February, 2013

Hey Readers! Some of you may know me from my blog on TechNet where I’ve covered topics on automation around System Center 2012 – Orchestrator and Opalis. Well, I’m joining the fun in the Building Clouds blog space to provide my experience...

Hello Readers/Viewers! So, by now you have seen this post and related video …You may have wondered, “Is this real life?” Or, “What did it take to do that?” Well, this post is all about my part in the “hijinks”: Automating the Surface Pro Hosted VM Live...

One of my favorite sayings has always been, " you can't manage what you don't monitor ". Best I can do for giving credit to the quote is that Candle Corporation in the late 90's had a marketing campaign built around this concept, I still have the shirt...

The PowerShell Deployment Toolkit – PDT – performs distributed installations of System Center 2012 SP1, including SQL and all prerequisites.  If you are doing a full production highly available scale-out deployment, this could potentially be across...

We’ve written several articles on this blog differentiating between virtualized-only and private cloud infrastructures, so I won’t detail those differences again, but in this post, I wanted to address the topic of “workloads,” how it’s likely that not...

In the previous blog post we talked about how Chargeback is working overall and some of the areas to consider when implementing Chargeback.   In this blog post we will walk through the configuration that needs to be done in Virtual Machine Manager...

The post titled the Cloud is Not Virtualization from almost couple years ago on this blog stated that for an IT solution to be called a “cloud” solution, it needed to enable the “essential characteristics” of cloud computing, as defined in The NIST Definition...

If you’ve been reading this blog and wondering about this thing we keep mentioning called “SCDemo", this post will get you up to speed. The “SC” in SCDemo stands for “Server and Cloud” and we use the term SCDemo...

If you’ve been reading this blog and wondering about this thing we keep mentioning called “SCDemo", this post will get you up to speed. The “SC” in SCDemo stands for “Server and Cloud” and we use the term SCDemo...

“How do you turn a stack of hardware into a fully functioning “Infrastructure-on-Demand” service as quickly and cheaply as possible?” That was the question confronting our team as we brainstormed our next project. Before I dive...

Most ITpros follow an automated process when deploying OS to bare metal servers, and when it comes to VMM (Virtual Machine Manager) there is a really nice built-in feature for this bare-metal deployment. System Center 2012 SP1 (VMM) includes several enhancements...

Two posts, back to back? Yes-sir-(or madam)-ee! I couldn’t help myself – I just needed to get a bit more information out about the Windows Azure Integration Pack… and, well, how it is unlike any other Integration Pack to date. Why is it different? Well...

Hello Readers/Viewers! Once again, I am excited to announce the release of even more Example Runbooks – This time for… Windows Azure ! Now… Let’s be clear, there is no way I can compete with this AWESOME post – that basically went viral yesterday – but...

Or: How we spent $4,000 and all we got was a tabletop datacenter Remember last week when I told you about our little geek experiment with our brand new Surface Pro devices? I promised a video, and we are not the type to disappoint our readers. We wandered...

Rather than letting the guys have all the fun, I will also be contributing to the site and talking about the work I have done driving the content layer of our Server and Cloud Demo (SCDemo) environment described in Rob’s post in the deployment track ...

Building and deploying a private cloud is a big deal for any organization, and to help our partners better understand how create their own private cloud, we built one of our own. What can this hybrid cloud environment look like?  We’ve put together...

Just a quick post to let everyone know that version 2.3 of the PowerShell Deployment Toolkit has now been posted to the TechNet Gallery here .  The major enhancement in 2.3 is pre-installation validation – Installer.ps1 will now run a series of validation...

In System Center 2012 SP1 a new feature is introduced called Chargeback. In a series of blog posts we will explain how this can be implemented in the Datacenter using System Center 2012 SP1 Blog Post 1: Discuss the background behind Chargeback and how...

I introduced the PowerShell Deployment Toolkit, or PDT, in a previous post .  As I mentioned in that post, PDT requires that the servers that System Center will be deployed to are already running, members of an Active Directory domain, and you have...

I was hoping to get this post out sooner but I’ve been busy this week taking a perfectly good Surface Pro and turning it into a tablet running Windows Server 2012. Fun stuff! Not only did we install Server 2012 on a Surface Pro we decided to create a...

Let’s say that you have your private cloud the way you want it. You’ve got the self-service, the metered services, the elasticity and the pooled resources and it’s running just the way you want. But then one day the boss comes in and says “we’re expecting...

In recent years, IT Service Management has become increasingly popular in many IT organizations around the world. Frameworks like ITIL and MOF are commonly used as prescriptive guidance or best practices for how to run IT and create better alignment between...

Question: What ridiculous things can 4 server geeks do with a sub-2lb tablet that has a Core i5 processor and a couple of free hours? Answer: Install Server 2012, enable Hyper-V, create some VMs, and then use Shared-Nothing Live Migration to move them...

A very active topic in the world  of private cloud regards which applications should be virtualized and which applications need to run in a traditional, siloed datacenter environment. At this time it’s hard to come up with a definite “right answer...

Many customers (including many service providers) have deployed Windows Server 2012 with System Center 2012 SP1 to deliver cloud-based services for IaaS, DaaS and SaaS. These customers are reducing costs by leveraging their existing investments in a datacenter...