I’m liking this MS Press monthly free ebook program. Especially with my new Kindle DX! Last month it was the Terminal Services Resource Kit, this month it is two for OCS:
Be sure to download these now, the offer only lasts for a short time (as in I waited too long to download last months and missed it!)
The links below lead to a series of technical whitepapers on DirectAccess, BranchCache, and Remote Desktop Services in Windows Server 2008 R2.
Networking Resources: DirectAccess and BranchCache
Remote Desktop Resources: Kerberos, User Profiles, RemoteApp
The New York Times magazine has a very interesting article by Tom Vanderbilt on datacenters and the infrastructures that power today’s online services. Several Microsoft (and former Microsoft) execs were interviewed including Mike Manos, Debra Chrapaty, Daniel Costello, etc.
The article ends with a very insightful comment by Mike Manos:
“We’re at the beginning of the information utility,” he said. “The past is big monolithic buildings. The future looks more like a substation — the data center represents the information substation of tomorrow.”
The Exchange team has published a whitepaper on TechNet comparing the power utilization of a typical 8 server physical Exchange environment compared to a a virtualized environment using the same number of logical processors but on only two Hyper-V host servers. The result: a 50% reduction in power usage (excluding storage). If storage is included it was a 37% reduction.
The purpose of the test was to isolate on power consumption scenarios so other things like cooling and space savings weren’t considered but would also be measurable benefits. There is also a link to general guidance on virtualizing Exchange as it makes sense in a lot of scenarios but not all.
The main introductory whitepaper to the Azure platform written by David Chappell has been updated. The main updates are around SQL Data Services and the move toward a more relational model and the introduction of something code-named the “Huron” data hub which uses the Microsoft Sync Framework to synchronize multiple databases (SQL, SQL Compact, etc) in a multi-master fashion. There will also be an SDK so that other databases can be synchronized as well. The document is well written and if you really absorb it you can start to see the scope and scale of the Microsoft vision for cloud computing.