Office 365

Call For Speakers – Cloud Camp, October 17th

My employers, MicroWarehouse, are running a community event in the Dublin Convention Centre on October 17th. Cloud Camp is a tech event, with four tracks covering:

Azure Infrastructure: Virtual machines, storage, networking, etc
Azure Platform: Web Apps, Containers, etc
Productivity & Security: Office 365, EMS, etc
Windows Server 2019 & Hybrid: Windows Admin Center, virtualization, clustering, storage, networking, private cloud, etc

UPDATE: We have enough submissions on Office, Intune, and M365 overviews. We need more on Azure IaaS and Azure PaaS. But we really want sessions on Windows Admin Center, Windows Server 2019, and data protection using Azure Information Protection & Client App Security.

Samuel Beckett bridge and Dublin Convention Center – Daniel Dudek, https://www.flickr.com/photos/dansapples/9563009141

We’re looking for speakers from around Europe to fill the slots. Expenses are being covered:

Flights
2 nights accommodation – the nights before and after the event
Tickets to the event

If you’re interested in speaking then please submit your bio and session proposal(s) here.

Speaking at Cloud & Datacenter Conference Germany in May

Lots of air miles this year! I will be travelling to Hanau, Germany, to present at the CDC Germany conference, which is running May 15-16.

About The Conference

If you are not familiar with this conference, it’s a professionally run Microsoft-centric event with expert speakers from around Europe (and further) talking about on-premises and cloud technologies, and aimed at attendees from the DACH (German-speaking) region. The speakers are mostly MVPs, who are known for their expertise in their chosen areas, and are veteran speakers/trainers. For example:

Dider van Hoye & Carsten Rachfahl are both Cloud & Datacenter Management (Hyper-V) MVPs known for their knowledge of virtualization, storage, and networking.
Martina Grom is a well known Office 365 MVP
Thomas Maurer, also a Hyper-V MVP, has been doing lots on containers and Azure Stack (on-premises Azure)
Dr. Benny Tritsch, MVP, is the best RDS person I know
Jan Kappen (MVP), along with Carsten, is the best at Storage Spaces Direct (Hyper-V hyper-converged infrastructure) there is in Europe.
Tudor Damian (Hyper-V MVP) is the go-to guy for Linux on Hyper-V – that’s why Microsoft have him at their booths!
Florian Klaffenbach, ex MVP but now working at Microsoft, knows more about connecting to Azure than anyone else I know.

And that’s just a small sample of the speakers.

The Content

The cloud & on-premises content is balanced to reflect the attendees. There’s plenty of on-premises content because that’s where people are, but there’s also lots of cloud content because migrations & deployments are happening or have happened.

My Session

I will be presenting a session called “Azure PaaS For The IT Pro”

Does the phrase “platform-as-a-service” scare you? Do you want to hit back or scroll to the next session in your browser? If so, then this session is for you! Aidan Finn, an IT pro, has been learning about Azure’s platform for developers. If you come to this session, you’ll learn what these services are, why your business or customers might like them, why you might like them, and why PaaS isn’t the end of the IT pro.

Why You Should Go

Why should you go to this conference? To be honest, you’d be dumb not to! Microsoft doesn’t run big conferences in Europe anymore, and there’s never been a greater need to learn … and re-learn. My career is defined by relearning and adapting to the changing environment. Cloud changes at an incredible pace, and now we see the semi-annual channel bringing this rate of change to on-premises. Those who refuse to learn and adapt will become redundant to needs – a threat to their employers, even! Those who want to excel and boost their careers – they will decide that learning is important … and where else are you going to find a collection of expert speakers & trainers than an event like Cloud & Datacenter Germany?

Register Here

Microsoft Ignite 2017 Keynote Notes

I’m live blogging from Microsoft Ignite in Orlando. Hit refresh to read more.

Before the Keynote

The score so far:

Orlando: 10
Chicago: Minus 5 trillion

This place is huge and the crowds are huge. But getting here was easy. My hotel is a good bit up “I-Drive” in Orlando, but it took less than 10 minutes to get here, from walking out the hotel door to walking into one of the conference buildings. I got in at 08:25, but the main keynote hall was already full and we were being redirected. I ended up on the “community hall” to watch the keynote on some big screens. Sounds like a downer, but I’m sitting at a table and I can easily type on my laptop.

We’re counting down to Julia White, the “host” of Ignite, before Satya Nadella takes command. That’ll be two hours of intelligent edge, mobile user experience, and his new book (I guess).

Roll the music … a video plays to show us highlights from the last year. Microsoft tech changing business, enabling someone to write again, saving a baby’s life. They really do this type of media well, but they need to share it on TV, not just at conferences.

Julia White

The “host” of Ignite takes the stage and talks about how hurricane Irma could have ended all this. Donation stations, kit assembly stations, and blood donation stations are throughout the conference centre.

We are “change agents” apparently – this week’s buzz phrase? There’s real-time translation in 12 subtitled languages, powered by MS AI.

Satya Nadella

The CEO takes the stage. He thanks the local community for helping with ensuring the conference could run. He offers words of support for the Texas and Florida communities.

The Ignite conference has a diverse range of attendees. Generations of Microsoft customers, with diverse roles from end user devices to back end. Envision is also on here, and this includes the business/C-level customers. “Digital Transformation”. 1 Drink. Continuous change and renewal is the theme of the two conferences.

Technology shouldn’t degrade humanity. Big chrome robots won’t crush your skinless skull after AI machine learning/deep learning launches nukes at us.

It’s hard to keep up with this. It’s lots of words, but it’s fluff. I’ll pause until the salad is finished and the meat is served.

…

Quantum Computing

Think about the limitations of a classic computer. It would try/fail/try to solve a maze – a brute force system. Instead of doing 1 or 0, a quantum computer does 1 and 0 simultaneously. It can try every path in the maze at the same time. Sounds easy, but it’s not. It starts with a world-class team, lead by Craig Mundie. Physics, computer science, and math must be put together.

Dr. Michael Freedman (maths), Dr. Charie Marcus and Dr. Leo Kouwaenhovern (physics) and Dr. Krysa Svore (computer science) come on stage for The Early Early Show with Satya Nadella. Seriously, these people are smart. I haven’t a clue – that’s not a complaint, they’re just incredibly intelligent.

Speaking At European SharePoint, Office 365 & Azure Conference 2017

I will be speaking at this year’s European SharePoint, Office 365, and Azure Conference, which is being held in the National Conference Center in Dublin between 13-16 November. I’ll be talking about Azure Site Recovery (ASR):

It’s a huge event with lots of tracks, content and speakers from around the world.

For those of you in Ireland, this is a rare opportunity to attend a Microsoft-focused conference of such a scale here in Ireland.

Webinar Recording: Defending Today’s Threats With Tomorrow’s Security By Microsoft

MicroWarehouse has posted the recording of our last webinar, which explained why the security solutions of the 1990s that some companies are still relying on, are being easily defeated by attackers today.

The post explains what is happening now, based on 2015 survey information from multiple sources. And I explain how a number of cloud-based security services from Microsoft can protect both your on-premises and cloud infrastructures from these modern attack methods, that your firewall and anti-malware scanning will let pass right through or never see.

In fact, I just saw a support request on a security issue that 2 of the solutions in this webinar would have prevented.

We have also shared the slides and a hand-out with some follow-up reading/watching.

Technorati Tags: Event Notes,Security,EMS,Azure,Active Directory,Azure AD,Office 365

Microsoft News – 19 October 2015

It turns out that Microsoft has been doing some things that are not Surface-related. Here’s a summary of what’s been happening in the last while …

Hyper-V

Microsoft Loves Linux Deep Dive #2 – Linux and FreeBSD Integration Services Core Features: Talking about the services that are integrated into Linux guest OSs on Hyper-V.
Shared Hyper-V virtual disk is inaccessible when it’s located in Storage Spaces on a Windows Server 2012 R2-based computer: A hotfix is available.
Recover From Expanding VHD or VDHX Files On VMs With Checkpoints: Tut tut!
Find All Virtual Machines With A Duplicate Static MAC Address On A Hyper-V Cluster With PowerShell: A handy tip from Didier to avoid networking hell.
Microsoft Loves Linux Deep Dive #3: Linux Dynamic Memory and Live Backup: Dynamic Memory for Linux guests and backup VMs with file system consistency without shutting them down.
Virtual Network Appliances I Use for Hyper-V Labs: A post by Didier Van Hoye.
Microsoft Loves Linux Deep Dive #4: Linux Network Features and Performance: More about open source on Hyper-V.
KB3095308 – VMs may not get additional memory although they’re set to use Dynamic Memory in Windows Server 2012 R2: You experience a poor performance, and IIS servers may run out of memory at peak times.
KB3093571 Update to replicate multiple VM groups and VMs that use shared VHDs in Windows Server 2012 R2 or Windows Server 2012: This article describes a hotfix that enables multiple virtual machine (VM) groups replication and the ability to replicate VMs that use shared Virtual Hard Disks (VHDs) in Windows Server 2012 R2 or Windows Server 2012. This is BIG – I’ll have more on this topic later.
Windows 10 Build 10565 Adds Nested Hyper-V: A post I wrote for Petri.com.
KB3093899 – VMs that run on CSVs fail if DCM can’t query volumes in Windows Server 2012 R2: This article describes an issue that occurs when Desired Configuration Management (DCM) can’t query volumes in Windows Server 2012 R2.
KB961804 – Virtual machines are missing, or error 0x800704C8, 0x80070037, or 0x800703E3 occurs when you try to start or create a virtual machine: This problem may be caused by antivirus software that is installed in the parent partition if the real-time scanning component is configured to monitor the Hyper-V virtual machine files. Follow Microsoft’s guidance on antimalware for Hyper-V hosts, and stop being a “yes sir, no sir” gombeen kow-towing to the know-nothing security “expert”.
Trunking With Hyper-V Networking: Trunk the virtual switch port to allow a virtual appliance connect to multiple VLANs at once.
Remove Lingering Backup Checkpoints from a Hyper-V Virtual Machine: A recovery snapshot stays and you cannot apply or delete it.
Hyper V Amigos Podcast Episode 1 – Ben Armstrong: Hyper-V MVP Carsten Rachfahl interviews Microsoft PM, the Virtual PC Guy.

Windows Server

Windows Server Containers, what are they and where do they fit? Read the Microsoft explanation, and then read my one.
Memory Compression in Windows 10 Threshold 2: Improving resource utilization with TH2, the next major Windows release, coming in November.
“Not enough server storage is available to process this command” error when you try to access file shares on an SOFS-configured server : You ignored the guidance and used SOFS as an end-user file server. Seriously – try reading!
New Windows Server 2016 Storage Video Series: A set of videos on WS2016 storage.
KB3091057 – Cluster validation fails in the “Validate Simultaneous Failover” test in a Windows Server 2012 R2-based failover cluster: This hotfix changes some timing of the “Validate Simultaneous failover” test to more accurately verify the storage compatibility with the failover cluster.
How to setup Nano Server to send diagnostic messages off-box for remote analysis: Troubleshooting Nano server will be fun if you cannot log into it. So don’t log into it.

Windows Client

Windows 10 Enterprise Feature – Credential Guard: Using VSM to protect LSASS.

Azure

Monitor your Azure RemoteApp environment with OpInsight – Part 4: Monitor the User Profile Disks.
Learn how to back up your IaaS VMs in five minutes: It’s simple: create a backup vault, discover VMs, register VMs, create a policy.
Microsoft Azure Backup Server: Download the MAB (based on DPM) to get on-premises backup of Hyper-V, SQL, Exchange, SharePoint and clients that you can forward to Azure Backup vaults.
September updates to Azure RemoteApp: New features in the RDS service. Note that Office 2016 is not supported yet.
A VM that Azure Site Recovery helps protect goes into a resynchronization state: “Resynchronization is required for the machine X. Resume replication to start resynchronization” and “Resynchronization for virtual machine ‘VMName’ was marked corrupted by the service.”.
Inside Azure File Storage: Learn more about this application data sharing facility.
Azure RBAC is GA: Implement just enough administration (JEA) in your Azure subscription.
Azure RemoteApp Custom Image Licensing Error: When you make your own RemoteApp image from scratch.
Introducing Microsoft Azure Backup Server: A post I wrote for Petri.com on “Project Venus” progress.
Azure AD Domain Services is now in Public Preview – Use Azure AD as a cloud domain controller: We’re getting closer to Server Zero. Note the lack of integration with legacy AD.
The Azure AD App Proxy just keeps getting better and better: Cloud-enable legacy apps.
KB3090067 – Azure Backup performance update: Update MARS to avoid when incremental backups by using the Azure Backup agent may run slowly for servers that have many files.
User Environment Management in Azure RemoteApp – Part 1: Using UE-V with the user profile disks.
IIS and Azure Files: Can I host my IIS web content in the cloud using Azure Files? Yes you can put your websites in Azure Files and use shared configuration for shared web content between a farm of auto-scaling, load balanced VMs in an availability set with auto-scaling enabled. Yum!
Get Fast + Easy Support with OMS: Add Microsoft support users to a workspace so they can see the same thing as you.

Office 356

Cloud security controls series – OneDrive for Business: Compliance and security stuff.
Data Loss Prevention in OneDrive for Business, SharePoint Online and Office 2016 is rolling out: PDB is finally starting to improve.
Share with the click of a button in Office 2016: How to edit cooperatively.
What’s new – September 2015: A bit of a quiet month in Office, right? It was just Office 2016, Exchange 2016, …
I sync therefore I am…: A preview of the new ODB sync client
Azure PowerShell 1.0 Preview: A preview of v1.0 which appears to focus on improving admin of Azure Resource Manager.

Miscellaneous

A message to our customers about EU – US Safe Harbour: A comment by Microsoft’s legal honcho, Brad Smith, following the recent ECJ ruling that Safe Harbour is “invalid”.

Microsoft News – 30 September 2015

Microsoft announced a lot of stuff at AzureCon last night so there’s lots of “launch” posts to describe the features. I also found a glut of 2012 R2 Hyper-V related KB articles & hotfixes from the last month or so.

Hyper-V

The uptime value of the Hyper-V Management console changes to the resume time of the last pause on Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 R2: The uptime value of the Hyper-V Management console changes to the resume time of the last pause instead of the time when backup completed
A virtual machine that is running on Windows Server 2012 R2 may not start: Not enough memory in the system to start the virtual machine ‘<Virtual Machine Name>’.
Non-queued commands are sent to disk controller on a Windows Server 2012 R2-based Hyper-V host server: A solution to a non-described issue – how weird!
Cluster service stops during the VSS backup in a Windows Server 2012 R2-based Hyper-V cluster: When multiple VSS backups are in progress, the cluster service may crash because of inconsistent state in the CSV VSS provider. Then, all virtual machines go offline because of the CSV failure.
Hyper-V storage migration failure and “ERROR_BAD_COMMAND” error in Windows Server 2012 R2 or Windows Server 2012: You get “Migration did not succeed. Not enough disk space at ‘\’. ” when doing Storage Live Migration to a CSV or Hyper-V Replica stops with ERROR_BAD_COMMAND.

Windows Server

Applications can’t perform I/Os in Windows Server 2012 R2: When a disk fails or isn’t responsive and a large number of I/O port transitions are pending, I/Os may be stalled because the storage adapter is paused and will be resumed after a time-out period as specified by the miniport.
Changed cluster properties revert to default values on cluster nodes that run Windows Server 2012 R2 or Windows Server 2008 SP2: ameSubnetDelay, SameSubnetThreshold, CrossSubnetDelay, or CrossSubnetThreshold properties revert to original values.
Cluster services go offline when there’s a connectivity issue in Windows Server 2012 R2 or Windows Server 2012: The cluster nodes in both datacenters lose quorum and fail when a connectivity issue occurs between datacenters.

Azure

Using Azure Automation to take action on Azure Alerts: Reduce human effort by automation solutions to recurring problems.
Announcing expanded Microsoft Azure support for financial services customers: Adding European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) Information Assurance Framework (IAF) and the Shared Assessments Program (formerly known as BITS Shared Assessments).
Microsoft ExpressRoute – Office 365, Azure Government Cloud, more partners, simplified billing: Place equipment (e.g. SANs) in Microsoft “Meet-Me” locations with low latency connections (1-2 ms) to Azure.
Azure Container Service – Now and the Future: Azure Container Service builds on our work with Docker and Mesosphere to create and manage scalable clusters of host machines onto which containerized applications can be deployed, orchestrated, and managed.
Making the cloud more secure: Azure Security Center—a new Azure service that gives you visibility and control of the security of your Azure resources without impeding agility, and helps you stay ahead of cyber threats even as they evolve.
Azure File Storage, now generally available: Shared storage for APPLICATION data. This is not for user files.
How to use Azure File storage with Windows: Here are the Linux instructions.
Azure Storage Improvements: A roundup, including Premium Storage improvements and region support of Import/Export.
Monitor your Azure RemoteApp environment with OpInsight – Part 3: Monitoring the usage of your Azure RemoteApp collection.

Announcing general availability of ExpressRoute for Office 365: This direct connection offers customers more predictable network performance, an SLA for guaranteed availability and additional data privacy.
Office 365 release options: Why am I not getting the Office 365 Click-To-Run update from Office 365? Are you in the Standard Release or First Release update rings?

EMS

Microsoft Intune Company Portal for Android: A new version.

Technorati Tags: Hyper-V,Windows Server 2012 R2,Windows Server 2012,Backup,Failover Clustering,DR,Azure,Cloud,Cloud Computing,Hybrid Cloud,PowerShell,Scripting,Networking,Containers,Storage,Remote Desktop Services,Office,Office 365,EMS,Intune

Microsoft News – 28 September 2015

Wow, the year is flying by fast. There’s a bunch of stuff to read here. Microsoft has stepped up the amount of information being released on WS2016 Hyper-V (and related) features. EMS is growing in terms of features and functionality. And Azure IaaS continues to release lots of new features.

Hyper-V

The Mysterious Case of Infrequent Network Connectivity Issues on 2 Hyper-V VMs Out of 40 Guests: Some PowerShell troubleshooting.
Storage Migration “Operation not allow for VM because Hyper-V State is yet to be initialized from Virtual Machine Configuration” (0x80070015): A fix or workaround to solve this problem.
Missing Hyper-V VMs on Windows 10 – Build 10547: A bug in this insider build hides non v5.0 VMs.
Hyper-converged with Windows Server 2016: Run your storage (Storage Spaces Direct, not SOFS) and Hyper-V cluster on the same hardware.
Configuring site awareness for your multi-active disaggregated datacenters: Solving one of the biggest issues with using Failover Clustering as a DR solution.
Introduction to Linux and FreeBSD on Hyper-V: The Linux Integration Services (LIS). Note that LIS 4.0 can be installed on some distros that have previous versions of LIS built in.
Running Hyper-V on Nano in Windows Server 2016 TP3: For you large scale customers that can afford to lose a host.
Running Nano from Windows Server 2016 TP3 on Hyper-V: Teeny tiny VMs for running born-in-the-cloud services.
Do you know how fast your disks are? I’ve seen expensive customer deployments with over-specced hosts and sh1te SANs where one ordinary VM could effectively shut down the cluster because the SAN couldn’t keep up.
Virtual Machine Storage Resiliency in Windows Server 2016: A very nice resiliency feature from the Hyper-V storage folks.

Windows Client

Windows 10 servicing and deployment guidance now available: Learn about Windows as a Service.
Introduction to Windows 10 servicing: How enterprises can keep devices current with the latest feature upgrades, make better use of Windows Update, and what the new servicing options mean for support lifecycles.
Windows 10 – Reducing the disk footprint: how to deploy Windows 10 with the new smaller installation footprint – great for machines with smaller storage (tablets and ultrabooks)

Azure

Azure Backup – Announcing general availability of backup for Azure IaaS VMs: This vital service for VMs has gone GA with a number of improvements.
Azure Backup of IaaS VMs Generally Available: A post I wrote for Petri.com.
Remote Desktop Services DR Solution using ASR – Guidance: A best practices guide from Microsoft.
SharePoint DR Solution using ASR – Guidance: A best practices guide from Microsoft.
Microsoft Exchange DR Solution using ASR – Guidance: A best practices guide from Microsoft.
A VM that Azure Site Recovery helps protect goes into a resynchronization state: Each VHD must be 1023 GB or less.
Source Control Integration in Azure Automation: Manage your automations scripts.
Monitor your Azure RemoteApp environment with OpInsight – Part 1: A nice hack.
Monitor your Azure RemoteApp environment with OpInsight – Part 2: Continuing the hack.
Microsoft showcases the Azure Cloud Switch (ACS): Linux? Linux! Linux?! Yes; Linux.
September update – Azure Preview Portal improvements: Ibiza continues to evolve in the very long preview. This is starting to feel like the GMail beta. There are some good improvements here, but the lateral scale of the UI needs to be chopped by 80%, or we should get an 80″ Surface Hub for free with every Azure subscription.
Use Azure as Virtual DR Site for VMware and Physical Servers: A post I wrote for Petri.com.
August updates to Azure RemoteApp: Some updates.
How does Azure RemoteApp save user data and settings? I really do not like this solution – I prefer to use a virtual file server with domain membership on the VNet because I have some measure of control.
ADFS Publishing via Azure Traffic Manager : Ah yeah, geo-redundant ADFS.

System Center

Near Real-time Performance Data Collection in OMS: Could this be the start of the replacement of SCOM with a cloud service?
Deploy Software Defined Networks using Virtual Machine Manager : A document based on TP3 of System Center 2016.
2nd Edition of Microsoft System Center: Building a Virtualized Network Solution now available and free to download: Featuring Irish MVP, Damian Flynn.
How to Deploy Host Guardian Service using Service Templates in VMM Tech Preview 3: The new WS2016 Hyper-V security feature.

Office 365

The New Office is Here: In case you missed it, Office 2016 launched this week. O365 customers will get is based on which servicing branch they are in. You might not see it for months if you are in the Current Branch for Business (Pro Plus plans default to this).
What’s new in Office 2016: Why should you upgrade, and what should you look for if you have upgrade rights?
Admins—get ready for Office 2016, rollout begins September 22: I’d tweeted several months ago that I’d heard September was the month, so I am not surprised at all.
Announcing the Office 365 Service Trust Portal: STP is a service feature in Office 365 designed to provide deeper information on how Microsoft manages security, compliance and privacy.
Office 365 Import Service—migration to SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business just became easier: An out-of-band transfer using hard disks, similar to the Azure import service.
Introducing Office 365 Planner: A “simple and highly visual way to organize teamwork”.
Step-By-Step – Setting up AD FS and Enabling Single Sign-On to Office 365: Set up single sign-on.
How to use your Office 365 subscription with Azure RemoteApp: There’s a new “with O365” template that you can use now. Use your ProPlus installation rights in Azure’s RDS.

EMS

Coming soon – New features for managing Windows 10 and iOS devices: New features between September 25 and October 5.
Day Zero Support for iOS 9 with Intune: Manage your iPhones and iPads.
Azure Active Directory B2B collaboration: Inter-company federation via Azure AD.
Azure AD Premium Dashboard is in preview: Microsoft has turned on the Azure Active Directory Premium Dashboard – available in North America only at this point.
Azure AD B2C and B2B are now in Public Preview:
Learn all about the Azure AD B2B Collaboration Preview: Learn more about the Biz-2-Biz preview.

Security

Tracking a Bluetooth Skimmer Gang in Mexico: A whole new way of skimming your card at the ATM, thanks to the ATM engineers.
Tracking Bluetooth Skimmers in Mexico, Part II: More on this story.
Who’s Behind Bluetooth Skimming in Mexico? A very professional criminal operation.

Miscellaneous

Microsoft heads back to court on September 9th: A post I wrote about the Irish datacenter and US warrant appeal.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Hyper-V,Virtualisation,Failover Clustering,Storage,Storage Spaces,Linux,Windows 10,Azure,Cloud,Cloud Computing,Hybrid Cloud,Backup,Remote Desktop Services,DR,Active Directory,System Center,VMM,Security,Office,Office 365,Licensing,EMS,Intune

Microsoft News – 7 September 2015

Here’s the recent news from the last few weeks in the Microsoft IT Pro world:

Hyper-V

Configuring Default Checkpoint type in Windows 10: How to automatically get the legacy style checkpoint behaviour – might be useful in test/dev/demo labs.
Hyper-V Dynamic Memory Versus Virtual NUMA: The two incompatible memory optimization techniques. A post I wrote for Petri.com.
Workgroup and Multi-domain clusters in Windows Server 2016: Note: Workgroup clusters do not support Live Migration (hence useless to most).
Site-aware Failover Clusters in Windows Server 2016: Making stretch clusters more suitable. An interesting option is “preferred site” of a (entire) cluster.
Linux Integration Services 4.0 Update: An update to the Linux integration components for Hyper-V.

Windows Server

How to enable and disable SMBv1, SMBv2, and SMBv3 in Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows 8, and Windows Server 2012: You might disable SMBv1 in totally modern deployments, but I prefer to stay on the well walked path.
Announcing Windows Server 2016 Containers Preview: Post by Scott Guthrie.
Microsoft and Mesosphere partner to bring Mesos container orchestration across Windows and Linux worlds: Container orchestration comes to Windows.
Microsoft and Intel showcase Storage Spaces Direct with NVM Express at IDF ’15: 4.2 million IOPS with S2D.
Data Deduplication in Windows Server Technical Preview 3: BIG improvements for scalability and backup.
Comparing Work Folders and Offline Files: I bet you’ve never heard of Work Folders – what I call “company owned DropBox”.
Work Folders encryption on Windows: Security with replicated files.
Windows Server 2016 Installation Option Changes: Our feedback was listened to.

Windows

Adjusting the Network Protocol Bindings in Windows 10: I guess the same applies to Windows Server 2016.
Windows 10 Pre-Upgrade Validation using SETUP.EXE: Using /Compat ScanOnly.
MDOP 2015 and more tools are now available: Windows 10 support.

System Center

DPM 2012 R2 UR7 re-released: Wow, a System Center update rollup had issues. Whoda thunk it?!?!?!

Azure

Mandatory update for Azure Backup to avoid an authentication error for ongoing backups: You must have a MARS agent that released August 19 2015 or later.
AzCopy – Introducing Append Blob, File Storage Asynchronous Copying, File Storage Share SAS, Table Storage data exporting to CSV and more: AzCopy 3.2.0 and AzCopy 4.2.0-preview are now released.
Azure Backup update – New features in IaaS VM backup support: Support for up to 16 data disks, retention up to 99 years, improved performance, and reporting.
Azure Premium Storage expanding in more regions: Adding Central US, East US, East Asia, and North Europe.
Announcing the GS-Series: Adding Premium Storage Support to the Largest VMs in the Public Cloud: Big and fast.
Boot Diagnostics for Virtual Machines: Needed because there’s not KVM access.
A Look at Microsoft’s New Hybrid Cloud Features: A post I wrote for Petri.com.
How to Link an Azure RemoteApp collection to your existing Azure Virtual Network Without Domain Join: If you have applications that don’t require domains. Beware that this will cause messy session hosts without GPO to control user access/storage from a central point.

Office 365

What’s new – July 2015: Apps galore.
What’s new – August 2015: The education SKUs are getting a “shake up”.
Microsoft is reducing its number of portals, merging Intune with Office 365: Good idea … but I am sceptical of the success/future of this.

Intune

Windows 10, Azure AD and Microsoft Intune: Automatic MDM enrollment powered by the cloud: See the new Active Directory in action.
Microsoft Advanced Threat Analytics in now GA: This EMS bundle member is now available for detecting nefarious usage of company identity.

Events

Meet AzureCon: A virtual event on Azure on September 29th, starting at 9am Pacific time, 5pm UK/Irish time.

Technorati Tags: Hyper-V,Virtualisation,Failover Clustering,Linux,Windows Server 2016,Windows Server 2012 R2,Storage,Networking,Windows 10,Deployment,DPM,System Center,Azure,Cloud,Cloud Computing,Hybrid Cloud,Backup,Remote Desktop Services,Office 365,Intune,Active Directory,Events