Last week’s challenge was to pass the Preparing the Datacentre for a private cloud with Windows Server 2008 R2 test. The three names pulled out of a hat were:
Aidan Dennehy, Paraic Nolan and Nassir Hussain
Well done guys! Prizes are on their way.
This week’s challenge is yet another Private Cloud topic: Service Delivery and Automation
So, to be in with a chance of winning, get your screenshot that proves you’ve passed into my inbox before Monday 26th March ay 09:00
Unfortunately I can’t open this up to the world – you’ll have to give me an Irish address to claim your prize (North or South).
Good luck everyone.
Microsoft Learning, IT Pro Evangelism & Server & Cloud Product Marketing recently delivered a 2-day virtual training event to help the world learn about the upcoming enhancements with the Creating & Managing a Private Cloud with System Center 2012 Jump Start. The event sold out and received a record satisfaction score, so a replay will be offered on April 3 & 4. Presenters include Symon Perriman, Kenon Owens, Sean Christensen, Adam Hall & Anant Sundaram and there will be a live Q&A.
This accelerated Jump Start is tailored for IT professionals familiar with Windows Server technologies, Hyper-V virtualization, and the System Center management solutions
Call to Action:
It is 100% free and open to the public, so register now
Last week’s Microsoft Virtual Academy (MVA) challenge was to pass the Private Cloud: Infrastructure Management test.
From all the entries, the three names picked out of a hat were: Paraic Nolan, Geoff Alderdice and GerryR. Well done guys – your prizes will be sent out this week.
This week’s challenge is to pass another Private Cloud topic: Preparing the Datacentre for a private cloud with Windows Server 2008 R2
To be in with a chance of winning a prize, please send me a screenshot that proves you’ve passed this week’s test.
Aidan Finn is a Microsoft MVP specialising in Virtual Machine and Systems Administration. He works for MicroWarehouse, can be contacted on email at aidan@aidanfinn.com or on Twitter at http://twitter.com/joe_elway
The following is a summary of a more detailed blog post http://www.aidanfinn.com/?p=12147
Typically when we read about new Microsoft technologies we read figures such as 1TB RAM, supports X million users, and scales out to thousands of machines. For the majority of us operating in the Irish market, these are fantastic but irrelevant numbers. The majority of us work in the small and medium enterprise (SME) and most of these techs or whitepapers appear to be written for the Fortune 1000 companies.
One of the very best features of Windows Server “8” is written for the SME. Hyper-V Replica is a mechanism that allows disaster recovery (DR) of virtual machines between remote sites. Typical of Hyper-V, it is built-in and requires no additional licensing.
Hyper-V Replica is easy to configure. In the DR site, you enable Hyper-V on the hosts or cluster of hosts, and can create different replication policies. In the production site, you configure each virtual machine to replicate to a destination host or cluster, using either HTTP (Kerberos for inside an Active Directory forest) or HTTP (SSL – for secured inter-company replication). And that’s it; replication just works.
The mechanism is designed to work on high latency, commercially available broadband links that SMEs are able to afford. It is log based, and the mechanism only transmits the required changes over the wire. This is normally done every 5 minutes, meaning that you would normally only lose between 1 second and 10 minutes of data during an unplanned failover.
Microsoft considered everything, including that first painfully big synchronization. You can just copy the VMs over the wire, you can schedule that copy, you can do it using offline storage (preferably encrypted using BitLocker-To-Go), or restore the VM from backup in the DR site, before replication starts up.
Working for a Microsoft Value Added Distributor (MicroWarehouse), one of the things I love about Hyper-V Replica is how achievable it is as a solution. A business with two sites could link them and replicate VMs between the two sites. A Microsoft Partner (either a hosting company or a system integrator) could build a multi-tenant Windows Server “8” cluster and sell a service to provide hosted DR with the Internet friendly HTTPS mechanism. Using two machines you can test this great business solution now using the Windows Server 8 beta.
Couple of good links here:
· TechNet: Hyper-V Replica Technical Preview: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831716.aspx Good image on there.
· Understand and Troubleshoot Hyper-V Replica in Windows Server "8" Beta: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=29016
If you’ve experienced this error message: “The following feature couldn’t be installed: .NET Framework 3.5 (includes .NET 2.0 and 3.0)
Then this is your solution (at the moment):
dism.exe /online /enable-feature /featurename:NetFX3 /Source:g:\sources\sxs
from an administrative CMD. “g” is the drive where you have your win8 installation files.
The three lucky winners pulled out of a hat this morning were: GerryR, Gerard Luiten and Jerry Lane. As promised, they didn’t win much (a MS Press book and an 8GB memory key)!
I’ve ordered up a load of (debatably) better prizes – jackets, umbrellas, toolkits and 32GB USB 3.0 drives (you can boot and run Windows 8 from one of those).
Last week our challenge was the Infrastructure Components of the Private Cloud. This week’s challenge is more on the Private Cloud. - we’re going to learn about what you need to manage it.
So, to be in with a chance of winning, please email me your screenshot that proves you have passed this exam: https://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/tracks/private-cloud-infrastructure-management
Good luck
Thank you to everyone who is playing along and thank you for your words of support and encouragement (a guided tour of the Microsoft Virtual Academy is going down very well).
Congratulations to everyone who passed last week’s exam; especially to Fergal Storan, Sean Stack and Pawel Bogucki who won today’s prizes (an MS Press book and a 8GB memory key).
This week my challenge it to pass the Private Cloud: Infrastructure Components test.
To be in with a chance to in a prize, send me a screenshot similar to this one before 09:00 next Monday (5th March):
In answer to your questions: this month will all be about Private Cloud and my prizes will get a little better (I’ve ordered some jackets, umbrellas, mini-toolkits and some 32GB USB 3.0 memory sticks).
Have you all downloaded the Release Candidates of our Private Cloud solution? If not, please download then now from here (you’ll be helping me, as I’m measured on how many people download).
For everyone who enters ALL of the weekly draws in March, I’ll be pulling a name out of the hat and giving away a Nokia Lumia 800
Happy learning!
Fergal Storan, Sean Stack and Pawel Bogucki.
As promised, their prizes were nothing special (an MS Press book and an 8GB memory key).
I’m ordering up some better prizes in March (jackets, umbrellas, etc).
I’ll be announcing this week’s challenge in a while.
I had to share this with you – it’s a great write-up of some of the new features that we’ll see in Windows Server “8” Hyper-V
The complete post is here:
http://www.windowsitpro.com/article/windowsserver8/windows-server-8-hyperv-141821
This is the last paragraph:
Great New Capabilities
The new Windows Server 8 features for VM migration and replication give organizations a great new capability for keeping VMs available and mobile throughout an organization's IT infrastructure -- without needing complex and expensive infrastructure changes. The Hyper-V live migration and Replica capabilities are just a few of the enhancements, and this discussion is based on the beta of Windows Server 8 so functionality could change. But the features give us an idea of the level of advancements that we're going to enjoy in the next version of Hyper-V and Windows Server.
The Microsoft Office suite offers up a powerhouse of tools to users in all fields. Word is there for the casual letter writer or the professional novelist. Excel can track, and chart, data figures be you a home user planning a holiday budget, a large business keeping track of profits, or a kid who just loves to create pie charts. PowerPoint allows you to create interactive slideshows of family holiday snaps or a new business proposal. When most people think of Office, they think of these three packages. But there are other packages in Office such as Outlook for powerful email and appointment planning, OneNote for quick note taking, and Access for database handling.
I’ve been using Microsoft Office Professional since the release of Office 97. Over the years I moved up to Office 2003, I didn’t make the move up to Office 2007 but did use the demo of it and was delighted with the newly redesigned interface, the Ribbon. And only a couple of months ago I finally made the move up to Office Professional 2010. And I have to say I’ve very pleased with it indeed. But as a home user, you might ask yourself why I want to invest in the full Professional version of Office instead of opting for the cheaper Home & Student version which offers up the key Office packages of Word, Excel and PowerPoint. What is it about Microsoft Office Professional that always draws me attention?
The answer is Microsoft Publisher.
I was first introduced to Publisher when I got Microsoft Office Professional 2003 with a new PC I bought. When I first looked at Publisher, I remember saying to myself, “Why would anyone want this?” It looked like Microsoft’s answer of Page Maker which I had used on a computer course a few years previously and I never became a fan of that package. To me, once you have Microsoft Word, that was all you needed. I mean, it could do text boxes, pictures, drawing shapes, etc. I wrote Publisher off as a package used by industry professionals, probably in the magazine industry, and for a long time I stuck with Word.
Now let me tell you a bit about myself. I am a very creative guy. I LOVE to be creative! I write, I do 3D art and animation, and I do publication work. None of this is in a professional sense, this is all a hobby for me and is something I very much enjoy. When I said above I do publication work, what I mean is I do posters, guide booklets on topics of interest, and other such pursuits. For years I use to always work in Word when doing these things and never really had any complaints. Oh sure, lining up text and graphics could be tricky at times, and trying to insert new content without messing up preceding page layouts could be a pain, but overall I loved Word for stuff like this.
Then one day I decided to take a look at Publisher.
I was working on a story for a game I was making and trying to do all the alignment and editing in Word was a task and a half at times! Remembering Page Maker from my college days and how easy it was to work with stuff like this, I decide to see what Microsoft Publisher had to offer. I spent a week in front of it, the Help file open next to it, as I explored all the tools in Publisher and how to use them. After that one week was over, I was in love with Publisher.
I instantly moved my story over to Publisher and started to develop it, using it as my project for learning Publisher. The creative process was just a joy to work with! I could grab a graphic, resize it and position where I wanted it on my page, with perfect accuracy, without having to fiddling around with text boxes and resizing them and trying to make them line up. Text naturally avoided placed graphics (you can of course make your text type over graphic too), no more hitting the Enter key to get text in a sentence down onto the next line when working beside a graphic.
Placing a background graphic was utter joy in Publisher!! In Word, I would place this background graphic in a text box to fit the screen. Then I would layer another text box on top of that for the text itself. But if you accidently grabbed the text box with the graphic in it when you really wanted to graph the text box with the text in, you could seriously mess up your layout. In Publish I can just bring in my background graphic, fill the page with it, and place my text box over it for the text, no worries.
Publisher’s accurate use of measurements means I also use it for create my own cards. At Christmas, birthdays, or whatever the occasion, I can create a layout in Publisher for the size of the printing card I’m using and onto that I can add my own graphics, text, etc., making the card uniquely mine, which then prints perfectly. Trying to achieve this in Word use to see a few of my printed cards misaligned, ruined!
My most recent project in Publisher is my very own guidebook to Orlando Florida. I love Orlando Florida, with Walt Disney World, Universal Studios, the shopping! I love it so much that folks use to always ask me for tips about visiting the place. So I created my very own guidebook to Orlando Florida which is updated whenever need be and is freely available for download from my website here: http://www.iol.ie/~pkb/OF.htm
I have truly fallen in love with Microsoft Publisher. It allows my creativity to flow freely from my mind to the screen to print. As a matter of fact, I have become such a huge fan of Microsoft Publisher that when I go to write a letter to family and friends, I use Publisher for it instead of word which allows me to control the flow of the text and any graphical elements I want to toss in. Publisher may not be a took many home users use, but I am a huge fan of it and fair play to Microsoft on development such an amazingly powerful development tool.