UPDATE: There's ONLY 10 DAYS LEFT for the Microsoft Learning " Second Shot " exam voucher offer! Be sure to register and take advantage of this offer prior to May 31st, 2013 ... and use this proven study guide to help you quickly prepare for the MCSA Upgrade Exam on Windows Server 2012! I’ve...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

UPDATE: I'm updating this article to also include a new Step-by-Step video and migration guide that was recently released by our Cluster team to provide guidance for using the Migrate a Cluster Wizard to migrate CLUSTERS of Hyper-V Server hosts from 2008 R2 to 2012, in addition to the other migration...

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...

I’ve recently presented talks at a number of SharePoint-related conferences and events on practical approaches to deploying SharePoint on Windows Server 2012 and our FREE Hyper-V Server 2012 enterprise-grade bare-metal hypervisors ( on–premise ) as well as using Windows Azure VMs ( in the...

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...

This year, we're delivering in-person IT Camp events as part of our broader Cloud OS Signature Launch Series on Windows Server 2012 and Azure Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). In addition, we'll also be delivering a series of additional IT Camp events throughout the US Heartland ... be sure to check...

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...

A while back, I had written an article on some options for IT Pros wishing to extend Host-attached USB devices into a VM. With the introduction of Windows-To-Go ( WTG ) USB Drives, there’s now a new option to extend USB storage into VMs by leveraging the firmware present on WTG-certified USB devices...

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...

My good friend and colleague, Matt Hester , recently wrote a great article on Hyper-V Host Clustering as part of our latest article series, Become a Virtualization Expert in 20 Days! In this article, I’ll build on Matt’s cluster scenario to walk through the advantages and implementation steps...

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...

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...

Windows Server 2012 and our completely FREE Hyper-V Server 2012 certainly have some really cost effective new storage options, with Storage Spaces and Hyper-V over SMB 3.0 . However, many IT Pros have already invested in iSCSI shared storage and, as a result, many Hyper-V deployments also need to be...

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...