azure supported Linux VM.
How to create a hybrid deployment of RemoteApp: This tutorial walks you through the process of creating a hybrid deployment of the Azure RDS service.
Manage your Azure Websites directly with Websites Process Explorer: This is especially useful when your site has been scaled out and misbehaving in some specific instances but not in others. You can quickly identify runaway processes, find open file handles, and even kill a specific process instance. This feature is freely available for all Azure Websites.

Security

Using the Microsoft Security Compliance Manager Tool: Study for those certification exams!

OS Deployment

Utilizing Windows Deployment Services in Windows Server 2012 R2: A free OS imaging solution with multicast, driver management, and all that jazz. A real Ghost killer.

Office 365

Creating an Office 365 Support Organization: Available now on the Partner Learning Center is a new training on best practices for creating an Office 365 Support Organization.
Why FastTrack and the Adoption Offer for Office 365 is great news for partners: The FastTrack and the Office 365 Adoption Offer less than two weeks away, here are some details and resources.

Microsoft News Summary – 20 August 2014

The headline news from yesterday is that Steve Ballmer has resigned his new position from the Microsoft board to focus on “teaching” and his duties as the new owner of the Los Angeles Clippers NBA basketball franchise. He’s still the largest independent owner of MSFT stock.

Microsoft

Former Microsoft CEO Ballmer steps down from the board: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is stepping down from his current role as Microsoft board member.
Gartner names Microsoft a leader in Four Magic Quadrants: Microsoft is currently positioned as a Leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrants for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service, x86 Server Virtualization, Enterprise Application Platform as a Service and Public Cloud Storage Services.

Virtual Machine Manager

VMM 2012 Self-Service users cannot open a console session to a virtual machine: When you try to connect to the console session of a virtual machine (VM) that is running in Windows Server 2012 by using Microsoft System Center 2012 R2 Virtual Machine Manager or Microsoft System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager Service Pack 1 (SP1), the connection fails, and you receive the following error message – Virtual Machine Manager lost the connection to the virtual machine for one of the following reasons.

Azure

Azure Virtual Machine Disk Encryption using CloudLink: Encrypt Windows and Linux VMs in Azure using a third-party product.
What is Microsoft StorSimple? A post by me on Petri.com.
Where can I find information on how to Sell, Deploy and Support Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Azure, and Microsoft Hybrid Cloud? Microsoft Partner Technical Services can assist you as you sell, deploy and support Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Azure, and Microsoft Hybrid Cloud solutions.

Office 365

SharePoint Online simplifies storage management: Anything that simplifies SharePoint is welcome!

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,System Center,VMM,Hyper-V,Security,Azure,Cloud,Cloud Computing,Office 365,SharePoint,Storage,Hybrid Cloud

Microsoft News Summary – 19 August 2014

Does “fail fast” = “fail predictably often”? Automated testing of software for cloud services needs to be investigated and questioned. First we had the clusterfrak August updates for Windows. Then a significant chunk of Azure went offline.

Azure IaaS experienced issues in many regions yesterday: Mary Jo Foley posted updates (see below).
Install the VM Agent on an existing Azure VM: The MSI package to install the VM Agent on an existing Azure VM is now available for download.
Migrating a VM from EC2 to Azure at 300 Mbps: A very clever method to migrate VMs from AWS to Azure using the first cloud’s upload bandwidth & MS conversion/upload tools.
Hyper-V Amigos Episode 5 Generation 2 VM: This Youtube podcast is back with the latest episode.
SQL Server High Availability in Windows Azure IaaS: When deploying SQL Server in Windows Azure you must consider how to minimize both planned and unplanned downtime. Because you have given up control of the physical infrastructure, you cannot always determine when maintenance periods will occur.
After a 10-year Linux migration, Munich considers switching back to Windows and Office: LMAO
Using Office 365 Data Loss Prevention (DLP): Take control of data leakage!
Managing an Azure VM via Windows Server Manager: Hmmm
Cloud App Discovery keeps getting better: Find cloud apps and enable secure single-sign on.
Deploying Virtual Machines in Azure using the Service Manager and SMA Part I: Truly mad stuff. Remember that your System Center licensing gets "fun" when you go hybrid like this! An on-premise System Center SML with SA can manage up to 8 VMs in a remote public cloud.
Rick Claus and Simon May of MSFT take the ice bucket challenge: See these two well-known personalities take the plunge!

Technorati Tags: Azure,Cloud,Cloud Computing,Hyper-V,Virtualisation,SQL,Failover Clustering,Linux,Office 365,System Center

ADFS Authentication Via Azure

I’ve recently started doing lots of presentation on Azure thanks to the release of Azure via Open licensing. People wonder what the scenarios ate where an SME would deploy machines in Azure and on premises. Here’s one I came up with this morning (an evolution of one I’d looked at before).

I was chatting with one of my colleagues about a scenario where a customer was looking deploying ADFS to provide Office 365 authentication for a medium-sized multinational company. I wondered why they didn’t look at using Azure. Here’s what I came up with.

Note: I know SFA about ADFS. My searches make me believe that deploying a stretch ADFS cluster with a mirrored SQL backend is supported.

The company has two on-premises networks, one in Ireland and one in the USA. We’ll assume that there is some WAN connection between the two networks with a single AD domain. They have users in Ireland, the USA, and roaming. They want ADFS for single sign-on and they need it to be HA.

This is where companies normally think about deploying ADFS on-premises. Two issues here:

You need local infrastructure: Not so bad if you have spare license and hardware capacity on your hosts, but that’s not a given in an SME.
Your ISP becomes a risk: You will place ADFS on premises. Your office has a single Internet connection. A stray digger or ISP issue can put the entire business (not just that office) out of action because ADFS won’t be there for roaming/remote users to authenticate with O365.

So my original design was to stretch the network into Azure. Create a virtual network in an Azure region that is local to your Office 365 account (for example, an Irish O365 customer would deploy a virtual network in Azure Europe North). Create a site-to-site VPN network to connect the on-premises network to the Azure VNet. Then deploy an additional DC, in the same domain as on-premises, in the Azure VNet. And now you can create an ADFS cluster in that site. All good … but what about the above multi-national scenario? I want HA and DR.

Deploy an Azure VNet for Ireland office (Azure Europe North) and for the USA office (Azure USA East) and place virtual DCs in both. Connect both VNets using a VPN. And connect both on-premises networks to both VNets via site-to-site VPNs. Then create an ADFS stretch cluster (mirrored SQL cluster) that resides in both VNets. Now the company’s users (local, roaming and remote) have the ability to authenticate against O365 using ADFS if:

Any or both local on-premises networks go offline
Either Azure region goes offline

As I said, I am not an ADFS person, so I’ll be interested in hearing what those how know ADFS think of this potential solution.

Technorati Tags: Azure,Networking,Active Directory,Office 365

Microsoft News Summary – 1 August 2014

Talk about crappy timing. A federal court in the USA has determined that emails are not actually emails, and therefore Microsoft must turn over ~~emails~~ business records stored on Email servers in the Dublin region to the FBI. One must wonder why the FBI didn’t contact the Irish authorities who would have jumped at once if the case was legitimate and issued an order locally. Maybe the case is not actually legitimate?

On the eve of Azure going big through Open licensing, a federal judge has stuck a stake through the heart of the American IT industry – this is much bigger than Microsoft, affecting Google, Apple, Oracle, IBM, HP, Dell, and more. Microsoft has already lodged an appeal.

Microsoft ordered to hand over Irish-based data to the US government: Microsoft must turn over a customer’s emails stored in a data centre in Ireland to the US government, a US judge has ruled in a case that has drawn concern from privacy groups and major technology companies.
Microsoft responds to ruling in warrant case: Microsoft Executive Vice President and General Counsel Brad Smith provided the following response to a federal court ruling in New York on Thursday in the company’s ongoing case challenging a U.S. government warrant for customer data stored in Dublin, Ireland.
Deploy a SharePoint Farm in Microsoft Azure: Using the new farm functionality in Azure
General Availability for Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET) 5.0: EMET is a free tool, designed to help customers with their defense in depth strategies against cyberattacks, by helping block and terminate the most common techniques adversaries might use in comprising systems. EMET 5.0 further helps to protect with two new mitigations, and with new capabilities giving customers additional flexibility on their deployments.
Support Tip – VMs deployed to Hyper-V networks experience delays acquiring an IP address after reboot: When using System Center 2012 R2 Virtual Machine Manager (VMM 2012 R2), you may discover that some virtual machines that are deployed on Hyper-V Network Virtualization networks with dynamic IP address allocation may not get an IP address for a few minutes after a reboot of the VM. Eventually the VM gets the IP address and otherwise functions normally.

Technorati Tags: Azure,Cloud,Cloud Computing,Office 365,Microsoft,SharePoint,Security,Hyper-V,System Center,VMM

Microsoft News Summary – 30 July 2014

The big news here for MSFT techies are the releases of update rollups for SysCtr 2012 SP1 and SysCtr 2012 R2. Please wait 1 month before deploying to avoid the inevitable issues (history indicates that I am probably right) and use that time to carefully review the installation instructions.

Using PowerShell to Provision Member Servers in Microsoft Azure: How to provision a new member server using a couple of simple commands.
Getting Started with Azure Automation: Automation Assets: What is says on the tin.
New Office 365 admin tools: You can now receive Office 365 service communications in Microsoft System Center by importing the newly available Office 365 Management Pack. And you can integrate Office 365 service communications into your monitoring systems and tools by interfacing with the Office 365 Service Communications API.
How to Setup a Microsoft Azure Virtual Network: This article show you how to setup a Microsoft Azure virtual network and talk about the new Azure point-to-site and site-to-site VPN.
Microsoft Azure Growing Faster than Amazon, IBM, and Google in Cloud Services: A news article I did on Petri.com that also covers Azure in Open Licensing.
Update Rollup 7 for System Center 2012 Service Pack 1: Wait 1 month and read the instructions CAREFULLY before deploying.
Update Rollup 3 for System Center 2012 R2: Wait 1 month and read the instructions CAREFULLY before deploying.
System Center Management Pack for Office 365: Monitor O365 using OpsMgr/SCOM. Through Operations Manager, datacenter admins can monitor the health of their Office 365 subscriptions and provide alerts when subscribed services may be experiencing an outage.
System Center 2012 R2 Management Pack for Virtual Machine Manger Host and Virtual Machine Dashboards: Two new dashboards focused on visualizing resource consumption of virtualization hosts and VMs.
Best Practices for Task Sequences in System Center 2012 Configuration Manager R2: Create and manage SCCM 2012 R2 task sequences using Microsoft best practices.
Avoiding IP Blacklisting with Azure Web Sites: In a multi-tenant environment where customers share a number of IP addresses, it’s not uncommon to have malicious content on a site or two. In some case they may be result of compromise and in other cases this may be intentional. Either way, this can lead to one or more shared IP addresses getting added to the lists of the various black list services that exist on the web. Once a shared IP is blacklisted, this would typically affect innocent sites as well.
Analyst: Cloud Backup Services Should Be a Consideration: Organizations should strategically consider using public cloud services for backup and disaster recovery (DR) scenarios, according to a Tuesday Forrester Research webinar that was sponsored by Microsoft.
MICROSOFT: The (US) Government Has A Sneaky Way Of Forcing Tech Companies To Turn Over Your Emails: Microsoft’s general counsel Brad Smith announced in a Wall Street Journal op-ed Tuesday night that the company will fight a tactic used by the U.S. government to force tech companies to turn over customers’ emails stored on remote servers.

Technorati Tags: PowerShell,Scripting,Azure,Cloud,Cloud Computing,Office 365,Networking,System Center,ConfigMgr,Configuration Manager,Operations Manager,OpsMgr,Deployment,Backup,Microsoft

The Pressure Builds On End Of Support For W2003/R2

The end of support for Windows Server 2003 (W2003) and Windows Server 2003 R2 (W2003 R2) is July 14, 2015. This includes Small Business Server (SBS) 2003 R2. That gives you one year to get off of these server operating systems before all security updates stop. This date will NOT be extended.

Why won’t it be extended? Microsoft wants you to do one of three things:

Upgrade to Windows Server 2012 R2
Upgrade via deploying Hyper-V
Upgrade/migrate to Microsoft Azure

And to be honest, you’re using a server operating system that is currently 11 years old. The features you’ve been asking for are probably in newer versions of Windows Server.

Upgrading will not be easy. You have AD’s to upgrade, LOB applications that are dependent on server resources. And most W2003 installs were 32-bit, there are no more 32-bit server operating systems, and you cannot upgrade x86 to x64. You will have to perform migrations.

So NOW is the time to start planning.

For Microsoft partners that are service providers:

We estimate that over 50% of servers in Ireland are of the W2003/R2 generation
92% of Irish business are SME’s and a large percentage of those were SBS customers. Consider deploying Office 365 to replace SBS, and maybe put in Server Essentials if they still require a local server for bulk data/printer sharing.
Microsoft (WPC 2014) said that there are 22,000,000 W2003/R2 servers worldwide. That equates to an estimated $6,000,000,000 of business.

Start having the conversations now. Start planning now. Waiting until 2015 will be a fools errand. BTW, there are no stupid questions, only stupid people.

Technorati Tags: Windows Server 2003,Windows Server 2012 R2,Azure,Cloud,Virtualisation,Cloud Computing,Office 365,Security