Microsoft | Aidan Finn, IT Pro

Microsoft News Summary – 8 August 2014

It looks like you will have to use the latest version of IE to be supported after January 2016. That’ll go down like the Hindenburg in businesses.

Sysinternals Sysmon v1.0: A Windows system service and device driver that, once installed on a system, remains resident across system reboots to monitor and log system activity to the Windows event log. By collecting the events it generates using Windows Event Collection or SIEM agents and subsequently analyzing them, you can identify malicious or anomalous activity and understand how intruders and malware operate on your network.
Microsoft will kill support for IE 8, the world’s most popular desktop browser, by 2016: See the official MSFT support lifecycle statements here.
Microsoft licensing for data center outsourcing: SPLA is complicated.
Strengthening encryption for Microsoft Azure customer: Microsoft Azure has taken additional steps toward our commitment to protecting customer data with the announcement of encryption improvements for Microsoft Azure guest OS
TLS/SSL Cipher Suite Enhancements and Perfect Forward Secrecy: zure is announcing additional enhancements that honor our commitments to security and increased transparency.
Differences between Azure Guest OS and Default Windows Server: This page lists the differences between default installations of Windows Server and the Microsoft Azure Guest Operating System (OS) used with Azure Cloud Services.

Technorati Tags: Internet Explorer,Microsoft,Licensing,Security,Azure,Cloud,Cloud Computing,Networking

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.

A story of how Generation 2 VMs caused performance issues: This, on top of secure boot up cert update issues lead me to advising: STICK WITH GENERATION 1 VIRTUAL MACHINES
Microsoft’s Windows ‘Threshold’ expected to add virtual desktops, drop charms: Mary Jo Foley has news on the changes coming to Windows vNext. TechEd Europe should be interesting.
New Site Recovers Files Locked by Cryptolocker Ransomware: Two security firms teamed up to launch a free new online service that can help victims unlock and recover files scrambled by the malware.
3 Steps to Securing FTP on IIS 8: Here are three additional things you can do to increase the security of your server’s FTP service and minimize its attack footprint.
Microsoft to block outdated Java versions in Internet Explorer: It’s about time that Java was treated like malware.
Service Management Automation using System Center 2012 R2: A whitepaper on SMA by MVP Michael Rueefli.
License Mobility through Software Assurance on Azure: License Mobility through Software Assurance gives Microsoft Volume Licensing customers the flexibility to deploy eligible server applications with active Software Assurance on Azure. With this Software Assurance benefit, there is no need to purchase new licenses and no associated mobility fees so, you can easily deploy existing licenses on the Azure cloud platform.
Cloud Ecosystem Poster: Microsoft Azure, Windows Server 2012 R2, System Center 2012 R2: This document provides a visual reference for understanding key Microsoft private cloud and on-premises cloud technologies.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Hyper-V,Windows Server 2012 R2,Security,IIS,Internet Explorer,System Center,WAP,Azure,Licensing,Hybrid Cloud,Cloud,Cloud Computing

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

Microsoft Data Centres Going Greener

Microsoft’s data centres are pretty “green”. And when I say green, I mean that they build & install only what they absolutely need, and they focus very heavily on power. A common measurement stick is Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), which Wikipedia defines as:

… how much energy is used by the computing equipment (in contrast to cooling and other overhead).

The lower the number, the better. Microsoft does not share their PUE publicly, but according to the Green (Low Carbon) Data Center Blog the:

… PUE figures for its newest data centers which range from 1.13 to 1.2.

That’s an incredibly efficient achievement. I know quite a bit about how Microsoft do this, but I’m under NDA, after NDA, after NDA 🙂 All I can say is jump at the chance if you ever have an opportunity to tour on of the Microsoft Global Foundation Services modern data centres.

So what drives Microsoft? Sure, getting the likes of Greenpeace on your side is always good,especially when trying to sell business to environmentally sensitive customers. But the biggest reason for electrical efficiency is to save money. Electricity is only becoming more and more expensive. Data centers are growing in size and number, and are competing for this limited resource with each other, and with us (customers, consumers, businesses, etc). So saving a hundredth from a PUE figure could be worth millions of dollars every year (if not more!).

According to Fool.com, Microsoft has gone one step further by acquiring 20 years of power supply from a wind farm in Illinois, USA. This produces 175MW of power, all for Microsoft! And before that, Microsoft agreed to purchase 100% of production from a wind farm in Texas.

In theory, this is a renewable energy source with a pretty fixed cost. That contrasts nicely with competing for electricity from producers that are using dwindling carbon-based fuels. The strategy allows Microsoft to budget long-term, and it doesn’t hurt that renewable power will get a nod of approval from those wearing vegan trousers. It makes sense that Microsoft will continue this trend worldwide, thus making property costs and climate the only variations in the cost of operating Azure in different regions.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Azure

Microsoft News Summary – 23 July 2014

Overnight Microsoft news is dominated by their Q4 2014 (MSFT financial year is July-June and just started FY 2015) returns.

Microsoft Reports Positive Q4 Earnings: Cloud services grew 44%, and beat overall revenue expectations. Shares are now at $44.83 each – after a decade of around $25 under Ballmer. Mary Jo Foley has a better breakdown here.
Windows 8.1 Update 2 Rumored To Appear on August 12: "Update 2" which is probably going to be called "August 2014 update for …" is rumoured to be out next month as another "service pack". It should also be released for WS2012 R2.
Microsoft Fixes Flawed ISOs of SQL Server 2012 SP2: Microsoft indicated late last week that it has fixed a problem with SQL Server 2012 Service Pack 2 that may have affected some of its TechNet or MSDN subscribers. Woops!
SPLA – Back to Basics: Understand hosting/leasing licensing. This is a must-know if building on top of Azure.
Microsoft Partners – Activating Your Azure Benefits (Free Stuff!): This short video will show you how to activate your benefits for free monthly credits as well as some resources that can help you get started.
How to link Azure RemoteApp to an existing VNET: Now we’re talking – enable remote/latent network access to legacy apps hosted in Azure.
Stop Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines in Parallel using PowerShell: A critical must-know IMO.
Why Blade Servers are the Wrong Choice: An article I wrote for Petri.com based on lots of problems I’ve seen or heard about.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Windows 8.1,Windows Server 2012 R2,SQL,Licensing,Azure,RDS,Hardware

Microsoft News Summary – 21 July 2014

Not much news floating about. But the first two items in my summary makes me worry about Microsoft. V- staff (contractors) are going to be blocked from network access intermittently, making them redundant, and baldy needed human testers are being made redundant.

Microsoft imposes restrictions on ‘external staff,’ limits their network and business access: This is the sort of bull$h1t that happens when HR people are allowed into meetings or to make decisions. They should be restricted to rubber stamping employment contracts.
Operating systems group chief Myerson’s memo to the troops: I have no idea why MSFT is cutting testers when testing quality has been dropping. We need less automation and more human involvement.
Microsoft Azure RemoteApp – You can now create cloud deployments with your own template image: You can now create a cloud deployment using your own template image.
Controlling SMB Multichannel in Windows Server 2012 R2: A post by me on Petri.com.
Lenovo gives up on small-screen Windows tablets in US market: Premium 8" Windows tablets not selling in the USA. Small is about cheap. And small requires quantity and quality native apps.
Record number of DDoS attacks in first half of 2014: A new report examining distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks in the first half of 2014 has shown that incidents are increasing exponentially at 20Gbps.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Azure,RDS,Storage,Networking,Windows Server 2012 R2,Hardware,Security

Why Should You Attend TechEd Europe 2014

Other than the fact that this might be the venue of the most important product announcements in Microsoft’s recent history … hmm … let me think …

Hear what community members say about TechEd at the TechEd Roundtable

I have also recorded a video (on Instagram) that discusess how to convince your boss that you need to go to TechEd Europe.

But honestly, traditional learning mechanisms can no longer keep up with sprint development, new features out every few weeks, and RTMs every 12-18 months. TechEd is like a triple espresso shot of learning … you take 4-5 days, depending on travel, out of your regular work schedule and get immersed in new tech, from keynote, to foundation, to deep dive … and maybe throw in some hands on labs and certification while you’re at it. I learn at TechEd (as an MVP I also am lucky to have MVP sources); a lot of what I write about is sourced from TechEd sessions or materials. TechEd sessions give me access to wide amounts of information … and I can chat with the Microsoft experts in the expo hall afterwards.

There is nothing else like this learning experience in the Microsoft world for the general public. And I’m pretty sure that TechEd Europe 2014 will be a very special education opportunity. We’re on the threshold of a very interesting time.

Technorati Tags: Events,Microsoft