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I am always asked if there are any good training events happening that have great technical speakers.  I thought I would mention that there is an event called Tech Days taking place in San Francisco (at the Microsoft downtown office) on May 2nd and 3rd.  The list of speakers include the following...

Back in February, I placed an order for my new work laptop – Lenovo Carbon X1 and I also got the USB 3.0 Dock. It took over a month before I received it, but I did get it and finally got everything configured and working nicely on it. I thought I would just share my experience so far with my new...

Using System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) to do basic Virtual Machine management of Hyper-V is pretty simple and straight forward.  The real magic sauce (and power) comes with understanding and using the Fabric components and Service Templates that are also available with VMM. ...

In Part 10 of the Server Virtualization Series last month, I covered off on NIC Teaming. Since networking is an important piece of Server Virtualization, it is a good thing that Keith Mayer covered it again with some additional details in his post in the Build Your Private Cloud Series . I am including...

In this article, Matt Hester focuses on building the Private Cloud foundation from a storage perspective.  As I’ve pointed out in previous posts, storage is a very important part of your Private Cloud infrastructure since that is where everything is stored.  I am including a brief snippet from...

Although this is not necessarily a super technical article, it is an important one.  With everyone (including Microsoft) throwing around the term “Private Cloud”, it is important to understand what it is and why you would want one.  Otherwise, why would you spend time building one?? In this...

Now that April is upon us, the US IT Pro Evangelist team is embarking on another Blog Series for the month of April - Build Your Private Cloud in a Month . Since the team has covered Windows Server 2012 (December 2012), Windows Azure (January 2013), Migration and Deployment (February 2013) and Server...

In this latest episode of TechNet Radio: Virtualization and Cloud Experts Café, I chat with John Allwright, Sr. Product Marketing Manager with the Server Infrastructure team to discuss the latest enhancements made to System Center 2012 SP1 and the new capabilities found within Windows Azure Services...

When trying to understand how your server is performing, it is usually a good idea to monitor the CPU resources to make sure you do have enough processing power.  There are multiple ways to look at this resource; from Task Manager to Performance Monitor.  In Part 16 of the Server Virtualization...

I have talked about Hyper-V Replica many times in the past and have mentioned how great of an option it is for setting up a Disaster Recovery (DR) solution at an affordable price.  This is a feature that comes with Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V without any additional cost.  Basic configuration...

I thought long and hard about what I was going to write for this article. My first thought was to go into detail on monitoring memory using Performance Monitor. Then I thought about it a bit more and remembered that my teammate, Chris Avis, wrote a blog post about Dynamic Memory monitoring on March 6th...

High Availability is important and hence why Microsoft offers Failover Clustering.  As more and more people start virtualizing their server infrastructure, Hyper-V Host Clustering is important and that was why Matt Hester covered that in Part 13.  At the same time, a server application that...

I have finished holding two IT Camps in my territory (Lehi, UT and Tempe, AZ) with three more to go (Los Angeles, Irvine and San Diego).  I wanted to make the PowerPoint Decks available to everyone.  I have put them up on SlideShare where you can download them.  I am also embedding them...

When deploying multiple Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V hosts into an environment, High Availability should be one of the things an IT Pro needs to take into account.  If one Hyper-V host fails, it is no longer just one server or application that goes down, it is probably at least 5 (or 100) depending...

On Tuesday, March 19, 2013, Brian Lewis posted Part 12 of the Server Virtualization Serie s on Live Migration.  If you are new to Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V or just haven’t had a chance to look at all the capabilities of Live Migration in Server 2012 Hyper-V, then this is a good read.  Brian...

As you start working with Hyper-V, virtual networking configuration becomes very important.  You need to understand how to allocate physical adapters for use by Hyper-V (virtual switches) and what the difference is between an Internal, Private and External switch.  In Part 9 of the blog series...

I realize this one is definitely out of order, but I just realized today that I did not create a post for a Parts 7 and 9 in the series. I’m sure most folks are familiar with iSCSI storage and may have even configured a Windows Server to connect to the iSCSI storage at some point.  If you have not...

As most people who work with Server Virtualization realize, storage is one of the biggest components of the architecture.  As VMs grow and the storage used by the Hyper-V host starts to get full, what options are available to the administrator?  One “solution” could be to shut down the VM and...

As you start virtualizing more and more of your server infrastructure, network bandwidth (and networking in general) become more and more important to the overall design and architecture of your virtualization strategy.  Towards that goal, I want to get a little more into NIC Teaming in Windows...

I’ve been a Unified Communications guy for quite some time and have been using Lync (and its predecessors) for many years now. During that time, I’ve had the opportunity to try out different headsets and thought I would take a few minutes and share some of my experiences. Before I start...

As you size the hardware for Hyper-V, I’m sure one of the things you do take a hard look at is storage.  How much do you really want to spend to get the performance you want (or need)?  There are a lot of storage options out there so it is very helpful to have a better idea of what the options...

On Wednesday, my teammate Chris Avis posted a very nice article on his blog about Monitoring Dynamic Memory in Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V.   Towards the end of the article, Chris makes a good observation that the counters you will likely spend the most time monitoring (specific to Dynamic Memory...

The concept of Datastores in virtualization is really a VMware “thing” and not so much a Hyper-V thing.  The reason is that the two products do things slightly different and terminology is also different.  For those of you who are coming from a VMware environment into a Hyper-V environment...

A common question I get from folks who are looking to purchase new server hardware to run Server Virtualization workloads is where to spend the money – memory or processor.  I find that in most cases, processor is not the bottleneck, but memory definitely is the limiting factor for how many VMs...

For those of you who use Hyper-V or are looking to (evaluating it), I’m sure you are curious as to what Virtual Machine settings can be changed or what virtual hardware can be added to a VM while it is up and running.  If you haven’t paid attention to this, then you definitely want to take a look...