• external source: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/special-report-the-worlds-largest-data-centers/

• 10. The SuperNAP, Las Vegas (Switch Communications)
• 9A and 9B. Microsoft Data Centers in Quincy Washington and San Antonio
• 8. CH1, Elk Grove Village, Ill. (DuPont Fabros)
• 7. Phoenix ONE, Phoenix (i/o Data Centers)
• 6. Microsoft Dublin (Microsoft)
• 5. Container Data Center, Chicago (Microsoft)
• 4. NGD Europe, Newport Wales (Next Generation Data)
• 3. The NAP of the Americas, Miami (Terremark)
• 2. Metro Technology Center, Atlanta (Quality Technology)
• 1. 350 East Cermak / Lakeside Technology Center (Digital Realty)

Great Blog about using Opalis in real world scenarios

http://blogs.technet.com/b/opalis/archive/2010/11/22/opalis-6-3-automating-hyper-v-cluster-patching-using-the-configuration-manager-ip-part-1.aspx

http://blogs.technet.com/b/opalis/archive/2010/12/01/opalis-6-3-automating-hyper-v-cluster-patching-using-the-configuration-manager-ip-part-2.aspx

http://blogs.technet.com/b/opalis/archive/2010/12/02/opalis-6-3-automating-hyper-v-cluster-patching-using-the-configuration-manager-ip-part-3.aspx

Microsoft has been providing cloud computing services for more than 15 years by operating our own consumer Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings including Hotmail (with over 450 million users), Live Mesh, and BING (search) with over 28 billion queries per month. With enterprise online services such as the Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), which includes Microsoft Exchange Online, Microsoft SharePoint Online, Microsoft Office Live Meeting, and Microsoft Office Communications Online, Microsoft Cloud services have been expanded to commercial and government enterprise customers. Additionaly in the Education Sector Microsoft offers free solution  Messaging and collaboration for Universities with Live@Edu.

• Fabric Management enables the infrastructure (facilities-storage-network-compute) to operate as a system
• Traditional infrastructure deployments have redundancy in every component to avoid single points of failure – which is a significant cost multiplier
• When viewed as a complete system, applications and workload instances can be spread across pre-defined fault domains which ensures that when a failure occurs the application/workload is still available
• A Fabric Manager contains the rules logic that has system-wide awareness to prevent application and workload instances from being provisioned, migrated, or de-provisioned in a way that violates the fault logic
• The result is a dynamic AND resilient infrastructure which is significantly less expensive because it does not require redundant components

• Service Delivery Layer: Represents those Service Management activities that require input and interaction with the business and service owner. The components are not only responsible for that interaction, but also the translation of business requirement into technology and operational capabilities. This layer represents the business perspective on the basis of IT.
• Software Layer: Provides the applications and software that support a business activity (for example, CRM). The Software Layer consumes Virtual Machines (VM) services from the Infrastructure Layer and may consume application services from the Platform Layer.
• Platform Layer: Provides a set of platform-level (above operating system (OS) level) building blocks which can be consumed by the Software Layer. It consumes hypervisor services from the Infrastructure Layer and is managed by the Management Layer.
• Infrastructure Layer: Provides resilient hypervisor services to the Platform Layer and is managed by the Management Layer. The Infrastructure, Platform, and Software Layers represent the enabling technology perspective within IT.
• Operations Layer: Represents Service Management and operational processes carried out by IT operations and support staff.
• Management Layer: Provides management services to the Infrastructure, Platform, and Software Layers. It is comprised of the suite of management tools necessary to support IT Service and Operations Layer and implements the operational processes. The Management Layer provides a baseline set of capabilities to the Infrastructure Layer and an incremental set to the Platform Layer and the Software Layer. The Operations and Management Layers represent the operational perspective within IT.

Sourcing models (shared or dedicated, and whether internally hosted or externally hosted) are defined by the ownership and control of architectural design and the degree of available customization. The different sourcing models can be evaluated against the three standards - cost, control, and scalability.

Public Cloud

The Public Cloud is a pool of computing services delivered over the Internet. It is offered by a vendor, who typically uses a “pay as you go” model. Public Cloud Computing has the following attractive attributes: you only pay for resources you consume; you gain agility through quick deployment; there is rapid capacity scaling; and all services are delivered with improved and consistent availability, resiliency, security, and manageability. Public Cloud options include:

• Shared Public Cloud: The Shared Public Cloud provides the benefit of rapid implementation, massive scalability, and low cost of entry. It is delivered in a shared environment where the architecture, customization, and degree of security are designed and managed by the provider according to market-driven specifications.
• Dedicated Public Cloud: The Dedicated Public Cloud provides functionality similar to a Shared Public Cloud except that it is delivered on a dedicated infrastructure. Security, performance, and sometimes customization are better in the Dedicated Public Cloud than in the Shared Public Cloud. Its architecture and service levels are defined by the provider and the cost may be higher than that of the Shared Public Cloud, depending on the volume.

Private Cloud

The Private Cloud is a pool of computing resources delivered as a standardized set of services that are specified, architected, and controlled by a particular enterprise.

The path to a Private Cloud is often driven by the need to maintain control of the delivery environment because of application maturity, performance requirements, and regulatory or business differentiation reasons. For example, banks and governments have data security issues that may preclude the use of currently available Public Cloud services.

Private Cloud options include:

• Self-hosted Private Cloud: A Self-hosted Private Cloud provides the benefit of architectural and operational control, utilizes the existing investment in people and equipment, and provides a dedicated on-premise environment that is internally designed, hosted, and managed.
• Partner-hosted Private Cloud: A Partner-hosted Private Cloud is a dedicated environment that is internally designed, externally hosted, and externally managed. It blends the benefits of controlling the service and architectural design with the benefits of outsourcing.

Microsoft’s cloud solution provides a comprehensive range of service-based components. Microsoft not only provides infrastructure services but also offers a range of platform and software services solutions as well.

With Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), customers get on-demand computing and storage to host, scale, and manage applications and services through Microsoft’s worldwide datacenters. This allows customers to scale with ease and quickly meet the infrastructure needs of an entire organization or an individual department, either globally or locally.

Windows Azure provides a Platform as a Service (PaaS) consisting of an operating system, a fully relational database, and consumable Web-based services that provide security-enhanced connectivity and federated access control for applications. As a family of on-demand services, the Windows Azure platform offers organizations a familiar development experience, on-demand scalability, and reduced time to market for applications.

Microsoft Software as a Service (SaaS) Online Services is subscription-based, on-demand applications and hosted services, providing end users with a consistent experience across various client devices. Microsoft has a comprehensive set of online SaaS offerings, including:

• The Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) delivering security-enhanced, hosted communications and collaboration tools including Microsoft Exchange Online, Microsoft SharePoint Online, Microsoft Office Live Meeting, and Microsoft Office Communications Online.
• Exchange Hosted Services is a set of tools to help organizations manage electronic communications including:

• Protecting against spam and malware
• Helping satisfy retention requirements for e-discovery and compliance
• Encrypting data to preserve confidentiality
• Maintaining access to e-mail during and after emergency situations

• Microsoft Dynamics® CRM Online provides marketing, sales, and customer service solutions deployed through Microsoft Office Outlook or an Internet browser to help end users efficiently automate workflows and centralize customer information.
• Office Web Apps provides on-demand access to the Web-based version of Microsoft Office suite of applications, including Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft PowerPoint.

With Microsoft cloud services, customers maintain choice and control over how and where services are utilized. These choices include, for instance, determining the ratio of on-premises to off-premises solutions, whether to host within a Microsoft datacenter or at Microsoft partner, and how to change the mix as needs grow, and so forth. Customers also choose which Microsoft services to deploy -- IaaS, SaaS, PaaS, or any combination of the three.

For more information on our Cloud computing, please browse through the following site.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/cloud/default.aspx#tab2-small

There's a lot of information out there that will help you plan, design and manage your high availability or site resilience solution. For example, you might want to start with this four-part video blogcast on high availability in Exchange 2010:

• High Availability in Exchange Server 2010 - Part 1
• High Availability in Exchange Server 2010 - Part 2
• High Availability in Exchange Server 2010 - Part 3
• High Availability in Exchange Server 2010 - Part 4

Next, visit the Exchange 2010 library in TechNet, where you can read topics that will help you understand high availability and site resilience in Exchange 2010. When you're ready, check out these TechEd presentations for deeper technical content:

• Microsoft Exchange Server 2010: High Availability Deep Dive
• Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 High Availability Design Considerations

To read all available library content for Exchange 2010 high availability and site resilience, see High Availability and Site Resilience in Exchange 2010.

Roughly a year ago, Microsoft launched the Exchange Server 2010 Deployment Assistant. It allows you to create Exchange Server 2010 on-premises deployment instructions that are customized to your environment.

The Deployment Assistant asks you a small set of questions and, based on your answers, it provides a checklist with instructions that are designed to get you up and running on Exchange 2010.

In addition to the online checklist, you can even print a PDF of your checklist.

The Deployment Assistant has been enhanced to include rich coexistence information for those interested in maintaining some users on-premises and some users hosted by Microsoft Office 365 for enterprises in the cloud. This approach is different than the Simple Exchange Migration (SEM) and Staged Migration options currently offered by Office 365. As of now, the available scenario is targeted solely at those organizations with a current Exchange 2003 on-premises implementation, but additional scenarios for supporting Exchange 2007 and Exchange 2010 will be coming.

Microsoft plans to begin rolling out its latest service refresh to its Live@edu academic customers in February 2011, according to a UK Live@edu team blog post.

The February refresh will add federation support, Forefront Online Protection for Exchange functionality and overall performance improvements to the service.

Live@edu is a set of Microsoft-hosted services, including hosted Exchange (Outlook Live), Office Live Workspace and SkyDrive storage. (Microsoft also announced in 2009 plans to add hosted SharePoint to the Live@edu bundle.) The suite is available to students and academics. Microsoft is rebranding Live@edu as Office 365 for Education and will be adding new free and optional paid services to that offering in 2011.

According to the Live@edu UK post, the transition to Office 365 for Education is slated for the second half of 2011.

Source: http://mashable.com/2010/12/13/facebook-members-visualization/

This is what the world looks like, according to the Facebook social graph.

Facebook intern Paul Butler was interested in the locations of friendships, so he decided to create a visualization of Facebook connections around the globe. How local are our friends? Where are the highest concentration of friendships? How do political and geological boundaries affect them?

Butler started by using a sample of 10 million friend pairs, correlated them with their current cities and then mapped that data using the longitude and latitude of each city.

That was the easy part. Creating the right effect to show connecting relationships between thousands of cities proved to be a challenge. Butler wrote a fascinating Facebook note explaining some of the challenges he faced creating his visualization:

“I began exploring it in R, an open-source statistics environment. As a sanity check, I plotted points at some of the latitude and longitude coordinates. To my relief, what I saw was roughly an outline of the world. Next I erased the dots and plotted lines between the points. After a few minutes of rendering, a big white blob appeared in the center of the map. Some of the outer edges of the blob vaguely resembled the continents, but it was clear that I had too much data to get interesting results just by drawing lines. I thought that making the lines semi-transparent would do the trick, but I quickly realized that my graphing environment couldn’t handle enough shades of color for it to work the way I wanted.

Instead I found a way to simulate the effect I wanted. I defined weights for each pair of cities as a function of the Euclidean distance between them and the number of friends between them. Then I plotted lines between the pairs by weight, so that pairs of cities with the most friendships between them were drawn on top of the others. I used a color ramp from black to blue to white, with each line’s color depending on its weight. I also transformed some of the lines to wrap around the image, rather than spanning more than halfway around the world.”

With a few more tweaks, he eventually came up with the amazing visualization you see here. At first glance, it provides some expected data; the U.S. has the highest concentration of Facebook friendships, and Africa has the lowest concentration. While most of Russia and Antarctica are nowhere to be found, the rest of the world is easily identifiable

Source: http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/12/13/the-top-50-gawker-media-passwords/

Readers of Gizmodo, Lifehacker and other Gawker Media sites may be among the savviest on the Web, but the most common password for logging into those sites is embarrassingly easy to guess: “123456.” So is the runner-up: “password.”

On Sunday night, hackers posted online a trove of data from Gawker Media’s servers, including the usernames, email addresses and passwords of more than one million registered users. The passwords were originally encrypted, but 188,279 of them were decoded and made public as part of the hack. Using that dataset, we found the 50 most-popular Gawker Media passwords:

e

How do Gawker Media users express themselves when no one is watching? While many of their passwords are common phrases like “qwerty,” others appear distinctive to the Gawker community. Where else would “f—you,” “blahblah” and “whatever” rank among the most popular passwords? And why, oh why, is “monkey” in the top 10?

At least two popular passwords are science-fiction references: “trustno1″ was Special Agent Mulder’s password on “The X-Files,” and “thx1138″ is a George Lucas film that envisioned a dystopian future. (There’s no way to tell, but these were likely created by users of  io9, Gawker Media’s popular  sci-fi site.) Other popular passwords are just plain-old geeky: “dragon,” “superman,” “princess,” “starwars” and “nintendo.” W00t!

The set of Gawker Media passwords differs significantly from a cache of 10,000 Hotmail passwords that leaked online last year, though “123456″ was the most popular among both groups. In both cases, the datasets only include passwords that could be decoded and aren’t necessarily representive of all users. For instance, more complex passwords may be harder to decode. We eliminated all identifiable information from the data we studied.

A plurality of Gawker Media passwords are six characters long, but we wondered whether that and other results might differ based on the user’s email provider. Indeed, users of Google and Yahoo’s email services are more likely than Microsoft email users to have passwords of eight or more characters. Popular passwords vary, as well: Gmail users are bigger X-Files fans (”trustno1″) and more likely to opt for the slightly clever variant “passw0rd.” Yahoo and Microsoft email users, meanwhile, are much more likely to get sappy with their passwords: “iloveyou.”

By this evening, Gawker Media said it had sent nearly 1.5 million emails to users notifying them of the hack. Slate put together a great tool for checking whether your information was compromised. And one of the best guides to creating a strong password (hint: not “123456″) is available on Lifehacker, a Gawker Media site.

London's government agency in charge of public transportation is using the Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform to host a new set of publicly-available data feeds

The Transport for London (TfL) agency is hoping that third-party developers will build mobile and desktop applications that use these data feeds, called Trackernet,

which offer rapidly updated information on the current location of subway trains and scheduled trackwork.

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/213585/london_tries_microsoft_azure_for_hosting_data_feeds.html

Steve Rachui from Microsoft explains how to quickly and easily test remote SQL connectivity using any account you like. 

This is a neat trick that will surely prove useful when working with a wide variety of products.

Have you ever been troubleshooting a problem with remote SQL Iproxy MP, remote DB, etc) and wanted to test to see if the local system account (or any account for that matter) could make a remote connection to SQL but you didn’t want to install the SQL tools just to make that test?  Seems there is a file type – UDL file – that you can simply create that will bring up a window to allow testing of remote connections to SQL.

Just go anywhere on your system and create an empty text file named anything but instead of txt make sure the extension is UDL.  Then, double-click on the file and up pops a SQL connectivity window to allow testing of remote SQL connections.

Very easy to use to test connectivity with a known user account or as local system (using PSExec).

Earlier today the Exchange CXP team released a number of Update Rollups for versions of Exchange Server to the Download Center and via Microsoft Update.

• Update Rollup 2 for Exchange Server 2010 Service Pack 1
• Update Rollup 2 for Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 3
• Update Rollup 5 for Exchange Server 2010 RTM
• Update Rollup 5 for Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 2

Update Rollup 2 for Exchange Server 2010 SP1

This update contains a number of customer reported and internally found issues since the release of RU1. In particular we would like to specifically call out the following fixes which are included in this release:

• 2322161 Passive DAG Copy Doesn't Replay Logs if "Don't mount this database at startup" is Checked
• 2431500 Cannot connect using Outlook Anywhere as the same user from multiple XP Clients
• 2409597 Implement OpenFlags.AlternateServer for PublicLogon

Update Rollup 3 for Exchange Server 2010 Service Pack 1 is currently scheduled to release in February.

Update Rollup 2 for Exchange Server 2007 SP3

This update contains a number of customer reported and internally found issues since the release of RU1. In particular we would like to specifically call out the following fixes which are included in this release:

• 972186 Need to include the server service as a required service for Exchange 2007 running on Server 2008
• 2290105 OWA Sharepoint/UNC Access is broken after SP3

Update Rollup 3 for Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 3 is currently scheduled to release in February.

Update Rollup 5 for Exchange Server 2010 RTM

This update contains an internally found issue which can impact upgrades from RTM RU4 to Service Pack 1. We have opted to release an out-of-band update rollup for Exchange 2010 RTM proactively to ensure customers have as smooth an upgrade experience as possible.

• 2266458 Setup cannot perform a mode:/uninstall on a HT role server since RU2 delivered MSFTE.msi

Currently, we have no plans to release future update rollups for Exchange Server 2010 RTM. We strongly recommend customers upgrade to Service Pack 1 with the latest Update Rollup after installing this update.

Update Rollup 5 for Exchange Server 2007 SP2

This security update was released earlier this morning via the Microsoft Security Response Center. Details of this bulletin and it's fix can be found below:

• MSRC 10-024

Currently, we have no plans to release future update rollups for Exchange Server 2007 SP2. Instead, we strongly recommend customers upgrade to Service Pack 3 with the latest Update Rollup.

General Notes:

Note for Exchange 2010 Customers using the Arabic and Hebrew language version:

Microsoft introduced two new languages with the release of Service Pack 1, Arabic and Hebrew. At present Microsoft is working through the process of modifying our installers to incorporate these two languages. Due to the timing of RU1 we were unable to complete this work in time.

Customers running either of the two language versions affected are advised to download and install the English language version of the rollup which contains all of the same fixes.

Note for Forefront users:

For those of you running Forefront, be sure you perform these important steps from the command line in the Forefront directory before and after this rollup's installation process.  Without these steps, Exchange services for Information Store and Transport will not start back up.  You will need to disable ForeFront via "fscutility /disable" before installing the patch and then re-enable after the patch by running "fscutility /enable" to start it up again post installation. 

A System Center Configuration Manager 2007 (ConfigMgr) hotfix will affect one or more separate roles within the distributed environment.  Possible roles include:

·         Primary Site Server
·         Secondary Site Server
·         Remote Administrator Console
·         Remote Provider
·         Client

This article is designed to provide general guidance as it relates to ConfigMgr hotfixes. 

For details on a specific hotfix refer to its accompanying Knowledge Base (KB) article at http://support.microsoft.com.

A new version of the OpsMgr R2 Report Authoring Guide is available at - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg508710.aspx covering additional custom report development scenarios and methods.

Please find below a summary of links discussing WIn7 32 bit or 64 bit !

• http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows7/32-bit-and-64-bit-Windows-frequently-asked-questions
• http://www.w7forums.com/windows-7-64-bit-vs-32-bit-t484.html
• http://www.windowsnetworking.com/articles_tutorials/Deploying-Windows-7-Part9.html

The table below shows recommended best practice on how to configure network cards for Mailbox Servers within one DAG

Microsoft is allowing testers to register, as of December 7, for a public Community Technology Preview (CTP) test build of the reporting services technology for its SQL Azure cloud database.

Microsoft SQL Azure Reporting is a cloud-based reporting service built on SQL Azure, SQL Server, and SQL Server Reporting Services technologies that allows users to publish, view, and manage reports that display data from SQL Azure data sources.

The test build that will be made available is designated CTP 2 and will be made available to a “limited” number of testers.

Microsoft Forefront team is currently conducting a survey and would like to hear your opinions around email security, especially how you would use email security solutions in your organization.

This information will help us improve Forefront Protection for Exchange.

Please consider taking a few minutes at this time to finish the survey. This survey should take about 8-15 minutes to complete.

To participate, please click here.

SC VMM 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 RC is now ready for the general public! This release adds support for Dynamic Memory and RemoteFX in Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 RC. 

It is being uploaded to Microsoft Connect now. Since this is a pre-release version, usage of this is limited to test environments.

Customers are encouraged to ask questions via the SC VMM forums on TechNet.  Feedback can be submitted directly to the product team via Microsoft Connect.

UPGRADE MATRIX: You can use this SP1 RC to upgrade from 2008 R2 and you will be able to upgrade from this SP1 RC to the SP1 RTM.

DOWNLOADS:  this release through Microsoft Connect. 

Source: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/the-road-to-microsoft-office-365-the-past/8078