Tag: Private Cloud

Microsoft News 28-May-2015

Very little to cover here, except one possibly controversial article on Hyper-V that you long-time readers might expect me to write an angry response to …

Hyper-V

Windows Server

Azure

Office 365

Microsoft News – 14 January 2015

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

Windows Server

System Center

Azure

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

System Center

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

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

Windows Server

System Center

Windows Client

Azure

The Great Big Hyper-V Survey of 2012 Has Launched

You can participate in the survey HERE.

 

Just over a year ago, we asked people to answer 80 questions about their intentions and implementations of Hyper-V and System Center in The Great Big Hyper-V Survey of 2011. We learned a lot about how people were using Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and System Center 2007-2010.  Back than, we knew just 2 things about Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V and System Center 2012 was still pre-release.  But now, both are generally available, and we want to learn about:

  • Have you learned about these new technologies?
  • Do you already use them?
  • Are you planning on using them?
  • How do you plan to use them?

Once again, this is a completely independent survey, run by 3 MVPs (me, Hans Vredevoort, and Damian Flynn), and Microsoft has had no input or involvement. They might help us promote it – because we do know that our findings were read by them and some of the information was a surprise for them.

The goal of the survey is to learn. We’re all bloggers and speakers and we want to deal with what’s relevant. You’re interested in seeing what other people are doing. We all want to learn from each other and we learned a lot last year.

This is a perfect time to speak – if Windows vNext development is like that of Windows Server 2012, then they’ll be spending the next 10-12 months talking, learning, etc. And the same might happen post-SP1 for System Center 2012.

So we ask you to:

  • Respond to the survey and answer all the questions.  There are 72 questions.  I know, it’s a lot but there’s a lot of stuff to ask about.  We’ll only be using complete responses.
  • Share the survey with colleagues, customers, on Twitter, Facebook, blogs, LinkedIn, MySpace, or whatever work-related social network you are on.  We got an amazing response last year and we want to beat that.  The more responses we can use, the more reliable the data will be.

Thank you in advance for taking the 10-15 minutes to respond to the survey.

BTW, we don’t ask for or want any personal data or email addresses. No individual response will be shared.  We will only be sharing aggregate information, e.g. X people responded with Y answer.

The survey will close on October 31st.

 

You can participate in the survey HERE.

 

Build A WS2012 Hyper-V Cloud Using PowerShell

Fellow MVP David Lachari found a great series of Microsoft blog posts on how to use PowerShell scripts (with examples) to build a Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V cloud.  It’s some impressive stuff.

You might want to check out my series of posts on converged fabrics to understand some of the stuff in this series.

Got My Paperback Copies of Microsoft Private Cloud Computing

After a 2 week snafu by the local An Post office in my town and me being abroad, I finally gotten my copies of Microsoft Private Cloud Computing this morning.

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This is the point when you can finally say “it’s finished”.  Now on to other things …

Microsoft Private Cloud Computing Available In Paperback

Last Sunday Wiley released the electronic version of Microsoft Private Cloud Computing in Amazon Kindle, and other formats such as iTunes. 

Oddly enough, the paper version is usually released before the digital ones.  I know that sounds backwards but it has always been my experience.  I can confirm that the paper editions are actually available.  There seems to have been an issue with distribution so Amazon still don’t have stock but should have soon.

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Microsoft Private Cloud Computing Book Nearing The Stores

I just saw this tweet by Damian Flynn, regarding the book Microsoft Private Cloud Computing (Sybex, 2012):

#MsftPrivateCloud And it is done, that final edits have being submitted and the printer takes ownership tomorrow!

Hans, Patrick and Damian did in incredible amount of work on this book.  In fact, Damian went the extra mile *twice* (or was it three times? Smile) to make sure the reader got the very best and latest information on this solution (it’s hard writing a book on something before it RTMs).  Gentlemen, I salute you!

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Amazon has a date of July 3rd posted.  That’s not always accurate.  And yes, there will be ebook versions, such as Kindle.  Don’t ask me when – you’ll know before I do.

VMware Cloud Management Stuck In The 1990s

Credit to Dave Northey (DPE, MSFT IE) for blogging this one.  VMware’s CTO, Dr. Stephen Herrod says:

VMware Cloud Infrastructure Suite is really more of a marketing term. Those of you know our products deeply know that they don’t fit this well together as they need to. Some of them have multiple databases, some don’t look the same, some install differently, and what I can’t stand that is Site Recovery Manager doesn’t currently work with vCloud Director. So, what we are basically able to say is that we created and acquired companies that led to a lot of individual products that don’t work well enough together yet.

Worse … he was caught on video, as you can see on the link in Dave’s post.  Someone call Tad!

Seriously, I’ve been talking about this for a while.  VMware went and bought a slew of companies in the last few years.  Last year I was at a big VMware event in Dublin where they pushed their “integrated” cloud solution for vSphere.  If by integrated they meant that they changed the icons, grouped them together, and stuck a “v” in front of the name, then they did no better than Amdahl or CA were doing in the 1990’s.  I know; I worked with both product sets back then.  What you got were uncoupled, different, and non-integrated point solutions.  Hardly a cloud at all.

That sort of thing should be buried with grunge rock and rap metal back in that dark, dark decade.

On the other hand, a couple of months ago I was asked to whiteboard the integration of System Center 2012.  I had to tell the people in question that I might as well scribble lines all over the board because it was so deeply integrated.  That’s a modern day, integrated solution for ya!