A blog covering Azure, Hyper-V, Windows Server, desktop, systems management, deployment, and so on …
Microsoft has increased the maximums once again for Hyper-V, with the upcoming release of Windows Server 2016. They’re leaving VMware not just in the dust, but somewhere so far behind that they’re over the horizon.
How does vSphere 6.0 stack up against the superior Hyper-V?
Ouch! Enjoy, vFanboys!
I can’t wait for the angry tweets!
I’m presenting in a webinar by DataON Storage later today at 6PM UK/Irish time, 7PM Central Europe, and 1 PM Eastern. The focus is on how small-medium businesses can switch to an all-Microsoft server stack on DataON hardware and greatly reduce costs, while simplifying the deployment and increasing performance.
There are a number of speakers, including me, DataON, a customer that made that jump recently, and HGST (manufacturer of enterprise class flash storage).
You can register here.
I recently did another webinar for work, this time focusing on how to deploy an affordable Hyper-V cluster in a small-medium business or a remote/branch office. The solution is based on Cluster-in-a-Box hardware and Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V and Storage Spaces. Yes, it reduces costs, but it also simplifies the solution, speeds up deployment times, and improves performance. Sounds like a win-win-win-win offering!
We have shared the recording of the webinar on the MicroWarehouse site, and that page also includes the slides and some additional reading & viewing.
The next webinar has been scheduled; On August 25th at 2PM UK/Irish time (there is a calendar link on the page) I will be doing a session on what’s new in WS2016 Hyper-V, and I’ll be doing some live demos. Join us even if you don’t want to learn anything about Windows Server 2016 Hyper-V, because it’s live demos using a Technical Preview build … it’s bound to all blow up in my face.
Microsoft announced, in a cryptic way, that Azure Backup has “additional monitoring and alerting capabilities”. Let’s focus on alerting because that’s been a huge request for Azure Backup. Every single meeting I’ve had on the subject included the question “does it do alerts?” and the answer for the last 2.5 years was “no, but it’s coming”. Finally, it’s here! For some customers.
If you are using the recovery services vault – Azure Backup in the Azure Portal – then you’re in luck. Open your vault and browse to Settings. Click Alerts & Events.
Click Backup Alerts – note that Site Recovery Events (alerting for ASR DR) has been available for quite a while.
The Backup Alerts dialog opens. This is where all alerts will be displayed. You can filter the information in this blade based on severity, status, time and date. We’ll continue with setting up email notifications.
Click Configure Notifications
Enable notifications.
Enter the email addresses (preferably of mail groups and systems, not people) that you want the alerts to go to. Use a semi-colon ( ; ) to separate multiple addresses.
Choose if you want to get 1 email per alert or if you want an hourly digest.
And select what kinds of alerts you want to be notified about. Maybe Warning and Critical would be best, but some of you like to know about successful backups (you tape-loving lugs).
Click Save. And you are done.
But what if you are one of the customers that has been using Azure Backup, maybe for years, via the backup vault in the classic Management Portal? Sorry – no alerting for you. I hope that Azure Backup creates a way to migrate customers from the backup vault to the recovery services vault, including the ability to migrate to a different subscription (e.g. Open/direct/EA to CSP).
Microsoft made a small change to the Basics blade of the ARM VM deployment wizard, which I noticed for the first time this morning.
Microsoft is constantly changing the Azure Portal. Feedback, new features, and probably metrics gathered from our usage, shape the solution. It’s gone from being a horrible tool to something I find to be, not only, useful, but also educational – the portal helps me find new things in Azure and understand how things fit together. For example, I tried reading about the Azure ARM load balancer but all of the materials were infinite loop gibberish. I open the portal, deployed a template, and traced how the pieces fit together.
Part of the feedback Microsoft gets is that the UI is “too big”. You have to click and scroll too much. A big improvement was the “all settings” blade which removed the “symantec” from the design and put all of a resource’s features into one flat and discoverable blade.
We got another such improvement in the last couple of days. When we are building a VM in the portal we have to select a spec and size of VM. That opens up a HUGE blade with dozens of options, each presented in a little frame with details of that VM spec/size. Only the other day, I though that this blade had become a pain in the a**. Microsoft has eased the pain (a little) by changing the Basics blade. As you can see below, a new list box asks if we want a VM with SSD or HDD storage – that’s a little over simplified but that’s a conversation for another time. Selecting one option filters what options the Size blade needs to show you.
Note that this change only affects the deployment of ARM virtual machines. The old experience is still there for Classic (ASM) virtual machines.
I do have another option for Microsoft … cull the numbers of specs of VM. Do we really need Basic A, Standard A, D, DS, Dv2, F, FS, G, GS, NC and NV, each with a number of sizes? I used to be able to explain the features/differences of the different series with a single PowerPoint slide … now it’s a presentation deck all of it’s own!
We just wrapped up delivering our latest webcast, which will be shared on the MicroWarehouse site in the next few days, along with the deck and digital handout. And we’ve already scheduled the next webinar, which will be the first in a series of webinars focusing on Windows Server 2016 ahead of the launch at Microsoft Ignite on 26th of September – probably followed up by being on the “new sales” price list on October 1st.
The first WS2016 webinar will focus on Hyper-V – further sessions will be scheduled on storage, clustering, networking, etc. And I’m going to be doubly brave. I’m going to do demos based on a technical preview release (what an idiot!), and I’m going to do them live in the webinar (what a moron!). Hey – it’s all fun, right?!?!?
So come on and join us on August 25th at 14:00 (UK/Ireland), 15:00 CET and 09:00 Eastern, to see if it all blows up in my face and maybe learn something new about where virtualization is going in this era of cloud computing.
Register here and download the calendar reminder.
Microsoft has launched the preview of Azure VNet Peering. You can find overview information on it and some how to’s.
You need to register for the VNet Peering preview using PowerShell:
Register-AzureRmProviderFeature -FeatureName AllowVnetPeering -ProviderNamespace Microsoft.Network –force
It takes up to 30 minutes for this to complete. You can check your registration status by running:
Get-AzureRmProviderFeature -FeatureName AllowVnetPeering -ProviderNamespace Microsoft.Network
However … there does appear to be issues during these early days of the preview. I’ve tried it out with a couple of subscriptions (Open and CSP) and the registration claims to have succeeded but I cannot peer VNets yet, because I “have not registered yet”.
It’s not unusual for a preview to have issues in the first couple of days – this is the first time the feature (which is still preview!) will have widespread rollout and usage. I would expect that Microsoft has detected issues and is working on a fix for this anticipated feature.
In a busy night of Azure announcements, Microsoft said that we can now peer two Azure VNets to connect them without using a VNet-to-VNet VPN. This in-preview feature will reduce costs and complexity.
I have yet to find any technical details, but this will be a great addition. I like that it supports ASM and ARM connections via different subscriptions – I can run RemoteApp in Open (ASM) to provide remote access to services in CSP (ARM).
As usual, you should carefully plan your VNet network address to plan for scalability – don’t be the idiot that deploys the entirety of 10.0.0.0 to a single VNet/subnet!
Note that I have been unable to find technical documentation yet.
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.
Microsoft is finally making updates to Azure to reduce downtime to virtual machines when a host is rebooted.
Microsoft sent out the following announcement via the regular pricing and features update email to customers last night:
That sounds like Quick Migration. So Azure has caught up with Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V. 
And it sounds like later in 2016, we’ll get Live Migration … yay … Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V 
Seriously, though, Azure was never designed for the kinds of high availability that we put into an on-premises Hyper-V cluster. Azure is cloud scale, with over 1 million physical hosts. A cluster has around 1000 hosts! When you build at that scale, HA is done in a different way. You encourage customers to design for an army of ants … lots of small deployments where HA is done using software design leveraging cloud fabric features, rather than by hardware. But, when you have customers (from small to huge) who have lots of legacy applications (e.g. file server) that cannot be clustered in Azure without redesign/re-deployment/expense, then you start losing customers.
So Microsoft needed to make changes that acknowledged that many customer workloads are not cloud ready … and to be honest, most of the prospects I’ve encountered where code was being written, the developers weren’t cloud ready either – they are sticking to the one DB server and one web server model that has plagued businesses since the 1990s.
These improvements are great news … and they’re just the tip of last night’s very big and busy iceberg.
