Cloud | Aidan Finn, IT Pro

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 – 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

Getting Hyper-V Integration Components via Windows Update: A post I wrote for Petri.com
Hyper-V and Wireless networking: Ben Armstrong explains why your Wi-Fi NIC or DHCP might not be working correctly with Hyper-V virtual machines.
Troubleshooting Hyper-V Networking: A post by me on Petri.com
Hot Memory Resize with Windows 10: You can hot-resize memory of vNext guest OS VMs with static memory.
Memory Demand in Windows 10: You can easily see actual memory usage of a guest OS VM with static memory.
Docker on Ubuntu on Hyper-V 2012 R2: Application containers in virtual machines.

Windows Server

Using PowerShell to select Physical Disks for use with Storage Spaces: Using PowerShell speeds up your deployment.
New version of Microsoft Assessment and Planning 9.2: Get information for a migration or upgrade.
Why 1.6 million people will miss Microsoft’s Windows Server 2003 date with fate: Article I was interviewed for on The Register.

Windows Client

Microsoft Announces FIDO 2.0 Support Coming to Windows 10: Fast IDentity Online (FIDO) Alliance – transitioning away from passwords and to a stronger form of identity.

System Center

Hyper-V local storage available for placement in SCVMM: Avoid VMs being accidentally placed on host-local storage, e.g. the D: drive on bare-metal-deployed hosts.
Cumulative Update 4 for System Center 2012 R2 Configuration Manager: Now available.
Some disks are not enumerated when you try to add them to a Data Protection Manager disk pool: When you have disks that are physically attached to a server that is running Microsoft System Center 2012 Data Protection Manager (DPM 2012 or DPM 2012 R2), the disks are displayed in Disk Management as expected, however when you try to add them to the Data Protection Manager disk pool, Data Protection Manager may not enumerate some of the disks.
How to work with Hyper-V network virtualization and Hyper-V replicas in VMM 2012: Although VMM 2012 does not manage Hyper-V replicas natively without ASR, you can still use Hyper-V replica PowerShell cmdlets to automate Hyper-V replica-related operations. Such operations include failing over a VM by using a Hyper-V replica but without using ASR.
Update Rollup 5 is released for System Center 2012 R2: Exercise caution and read ALL of the installation instructions.

Azure

Exploring the Azure RemoteApp User Experience: With Azure RemoteApp, you can run Windows applications in the cloud and deliver them to your users on iOS, Mac OS X, Android in addition to Windows, and Windows Phone.
Managing On-Premises Systems with Azure Automation: Thanks to the Windows PowerShell Remoting feature, Azure Automation can not only manage your Azure resources at an infrastructural level, but also reach inside VMs and execute commands. Think of this as SMA in the cloud, without having to install WAP.
New set of Hybrid Cloud Test Environments: A set of topics for hybrid cloud test environments are now published.
Replicate Azure Pack IaaS Workloads to Azure using ASR: he integration of ASR and Azure Pack also enabled Service Providers to offer DR as a value added service, opening up new review streams and the ability to offer better Service Level Agreements (SLA) to their end customers.
Managing Traffic for Workloads in Azure: Huge solution, a few clicks.
Load balancing workloads in Azure: Expensive solution made affordable and easy by Azure.
New Azure Backup update supports offline disk shipment and increases the number of backup copies and retention policies in Windows: Seriously good update.

Office 365

What’s new – January 2015: Office has gone x-plat and more.

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

Proposed bill limits reach of US search warrants on overseas servers: Proposal to save US owned public clouds from bankruptcy caused by ill-thought-out spying.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Windows Server 2012 R2,Windows 10,Windows Server 2016,Hyper-V,Virtualisation,Networking,PowerShell,Scripting,MAP,Windows Server 2003,Security,System Center,Configuration Manager,VMM,RDS,Azure,Hybrid Cloud,Cloud,Cloud Computing,Office 365,Intune

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 Server and System Center roadmap update: We won’t see new versions of Windows Server and System Center until 2016 🙁
New Guided Walkthrough for troubleshooting problems relating to Slow copying from a shared folder over a network: This article is intended for IT administrators to help diagnose and resolve situations in which users may experience slow file copying over a network.

Windows Client

Windows 10 for Enterprise – More secure and up to date: How businesses will get and can control updates for Windows 10 features.
Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit (Windows ADK) for Windows 10 Technical Preview: The Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit (Windows ADK) is a collection of tools that you can use to customize, assess, and deploy Windows operating systems to new computers
Remote Server Administration Tools for Windows 10 Technical Preview (January 2015): Remote Server Administration Tools for Windows 10 Technical Preview enables IT administrators to manage roles and features that are installed on computers that are running Windows Server Technical Preview from a remote computer that is running Windows 10 Technical Preview.

Azure

Announcing Azure Preview Portal Improvements: Codename Ibiza has been improved based on feedback.
New Cloud Platform Roadmap Site: See what’s coming (that Marketing has allowed to be announced) in the Cloud OS.
Automating Azure Virtual Machine Deployment with Chef: But what does "Infrastructure as Code" mean and how do I leverage this concept with Azure?
Microsoft Azure makes business productivity easier and more secure with updates across SQL Server, Enterprise Mobility, and Azure Media Services offerings: Marketing post – just look at the title.
Linux Virtual Machine Management with Kundana Palagiri: Channel 9 video covering how to have Azure automatically run shell scripts on Azure VMs as they provision without having to manually SSH into each machine, Chef and Puppet.
Azure Websites and the "Deploy Button" with Elliot Hamai: Channel 9 video on how to easily deploy websites from GitHub.
Azure AD Conditional Access and Azure AD Connect Health – Now in Preview: Conditional Access for SaaS Apps and Azure AD Connect Health.

Licensing

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

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Windows Server 2015,System Center,Networking,Windows 10,Deployment,Azure,Hybrid Cloud,Cloud,Cloud Computing,Linux,Active Directory,Licensing

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

Distributed File System Namespace Solution with Hybrid Cloud Storage Deployment Guide: This paper explains how to deploy Microsoft Azure StorSimple, Windows file servers, and Windows Server Distributed File System Namespace to create a global namespace for all the shares created in StorSimple.
System Center Endpoint Protection support for Windows Server 2003: Microsoft will end support for their anti-malware on W2003 on July 14th in line with W2003 end of life.

Windows Client

Microsoft Clarifies How the Spartan Browser Will Support Legacy Sites and Apps: The new additional browser for Windows 10 will be compatible all the way back to IE5 via IE11 Enterprise Mode.

Azure

New G-Series Support in US East 2: Given the growing demand Microsoft is seeing, they accelerated the release of another region, US East 2. You can now deploy G-Series Virtual Machines in either US West or US East 2. They will continue to expand G-series support to other regions based on customer demand and usage.
Scheduling Azure Automation runbooks with Azure Scheduler: A very useful feature. They also show how to schedule for specific days of the week.
Troubleshooting Microsoft Azure Storage with Message Analyzer: Microsoft has released a set of Azure Storage specific assets in Microsoft Message Analyzer, including parsers, color rules, charts, filters, and view layouts, to help you diagnose and troubleshoot issues in cloud storage applications.
Choosing Between Azure VM Series: A post I wrote for Petri.com.
Creating an Azure AD Lab Environment: A handy start up guide.

Intune

List of attributes that are synced by Microsoft Intune: Some may need access to this information for compliance checks.

Security

Microsoft’s Security Essentials Fails Latest Antivirus Test: According to AV-Test in December 2014.

Miscellaneous

Has Microsoft Changed their Image? A post by me on Petri.com
New Apple partner IBM prepares for largest corporate layoff in history: 111,000+ people to go at "Much Smaller Blue"

Technorati Tags: Windows Server 2003,Security,Storage,Windows 10,Azure,PowerShell,System Center,Scripting,Cloud,Cloud Computing,Hybrid Cloud,Intune,Microsoft

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

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

Hyper-V Script to move everything off of a physical disk: Drain anything that is located on a particular disk.
Announcing DSC resources to deploy Hyper-V converged virtual network: This is an interesting third-party offer. I am wary of deep integrations such as this because I am worried about lock-ins that prevent upgrades when/if there are significant changes from Microsoft.

Windows Server

You are invited to participate in the Windows Server 2003 Modernization offering: The Partner Technical Services team is excited to share a new initiative focused on helping you migrate from Windows Server 2003 before end of support.
Work Folders for iOS – iPad App Release: Great add-on for iOS, giving businesses their own version of DropBox based on WS2012 R2 file servers and Workplace Join.
Win2012R2: STOP 0x133 and STOP 0x9E caused by too many NBLs in a DPC: Microsoft has been seeing an increase in STOP 0x133 (on non-clustered) and 0x9E (on clustered) cases, where the root cause is that there are too many NBLs indicated in a DPC. This causes the DPC watchdog timer to expire, resulting in mentioned STOP errors.
Announcing Message Analyzer 1.2: I really dislike this replacement for NetMon. It’s too difficult to use, even after you’ve sat through a briefing. My advice to Microsoft: start from scratch … again.

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

Configuring VMM logical switch with bandwidth limit virtual port: Enable VM QoS.
Monitoring Text and CSV log files in System Center Operations Manager: Very useful.
Cluster overcommit algorithm in System Center 2012 R2 Virtual Machine Manager: This article describes four approaches for the System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) cluster overcommit algorithm in Microsoft System Center 2012 R2 Virtual Machine Manager.

Azure

Try ExpressRoute Free of Charge with this Promotion: Microsoft launched a promotional offer for Azure ExpressRoute, making it easier to get started with fast, private network connections between your on-premises environment and Azure.
New Application Insights functionality on Azure Websites with the Application Insights Website extension: This feature is designed to help development teams get 360° views of their applications across Availability, Performance and Usage with fast & powerful troubleshooting, diagnostics and usage insights.
Saving Money with Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines: In this article I will look at some methods you can employ to save money when you deploy virtual machines into Microsoft Azure.
Microsoft Azure App Enables Workplace Join Connections for Android Devices: Give controlled Android users access to on-premises resources with a hybrid cloud service.
Azure AD Workplace Join, now with Android Support: The official announcement.
Connect servers directly to Operational Insights: Easy to set up from-the-cloud server management.
How to easily spin up an Azure AD Premium Trial: So you’d like to demo Azure AD to your customers or want to get the feel of it? Perhaps you have Azure via MSDN and would like to spin it up on the fly for a demo environment?

Office 365

Participate in the Office 365 Practice Accelerator for SMB offering: A new initiative focused on helping Microsoft partners learn the fundamental deployment principles and processes that lead to repeatable successful deployments of O365 for Small and Medium customers.

Intune

Enrolling iOS Devices Via Apple Configurator In Microsoft Intune: A step-by-step. Been a while since I did this, but it was easier than enrolling Windows Phone!

Events

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

Miscellaneous

Paul Thurrott’s last post on WinSuperSite.com: It’s the end of an era for that important site. But Paul continues tomorrow on thurrott.com.
Blue Whale Web Partners with Paul Thurrott to Launch Thurrott.com Technology News Site: So I am now a work colleague of Paul Thurrott!!! Thurrott.com has launched as a sister site of Petri.com and Paul is also writing news articles for the site.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Hyper-V,Virtualisation,PowerShell,Scripting,Windows Server 2003,Active Directory,Networking,Windows 10,System Center,VMM,Operations Manager,Failover Clustering,Azure,Cloud,Cloud Computing,Hybrid Cloud,Office 365,Intune,Events

Microsoft News – 14 January 2015

Here’s the Microsoft updates from the last few days.

Windows Server

Advances in Active Directory since Windows Server 2003: Features that people have been asking for since 2003 … some have been there since Windows Server 2008!

System Center

Windows Azure Pack and it’s licensing: A post by MSFT employee (and co-author on the last Hyper-V book), Michel Luescher.
Microsoft Updating Intune and SCCM with an Eye Toward Windows 10: Mobility seems to be the focus.
Step-By-Step: Building A System Center Virtual Machine Manager Lab Part 1: Start to learn VMM
SCOM – New Windows Server OS Management Pack Available – BUT BEWARE!: A warning from Kevin Greene about a new (and recently pulled) update to the Windows Server OS management pack.

Azure

Azure Data Center Migration just got easier: It’s still a hack, so it’s not as simple as it should be.
AzCopy – Introducing synchronous copy and customized content type: AzCopy 3.1.0 and 4.1.0-Preview are now released.
Microsoft Azure Reaches New Industry-Leading Cloud Compliance Milestones: Compliance stuff.
Migrate Linux VMs to Azure with Migration Accelerator: Microsoft announced support for the migration of Linux physical and virtual machines to Azure.

Office 365

What’s new – December 2014: Quite a few things, despite the end of year holidays.

Technorati Tags: Windows Server 2015,Active Directory,Windows Server 2003,WAP,System Center,Intune,Configuration Manager,VMM,Private Cloud,Cloud,Cloud Computing,Operations Manager,Azure,Hybrid Cloud,Linux,Office 365

Microsoft News – 9 January 2015

3 big announcements from Azure last night plus a useful Hyper-V reporting script feature today.

Hyper-V

Hyper-V Reporting Script: A post by Ben Armstrong promoting a very useful script by Hyper-V MVP Serhat AKINCI

System Center

Hyper-V NVGRE Gateway Toolkit: An alternative way to deploy Hyper-V NVGRE gateways
Have a say on the future of System Center: A survey on System Center.
Azure Pack Tenant portal extensibilities – Part 1: This series of posts is going to talk about a certain set of extensibilities that Microsoft enabled for Azure pack to support different reseller-type functionalities.

Azure

Azure Storage to start disabling SSL 3.0 on February 20th, 2015: Protecting against the SSL 3.0 vulnerability. You need TLS 1.0 or higher to continue.
Azure is now bigger, faster, more open, and more secure: Azure Key Vault helps customers safeguard and control keys and secrets using HSMs in the cloud, with ease and at cloud-scale. Furthermore, customers can deploy an encrypted Virtual Machine with CloudLink SecureVM with the master keys in Key Vault. The "Goliath" G-series VMs have gone GA. And an image of a Docker-enabled Ubuntu VM is in the Marketplace.
Largest VM in the Cloud: G-series sizes provide the most memory, the highest processing power and the largest amount of local SSD of any Virtual Machine size currently available in the public cloud.
Introducing Docker in Microsoft Azure Marketplace: Microsoft announced the first Ubuntu image fully integrated with the Docker engine available for fast deployment from the Microsoft Azure marketplace.

Security

Evolving Microsoft’s Advance Notification Service in 2015: We’re getting less information. Is this a good or a bad thing? I don’t know yet.

Technorati Tags: Hyper-V,Windows Server 2012 R2,Virtualisation,Networking,System Center,VMM,Cloud,Hybrid Cloud,Private Cloud,Azure,Storage,Security

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

Setting up Port Mirroring to Capture Mirrored Traffic on a Hyper-V Virtual Machine:A handy but rarely discussed feature
Large Scale VDI deployment using Hyper-V with Storage Tiers and Data Deduplication: Need some help planning a large scale, highly efficient Personal Desktop deployment that leverages Storage Tiers and Data Deduplication?

Windows Server

WorkPlace Join vs. Domain Join: The new way (personal and mobile client devices) and the old way of authenticating machines against Active Directory.
Case Studies on Storage Spaces, Scale-Out File Servers with SMB3 or both: Need some proof?

System Center

Deduplication of DPM Storage – Reduce DPM Storage Consumption: DPM does not do deduplication of its own storage; instead a virtual DPM places data storage (VHDX files) on deduplicated SMB 3.0 (only) volumes. This is the only supported scenario.
Azure Pack Wiki Available Via OneNote: Courtesy of Hyper-V.nu

Windows Client

Microsoft is building a new browser as part of its Windows 10 push: Say by bye to IE

Azure

Use Microsoft Azure Backup with Recovery Services: An article I wrote for Petri.com on how to backup PCs to Azure

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Virtualisation,Hyper-V,Networking,VDI,Remote Desktop Services,Storage,Active Directory,Windows Server 2012 R2,Failover Clustering,System Center,DPM,Cloud,Cloud Computing,Private Cloud,Windows 10,Internet Explorer,Azure,Backup,Hybrid Cloud

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