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One of the things that can help provide a differentiator in your career is certification. Especially with all of the new technologies centered around today’s technology. You may be wondering where to start, well Brian provides some great and helpful tips for you get jumpstarted on certification.
Check out Brian’s post here: The Cloud on Your Terms Part 30 of 30: Certification Tips To Get Your Career Ready For The Cloud
As I mentioned in part 1 we are going to be posting the series across 4 blogs: Brian Lewis, John Weston, Kevin Remde and myself. Let us know what you think of the posts and if you think of topic let us know!
If you happen to miss a part and want to get caught up. You can find all the parts of the series here: The Cloud on Your Terms: 30 Days about the Cloud
Quiz #3 opens today at 8:01 p.m. EST (7:01 p.m. CST, 6:01 p.m MST, 5:01 p.m. PST
Are you up for the Challenge?
If you answered yes, and if you are you a student, do you know a student or are you going back to school and can you answer a question like this then your ready for Round 1 of the Imagine Cup 2012 IT Challenge:
You are the administrator for the company network. You are bringing a new remote office online. The office has a domain controller that also runs DNS and WINS. It also has a file server that runs DHCP. DHCP enabled workstations are not getting DHCP addresses as expected. What should you do? Move the DHCP service to the domain controller Disable WINS since it interferes with DHCP on the same network Authorize the DHCP server in Active Directory Enable DHCP forwarding on the workstations
You are the administrator for the company network. You are bringing a new remote office online. The office has a domain controller that also runs DNS and WINS. It also has a file server that runs DHCP. DHCP enabled workstations are not getting DHCP addresses as expected. What should you do?
Well if you can answer that (btw this is from the practice test) then you may be ready to take the test to pass round 1, Until October 20th, go take the practice exam here:
Imagine Cup 2012 IT Challenge
To learn more about the challenge take a look at my post here : Students Are You Up for a Challenge? Enter the Imagine Cup 2012 IT Challenge NOW!
Here are the quiz dates
In today’s post we have Net/IQ talk about how do you get to the cloud. Hopefully during this series you have wanted to hop on in and try virtualization. Maybe you are taking a look at comparing your existing virtualization environment with Hyper-V, but how do you get there? Well in today’s post Net/IQ gives you one possible answer to that question, with a tool called PlateSpin Migrate.
Check out NetIQ’s post here: The Cloud on Your Terms Part 29 of 30: How Do I Get to Hyper-V?
If anyone has a spare $650,000k laying around, I would like one. Full article here: http://www.engadget.com/2011/10/20/the-gadget-show-builds-an-fps-simulator-that-shoots-back-video/ Watch the video (about 17 minutes) amazing technology:.
Welcome to my personal favorite part of the series, part 28! Really the series would have been incomplete without a part of the series focused on PowerShell! As many of you may know PowerShell is one the great tools we can use as administrators for automation of repetitive tasks. IT Administrators have been saving time for years with PowerShell and on premise servers. Well you can continue to leverage your PowerShell skills as there is support for the worlds greatest shell in Office 365 and Windows Azure. In today’s post we will take a look at both ways to leverage the PowerShell in both technologies.
Windows Azure and PowerShell
The cmdlets are based on the the Windows Azure Management and Diagnostics APIs and the full source code is available through this CodePlex project so you can better understand the underlying APIs. Finally, the documentation included with the download package also shows how to use the cmdlets to perform a new Windows Azure deployment and retrieve information about a hosted service. You can download the cmdlets here: Windows Azure Platform PowerShell Cmdlets The Windows Azure Platform PowerShell Cmdlets enable you to browse, configure, and manage Windows Azure Compute and Storage services directly from PowerShell. These tools can be helpful when developing and testing applications that use Windows Azure Services. For instance, using these tools you can easily script the deployment and upgrade of Windows Azure applications, change the configuration for a role, and set and manage your diagnostic configuration. There is also some great documentation for the cmdlets here: To Learn more about the Azure cmdlets You can view a full list of the PowerShell Cmdlets here. Cerebrata also makes a 3rd part toolset for Windows Azure, you can learn more here: http://www.cerebrata.com/Products/AzureManagementCmdlets/
Office 365 and PowerShell
With Office 365 you can leverage PowerShell for Exchange Online as well as a couple of ways to work with the Office 365 service. Before you can begin to work with Office 365 in a PowerShell session you need to download the Microsoft Online Services Module for Windows PowerShell. This module for installs a set of Office 365 cmdlets that you can use to accomplish many administrative tasks, such as user management, domain management, and configuration of some of the service-level settings discussed on this page. You can learn more about the Microsoft Online Services Module for Windows PowerShell here: Use Windows PowerShell to manage Office 365 . After you have installed the PowerShell module you can import the module with the following PowerShell command or load the Microsoft Online Services Module for Windows PowerShell shortcut :
Import-Module MSonline
You can use these PowerShell cmdlets to change users passwords, add users, set user properties…etc. To see all the cmdlets for the module you can run the following:
Get-Command -module MSonline
One of the fantastic capabilities for is the ability is to manage Exchange Online with PowerShell. This is actually pretty easy to do after you have loaded the MSOnline module. The following PowerShell commands will allow you to manage your Exchange online environment:
#Get your Credentials (you will use your administrator account for your Office 365 account (i.e. admin@domain.onmicrosoft.com) $LiveCred = Get-Credential #Create a new Remote Powershell Session to Office 365 (the credential you stored in $LiveCred is used here to take you the specific Exchange online environment) $Session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://ps.outlook.com/powershell/ -Credential $LiveCred -Authentication Basic –AllowRedirection #Start the the Exchange Online session Import-PSSession $Session #Find the commands (when you start the session you will get a script with a tmp and long identifier) Get-Module Get-command -module #name of the tmp*
#Get your Credentials (you will use your administrator account for your Office 365 account (i.e. admin@domain.onmicrosoft.com) $LiveCred = Get-Credential #Create a new Remote Powershell Session to Office 365 (the credential you stored in $LiveCred is used here to take you the specific Exchange online environment) $Session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://ps.outlook.com/powershell/ -Credential $LiveCred -Authentication Basic –AllowRedirection #Start the the Exchange Online session Import-PSSession $Session
#Find the commands (when you start the session you will get a script with a tmp and long identifier) Get-Module Get-command -module #name of the tmp*
If you want to learn more about PowerShell here are two great resources for you:
Today we are going to take a look at another example of a hybrid cloud. In a few of parts of the series we talked about hybrid clouds:
In today’s post we are going to look specifically at a product designed to work with Office 365, in particular Exchange online. SBS 2011 Essentials has been designed to facilitate the connection to the cloud with its integration between on-premise and online services. SBS 2011 Essentials is not your typical version of SBS it has none of the traditional server components built in. . It has all the traditional SBS offerings, Active Directory, Backup, Remote Web Access, DNS…etc. The only it does not have is Exchange and other integrated components. This version is also tailored for small business’ with a limit of 25 users
SBS 2011 Essentials leverages Office 265 for core services like email and SharePoint. To do this SBS 2011 Essentials uses the Office 365 Integration module, the beta was released on Nov. 1.. You can install and configure the Office 365 Integration Module at any time after completing the server installation. The Office 365 Integration Module for Windows SBS 2011 Essentials extends the features of the server Dashboard by providing integration with Office 365 services. When you integrate Office 365 with the server, you can:
To take a look at an earlier version of the Office 365 Integration module and how it works take a look at this quick video:
To learn more and get the integration module: Office 365 Integration Module Beta for Windows® Small Business Server 2011 Essentials You can learn more about SBS 2011 Essentials here: SBS 2011 Essentials Overview and download the trial here: Download Windows Small Business Server 2011 Essentials
As a Microsoft Certified Trainer I have had the privileged to meet and work with some fantastic individuals. I have also been part counselor when I have had folks come to my class worried about jobs, from folks worried about learning Active Directory from other directory services, to folks learning Exchange over Lotus Notes or GroupWise or learning Word over Word Perfect. Okay maybe not the last one but there was a lot FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) and fear of the unknown when it came to those changes. Ultimately when you started looking objectively at the technologies there were more similarities than not. Sure the technologies were different, and you had to learn new ways to accomplish things. Fundamentally they were still the same concepts. So now we come to the cloud, and one of the “elephants in the room” around the cloud that same theme. I am going to lose my job as an IT Pro. Again me and my peers have seen a ton of FUD on this topic. Even if you run a bing search on “the cloud will take my job” you will get several articles on the topic. You will find articles that will outline both sides of this argument, and with similar arguments. Ultimately, all the articles share one common theme however: Transformation. The cloud is not only option that could transform your IT environment you will also need to grow and change your skills to adapt to that environment.
As you can see from the title of my post. I am on the side the cloud will provide even more opportunity for us IT Pro’s. In the case of Office 365 I firmly believe this will allow you leverage existing skillsets and even learn more! Office 365 will free you from chasing server hardware and you will still have plenty to do. If you are not familiar with Office 365, the offering includes Office Professional Plus 2010, SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, and Lync Online. You can try it here: http://aka.ms/o365trial. If you read that list and if you asked:
Then you are starting to see the point that Office 365 has a lot of the same daily administration tasks today. The advantage and difference is we do not have to worry about the hardware and deploy the server applications. If you think about what Office 365 provides, Exchange, SharePoint, and Lync are already installed and working together. No need for to get that deployed, within minutes of you setting up Office 365 these technologies are already up and running! However you still on the hook to manage the environment and deploy the tools. Here are some of the things you will still need to do, and picture to the right is the administration home page.
Office Professional Plus
SharePoint Online
Exchange Online
With Exchange you will have a ton to manage and is very similar to on-premise servers today. The environment we can use today is the Microsoft Online Administration Center (MOAC). The web-based interface is easy to use but currently it is fairly limited in terms of administrative power. Exchange 2010 gives you a much richer set of tools to manage and customize your Exchange Online environment. There are other tools, including the MOAC mentioned below:
Lastly you may still want to setup single sign on for your users.
Single Sign On
Today in Microsoft Online Services, users have an Online services identity that is separate from their domain login and password. A sign in application runs in the system tray of each user’s machine, which stores their Online password, so they don’t have to type it in every time. It’s a workable solution that achieves a single-sign-like experience. You will be able to use Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS), an enterprise-class tool for federating your Active Directory with Microsoft Services. Your employees will be able to access services with their domain credentials, the same way they access the on-premises applications they use today, and there will no longer be a need for a sign-in tool. With ADFS you can also customize the login page used for authenticating OWA users (the same page is used for other federated web-based applications)
To enable federation with Online Services, you first set up a Windows 2008 or 2008 R2 server and install ADFS as a server role. Then you use a “Federate with Online” tool/wizard to set up a trust between on-premises AD and Online Services. Once that is in place, when users accesses Exchange Online, they are redirected to the local ADFS server for authentication first, and then a SAML token is passed to the cloud service to log the user in. Passwords are not synchronized to the cloud, or stored there. To learn more about Office 365 federation take a look here: Prepare for single sign-on
As you can see you will still have plenty to do with Office 365 and there is enough to keep you busy. The introduction of these management capabilities means that you can move your environment to cloud without giving up control. You can offload task while retaining control over essential management features. You can let the Microsoft datacenter staff manage servers, hardware, and storage, but still retain control over settings and configuration, and rolling out features that are visible to your org. If you do not believe me, sign up for a free trial here: http://aka.ms/o365trial and give Office 365 a whirl.
In today’s post John takes a look at one of the newest cloud technologies, Windows Intune. John gives a brief tour of Windows Intune and hopefully you will get some ideas on how the tool can help you.
Check out John’s post here: The Cloud on Your Terms Part 25 of 30: Windows Intune
In today’s post John takes another look at the hybrid cloud. This time he takes a look at using the public cloud technologies with on premise tools and techniques. He really takes a great look at the technology from an application development perspective to an Active directory perspective.
Check out John’s post here: The Cloud on Your Terms Part 24 of 30: Hybrid for Public Cloud
Today Kevin got to talk an interesting topic for an IT Pro: Windows Azure. Now I know what your thinking, wait a second that topic is just for developers. Well maybe in the early on stages of Azure it may have been. However now you can access and work with Windows Azure with all kinds of tools like Windows PowerShell and Microsoft Management Consoles. Kevin talks about that and more.
Check out Kevin’s post here: The Cloud on Your Terms Part 23 of 30: Windows Azure for the IT Professional
In today’s post Kevin takes a fun look at his private cloud. Wait not just his private cloud, but his private private cloud. Almost like double secret probation. In the post Kevin does a great little screencast showing off his private private cloud.
Check out Kevin’s post here: The Cloud on Your Terms Part 22 of 30: My Private Private Cloud
In today’s post Brian takes a look at how he has setup his current environment. Brian wanted to be able to setup an actual physical SAN using some free software (with the iscsi target I talked about on part 19: The Cloud on Your Terms Part 19 of 30: All About the Networking). Brian talks about the SAN he picked up for about $230, and all the fun he had with SCSI-3 Persistent Reservation commands.
Check out Brian’s Post here: The Cloud on Your Terms Part 21 of 30: Setting up an inexpensive SAN
One of the best trips I got to take this year was to the Microsoft San Antonio Data Center. They say everything is bigger in TX and man they are not kidding! I was amazed by the amount of technology and respect for electricity. In today’s post John takes you on a quick recap of our trip and what does one do with 500,000 gallons of water.
Check out John’s post here: The Cloud on Your Terms Part 20 of 30: San Antonio Data Center Have you Seen a lot of H20?
As cool as writing and working with this series has been. I love to talk about technology, especially technology that can help save you time and money. When you look at the System Center products and a tool like PowerShell how can you not enjoy saving time and money. However one of the key things I have learned throughout the process of working with all of these technologies is that it all boils down to the basics. In the world of the IT Pro those basics are all centered around the network. From DNS, to Active Directory, to fail over clustering, to email….etc. None of it works without a healthy and properly functioning network. Aside from the occasional I unplugged the cable, see one of my early forays into writing: Field Notes: The Doctor Is In. you really need to dot all of your i’s and cross your t’s when it comes to networking.
For me one of the facts about virtualization that makes me smile is that you still have manage and worry about networking to the servers. This environment can get tricky when you start working with limited physical resources. For example take a look at ,y current event environment. I have two laptops, and have to be able to showcase Live Migration. For me this meant I would be leveraging my virtual environment to host all of core services, AD, DNS, Storage (using Microsoft iSCSI Software Target 3.3), SCVMM, and a SQL server. I also had enabled failover clustering on my two laptops. I was able to get all the machine domains joined and configured. I even configured my DC (as well as my other virtual servers with a delay start) to come online automatically after every boot, that way I can log on to domain when I restart my laptops.
Now I was ready to setup my clusters and get them all connected and try out my live migration. Before I go on with all the fun I had, I have to give mad props to Aidan Finn, for his Hyper-V clustering guide which you can find here: How to Build a Hyper-V Cluster Using the Microsoft iSCSI Software Target v3.3 Aidan’s guide is a great place to start if you want to kick the tires with live migration. I learned quickly that there is a reason why we recommend 3 physical NIC’s for clustering. As I was going through the steps in Aidan’s doc this is when I was reminded of something my good buddy Keith mentioned to me, Core Networking is a Skill. It is not just about making sure you can do simple pings but also making sure you have proper name resolution and routing done properly. You also want to make sure you plan and diagram your network before you build it, that way you can see it and something to refer back to. A basic diagram of my network is to the right, Aidan’s doc is much nicer. Lastly and most importantly you have to have the skill to interpret error messages that sometimes are a result of bad networking. Here are some of the my favorite examples that I saw as I was having fun building this environment:
The last one is my favorite of the bunch. I got that error message from a domain joined system (HVHOST1), logged on as the domain admin. My first thought was what what, there is no way you are joined to the domain. I may used your more colorful language but you get the point. As it turned out my cluster name was resolving to wrong IP address and my cluster I made a typo for the access point IP. sigh. But when you look at that error, trust me IP configuration is not your first thought . But this goes to prove my point make your network solid and name resolution great, then you have a solid foundation to build other technologies on.
One of the last things very unique to my network is the setup and since I do not have the recommend 3 nics how could I get live migration to work. Again this was all a networking issue and understand how clustering leverages the network and was key to why my live migrations were failing in my little virtual network. Well as it turns it the clustering service automatically chooses the preferred network and you can see which one is being used with this PowerShell command:
Get-ClusterNetwork | ft Name, Metric, AutoMetric, Role
The one with the lowest metric is the one that will be used. You can control this either with PowerShell or via the GUI. For my I had to basically configure my networking to use the physical network than viola success! Again it starts with a solid network, and knowledge how the servers and services are going to leverage your network.
There are some great resources here to help with your clustering and networking:
As you can see from the last two posts from Kevin and Brian, we are sharing some of our own personal experiences from working with our datacenters. In today’s post John takes us a quick journey to our data center we are building. It is an interesting trip, and he shares with how to work with and think about large hard drives.
Check out John’s post here: The Cloud on Your Terms part 18 of 30: Lessons learned from Private Cloud build out (Stupid cold!)
In today’s post Brian starts to share some of his insights and experiences he has had on building out a private cloud. especially all the fun he had with SIDs.
Check out Brian’s Post here: The Cloud on Your Terms Part 17 of 30: Lessons Learned from our Private Cloud Build Out
In todays post, and for the next 4 posts we are going to share with you our experiences in building out our local datacenter in California. Kevin does a great job of writing up a post on where to put the DC. It all boils down with a little bit of planning, and know how you are going to handle a virtual DC with physical hosts.
Check out Kevin’s post here: The Cloud on Your Terms Part 16 of 30: Where Should the DC Go?
Good day everyone! In today’s post John takes another look into the Hybrid cloud but this time in conjunction with private cloud. In Part 2, we looked at Hybrid cloud. In this installment John takes a look at how you can leverage cloud services to provide even more robust service for your private cloud infrastructures.
Check out John’s post here: The Cloud on Your Terms Part 15 of 30: Hybrid for Private Cloud
What were you doing 10 years ago, I was taking a day of vacation and saving the planet! Looks like I have another day of vacation in my near future!
Conducting today’s post is the musically talented Kevin. He really is an awesome singer. Today he talks about Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Specifically he talks about what he have today in Opalis and what is coming in the future with System Center Orchestrator 2012. Automation and orchestration is the key component to make your private cloud using “runbooks”. If you are not sure what a “runbook is you need to check out his post!.
Check out Kevin’s post here: The Cloud on Your Terms Part 14 of 30: System Center Orchestrator 2012
Quiz #2 (sorry I missed quiz one I was OOF) opens today at 8:01 p.m. EST (7:01 p.m. CST, 6:01 p.m MST, 5:01 p.m. PST
Today John takes a quick tour of System Center Operations Manager. He takes a quick tour of SCOM 2007 and talks about the release candidate for SCOM 2012.
Check out John’s post here: The Cloud on Your Terms Part 13 of 30: System Center Operations Manager
In today’s post we have a guest to our series: Microsoft Partner Veeam. They have also been joining us for our events around the country for a list of the events in my region take a look here: Register Now TechNet Events Present: A Day with Microsoft Virtualization, Hyper-V, SCVMM 2012 and SCOM 2012…Oh My Doug Hazelman is the Vice President of Product Strategy agreed to write the post for us. He does a great job of outlining his perspective on virtualization and the private cloud. His post could be summed up in one word: Coexistence. Doug outlines how to manage a heterogeneous virtual environment with System Center Operations Manager (SCOM). Thanks for Doug and Veeam for agreeing to join our series.
Check out Veeam’s Post here: The Cloud on Your Terms Part 12 of 30: One Big Happy Private Cloud
In today’s post Brian takes a look at SCVMM and a lot of the many reasons why this tool is so great for your virtualization environment. Notice I did not say, just Hyper-V. One of the great things about SCVMM is it provides a Heterogeneous Virtualization Management from One Console. Which means it provides compatibility with VMware, Citrix, and Hyper-v. VMM supports both Live Migration and VMotion.
Check out Brian’s Post here: The Cloud on Your Terms part 11 of 30: SCVMM and Virtualization a Love Story
If you happen to miss a part and want to get caught up. You can find all the parts of the series here: Cloud on Your Terms: 30 Days about the Cloud
Sometimes working with all of these technologies around the cloud you want to know how is that done? Eventually you get to a point where you want to see what is behind the magic curtain. In today’s post Kevin takes you on a tour of have he put is cloud environment together. Some of you may have seen this environment in action at the live events we are delivering this quarter across the region: (For More Information on the Events Click Here). We like to call it a “mad house” especially when you compare to the giant data centers because we have to make sure our cloud can be built to travel. So Kevin shares with you how he built his cloud using 3 laptops, and several pieces of software (http://aka.ms/evaluation ) to make his cloud come to life. Great post!
Check out Kevin’s Post here: The Cloud on Your Terms Part 10 of 30: Kevin’s Mad House of Cloud