Didn’t make it to TechEd this year? Don’t worry! This month, we’ll be releasing a new article series that highlights the Best of TechEd announcements and technical information for IT Pros. Today’s article focuses on the new Windows Azure Pack for Windows Server 2012 R2 and System...

Didn’t make it to TechEd this year? Don’t worry! This month, we’ll be releasing a new article series that highlights the Best of TechEd announcements and technical information for IT Pros. Today’s article focuses on enhancements for Private Cloud scenarios with the upcoming System...

UPDATED: Added new Module 14 for What's New in Private Cloud with the new R2 Releases Are you virtualizing your servers? Yes, of course! Are you spending less time managing your servers as a result? Hmm … No! Server Virtualization is Great, But … Server virtualization has...

This week at our annual Microsoft TechEd IT Pro conference, there's a huge concentration on helping IT Professionals improve their careers by mastering our Data Center / Private Cloud infrastructure solutions and getting certified. Today, I'll be delivering two Exam Prep sessions for the new MCSE Server...

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...

TechEd is our premier technical conference for IT Professionals and Enterprise Developers, and this year Microsoft TechEd 2013 North America will be in New Orleans, LA on June 3rd-6th. I’ve attended almost every TechEd conference since 1997, and I’ve always found it to be a tremendously...

UPDATE: New Resources Included for System Center 2012 SP1 This month, I spent a fair amount of time preparing for the new Microsoft Private Cloud Certification Exam 70-246, Monitoring and Operating a Private Cloud with System Center 2012 and I saved links to all the study resources that I used...

In this final portion of our Build Your Private Cloud in a Month series, Yung Chou and I show how to leverage System Center 2012 SP1 App Controller to manage a hybrid cloud environment that could consist of on-premises Private Clouds, Windows Azure Infrastructure Services , and hosted Service Provider...

Continuing on in our Build Your Private Cloud in a Month series, today Yung Chou and I walk through the steps needed to dynamically optimize our Private Cloud Fabric.  Tune in as we show you how to reserve capacity for virtualization hosts, dynamically balance VM loads across hosts, configure automatic...

Today, as part of our Build Your Private Cloud in a Month series, Yung Chou and I are extending our Private Cloud into a Hybrid Network Infrastructure with Windows Azure Infrastructure Services to provide our cloud fabric with the best of both worlds … the low-latency and high-bandwidth available in...

In this episode of our Build Your Private Cloud in a Month series, Yung Chou and I show how to protect Private Cloud workloads using System Center 2012 SP1 Data Protection Manager and also demo how to integrate DPM with VMM for seamless backup of VMs even if they’ve been Live Migrated to different virtualization...

As we’ve seen so far throughout our Build Your Private Cloud in a Month series, Private Clouds allow us to organize our datacenter resources into pools of resources and template configurations that are really easy to deploy and manage. But, as we all know, configuration tasks for datacenter...

So far in our Build Your Private Cloud in a Month series, we’ve prepared a scalable, resilient foundation and created our storage, network and compute fabric in System Center 2012 SP1 Virtual Machine Manager. Now …. we're ready to build some Private Clouds! In System Center 2012 SP1,...

Earlier in this Build Your Private Cloud in a Month article series, we defined Elasticity as an important property of a Private Cloud Fabric. Elasticity allows us to manage our Private Cloud as a flexible pool of resources that we can leverage to rapidly grow our datacenter capacity to meet new resource...

To be effective, Private Clouds need to embrace the virtualization technologies that you have currently deployed in your datacenter and permit you to manage them as a single compute fabric, rather than getting locked in to separately managing silos of virtualization technologies. Don’t get me...

Yung Chou and I are back for another episode in our multi-part series on how to Build Your Private Cloud using System Center 2012 SP1 . Tune in today as we show how to configure the network fabric in System Center 2012 SP1 Virtual Machine Manager . We’ll walk through the process of adding datacenter...

When designing your virtualization ho st framework for your Private Cloud, it's important to select platforms that use widely supported standards and provide cost-effective solutions for elastically scaling a resilient compute foundation. With this criteria in check, you'll be able to grow your compute...

When planning network infrastructure for a Private Cloud, there’s a number of technologies to consider and leverage in Windows Server 2012 . At many of my events, IT Pros have lots of questions on when to use various network technologies in their overall Private Cloud design, such as: Teaming...

Yung Chou and I are back for another episode in our multi-part series on how to Build Your Private Cloud using System Center 2012 SP1 . Tune in today as we show how to configure the storage fabric in System Center 2012 SP1 Virtual Machine Manager . We’ll walk through the process of adding different...

Yung Chou and I are back for another episode in our multi-part series on how to Build Your Private Cloud using System Center 2012 SP1 . Tune in today as we show how to deploy System Center 2012 SP1 Virtual Machine Manager AND upgrade from the VMM RTM release. We’ll walk through some of the key...

Thanks for your interest in the Microsoft TechEd "Cloud Challenge" and Windows Azure Infrastructure Services ! This contest has ended , and we've selected winners for each prize below. Congratulations To Our Winners! Congratulations to our winners listed below! All winners have been individually...

Manage Hyper-V Server 2012 with a local GUI console tool? Yep. I thought Hyper-V Server 2012 was a free optimized version of Windows Server 2012 Server Core with the Hyper-V role pre-installed! It is … it’s a FREE enterprise-grade bare-metal hypervisor solution that is based on...

Yung Chou and I are back for another episode in our multi-part series on how to Build Your Private Cloud using System Center 2012 SP1 . Tune in today as we discuss reference architectures for scale-up and scale-out Private Cloud infrastructure designs that leverage the new Scalability, Storage Spaces...

Today, Yung Chou and I are kicking off our multi-part series on how to build a Private Cloud using System Center 2012 SP1 . Tune in as we discuss the difference between a Private Cloud and a Highly Virtualized Environment, how System Center 2012 components map to Private Cloud requirements, and how the...

NEW HOURS! Based on popular demand, we've updated the hours for "Early Experts" Virtual Study Hall assistance - Fridays each week from 11AM to 1PM Eastern Time . - - - - - - - - - - There’s so many cool features to explore in the latest Windows infrastructure offerings that it’s hard...