PowerShell

Microsoft News Summary – 8 September 2014

It’s been 5 days since my last of these updates – events, meetings and travel take their toll!

Below you will see an announcement on how to deploy DPM in Azure to backup stuff from within Azure VMs (not a host level backup). Please note that this is licensed using on-premises SysCtr SML licenses and cloud management licensing is not the same as on-premises licensing. A SysCtr Datacenter SML covers 8 VMs in the cloud, so you might need lots more SysCtr licensing to manage Azure.

Microsoft has also launched a Migration Accelerator for Azure based on the InMage acquisition. Right now, the preview is limited to the USA. That’s pretty dumb; anyone who knows MSFT virtualization knows that Europe is the place to be.

Oh – the MSFT versus FBI Irish data centre case rumbles on. It’s clear that the motivations of the US government were not speed (the Irish government would have been quick to help) but are more along the lines of “Mine! MINE! MINE!!!! MY PRECIOUSSSSS!”.

Windows Server

What is Hyper-Convergence? A post by me on Petri.com
5 Reasons Why You Should Upgrade To Windows Server 2012 R2: A post by me on Petri.com

SCVMM

Support Tip – Updating DHCP agents after applying VMM 2012 R2 Update Rollup 3: With the release System Center 2012 R2 Virtual Machine Manager Update Rollup 3 (VMM 2012 R2 UR3) the DHCP agent was updated. The most important fix in this agent is the mitigation of an issue that can cause delays of up to 45 seconds in acquiring an IP address when using private networks.

Azure

Modernizing Your Infrastructure with Hybrid Cloud – Step-by-Step: Building Microsoft Azure Virtual Networks (Part 14): A video on managing deploying networks in Azure.
XenDesktop 7.5 Windows Azure Pack Gallery Image Tech Preview: The Citrix XenDesktop 7.5 Windows Azure Pack Gallery Image enables rapid and repeatable XenDesktop deployments. The automation capabilities of Windows Azure Pack are leveraged to greatly reduce administrator involvement with XenDesktop configurations.
Azure IaaS workload protection using Data Protection Manager: Deploy DPM in Azure to protect your Azure VMs, and if you want, stream that data to Azure online backup.
Introducing Microsoft Migration Accelerator: Spawned from the technology of our InMage acquisition the MA is designed to seamlessly migrate physical, VMware, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Hyper-V workloads into Azure.
Azure Automation: Reliable, Fault-Tolerant Runbook Execution Using Checkpoints: As an Azure Automation runbook author you want to create runbooks that execute reliably in the face of unexpected issues like errors, exceptions, network issues, and crashes. Azure Automation helps you with this.
Networking Infrastructure Setup for Microsoft Azure as a Disaster Recovery Site: This post explains how to setup the required networking infrastructure with the help of an example.
MSFT certification (70-533): Implementing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions (IaaS)
Study Guide for 70-533 Implementing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions: Curated by Marius Sandbu.

Office 365

Microsoft Promo Provides Support for Office 365 Migrations: Microsoft has kicked off a limited-time Office 356 promotional offer this month, but it’s just for new customers. The deal extends from Sept. 1, 2014 to March 31, 2015 for new customers only that purchase 150 "seats," or more, of various Office 365 licenses.
Toshiba to bring €139 Windows 8.1 tablet to market in Q4: This includes Office 365 Personal with 1 TB One Drive and offers license for 1 Tablet + 1 PC/Mac for 1 year. And other stuff. As was joked in the office today: buy Office 365 and get a tablet.
Questions to ask your cloud provider: According to Microsoft

Hardware

Intel releases first Core M processors for business-class convertible PCs: Broadwell means thinner, lighter devices with no moving parts (fans). Devices could be as thin as 9mm!

Legal

(Irish) Government’s ‘serious concern’ over US order on Microsoft: The Irish Government has expressed serious concern about a US court order for Microsoft to hand over emails held on servers in Ireland to US prosecutors, saying it would create significant legal uncertainty about data protection in Europe.

Technorati Tags: Windows Server 2012 R2,System Center,VMM,Azure,Cloud,Cloud Computing,Citrix,DPM,Backup,DR,PowerShell,Scripting,O365

Microsoft News Summary – 3 September 2014

The idiotic US government is continuing in their quest to kill off all US interests in cloud computing, thanks to “justice” Plesk contemplating placing contempt of court charges on Microsoft. Sad thing is, the contempt is justified.

Hyper-V

Installing a guest OS from a Windows ISO image: A Hyper-V post by me on Petri.com
What Is AutoRecovery.avhdx all about? Learn how this temporary VHDX is used by Hyper-V for backing up VMs.
‘Unnamed VM’ could not initialize… The security ID structure is invalid (0x80070539): A permissions issue that can occur when importing VMs.

System Center

Deploying Virtual Machines in Azure using Service Manager and SMA Part III: Using on-premises automation to deploy VMs in Azure.
Windows Azure Pack Tool: Enables you to execute tasks through a simple menu. In this version Windows Azure Pack Tool includes the following functions: Change default URLs, Add admin users and more!

Azure

Azure Site Recovery – Our Commitment to Keeping Your Data Secure: ASR was designed ground up as a hybrid IT service composed of both cloud & on-premises components aligning to Microsoft’s privacy commitments.
Azure AD – Under the hood of our geo-redundant, highly available, distributed cloud directory: Answering lots of questions. This is clever stuff.
Create your own dedicated MySQL Server for your Azure Websites: Set up MySQL in Azure VMs to have total control and multi-purposing.
Windows Azure Virtual Machine Monitoring with WAD Extension: With the launch of the Azure preview portal and the support for the Azure extension model, there are new diagnostic capabilities available that will help you better monitor your Azure IaaS VMs with very little setup and configuration.

Microsoft

Judge mulls contempt charges in Microsoft’s e-mail privacy fight with US: The borders & warrants issue continues, as does the stupidity of the US government. A simple request to the Irish government would have given them the data they wanted last year, assuming it was a legitimate request in the first place!

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Hyper-V,Windows Server 2012 R2,System Center,WAP,PowerShell,Azure,Cloud,Cloud Computing

Microsoft News Summary – 1 September 2014

Frak! It’s September already!?!?!?! Here’s my first update in a since last Wednesday – travel and events took priority.

The big news broke late on Friday and Saturday. The moron judge presiding over the FBI/Microsoft case cancelled the stay on the order to force Microsoft to turn over data from the Dublin data centre to the US feds, thus breaching privacy and violating Irish and European laws. Microsoft is refusing to comply and is appealing to a higher court in the USA.

Hyper-V

Manually Merging Hyper-V Checkpoints: Black magic for those of you who misuse Hyper-V snapshots.

Legal

Your email belongs to you, not us: Microsoft is quite clear on this, and it’s why the US government’s case is BS, and it’s not similar to the IRS demanding that you turnover your offshore bank records.
Microsoft Ireland data warrant upheld, stay on data turnover lifted: The American government wants to kill all American presence in the cloud. Microsoft will resist, and is supported by the rivals.

Azure

A backup to Azure Backup fails if the data source is larger than 850 GB: A hotfix for W2008 R2, WS2012, WS2012 R2 DPM 2012 SP1 and DPM 2012 R2.
How to plan your migration to Azure Websites: This post will showcase the what you need know about the platform when migrating to Azure websites.
Azure Automation – Authenticating to Azure using Azure Active Directory: Azure Automation can now authenticate to Azure using organization identity credential-based authentication, using Azure Active Directory.
Introducing Long Term Retention for DPM Azure cloud backups:

Windows Intune

Microsoft rolls out two new Windows Intune mobile-device management features: iOS and Windows Phone 8/8.1 Email Profile Provisioning and Mobile Policy Support for Enterprise Mode in Internet Explorer for Windows 8.1/8.1 RT.

Windows PowerShell ISE Fundamentals: This built-in tool makes learning PowerShell easy.

Surface

What’s the Future for Surface Tablets? IMO, doom. It’s impossible to sell a business machine to business users if you don’t give businesses a way to buy the device and an SLA-enforced mechanism to support it. First of you to say "BYOD" gets a kick in the groin for drinking 2-year old Gartner KoolAid.

Licensing

Hybrid, Dedicated, and Shared Scenarios: Easily, the most complicated aspect of licensing. It makes VDI look easy.

VMware

What’s New in VMware vSphere 6.0: Some nice things, but not that much to be honest.

Consumer

Finally, Microsoft Has Removed The 2GB File Size Limit On OneDrive: It never affected me, but someone must have complained.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Hyper-V,Virtualisation,VMware,Azure,Backup,DPM,System Center,Intune,PowerShell,Scripting,Hardware,Licensing

Microsoft News Summary – 25 August 2014

Not much has happened since last Friday morning. VMworld is on this week in San Francisco – maybe it’s no coincidence that there have been earthquakes nearby?

Azure

AzureConf, free online Azure conference: On September 25th, 2014, Microsoft will be hosting AzureConf, another free event for the Azure community. This event will feature a keynote presentation by Scott Guthrie, along with numerous sessions executed by Azure community members.

PowerShell

Writing a custom DSC resource for Remote Desktop (RDP) settings: This blog post is going to show you how to create a custom DSC resource based on a practical situation where you need to manage your servers remotely.

Intune

The Windows Intune Team will be performing scheduled maintenance at the end of August: All service functions and operations are expected to perform normally during this maintenance window. Once the upgrade to the Windows Intune service is complete, a number of mandatory agent updates will be pushed out to all PC client machines connected to the service. In most cases, these updates will not require a reboot after being applied.

Office 365

Matter Centric Legal Document Management: MSFT has launched a limited pilot program for an industry vertical O365 solution to improve the way law firms and attorneys work together by making it easier to organize files by client and matter, review documents, and find information when needed without ever leaving Microsoft Word or Outlook. < I wonder, if like some other verticals, this only applies to the USA … try set the URL to be non-US.

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 – 13 August 2014

Overnight, Microsoft released the August 2014 Update Rollup for WS2012 R2 and Windows 8. Lots of hotfixes!

TechNet Radio: (Part 10) Building Your Hybrid Cloud – Windows Azure Pack Remote Console Support: A video on Channel 9
Bare Metal Post-Deployment – Introduction and Scenario Part 1: VMM host deployment.
Bare Metal Post-Deployment – Pre-Conditions Part 2: The series continues.
Bare Metal Post-Deployment – Constructing the Post-Deployment Automation – Part 3: Here is part 3 on the topic of Constructing the Post-Deployment automation
August updates for Windows 8.1: It’s not as big as the April update, but it still has new features.
Azure Automation: Runbook Input, Output, and Nested Runbooks: This post will cover some of the basic concepts that will help you create high-quality runbooks.
Microsoft Azure Virtual Machine Readiness Assessment: Microsoft Azure Virtual Machine Readiness Assessments for Active Directory, SharePoint Server and SQL Server.
The Best Hyper-V Training Resources: A post I wrote for Petri.com

Technorati Tags: Hybrid Cloud,Azure,Cloud,Cloud Computing,System Center,VMM,Deployment,Windows 8.1,PowerShell,Scripting,Hyper-V,Virtualisation

Microsoft News Summary – 11 August 2014

I think we can call today’s issue “What’s New in Azure”:

Introducing the Azure PowerShell DSC (Desired State Configuration) extension: Introducing the PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC) Extension for Azure VMs as part of the Azure PowerShell SDK.
Desired State Configuration (DSC) Nodes Deployment and Conformance Reporting Series (Part 1) – Series agenda, Understanding the DSC conformance endpoint: In any configuration management process, once the configuration is applied to the target systems, it is necessary to monitor these systems for any configuration drift.
Desired State Configuration (DSC) Nodes Deployment and Conformance Reporting Series (Part 2) – Deploying a pull service endpoint and automating the configuration of the DSC nodes: How a pull service endpoint can be installed, and how nodes can be configured to point to this server and retrieve their DSC configurations.
Desired State Configuration (DSC) Nodes Deployment and Conformance Reporting Series (Part 3) – Working with the conformance endpoint: How to deploy/configure, and work with the conformance endpoint.
Introducing Zone Redundant Storage: Introducing Zone Redundant Storage (ZRS) as an additional redundancy option for Azure Storage.
AzCopy 2.5 Release: his version includes several important improvements for performance and usability. There is also a comprehensive Getting Started tutorial for AzCopy which helps summarizes the syntax for AzCopy as well as guidance for key scenarios.
Microsoft outlines plans to replace Select Plus with MSPA license: Microsoft volume licensees, take note: Microsoft will be replacing its Select Plus agreements with the new Microsoft Products and Services Agreement (MPSA).
How To Use Repadmin for Active Directory Troubleshooting: The Windows Server tool Repadmin can be your best friend when trying to pinpoint and fix Active Directory issues.
IT Pros Face August 12 Deadline on Updates to Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2: August 12 will be a big milestone day for IT pros managing Microsoft’s latest Windows operating systems.

Technorati Tags: Azure,PowerShell,Storage,Cloud,Cloud Computing,Licensing,Active Directory,Windows Server 2012 R2,Windows 8.1

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

Microsoft News Summary – 28 July 2014

It was a quiet weekend. Note a useful scripts for health checking a Scale-Out File Server (SOFS) by Jose Barreto.

How to Reserve Public Virtual IP Addresses in Microsoft Azure: Using the new feature to reserve a public IP for your cloud service – recommended!
Microsoft Working on Hotfix for Windows Server 2003 Migration Problem: Users sometimes aren’t able to log into their machines under this scenario because of a mismatch between the encryption types used by Kerberos in the two servers.
PowerShell script for Storage Cluster Health Test published to the TechNet Script Center: Storage PM, Jose Barreto, published a PowerShell script to check the health and capacity of a Storage Cluster based on Windows Server 2012 R2 Scale-Out File Servers.
How the Test-StorageHealth.ps1 script checks for Storage Cluster health: How the above script by Jose Barreto works.
Xbox-Produced “Atari: Game Over” Documentary Gets First Trailer: Microsoft has released a trailer for Atari: Game Over, the first part of its documentary series Signal to Noise (out this Fall, despite the closure of Xbox Entertainment Studios).

Technorati Tags: Azure,Networking,Windows Server 2003,Windows Server 2012 R2,PowerShell,Scripting,Scale-Out File Server,Storage,Storage Spaces,Failover Clustering,Hardware

Microsoft News Summary – 24 July 2014

Very little for you today:

Provision Domain Controllers in Azure using PowerShell: Learn how to provision domain controllers in Microsoft Azure using PowerShell with a single click of the mouse.
Proximal Data AutoCache Review: My review of this cool product for Petri.com.
New ExpressRoute locations and partners: Growth coming in the USA, Europe, and Asia.

Technorati Tags: Azure,Active Directory,PowerShell,Scripting,Storage,Networking,Cloud,Cloud Computing