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...

As Many of you know over the last month and a half we delivered a 35 part series on VMware or Microsoft. You can check out the whole list below. We hoped you enjoyed the series, and please let me know if you have any questions! Series Introduction What is a “Purpose-Built Hypervisor? ...

Welcome to today’s post and my last official post in the series. For this post I chose a topic near and dear to my heart: Automation! Hopefully, this is near and dear to your heart as well! The more we can automate and provision allows to move away from some of the grind of day to day management...

In Part 6 of our Windows Azure IaaS series I welcomes John Savill, Founder of SavillTech to discuss how Windows Azure and System Center 2012 work together. Tune in as we chat about the importance of System Center Orchestrator, App Controller and Service Manager as well as how these components integrate...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Introduction to Windows Server 2012 Migration Tools One of the fantastic tools we included in Windows Server 2012 are the migration tools. If you are familiar with Windows Server 2008 R2, then you are familiar with these tools. The tools can easily help you to migrate either to a Windows Server 2012...

In today’s part we take another look at Windows Azure networking.  Kevin , however decided to challenge himself and decided to show you how to create your networking by using only PowerShell.  He does a fantastic job and you can check out his post here: Create a Windows Azure Network using...

In today’s part Brian does a great job to show how you get started with managing the Windows Azure IaaS environment.  While you have the dashboard for some of the management needs in Windows Azure IaaS, learning PowerShell provides a fantastic way to interact with Windows Azure IaaS.  Take...

I just learned about a new tool currently in development now call the Microsoft® Script Explorer for Windows PowerShell®. Currently the tool is in Release Candidate, and it will help you find Windows PowerShell scripts, snippets, modules, and how-to guidance in online repositories such as the...

In today’s post Keith takes a look at a fantastic alternative to provide failover for your DHCP environments.  In prior versions of Windows Server you had the ability to cluster or use split scopes to provide failover.  In Windows Server 2012 , there are two new methods to provide this failover...

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. ...

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...

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...

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...

When Windows Server 2008 R2 was initially released there was no Hyper-V module for PowerShell to work directly with the Hyper-V role. You could work with Hyper-V via the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI). While WMI provides an invaluable component to your PowerShell sessions, it comes with a layer...

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...

With PowerShell 2.0 there are some nice GUI features to help leverage PowerShell in some new and interesting ways.  In yesterday’s post Sarah showed you the ISE works .  In this post I want to take a quick look at another GUI feature of PowerShell, the cmdlet, Out-GridView.  This cmdlet...

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...

One of the great things about PowerShell cmdlets is you can give them any name you want them to have using a feature called aliases. More importantly there are several built-in aliases in PowerShell allowing you to leverage your command prompt knowledge. If you have ever opened a PowerShell session and...

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...