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: I've provided links below to the decks I used to present at this training event ... DECK: Offsite Backup and Disaster Recovery with Windows Azure Infrastructure Services DECK: Building SharePoint Server 2013 in the Cloud with Windows Azure Infrastructure Services Windows Azure...

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...

UPDATED: Including the newly released Step-by-Step guides for implementing Windows Azure Virtual Network Site-to-Site VPN and Point-to-Site VPN hybrid networking in the list of linked resources in this study program. Are you virtualizing your servers? Yes, of course! Are you spending less time...

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 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...

Windows Azure Infrastructure Services officially launched in April for supporting production Virtual Machine and Virtual Network workloads. Master the skills for leveraging Windows Azure as part of a hybrid cloud infrastructure and showcase your new knowledge to others in the "Early Experts” Cloud...

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...

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...

I meet lots of IT Pros at my events that are interested learning more about the new and improved capabilities in Service Pack 1 for System Center 2012 Configuration Manager. In this article, I’ve compiled a list of video and hands-on lab resources that you can use to learn all about it and prepare...

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...

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...

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 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...

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...