Tag: Hybrid Cloud

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

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

Office 365

Microsoft News Summary – 15 August 2014

Here’s the latest from the last 24 hours:

Microsoft News Summary – 13 August 2014

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

Microsoft News Summary – 7 August 2014

Very little happening. These quiet times are great for rumours.

Oh – and don’t use Generation 2 virtual machines on WS2012 R2 Hyper-V.

Microsoft News Summary – 6 August 2014

I’ve done photography in some of the most rural parts of the world, but I’ve never been without phone or Internet for 3 days before. *exaggeration alert*  Being in a dark valley in Scotland over a long weekend was like having an arm removed. Anywho, here’s the news from the last few days. Note that there is an “August Update for …” Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2 coming out next week, what the media will probably called “Update 2 for …”.

Azure Site Recovery & InMage Scout – And Bad Decision Making

Microsoft announced last week that they had acquired InMage, a company that specialises in replication to the cloud. Microsoft is adding InMage to Azure Site Recovery (ASR) to enable replication to Azure. ASR enables you to use Hyper-V Replica (HVR) to replicate VMs to Azure IaaS. So what does InMage Scout (the product) add?

The key piece of the list of features is:

Support for major enterprise platforms, including Windows, AIX, Linux, VMware, Solaris, XenServer and Hyper-V

Imagine being able to replicate not just Hyper-V, but also vSphere and physical (Windows and Linux) workloads to Azure. Potentially, this is a much bigger solution. Potentially.

And potential is … lost opportunity.

That’s because the decision makers in ASR are, in my opinion, disconnected from reality living way too nicely in the Microsoft ivory tower. Why?

  • ASR can only be used by customers that manage Hyper-V using SCVMM. SCVMM can only be bought as a part of the System Center SML. The SML is cheap for larger businesses, but it’s way too expensive for most SMEs.
  • Only EA customers (large businesses) can get access to InMage:

The Azure Site Recovery subscription license will be available through the Microsoft Enterprise Agreement beginning August 1, 2014 and is the only offer through which InMage Scout usage may currently be purchased.

So, SME’s cannot use ASR or the cool new features that are coming. Large enterprises typically already own or want to own their own DR. And the sweet spot market for a hosted virtual DR (DRaaS) is the SME … the market that cannot afford or get access to ASR.

Oh, the madness continues.

Microsoft News Summary – 17 July 2014

This week’s Microsoft news has been dominated by the cryptic letter by Satya Nadella and the pending (and obviously required) layoffs after the completion Nokia acquisition. Let’s stick to the techie stuff:

Microsoft “Cloud in a Box” – Who Can Sell This?

Mary Jo Foley has the scoop on this story on ZDNet, about how Microsoft will sell packaged on-premises Azure (Hyper-V, System Center, and Windows Azure Pack) private or hosted (private or public) clouds through hardware partners. She asks a question: which vendors can offer this solution, which uses Storage Spaces for the Hyper-V VM storage. That is easy enough to answer, as of right now, thanks to the limited number of traditional server PLUS storage vendors in the Storage Spaces HCL category. This includes:

  • Fujitsu: who are not exactly a big player outside of government (at least here in Ireland)
  • Super Micro: A company that builds specifically to order, and doesn’t seem to understand channel sales like a HP, Dell, Fujitsu, etc – mainly a data center player and not a packaged solution vendor.
  • Dell

And that’s where I think we’ll see Microsoft make a play. Microsoft invested billions into Dell. Dell has 2 JBOD models for Storage Spaces. They sell the types of servers that Microsoft envisions for use in a cloud (half U servers). And Dell is the sort of company that sells packaged solutions.

And before you comment: No; I have not mentioned HP. HP has no certified Storage Spaces JBODs, as you can clearly see in the Storage Spaces HCL category. And anyway, HP want to push other things that are not in the Cloud OS vision and compete with Windows Server, System Center, and Azure.

But who knows – it’s just bang on 4 years since Microsoft announced that there would be third-party Azure appliances and they never appeared. Maybe nothing will happen of this – it’s hard to package up a Microsoft solution now because their Cloud OS products are upgrading way too quickly for a big company like Dell to keep up with.

Microsoft News Summary – 14 July 2014

After a week’s break in Finland, I am back with news from the last 10 or so days. It was a busy period!

TechCamp 2014 Presentation – Hybrid Cloud Using Microsoft Azure

This presentation was an introduction for IT pros to deploying hybrid cloud solutions based on Microsoft Azure, in conjunction with on-premises Hyper-V / System Center deployments. Here’s the deck that I presented … and yes … there are LOTS of slides because there is constantly new stuff in Azure.