The first part of a four-part article series titled Architecting a Microsoft Private Cloud, by myself and my colleague Adam Fazio (@adamfazio) has been published in TechNet Magazine here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/hh127072.aspx Microsoft Services has designed, built and implemented...

This week I had some folks ask me about the hardware and setup I use for customer meetings and demonstrations. Since I’m in the Consulting side of the business, usually my customer discussions are multi-product scenarios or solution-oriented, not just single product scenarios so I need to have a pretty...

Issue 24 of the Microsoft Architecture Journal focuses on virtualization. My paper, From Virtualization to Dynamic IT , has been published in this issue. My thesis: Virtualization is a critical infrastructure-architecture layer that is required for achieving higher IT-maturity levels, but several others...

With the release of Hyper-V R2 and Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2, many service organizations are seeing a business opportunity around providing design, planning, and implementation services around Hyper-V and the rest of the Microsoft virtualization and management platform. To encourage this trend...

What is a dynamic datacenter? How does a dynamic datacenter enable private cloud computing and fit within a long term, enterprise cloud strategy? What can be achieved now with Microsoft and partner solutions while laying the ground work for future product and service waves? These questions and many more...

Recently there has been some healthy debate around the validity of “private clouds” and whether such a construct is new or just a different name for virtualization and automated provisioning, i.e. a marketecture. In this corner for the anti-Private Cloud sentiment, we have the 2009 Prediction – Rise...

The Virtual Hard Disk Getting Started Guide is 61 pages of great info outlining all the relevant scenarios, configurations, and options for using VHD files. This was release about 3 weeks ago but I missed it at the time due to training and TechReady9. The guide outlines basic scenarios like booting Windows...

In a blog posting earlier this week , the Azure team announced that they would be moving all Azure applications out of our “USA – Northwest” datacenter. I was fascinated by this given that the stated reason for this move is a change in local tax law which presumably make it less financially attractive...

Day 4 and 5 of TechReady were action packed, I didn’t even have time to post yesterday. I skipped the first session timeslot on Thurs to prepare for the double session I was presenting with Citrix. The double session format basically allocates two sessions (3 hours) to one topic letting you get into...

Day 3 kicked off with a keynote by Ray Ozzie and several very cool demos on UI futures, what’s coming across some of the Bing features, and some stuff MSR is working on. There was also a good discussion of how concepts move from MSR, to Labs, then into the product groups. Next up was a very entertaining...

As mentioned here and in a few other posts, I’ve been using Friendfeed and Twitter quite a bit over the last couple months. I’ve been extremely impressed with Friendfeed in particular. I’ve created two Friendfeed groups that I’ve been posting content to in addition to my main feed. The groups are: Microsoft...

A new Security section has been added to the government site on Microsoft.com. The site consolidates a number of relevant tools, solutions, case studies, and links relevant to Public Sector organizations. Several of the solutions call for specific mentions here: Federal Desktop Core Configuration (FDCC...

There’s a good technical post over on Chris Adam’s blog about how to dynamically provision customized virtual machines by using System Center Virtual Machine Manager and unattend.xml. The unattend.xml file is used in combination with a sysprep’d image and applies customization (things like computer name...

Here’s an interesting and slightly amusing mock debate between Brandon Shell and Jason Conger on Citrix’s Workflow Studio vs PowerShell for automation . If you aren’t familiar with it, here is the description of what Workflow Studio is: “Citrix Workflow Studio™ is an infrastructure process automation...

The Hypervisor Functional Specification v2.0 for Windows Server 2008 R2 has been posted to the web and can be found here . The original v1.0 version for Windows Server 2008 RTM was described in this post . Here is the overview of the v2.0 version: This document is the top-level functional specification...

I was able to get a small commentary on desktop virtualization and VDI published in the Microsoft Architecture Journal . It’s based on the work I’ve been doing around creating a VDI offering to augment Microsoft’s server virtualization offerings. For a slightly expanded version of my thoughts on this...

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 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...

The Windows Server Division blog announced that Windows Server 2008 R2 is tracking with Windows 7 and both are planned to RTM in the second half of July with General Availability on Oct 22! That RTM date is earlier than I thought it would be, I was thinking late August. The more I dig into R2 the more...

New step-by-step guides have been posted for the new Remote Desktop Services (RDS) found in Windows Server 2008 R2 including the new VDI scenarios. These replace the original step-by-step guide from a couple months ago that was basically too big since it included all these scenarios in one and was a...

When planning server consolidation initiatives, particularly if using a structured offering and tools like SVAM and MAP , underutilized database servers are a frequent consolidation candidate. Similarly, if you have already widely implemented virtualization, then virtualizing database servers for new...

The Terminal Services (now called Remote Desktop Virtualization) team has announced that the Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services Resource Kit eBook is available for free download for a limited time. You can register (LiveID required) here and download the eBook (~30MB). The 2008 resource kit books...

Good news from the virtualization team. Over on their blog is a new post about the import/export functionality in Hyper-V. There are major enhancements that address several scenarios that were either not easy or not possible with Hyper-V RTM. Scenarios such as exporting a VM and importing it to a different...

Continuing the foray into social networking I started on a couple weeks ago, today’s topic is social bookmarking. For those who are even later to the game than I am, social bookmarking is basically a site or service that lets you tag and store your website bookmarks in a central location that is accessible...