TechEd 2013 North America will take place June 3-6 in New Orleans. TechEd is Microsoft’s premiere conference for IT Professionals and Enterprise Developers, offering the most comprehensive technical education across Microsoft's products, solutions, tools, and services. I have had the privilege...

My teammate Brian posted a great article on Hyper-V replica and Riverbed.  The article takes a look at a whitepaper we recently released.  The whitepaper shows up to 98% reduction in sync traffic for your replica server with an average of 70% reduction for most workloads. Check out the article...

When you first start working with provision your private cloud, you will need to learn how to provision the physical hardware or bare metal of your environment.  Learning how to provision bare metal systems allows you to deploy physical systems to serve various roles.  In regards to the private...

When you start to think of building a private cloud into your datacenters, you might naturally think you need run out and buy a SAN. While you still may want to go buy a SAN, with Windows Server 2012 you do not necessarily need to. In Windows Server 2012 there has been a tremendous amount of improvement...

Build your very own Virtual Network in the Cloud for FREE with the Windows Azure cloud platform, and Enter for a chance to win one of the following fantastic prizes: One Grand Prize: Ticket to TechEd 2013 North America in New Orleans, LA ( $2,195 retail value ) PLUS a $500 VISA Gift Card. Two...

One the most important resources to any virtualization environment , is memory.  Even with great tools like dynamic memory it is critical to make sure you monitor to insure your guest systems can run properly.   In this part Harold takes a brief look: Server Virtualization Series: Performance...

Okay, so had to get caught up a bit, officially here is a part 6 and it comes in two parts.  Dan does a great job to show some of the aspects of Hyper-V with Live adding of memory as well live multiple live migrations.  Take a look at his interviews and demos here: Hyper-V Live Part 1 of 2...

To download a copy of a slide deck: Click on the bottom right of the PowerPoint to “View full-size presentation” In the new browser window go to the menu and click File –> Download a copy Session 1: System Center 2012 SP1 and Azure IaaS Overview Session 2: Upgrade To Windows Server 2012 Session 3...

One of the features in Windows Server 2012 that got greatly enhanced is the Failover Clustering. See the bottom of this post for a list of all the new and improved features. In today’s part we are going to take a look at how Hyper-V takes advantages of some of these enhancements and how you can...

In Windows Server 2012 , and in networking in general there has been tremendous strides to improve network teaming.  Virtualization is no different and in this post Harold takes a look at the network teaming built-in to Windows Server 2012 .  Check out his post here: Server Virtualization Series...

In the part of the series Brian takes a look at one of the new features in Windows Server 2012 .  The ability to migrate your storage for your virtualization.  Take a look at his post here: Step-by-Step: Storage Live Migration ( Part 8 of 20)   We hope you enjoy the series, and if you...

One of the services we introduced in Windows Server 2008 R2 was the iSCSI services (which was a free download)  In Windows Server 2012 this is built-in and easy to install.  You can also do a majority of the work in PowerShell.  In this part Keith takes a look at the iSCSI services and...

Storage and where to put all the components for your virtual machines is key to your virtualization deployment.  In part 5 of the Bob, takes a great look a the different storage options.  What is even more amazing, is a some of the options fit really well inside of Windows Server 2012 . ...

As IT Pros, we absolutely love building with new technology! In February, my fellow IT Pro Technical Evangelists and I have been worked together on an article series for Migration and Deployment of Windows 8, Windows Server 2012, Windows Azure and System Center 2012 SP1 to help get you started. Here...

Here is the latest info on the Microsoft IT Camp series as we dive into how to get your datacenter ready for the cloud and beyond. Join us at a FREE Microsoft IT Camp for hands-on labs, demos, and interactive discussions with Microsoft technical experts. Here’s your chance to learn more about...

As some of you noticed we have been delivering another series this month focusing on Deployment and Migration on several scenarios. This post is do you caught up some of the great posts we have delivered over the last couple of weeks. 6. Requirements for a fresh Windows Server 2012 Installation...

Here is part 6, Bob does a great job of showing you the installation requirements for Windows Server 2012.  You can also of course sign up for a free trial of Azure here: http://aka.ms/getazureiaas to take a test drive of Window Server 2012 today. Requirements for a fresh Windows Server 2012 Installation...

The Solution Accelerators team just announced the Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit 8.0 Beta.   Join the MAP 8.0 beta. Included in MAP 8.0 Beta are hardware and infrastructure readiness assessments to assist you in planning the deployment of Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 , preparing...

As our server hardware has changed and improved.  So has many of the components critical to the hardware have as well.  Improvements for your NIC’s has seen just amazing improvements.  From being able to do encryption on the card to dramatic improvements to speed and throughput.  ...

Having your Virtual machines connect to your production network is vital to the success of your infrastructure.  Windows Server 2012 has included a lot of improvements to the networking environment in Hyper-V.  Specifically the Hyper-V switch is extensible, and provides some great improvements...

Cannot Wait until the 26th!  Pre-Order now: http://www.microsoft.com/surface/en-US   And Another Cool Video:

In today’s post we take a look at a new file system in Windows Server 2012.  The resilient file system or ReFS is the new file system is designed to be self correcting and tuning.  It adds a tremendous tool for maintaining your volumes on your Windows Server 2012, while we feel this will be...

You probably have doing NIC teaming in your infrastructure for a few years now.  Was it easy?  Could it use multiple vendors NICS?  Well we have finally added NIC Teaming into Windows Server 2012 that: Doesn’t care what the NIC vendor is, Doesn’t’ care about the NIC’s network speed, and...

How many of you say you have too much storage for your datacenters?  I am willing to bet it is nobody.  We have an ever increasing need for storage and data unless you are leveraging cloud services.  Well in this part Keith , takes a great look at Storage Spaces to help leverage storage...

Yet another fun video from Marco Tempest!