Hyper-V Replica is our included asynchronous site-to-site VM replication capability for Windows Server 2012 and our FREE Hyper-V Server 2012 bare-metal enterprise-grade hypervisor. Using Hyper-V Replica, you can quickly implement a cost-effective disaster recovery plan for your business critical VMs...

UPDATE: Added a Step-by-Step article for building a Cloud Distribution Point to the list of Additional Resources in this article ... Build a System Center 2012 Configuration Manager SP1 Cloud Distribution Point using Windows Azure Infrastructure Services by Kevin Remde System Center 2012...

UPDATE: At the end of this step-by-step article, I've also included a downloadable lab guide and a 130-line PowerShell script for initial provisioning. The PowerShell script helps to reduce the initial configuration time by automating the provisioning of a new Windows Azure Storage account, Virtual Network...

This month, my fellow IT Pro Technical Evangelists and I are authoring a new articles series on 20 Key Scenarios with Windows Azure Infrastructure Services . You can catch the full series at http://aka.ms/CloudTop20 . In today's article in this series, we'll discuss extending our On-premises Datacenter...

This month, my fellow IT Pro Technical Evangelists and I are authoring a new articles series on 20 Key Scenarios with Windows Azure Infrastructure Services . You can catch the full series at http://aka.ms/CloudTop20 . In today's article in this series, we'll discuss accelerating content on cloud-based...

This month, my fellow IT Pro Technical Evangelists and I are authoring a new articles series on 20 Key Scenarios with Windows Azure Infrastructure Services . You can catch the full series at http://aka.ms/CloudTop20 . In today's article in this series, we'll discuss backup of SQL databases and logs...

Today, April 16th 2013, the Windows Azure team has announced that Windows Azure Infrasructure Services ( Virtual Machines and Virtual Networks ) has been released for General Availability ( GA ) for production workloads! You can read the full details of this formal announcement at: READ: Windows...

Windows Azure Active Directory ( WAAD ), a cloud-friendly REST-based implementation of Active Directory for identity management of cloud applications, is now generally available for production cloud apps as a FREE service. WAAD provides consistent centralized identity management for Microsoft Office...

Windows Azure Virtual Machines and Virtual Networks provides the ability to securely extend the network perimeter of our data center into the Windows Azure cloud platform for many useful scenarios – backup, disaster recovery, accelerated cloud storage, dev/test/pilot, remote access, Internet applications...

The high availability afforded by Windows Server 2012 Failover Clustering is a key ingredient for managing and maintaining business critical applications. To gain familiarity with What’s New in Failover Clustering in Windows Server 2012, this article will step through an overview of new capabilities...

Big data is everywhere, and the cloud is no different! Windows Server 2012 can leverage the new Storage Spaces feature and integrated iSCSI Target Server role to provide SAN-like storage capabilities when presenting storage to other servers. When studying these features in Windows Server 2012, we can...

In this article, we’ll be continuing on in our “Early Experts” Cloud Quest lab scenario to add a Windows Server 2012 Replica Domain Controller ( DC ) to our cloud-based lab on the Windows Azure cloud platform. NOTE: This Step-by-Step guide builds on the cloud-based lab configuration...

Extending an on-premise Windows Server Active Directory ( AD ) infrastructure into the cloud is an important topic to consider when planning the migration or implementation of cloud-based applications. Many existing applications require Active Directory for authentication and identity management. When...

Often times, applications that we’re deploying to the cloud may expect Windows Server Active Directory to be present for authentication and identity management. With Windows Azure Virtual Machines and Virtual Networks , we can deploy Windows Server Active Directory on the Windows Azure cloud platform...

In previous articles in our 31 Days of Servers in the Cloud series, we’ve stepped through the process of building out various lab environments in the cloud, such as Windows Server 2012, SQL Server 2012, SharePoint 2013, Windows 8 App Dev and even Linux, on the Windows Azure cloud platform. ...

Developing Windows 8 Apps for the Windows Store offers an unprecedented opportunity for developers and partners! As reported earlier this month on Blogging Windows , more than 60 Million Windows 8 licenses have been sold and over 1,700 certified systems are available from our OEM partners for Windows...

Our Windows Azure cloud platform provides both Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) features for migrating and running virtual machines in the cloud and Platform as a Service (PaaS) features for developing new cloud-based applications. Together, these capabilities can be used by IT Pros and Developers...

With Windows Azure, you can easily deploy and run Windows Server and Linux virtual machines on your own virtual network in the cloud. These capabilities can be really useful for several scenarios, such as: building virtual lab environments, piloting new software in the cloud, deploying hybrid IT applications...

Today at Tech Ed North America, we all saw great keynote presentations featuring cool new features in Windows Server 2012 - improved features across the board, including Management, Storage, Virtualization and Security! Aching to begin playing around with some of these new features for yourself, but...