April, 2011

Originally posted on the Canadian Developers’ Connection blog by my colleague Susan Ibach. --------------------------- The traditional view of the developer or system administrator is that of a nerd. A complete geek with no social skills whatsoever (Big Bang Theory anyone?) But those of you who have a successful career in IT understand that even though we work with technology, we also work...

Just got word that the High Definition videos of our recent JumpStart training program on the MS virtualization stack is now available online at TechNet Edge .   Yup – it’s your one stop shop to get access to over 15 hours of co-presented goodness on the following topics: Entire course on TechNet Edge: Microsoft Virtualization for VMware Professionals o Platform 1: Virtualization Overview 2: Differentiating...

If you’ve started reading from this post, you’ll need to go through the previous parts of this series before starting this one: Introduction Part 1: Provisioning and Configuring SQL Azure Part 2: Provisioning a Storage Account Part 3: Configuring the Service Package Part 4: Configuring the Hosted Service, Deploying the Package, and Testing Part 5: Promoting from Staging to Production ...

If you’ve started reading from this post, you’ll need to go through the previous parts of this series before starting this one: Introduction Part 1: Provisioning and Configuring SQL Azure Part 2: Provisioning a Storage Account Part 3: Configuring the Service Package Part 4: Configuring the Hosted Service, Deploying the Package, and Testing Almost done! With your testing completed, it’s...

If you’ve started reading from this post, you’ll need to go through the previous parts of this series before starting this one: Introduction Part 1: Provisioning and Configuring SQL Azure Part 2: Provisioning a Storage Account Part 3: Configuring the Service Package Good new - updating the Service Configuration file with the storage account and database information was probably the most...

If you’ve started reading from this post, you’ll need to go through the previous parts of this series before starting this one: Introduction Part 1: Provisioning and Configuring SQL Azure Part 2: Provisioning a Storage Account With the database and storage account created, the application has to be configured to use them. Though developers are used to placing configuration parameters...

If you’ve started reading from this post, you’ll need to go through the previous parts of this series before starting this one: Introduction Part 1: Provisioning and Configuring SQL Azure The architecture of the application also calls for Windows Azure storage to store some of the application’s configuration data, as well as data for the ASP.NET providers. If you’d like...

If you’ve started reading from this post, you’ll need to go through the previous parts of this series before starting this one: Introduction The architecture of the application calls for a SQL Azure database to store the application’s data. The developers have created the database on their on-premise development SQL Server instance and since you can’t simply detach the database from SQL Server and...

I’d like to take this opportunity and introduce myself, as this blog post series is my debut on the Canadian IT Professionals blog. My name is Jonathan Rozenblit ( @jrozenblit ). I work alongside Rick and Damir though I focus on the developer tools and platforms. Windows Azure is one of those technologies that is both an infrastructure platform and a development platform, so when it comes to...

Over the last few weeks Ruth Morton and I have been out on the AlignIT Tour talking to IT managers about how organizations can embrace the cloud and increase IT staff and end user productivity.  During the tour we got a lot of questions regarding Office 365 and when it will be available for everyone to try.  Well, the wait is over.  Office 365 is now out as a public beta, meaning you...

In my last piece (Creating a Storage Area Network Using Microsoft iSCSI Software Target 3.3) I showed you how to create software Logical Unit Numbers (LUN). In this article we are going to take what we have learned to leverage the benefits of a SAN device to create redundancy for our Hyper-V environment. We will: Create a failover cluster between two servers ( nodes ); Enable Cluster Shared Volume...

As many of you know I work for Microsoft Enterprise Services as a Senior Technical Account Manager. I've been here for 6 years and I constantly get the question “what is it like to work for Microsoft?” . I always answer the same thing. “it’s fantastic!”. You get to work with really smart, interesting people, on challenging engagements. and the environment and culture is...

Over pints Pierre Roman, Bruce Cowper and Rick Claus decided they would put together a concise and timely podcast each “Update Tuesday”. The object is to keep it simple by letting you know in plain non technical language what the updates are, what they resolve and why you should care. As always - if you have suggestions on making it better - please pass on your comments. Mail Rick directly...

When Microsoft released their iSCSI Software Target to general download in April they opened up a world of possibilities for smaller companies (as well as IT Pros and hobbyists) who use servers, but cannot justify spending thousands of dollars on a Storage Area Network (SAN) device . In this article I will show you how to create a virtual SAN in your environment. Installing the iSCSI Software Target...

As Pierre Roman pointed out on April 5 th , Microsoft released its Software iSCSI Target to the Download Center ( The Microsoft iSCSI Software Target is now free ). I call it The Great Equalizer . Let me explain: There are two ways of creating shared storage. Network Attached Storage (NAS) is file-level storage that you create by formatting a volume on a server (or workstation or NAS...

Hello Folks, Over the last few years while demonstrating the Windows 2008 and Windows 2008 R2 Cluster and Virtualization capabilities, I've been asked several times, How can I take advantage of Hyper-V and/or cluster capabilities such as Live Migration (LM) and High Availability (HA) if i don't have access to a SAN? As you know, to use both LM and HA, these require shared storage. This shared storage...

Whoo-Hoo! I saw a tweet, plugged in my Samsung Focus on the Rogers network and look what popped up? (12:35)   I hit the update Now button and then it started (12:37) some more checks and then this… (12:39) quickly followed by a backup procedure and cute image Update in progress (12:51) restart of phone (1:01) Update complete! (1:02)