With storage needs in your organizations growing exponentially over the last few years and into the future there are plenty of things you may done in the past to help keep the cost down.  Chances are you bought some kind of fancy SAN, that had all the bells and whistles to help storage work efficiently...

Welcome to my blog post with slides and resources. This post will be updated fairly regularly with content I am delivering. All the links will take you a location on my SkyDrive with the appropriate data. Enjoy. Windows Azure Presentations Slide Decks: http://sdrv.ms/1bXOE8o Windows Azure...

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...

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...

Today we welcome Blain to the series and he takes you step by step on how to set up SQL in Windows Azure .  Very informative article and he takes a look at some of other details of setting up a sample database.  Take a look at his post here: Part 22 of 31 - Using your own SQL Server in Windows...

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 need to provide services and applications to our client desktops becomes more and more important, we turn to products like Remote Desktop Services in Windows Server 2012 to provide these features for our clients.  Wether you use RDS for just pure session virtualization or as a part of an...

I think one of everybody's favorite word is FREE.  In any language that is just a great word.  Well today we are going to combine that word with Hyper-V.  As in Free Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2012!   Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2012 is a hypervisor-based server virtualization server. ...

Hey everyone checkout some of these upcoming events, I will be attending/speaking at in the near future.  I hope to see you there! Join New Horizons Computer Learning Centers at SpecTECHular, and  learn about the latest products and trends in IT, October 18 Designed for IT Pros, Developers...

The Dayton IT Pro Camp is a FREE , daylong Camp for IT Pros featuring Microsoft Cloud Technologies. During the day, we will have presentations on Hyper-V, SharePoint, Office365 and Azure. In addition, we will have a cloud security presentation and presentations from the Vendors who have agreed to support...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

If you have been running Windows Server 2008 R2 (W2K8R2) you may have upgraded to SP1.  You may have not know why you did, but just saw it as an update and installed it.  Or maybe you are one of many that waited to deploy W2K8R2 until SP1.  In either case you might not know what you don...

Have you wanted to try how Azure can help support your application deployment and management, well check out the Deploying and Managing Windows Azure Applications Evaluation This evaluation will showcase how System Center and Azure can come together.  System Center enables IT Professionals to use...

Yup you saw that right PowerShell can be used to manage and work with your VMware environment. Specifically you use the PowerCLI when you want to manage your VMware vSphere environments. PowerCLI is a very popular third-party implementation of PowerShell. PowerCLI is a snapin for Microsoft PowerShell...

We have all been here before.  Maybe you have deleted a user either accidentally or on purpose.  Regardless you may need to get the user back with all of their properties, group memberships, security identifiers..etc.  In prior versions of Windows Server deleting a user could cause administrative...

In the last couple of posts we have taken a look at working with providers and using the registry provider .  In this post we are going to use a provider near and dear to networks everywhere, the Active Directory provider.  Working with the Active Directory provider is just one way to work...

Being able to call for help is important to how you learn PowerShell.  So who do you call?  When you press the universal help key (F1) in a PowerShell session nothing happens (unless you are in the Integrated Scripting Environment (ISE) more on this in a later when we talk about the GUI enhancements...

Join the beta program and explore Microsoft Office 365. When Office 365 is commercially released, beta accounts will be activated to trial versions, and you can easily continue using Office 365 beyond the 30-day trial period if you choose to purchase.   This used the Microsoft Office 365 (Plan...

As you have seen in a few post’s my team have been heavily engaged with student teams participating in Imagine Cup .  A number of these teams have been selected to participate in the Imagine Cup US finals .    Going to the finals is a big deal, and is essentially a world’s premier...

Thank you to everyone who attended the event in Cleveland, I had a great time and a lot of great conversations, here is the Q/A and resources from the event. I will also be placing the slides here: TechNet Slides: Transforming IT from Virtualization to the Cloud and here: TechNet Event Slides I also...

If you are a developer, you've probably heard plenty about the cloud. But if you're and IT professional, what have you heard about it? How does it intersect with the datacenter? How does it make your job easier – or harder? Is it something that your organization is looking at? Is the cloud something...