Tag: Windows Server 2016

Microsoft Ignite 2018: Office in Virtual Desktop Environments

Speakers: Gama Aguilar-Gamez & Sandeep Patnik

Goal: Make Office 365 Pro Plus a first class experience in virtualized environments.

Windows Virtual Desktop

  • The only mutli-user Windows 10 experience – note that this is RDmi and it also supports session hosts.
  • Optimized for Office 365 Pro Plus
  • Deploy and scale in minutes

Windows 10 Enterprise Multi-User

  • Scalable multi-user modern Windows user experience with Windows 10 Enterprise security
  • Windows 10
  • Multiple users
  • Win32, UWP
  • Office 365 Po Plus
  • Semi-Annual Channel

This is a middle ground between RDSH on Windows Server and VDI on Windows 10.

Demo

The presentation is actually being run from a WVD VM in the cloud. PowerPoint is a published application – we can see the little glyph in the taskbar icon.

User Profile Disks

High performance persistence of cached user profile data across all Office 365 apps and services.

  • Outlook OST/PST files – will be improved for GA of WVD. Support for UNC paths
  • OneDrive sync roots
  • OneNote notebook cache

Improving Outlook Start Up

  • Virtual environment friendly default settings
  • Sync Inbox before calendar for faster startup experience
  • Admin option to reduce calendar sync window
  • Reduce the number of folders that are synced by default
  • Windows Desktop Search is no per-user

See Exchange Account Settings to configure how much past email should be synced

Windows Desktop Search

  • Enables the full Outlook search experience that users expect
  • Per user index files are stored in the user profile for each roaming
  • No impact to CPU usage at steady state, minimal impact at sign in

With 100 users in a machine signing in simultaneously, enabling Windows Search has a 0.02% impact on the CPU.

Demo

Desktop of the remote machine is stretched across multiple displays – this demo is with a published desktop hosted in Windows 10 multi-user. Windows Desktop search is enabled. Instant search results in Outlook. OneDrive sync is working in a non-persistent machine – fully functional enabling the full collaboration experience in O365. Selective Sync works here too. Sync is cloud-cloud so the performance is awesome. In Task Manager, we see 3 users signed into a single Windows 10 VM via RDS.

OneDrive

  • Co-authoring and collaborative capabilities in wXP, powered by OneDrive.
  • OneDrive sync will run in non-persistent environments
  • Files on-demand capabilities
  • Automatically populate something

Support

  • Search products stay in sync with each other
  • Office 365 Pro Plus will always be supported with Win 10 SAC
  • Office 365 Pro Plus won Windows Server 2016 will be supported through October 2025

Best Practices

Outlook:

  • The OST file should be stored on local storage.
  • Outlook deployed with the primary mailbox in cached echange mode with the OST file stored on network storage, and an aggressive archiving strategy to an online archive mailbox
  • Outlook deploy in cached exchange mode with slider set to one month.

Office 365:

  • Licensing token roaming: Office 365 Pro-Plus 1704 or newer. You can configure the licensing token to roam with the users profile or be location on a shared folder on the network. This especially helpful  for non persistent VDI scenarios.
  • SSO recommended. We recommend using SSO for good and consistent user experience. SSO reduces how often the users are prompted to sign in for activation. With SSO configured, Office activates with the credentials the user uses to sign into Windows if the user is also licensed for O365 Pro Plus.
  • If you don’t use SSO, consider using roaming profiles.

Preview

Sign up: https://aka.ms/wvdpreview

Public preview later 2018.

GA early 2019.

Q&A

If you want to use RDSH on Windows Server 2019 then Office 365 Pro Plus is not supported. You would have to use persistent Office 2019 so you get a lesser product. The alternatives are RDSH on Windows Server 2016 or Windows 10 Multi User (Azure). 

Widows 10 Multi User is only available in Azure via Windows Virtual Desktop.

A lot of the above optimization, such as search indexing, rely on the user having a persistent profile on the latest version of Windows 10. So if that profile is a roaming profile or a UPD, then this works, in RDS or on physical,

Physical Disks are Missing in Disk Management

In this post, I’ll explain how I fixed a situation where most of my Storage Spaces JBOD disks were missing in Disk Management and Get-PhysicalDisk showed their OperationalStatus as being stuck on “Starting”.

I’ve had some interesting hardware/software issues with an old lab at work. All of the hardware is quite old now, but I’ve been trying to use it in what I’ll call semi-production. The WS2016 Hyper-V cluster hardware consists of a pair of Dell R420 hosts and an old DataON 6 Gbps SAS Storage Spaces JBOD.

Most of the disks disappeared in Disk Management and thus couldn’t be added to a new Storage Spaces pool. I checked Device Manager and they were listed. I removed the devices and rebooted but the disks didn’t appear in Disk Management. I then ran Get-PhysicalDisk and this came up:

image

As you can see, the disks were there, but their OperationalStatus was hung on “Starting” and their HealthStatus was “Unknown”. If this was a single disk, I could imagine that it had failed. However, this was nearly every disk in the JBOD and spanned HDD and SSD. Something else was up – probably Windows Server 2016 or some firmware had threw a wobbly and wasn’t wrapping up some task.

The solution was to run Reset-PhysicalDisk. The example on docs.microsoft.com was incorrect, but adding a foreach loop fixed things:

$phydisk = (Get-Physicaldisk | Where-Object -FilterScript {$_.HealthStatus -Eq “Unknown”})

foreach ($item in $phydisk)
{
Reset-PhysicalDisk -FriendlyName $item.FriendlyName
}

A few seconds later, things looked a lot better:

image

I was then able to create the new pool and virtual disks (witness + CSVs) in Failover Cluster Manager.

Q&A Webinar with Ben Armstrong (Microsoft/Hyper-V)

Altaro are hosting an “AMA” webinar where you will get the chance to ask your burning questions to Ben Armstrong (previously known as The Virtual PC Guy), Principal Program Manager at Microsoft, and one of the brains behind Hyper-V … and thus the platform of Azure!

if you’ve ever wondered where some of my uber-detailed posts on odd little hyper-V details came from … it was from Ben. He’s got tonnes of stories, lots of info, and this shouldn’t be missed if you have the chance to tune in.

Video–Azure File Sync

I’ve produced and shared a short video (12:33 minutes) to explain what Azure File Sync is, what it will do for you, and there’s a quick demo at the end. If you want to:

  • Synchronise file shares between offices
  • Fix problems with full file servers by using tiered storage in the cloud
  • Use online backup
  • Get a DR solution for file servers, e.g. small business or branch office

… then Azure File Sync is for you!

Was This Post Useful?

If you found this information useful, then imagine what 2 days of training might mean to you. I’m delivering a 2-day course in Amsterdam on April 19-20, teaching newbies and experienced Azure admins about Azure Infrastructure. There’ll be lots of in-depth information, covering the foundations, best practices, troubleshooting, and advanced configurations. You can learn more here.

Two Weeks Of Learning Coming To An End

I’ve been on the road for the last 2 weeks. The first week I spent in Orlando at the Microsoft Ignite conference. The second week, I was one of 600 people to attend the “Intelligent Cloud Architect Boot Camp”, run by Microsoft in Bellevue, WA, in the US Pacific Northwest. It’s been tough to be away from my family for 2 straight weeks, not just on me, but more so on them, but we viewed it as an investment in our future.

I’ve made a career from learning, what Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella calls being a learn-it-all instead of a know-it-all. I tell people in my Azure VM training that I’ve never set up a VLAN, but I can network the sh1t out of Azure – except for BGP routing Smile That’s because I’ve studied, tried, learned, and re-learned. In fact, in this cloud era, I think Nadella’s phrase should be modified to relearn-it-all. This two weeks has taught me so much, and it’s going to be information that makes a difference to my employer and our customers. The folks who sit back and don’t learn – well they’re the walking bankrupts that outsource their services to their competitors disguised as their service providers, or who lose their customers to other more agile and aware companies. Times have changed. Sitting back and attending a briefing every 3-6 years won’t cut it. You have to learn to, not just stay ahead, but to keep up in this cloud era, and that’s just the way it is. We all need to adapt – I’ve never previously deployed a lot of the resource types that are used in this mostly-serverless web application that I got working in a hackathon:

image

I’m going through another shift in my career – no it’s not Azure. That happened over 3 years ago. No; I’m learning more from the Dev side. Last week I found myself learning about IoT, big data, and analytics. This week I was all in on containers, microservices, and serverless computing. I became aware of things like Mesos, Kubernetes, and Jenkins. I used Swagger to discover and test APIs for the first time.

One of the highlights of the past two weeks is talking to people who’ve read this blog, saw me speak, heard me in a podcast, or read my content on Petri.com. I get a bounce in my step when someone thanks me for something that I was able to help with, and some of the compliments were very flattering. Thank you! One of the “oh crap!” moments was when I was standing near some MS staff and I overheard one of them say “That’s the Aidan Finn?” – that’s when the fight or flight instinct kicks in! One of the cool aspects of this boot camp was the cross-learning that went on. We did group whiteboard sessions which were the best things we did all week. A table of 6-8 people given a challenge to design something that no one person knows fully. Sometimes you lead, sometimes you learned. And I learned loads, so thank you to those people who taught through collaboration.

To be honest, between jet lag, learning, 8am-6pm classes followed by re-writing training until 11pm, and being away from home for so long has me exhausted. I can’t wait to get on my plane home and hopefully sleep a long sleep on the redeye, and finally getting home to give my family a big hug.

On Monday, Azure training courses continue at the office, supplemented with new information. Then we dive into working with a new type of customer, and I cannot wait to show them the things that I have learned. And then there’s something else … something new … something that I’ll share soon Smile

Windows Server Fall Release (1709) Technical Foundation

Speaker: Jeff Woolsey, Principal Program Manager

WS2016 Recap

Design points

  • Layered security for emerging threats:  Jeff has been affected by 4 of the big, well publicised hacks. CEOs are being fired because of this stuff now.
  • Build the software-defined data centre
  • Create a cloud-optimized application platform

Security in WS2016

  • Long laundry list of features: Defender, Control Flow Guard, Devices Guard, Credential Guard, Remote Credential Guard.
  • Shielded VMs – you don’t trust the operators
  • vTPM – encrypt the disks
  • JIT Administration

Software-Defined

  • Compute: rolling upgrades with no downtime, hot/add remove, more resilient to transient storage, compute, network issues.
  • Network: Azure code brought to Windows Server 2016: SDN scale and simplicity. L4 load balancer, distributed data centre firewall.

He tells a very funny story on RAM support: 24 TB physical, and 12 TB RAM in Hyper-V VMs.

  • Storage: Hyper-Converged, Storage Replica, cluster wide QoS
  • RDS: Lots there too.

Hyper-Converged Infrastructure

Built into WS2016 Datacenter edition: Storage Spaces Direct (S2D). Uses SATA, SAS, SSD, and NVME, Working with storage industry to add new flash types.

  • Cloud design points: used in Azure Stack
  • RDMA at the core for performance and latency benefits.
  • Simplifying the datacenter: Add servers to add compute and storage capacity. No more SAN network. Storage controller is s/w.

Working on adding NVDIMMS: Intel Persistent Memory. Not as fast as real memory, but you can add lots of it in, e.g. 100 TB of “RAM”. Supported in WS2016 and SQL Server 2017 and later.

SATADOM is supported in WS2016 and later. It’s flash but its attached to a SATA connector (see image below). The idea is to do the “boot from USB” to free up a drive bay. This tiny drive plugs directly onto the SATA controller on the motherboard. Faster than USB/SD boot and more reliable.

Cloud Ready Application Platform

  • Windows Server Containers: The next generation of compute, following virtualization. Both are different techs, and going forward, both will probably exist. But containers will be the tech of choice for deploying applications: speed, ease of deployment, better densities, and more performance.
  • Nano Server: Ideal for the microkernal in Hyper-V Containers
  • Automation: PowerShell 5.0 and DSC

Now on to the new stuff

Azure File Sync

Klaas Langhout comes on stage.

I’ve covered this in depth already.

Back to Jeff. He asks Klaas if customers access the shares any differently on prem. Nope – it’s the same old file share and any Azure connectivity/tiering/sync is hidden.

Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection (WDATP)

Using cloud intelligence to protect Windows.

  • Built into Windows Server
  • Behaviour-based, cloud-powered breach detection
  • Best of breed investigation experience
  • And more

You can sign into the Windows Defender Security Center to analyse activity to do forensics on an attack or suspicious activity, and learn how to remediate the attack.

Modern, Remote Management for Windows Server

I covered Project Honolulu earlier today.

Honolulu will remain a free download outside of Windows Server – expect updates every month.

FAQ on Honolulu

  • Price: Free
  • Edge, Chrome, Safari on Mac and more to be tested.
  • Installs on WS2012 R2 and later, Windows 10.
  • Manages Hyper-V Server 2012 and later and WS2012 and later.
  • Azure is not required.
  • AD is not required either.
  • Security: HTTS LAPS, Delegation
  • Configuration: No IIS, Agents not required. SQL not required. If you are pre-2016. you have to install WMF 5.1.
  • Positioning: Evolution of “in-box” tools. Does not replace System Center. Complementary to SycCtr, OMS, RSAT. Hopefully will eventually replace MMC-based RSAT.
  • Feedback: Via Windows Server UserVoice.
  • Extensions: It’s plugable, with alpha SDK today.

1709

On to the next release of Windows Server, coming in October.

Application Innovation

  • Container-optimized Nano Server image increase container density and performance.
  • .NET Core 2.0
  • SMB Support for containers
  • Linux Containers with hyper-V isolation
  • Windows Subsystem for Linux – to manage the above primarily

Where to Start With Containers

  • Containerize suitable existing applications. GUI-based apps aren’t suitable.
  • Transform monoliths into microservices, with new code and transforming existing code.
  • Accelerate new applications with cloud-app development.

What’s Next

Windows Server Insiders is a program to beta test and learn the new stuff in the semi-annual channel.

Post 1709 Improvements

Compute:

  • Honolulu integration
  • Shielded Linux VMs
  • Guest RDMA

Network:

  • Honolulu integration
  • Encrypted virtual networks
  • NTLM no longer required
  • SMB1 Disabled by default
  • and more

Software-Defined:

  • S2D Support for NVMe
  • S2D support for NV-DIMMs
  • Dedupe for ReFS
  • Cluster Sets to enable large scale HVI
  • Storage Replica test failover
  • Scoped volumes
  • Something on multi-resilient volumes

Windows Server – What’s New & What’s Next

Speakers:

  • Erin Chapple, General Manger Windows Server
  • Chris Van Wesep, Director Product Marketing

Erin Chapple starts things. Today they’ll talk about what’s new in Windows Server, what’s the future, and the hybrid/migration opportunities.

WS2016 Looking Back

Most cloud-ready OS:

  • Built-in security: Protection of identity (Credential Guard), secure the virtualization platform (shielded VMs, vTPM), and built-in layers of security (VSM, etc)
  • Azure-inspired infrastructure: Storage Spaces Direct, Network Controller, learnings from hyper-scale, affordable.
  • Hybrid application platform: Support for containers, built-for-purpose OS, Azure Hybrid Benefit for SA/Azure transition

Some customer case studies come up. Rackspace used Shielded VMs, Nano Server for applications (woops!) for hosting. A “large investigative government agency” needed to preserve lots of seized data (PB + per case). They used Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) on 8-node clusters, with data in VMs to isolate one investigation from another. biBERK used containers to deploy 22 apps on WS2016 Containers with Docker in less than 1 week.

The key for software-defined is the hardware. They leverage offloads so much that hardware must be more reliable. There is a Windows Server Software Defined Program (WSSD) and the site with all the info is http://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/sddc.

Supporting You Wherever You Are

WS2016 is the basis of on-premises, Azure, and Azure Stack (hybrid). 80% of enterprises see themselves operating in a hybrid mode for the foreseeable future. 55% have a hybrid strategy in place as of a year ago. 87% are planning to integrate on-premises datacentres with public cloud.

Hybrid is not about a network connection. It’s about consistency right down to the API level: unified development, VMs, storage, data, identity, and much more.

Will Gries – Azure File Sync

This is a new hybrid service that is a part of Azure Files. Centralize storage in Azure Files, but without giving up the file server. You effectively cache data locally on file servers for fast local performance. The cloud enables sync between site, centralized backup, and easy DR.

He starts a demo. The file sync agent is installed on a WS2016 file server. It is syncing to Azure. He proves this by changing & deleting things on Azure and it syncs to the cloud. It’s all near realtime, using change notifications on file server to ensure that sync happens very quickly. Cloud Tiering enables the “cache” feature. The greyed files with an O attribute have a disk size of 0 bytes because they are stored in Azure. If he opens the file, it’s recalled from Azure Files seamlessly. Files that are able to do partial reads/writes can stream from Azure – he opens a video and we can see in the UI that it is streaming from Azure. In file properties, we can see it has downloaded the blocks via the stream, optimizing the download to only required blocks, thanks to streaming.

Back to Erin.

Windows Server Cadence

Industry is moving incredibly fast. Industries in that fast lane need server improvements faster. There will be two channels of Windows Server:

  • Semi-annual channel. An opt-in for SA or Azure customers, releasing every spring/autumn. Each release is supported for 18 months, so you can choose to skip every second release. Build = approx year/month, e.g. 1709 will be released in month 10 of 2017.
  • Long-term Servicing Channel: For everyone outside of SA/Azure or not wanting to upgrade every 6-12 months. Typical 5+5 years support program and in all channels. Name = Windows Server + Year.

Many companies will use a mix of both channels, selecting the channel based on demands of an application/service.

Windows Server Insiders will give you a sneak peek of semi-annual channel releases.

The date of the next LTSC release is not announced, but it’s going to be after 2018.

Introducing Server Core to Semi-Annual Channel

Server Core is replacing Nano Server for infrastructure and VM roles. Nano Server adoption was very low in these areas. In 1709, Nano Server is completely focused on containers. It is much smaller for containers by stripping out the infrastructure pieces. Server Core should be a “soft landing” for moving applications from Nano Server. Server Core is the MS recommended choice for infrastructure roles.

Note by me: I will continue to recommend full installations for infrastructure roles. The full GUI is not in the semi-annual channel. So if you want rapid upgrades, you better learn some PowerShell to troubleshoot your networking and drivers/firmware.

What’s New in 1709

Hybrid Application platform and Modern Management

Jeff Woolsey

Jeff tells us that containers are the same journey that we went through with virtualization. Containers will happen, but they won’t kill virtualization – they work together. We’re at the beginning of the next 10 year journey with containers. Jeff says that cloud admins, hybrid admins, IT pros, must learn containerization.

Hybrid Application Platform

  • Nano Server just wasn’t right for virtualization: drivers, installation, patching, etc. So they switched the focus entirely to containers to make it faster to deploy/update, and to get higher levels of density & performance.
  • .NET Core 2.0 and SMB support was added for containers … allows containers to store data on SMB 3.0 storage.
  • Linux containers with Hyper-V Isolation enables a cross-platform to run all kinds of containers but in a secure way (each container running real Linux kernels n a Hyper-V child partition), and Windows Subsystem for Linux. When Win10 added WSL, Microsoft wasn’t planning to do it for Windows Server. With Linux Containers, the case for Bash management on the host made this a viable option.

Telemetry shows that most people using Windows Server containers are choosing the Hyper-V model for security.

All of this is wrapped up in Modern Management.

Demo: Enabling Cloud Apps with Nano Server & Containers

This is the next generation P2V … moving applications (Docker Convert) from VMs to containers. In the demo, Jeff uses Docker to deploy a Hyper-V container in a container. It runs SQL Server & IIS. The Docker tools on GitHub converted the app to an image in less than 1 hour. Now the image is a container image which is easy to deploy. When running in a container, it uses a fraction of the resources that were used by VMs.

Next he deploys a Linux container image with Tomcat Server, on the same Windows Server host as the Windows container.

Nano Server

The base image for WS2016 Nano Server was 383 MB. In 1709 is 78 MB. With .Net it went from 413 MB to 107 MB. Those are the compressed numbers.

Uncompressed: the base image wen from 1.05 GB to 195 MB, and with .NET it went from 1.15 GB to 262 MB.

Management Re-Imagined

  • This is next-generation of “in-box” tooling.
  • Simplified, integrated and secure.
  • Extensible

Required for Server Core in the real world. The UI is HTML5 and touch friendly. It has to manage the h/w, the local VMs, and VMs in Azure.

Today we use Task Manager, MMC based tools like Hyper-V Manager, Perfmon, Device Manager, etc, CMD.EXE, PowerShell, Serer Manager, etc. Jeff mentions lots more tools Smile

Project Honolulu

A HTML5-based touch-friendly UI. It’s running on Jeff’s laptop against 4 servers under his desk back in the office. He opens the Overview (Task Manager info). Computer name and domain join are there. Environment variables, RDP are here. Restart/shutdown are here.

Roles and Features is next. No more need for Server Manager (yay!). Roles & features easily installed remotely. Events shows all the event viewer info. Note that filtering UI is much better here than in the MMC. Files allows you to browse and edit the file system on a managed server. Virtual machines allows Hyper-V VM management.

The system is agentless. Honolulu is a 30 MB MSI download to a management node which you browse to. It even works on Safari on Mac.

Honolulu will be a free download when it goes GA.

Back to Erin

What’s Next For Project Honolulu

A peek into the pipeline … things they are exploring and experimenting with.

Azure Backup in Honolulu – a wizard to set up the Azure bits and start backing up items/system state. They show some mockups of it all being driven from Honolulu instead of the Azure Portal.

The Azure Connection

Chris comes on stage to talk about Hybrid scenarios.

He starts off by talking about Software Assurance. Highlighted features:

  • Required for Semi-Annual releases
  • Hybrid Use Benefit to move to Azure  – up to 40% savings on the cost of Windows Server Azure VMs

Premium Assurance add-on adds 6 years of support to the normal 5+5 model (16 years total) for applications that cannot stay up to date, but can continue to get security updates.

If you watch this session, please note that Chris over-simplifies (a lot) the Hybrid Use benefit. It’s actually quite complex, regarding moving & co-using licenses and core counts.

End of Support

W2008/R2 end of support is Jan 2020 – 1/3 of servers fall into this space. SQL 2008/R2 end of support is July 2019.  For larger companies, they should look at cloud and/or containerization, or even re-development in serverless cloud.

Questions

  • Honolulu can manage all the way back to Ws2012
  • Not every app can/should be containerized – key thing is that you need remote management because containers don’t have a GUI.
  • Where is Honolulu installed. Can be on a PC, on the managed server, or on a centrally dedicated management server. Honolulu uses WMI and PowerShell to talk to the managed servers.

Vison And Upcoming Innovations for Microsoft Remote Desktop Services

Speakers:

  • Scott Manchester, Principal Group Program Manager
  • Joydeep Mukherjee, Senior Product Marketing Manager
  • David Belanger, Senior Program Manager
  • Guest speaker: Sridhar Mullapudi, VP of Product Management, Citrix

Joydeep starts off.

At the last Ignite, Microsoft committed to making RDS the virtual workspace platform of choice. In WS2016, they added performance, scale, and optimization for the cloud. They considered all of this to be “platform capabilities”.

Future Innovations Overview

  • Increasing security, by leveraging things like signals from the security graph, MFA.
  • More cloud ready, a second level of cloud enablement on Azure.
  • Windows Apps everywhere

Scott takes over.

More Secure

Secure authentication powered by Intelligent Security Graph:

  • Azure AD integration
  • Single sign on, MFA
  • Conditional access

Secure environment powered by modern infrastructure:

  • Each tenant in its own sandboxed environment
  • Isolation of infra roles from desktop and app hosts
  • No inbound IP ports – more on this later in the session.

Demo

They’ve been adding AAD integration into the RDS clients. An “enlightened app” is shown, and he’s subscribes to a feed. He signs in, and the normal AAD MFA process kicks in. The RemoteApp client loads and shows the published apps (and published desktop) from the feed.

This will go live next year, and maybe this AAD functionality will be in all clients by then.

Environment

Normally, gateway, web access are domain joined and public facing. In the same network as connection broker, license server, RDVH and session hosts.

Going forward with Modern Infrastructure, the RDVH goes away, merged into the broker. A new diagnostics role is added. So, gateway, web access, diagnostics, connection broker and license server are non-domain machines. In an isolated VNet, the domain joined appllication and desktop hosts are joined to Azure AD.

Multi-tenancy is native to this design. The non-domain stuff has no domain join so it’s multi-tenant. The session/app hosts are domain joined so they are per-tenant.

IP-wise, 443 is required to the gateway, but the hosts are not public facing.

More Cloud Ready

Deploy gateway, connection broker, web server, licensing server as Azure App Services roles – PaaS reduces costs and maintenance. The legacy method will still be supported for on-prem deployments. App and desktop hosts are VMs which integrate with this PaaS deployment via a package. FYI, you can deploy the PaaS stuff in Azure, and do your VM hosts in Azure or on-prem (hybrid RDS deployment).

WIN_20170926_09_18_07_Pro

Demo

He opens the Azure Portal. There are no VMs in the Azure deployment. The infrastructure roles run in App Services. Key Vault is being used to store certificates. The broker DB is using Azure SQL. PaaS is possible because every role is stateless, other than the DB. Scaling out is easy: it’s web apps! You just use the scale out feature of web apps to add instances to the app service plan. You can also using auto-scaling to do it based on demand (rules monitoring CPU usage for scale out and scale in). If you don’t know this stuff, it’s very easy to set up scaling.

A company called PeopleTech (sounded like that) has built a UI for managing RDS Modern Infrastructure (RDMI). Apparently it’s similar to what RDS in Project Honolulu will look like.

Sridhar from Citrix

Honestly, this isn’t a big deal for me because none of my customers use Citrix, and Citrix’s “Azure” products only work in Enterprise Agreements. This is a marketing pitch so there’s no notes here other than support for Windows 10 S.

Back to MS with David.

Demo

An MS-owned RDS client for Mac is in public preview. It looks nice. Admins can group desktops logically for easy click-and-login. There’s thumbnails for identifying the desktops. There are options to disable thumbnails (privacy) and for list view (scale). It will support AAD with RDMI. Applications can be in folders. The Mac OS has some limitations – running published apps don’t get their own native icons in the task bar like they do on Windows, but MS will work around that, including app switching.

Next up is the Windows App for the RDP client. A lot of future improvement here are focused on admin usage (needed if it’s ever going to replace MSTSC.EXE). Indicator to see which desktops are connected. Multiple simultaneous connections is supported. You can easily switch desktops and go “home”. A coming feature in the app is to put the desktops into different windows. There will be an option in settings to open each connection as a new window. RDP files  can be associated with the App and open the desktop in a new window. For high DPI devices, you will be able to control the resolution and/or scaling of the display. You’ll also be able to choose to stretch the content but keep the aspect ratio, or stretch the content only. When you create groups, you can move connections between the groups.

Right now, almost all of this is available now, except multi-window support.

Next up is the new HTML5 web client. This will support RDMI and classic WS2016 deployments. In the demo, you can see the UI is refreshed and modern. It kind of runs similarly to the Windows Store remote desktop app. When connected, the session is in the browser. When you go full screen, an RDP bar is pinned at the top by default, but you can un-pin it to give more space to the app/desktop.

Year 10 as an MVP – Adding The Azure Expertise

Today was a stressful day – it was the annual date of my MVP renewal. The program has changed quite a bit in the last year, and this is the only renewal date from now on, so you might have seen more MVPs than usual sharing their nerves online.

I was extremely nervous, especially because my profile on the MVP directory went offline. I was sure that I was a goner. But later in the day my profile re-appeared, with a change.

NewMVPStatus

To mark year 10 as a Microsoft Valuable Professional, I have been awarded with a double expertise:

  • Cloud & Datacenter Management (Hyper-V)
  • Microsoft Azure

And a little later in the afternoon, the notification email arrived:

MVP2017Email

My eldest daughter, who is 10 years old, had noticed my stress and wanted to congratulate me. I was banished from the kitchen and later I was presented with this cake – I’m a proud Dad:

MVP10Cake

 

These are fun times ahead for IT pros. My double status, with on-premises virtualization and public cloud, mirrors what’s going on in many of our careers, either already or pretty soon.  My career has changed so much over the years:

  • UNIX programmer
  • Have-a-go-hero Windows consultant
  • Re-inventing myself to be a better Microsoft engineer
  • Senior sysadmin in an international company
  • MVP in SCCM
  • Virtualization engineer
  • MVP in Hyper-V
  • Author
  • Technical sales
  • Writer
  • Lead on Azure IaaS
  • MVP in Azure

And now I can see somewhat of a return to development. I don’t see myself coding, but I’m heading to Ignite with the intention of spending as much time as posisble learning PaaS stuff, while trying to figure out what’s happening in Windows Server 1709, Azure IaaS developments, and soooo much more!

Big Changes to Windows Server–Semi-Annual Channel

Microsoft has just announced that they are splitting Windows Server and System Center into two channels:

  • Long-Term Servicing Channel (aka Branch)
  • Semi-Annual Channel

Long-Term Servicing Channel

This is the program that we’ve been using for years. Going forward, we will get a new version of Windows Server every 2-3 years. This big-bang release is what we are used to. We’ll continue to get 5 years mainstream support and 5 years extended support, and recently Microsoft announced the option to pay for an extra 6 years of Premium Assurance support.

Existing installations of Windows Server will fall into this channel. This channel will continue to get the usual software updates and security updates every month.

Semi-Annual Channel

This is aimed at hosting companies, private cloud (Azure Stack), and other customers that desire the latest and greatest. In addition to the usual monthly updates, these customers will get an OS upgrade, similar to what happens with Windows 10 now, twice per year in the Spring and Autumn.  Each of these releases will have 18 months of support after the initial release. Most of the included features will be rolled up to create future Long-Term Servicing Channel builds. While the Long-Term Servicing Channel releases will probably continue to be named based on years, the Semi-Annual Channel will use build numbers. A theoretical release in September 2017 would be called version 1709, and a March release in 2018 would be called version 1803.

Customers who can avail of this option are:

  • Software Assurance customers
  • Azure marketplace
  • MSDN and similar programs

SPLA wasn’t mention but this surely would have to be included for hosters?

Impact

The first word that came to my mind was “confusion”. Customers will be baffled by all this. MS wants to push out updates to more aggressive customers, but most companies are conservative with servers. The channel had to split. But it shall be fun to explain all of this … over and over … and over … and over … and again.