I just found out about this and had to pass it on! John and I have been colleagues for years and I am certain that this will be an incredible training. This intensive one week event is designed to give attendees the skills required to architect, deploy and manage a Microsoft centric environment. By the...

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...

Here are all the parts of the Wndows Azure IaaS Series, please check as this post will be updated daily. If you want to see a particular scenario let us know and email me at mhester@microsoft.com . Also remember you can sign up for a FREE Windows Azure 90-Day Trial here: Get Started TODAY with a FREE...

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...

Being able to protect your Private cloud is one of the more important things you can do. With so many moving parts how do you approach this. If you are leveraging System Center 2012 for the many other components of your infrastructure, than I would highly recommend you look at Data Protection Manager...

In Part 3 of the Windows Azure IaaS series I discuss with Keith Mayer common scenarios in which IT Pros may use Windows Azure as a hybrid solution between their on-premise and cloud service needs. Tune in as we discuss disaster recovery and storage as well as how to migrate your SharePoint environment...

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...

Here is part 2 of the Windows Azure IaaS series and in this episode I take a look at the top Windows Azure Virtual Machines FAQs and common gotchas with Hari Dogiparthi. Tune in for this Q&A session and get the answers to some of the most common issues seen by customers. Also stick around for a quick...

I had the privilege to sit down and talk with Yuri Diogenes and Tom Shinder to talk about Windows Azure IaaS .   We chatted about the overall capabilities to configure and deploy VMs, security functionalities and recommendations during the migration process. I also did a quick demonstration...

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...

When you are working with Windows Server 2012 and Hyper-V you will want to keep an eye on your servers to make sure they are running properly and they are maintained. In this post I am going to show some of the things that are built-in the server, specifically with PowerShell. More importantly you are...

As I wrote in October of last year, SMB is dramatically improved, to learn more about SMB take a look at this article: 31 Days of Our Favorite Things: SMB 3.0 the Glue in Windows Server 2012 .  In this post, you will take a closer look at how Hyper-V and SMB.  Bob takes a look at some of the...

Here is a part 17 and Tommy does a great job at taking a look at System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager (VMM).    He shows how it works with Hyper-V and what you can monitor about your virtualization environments  Check out his post here: Virtualization Experts Series – Virtualization...

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...

Monitoring your Hyper-V resources is important but also putting it in context of your server performance is equally important.  Chris takes a look at how to look at how to monitor CPU resources on Windows Server 2012 and in Hyper-V.  Take a look at his article here: Performance Management:...

In this part Yung takes a look under the covers of Hyper-V .  Specifically he takes a look at the Hyper-V Replica Broker.  This service is required if your using Hyper-V replicas on hyper-v hosts that are clustered.  Take a look at his article here: Hyper-V Replica Broker   We hope...

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...

In part 13 I talked about how to cluster your Hyper-V hosts.  You can read that here: 20 Days of Server Virtualization- Your Hyper-V Hosts and Clustering an Availability Story (Part 13 of 20)   In this part Keith takes a look at how to cluster your guest operating systems take a look at his...

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 this post Brian takes a look at one of my favorite features in Windows Server 2012   Live migration.  Take a look at his post here: Step by Step: High Availability: Live Migration (Part 12 of 20)   We hope you enjoy the series, and if you have any suggestions let us know.  If you...

As some of you may know I am extremely excited about Windows Azure IaaS and the virtual machines feature (currently in customer preview). During my sessions I get a lot of the same questions about how Windows Azure IaaS works. Well I had a chance to do an ask the experts session a couple of weeks ago...

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 Windows Server 2012 , we have really enhanced the Hyper-V role.  One feature in Hyper-V that really got an overhaul is the virtual networking.    From  Virtual Machine Queue, IPsec task offloading, Single-root I/O virtualization(SR-IOV), and Live migration on Server 2012 Hyper...