Mostly I try to write tips about our latest products or something I’ve learned that makes me more productive. But sometimes I see someone do something small that’s been around for a while that I just didn’t think about using it that way. That is today’s tip.
For those of us that dual boot or triple boot (have multiple operating systems installed) or even boot from VHD (have operating systems installed on VHD files), you will understand this. When I switch from my Windows 2012 installation of Windows to one of the operating systems that I keep on VHD, I sit there and watch the shutdown, then watch the bootup, and pick the operating system or VHD that I want to boot to before the timer runs out.
I just hate waiting that long and I often get distracted by other people talking to me, phone ringing, or just someone jingling keys. When that happens I miss the prompt and end up booting into the wrong operating system. However, there has been a way to keep from doing this all along and I didn’t realize it. Simply bring up your advanced startup options, pick which boot manager option you want to use, and set it to default. Then when you reboot, you can go get a drink and when you come back it will be ready to go.
Windows Server 2008 R2 supported up to 16 cluster nodes
Windows Server 2012 supports up to 64 nodes
You can upgrade the MBAM 2.0 server infrastructure from previous versions of MBAM either of the following methods:
Manual in-place server replacement – You must manually uninstall the existing MBAM server infrastructure, and then install the MBAM 2.0 infrastructure. If you are using MBAM with Configuration Manager, you must also remove the Configuration Manager objects. You do not need to remove the databases to do the upgrade. Instead, you select the existing databases, which were created by the previous version of the MBAM Client, and the MBAM 2.0 upgrade installation then migrates the existing databases to MBAM 2.0.
Distributed client upgrade – Clients can be upgraded over time. For in-place infrastructure upgrades, the MBAM 2.0 server supports the 1.0 clients. This support allows administrators to upgrade the server infrastructure first and then upgrade the clients over time.
Today’s Tip…
A number of SysInternals tools were recently updated. For those of you that use these tools on a regular basis, you might want to grab these updates and add them to your respective collections.
AccessChk v5.2: AccessChk, a command line utility for dumping the effective permissions and security descriptors for files, registrykeys, processes, tokens, object manager objects, now prefixes Windows 8 application container SIDs with the word “Package”, and includes several minor bug fixes.
This release of AccessChk, a security command-line utility that reports the effective access and permissions of files, registry keys, processes, and more, adds support for file and printer shares. In addition, it adds filtering options for viewing accesses related to specified accounts and now includes the System Access Control List (SACL) when it dumps security descriptors
Procdump v6.0: Procdump is an advanced utility for capturing process memory dumps based on a variety of triggers including CPU usage, memory usage, performance counter values, and exceptions. Version 6.0 is a major upgrade that adds the ability to specify multiple filters, attach to a process by service name, and display/filter on the message text of a CLR or JScript exception.
RAMMap v1.30: RAMMap is a graphic utility that shows the breakdown of physical memory usage across different dimensions. This release fixes a bug that could cause a crash when accessing the cached files page when a cached file’s name exceeded a certain length.
This update also fixes a bug that caused RAMMap to fail on Windows 8.
Strings v2.52: This update to Strings, a command-line utility that prints a file’s embedded Unicode and ASCII strings, fixes a signed file offset printing bug.
This release fixes a bug that prevented the previous one from running on Windows XP.
Recently I was teaching a remote class to customers. They were all new to Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012, so I was giving a bit of a tour for them. When they got to their lab assignments one of my students informed me that he was connecting with a computer that had a nonstandard keyboard…one that didn’t include a Windows key. Because of this he couldn’t figure out how to get to the new Start screen.
I remembered back to my days of supporting Microsoft Natural Keyboard and told him to try Ctrl + Esc. Sure enough, my old knowledge was still handy. Good old Ctrl + Esc still taps the start button…even if it isn’t there.
Now it simply takes you to the Start screen.
I’ve done a couple of tips on Storage Spaces. But for those that missed them, it is functionality built into Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 that allows you to pool together physical disks into a logical grouping and then carve out virtual disks (aka storage spaces or just spaces). These spaces can utilize different RAID levels and even thin provisioning.
Today’s tip explains what happens in Disk Management and Device Manager when you step through the process.
So first we have some disks. I added 4 small disks just so I could get the screen shots…
If you were to look in Device Manager, you could see the disks there as well. They are listed here as Virtual HDs because I did this in a virtual environment. You wouldn’t do that normally.
When the pool is created all 4 disks will disappear from Disk Manager, but will still be visible in Device Manager. Then when you carve out a storage space, that space will appear both in Disk Management (shown here as Disk 8) and in Device Manager (shown here as ‘Microsoft Storage Space Device).
Then you can format it with whatever file system is supported by the your Windows installation and use it as a regular disk. But it is a bit disconcerting that your disks in Disk Management will appear to skip some numbers. In my case, they show up as disk 0, 1, 2, 3, 8….since disks 4 -7 are now masked away from me.
As with all commodities, Azure pricing continues to drop. Amazon announced some prices drops recently. Microsoft did the same. From a Storage perspective, check out the new prices.
During the last (Cloud) Tip of the Day series, there was a tip for an interview with business leader for the Azure business. Today, I am bringing you an interview with the technical leader of the Azure business. Mark Russinovich is a Technical Fellow and the lead Architect for the Azure business. Check out the interview at the link below.
http://www.infoworld.com/t/cloud-computing/mark-russinovich-how-microsoft-building-its-cloud-future-237465?page=0,0
We announced our new Basic instances at Build last week. The instances offer similar machine configurations as the Standard tier of instances offered today (Extra Small [A0] to Extra Large [A4]). These instances will cost up to 27% less than the corresponding instances in use today (which will now be called “Standard”) and do not include load balancing or auto-scaling, which are included in Standard. These instances are well-suited for production applications that do not require the Azure load-balancer (“bring-your-own load balancer” or single instance), development workloads, test servers and batch processing applications. Basic instances will have similar performance characteristics to AWS’s equivalent instances while the Standard instances will maintain their favorable performance.
NOTE: Now that I have an additional person writing for Tip of the Day, you will start seeing more Cloud information. Not all tips will be about the Microsoft Cloud, but more than previously.
Microsoft recently announced a new redundancy level for Block Blob storage, called Zone Redundant Storage (ZRS) that will be made available in the coming months. Today, customers use our Geo Redundant Storage (GRS) to keep their data durable in two regions hundreds of miles apart from each other, where we store an equivalent of 6 copies of the data (3 in each region). With the introduction of ZRS, we provide a new redundancy option that keeps your data durable by storing an equivalent of 3 copies of your data across multiple facilities. These facilities may be within the same region or across two regions. ZRS will be priced 37.5% lower than GRS as it becomes available.
According to Nasuni’s The State of Cloud Storage in 2013 industry survey:
Microsoft consistently performed better than the other Cloud Storage Providers (CSP) in the tests, delivering the best Write/Read/Delete speeds across a variety of file sizes, the fastest response times and the fewest errors. Not only did Microsoft outperform the competition significantly during the raw performance tests, it was the only cloud storage platform to post zero errors during 100 million reads and writes. In those categories where Microsoft was not the top performer (uptime and scalability variance), it was a close second.
For these reasons, Microsoft has replaced Amazon to achieve the top performer position in the 2013 report. Cloud storage is a rapidly evolving market with new providers and new offerings entering all the time. The results in this report illustrate that product parity does not yet exist in this market. While offering “cloud storage” is relatively easy, delivering a high performing, reliable and scalable solution requires significant focus, advanced technology and continuous investment.
We have made some improvements to our capabilities in troubleshooting sending and receiving email. Check out this webcast presented by one of the Exchange Online Supportability PMs Scott Landry. This webcast will help you learn about exciting enhancements of Office 365 that allow customers to troubleshoot issues with email - in particular, new Message Trace capabilities.
See the recording of this webcast here.
Want to know what's going on in Office 365? Check out this link which filters on only showing new updates to Office 365…
http://blogs.office.com/?filter=true&filter-product=office-365&filter-type=updates
Here is a RSS feed version that you can subscribe to…
http://blogs.office.com/feed/?filter-product=office-365&filter-type=updates
Here is a quick glance of what you may find. These are releases in March…
Office for iPad – You can download Word, Excel and PowerPoint for iPad from the App Store. The apps have the robust capabilities and familiar look and feel that is unmistakably Office, while offering a fantastic touch experience built from the ground up for iPad.
Office Lens – Capture you physical world, papers, whiteboards, business cards, and let Office Lens clean it up and drop the image into OneNote. OneNote’s optical character recognition helps you find the image when you search.
Clip to OneNote – OneNote Clipper, the easiest way to save anything on the web to OneNote with just one click. Think of it as your camera for the web, snapshotting any webpage you see directly into OneNote.
Compact message header in Outlook 2013 – We’ve taken all the feedback we’ve received and used it to design a compact version of the email message header in Outlook 2013. The new message header gives you control over the header information you see, so that you can concentrate on what matters most: the content of the message.
1 TB Site collections and unlimited tenant storage scale - Now you can have 1TB site collections for OneDrive for Business and team sites: allowing your teams to store more content in a single location and infinite tenant storage scale – so that your organization can bring your content to the cloud without compromise.
Calendar Search in Outlook Web App – Calendar Search allows you to search your own calendars or Group calendars for events in the past, present, and future. You can also search for people’s calendars and overlay their calendars on top of yours for quick comparison.
Enhanced text editor in Outlook Web App – New copy-and-paste options, hyperlink and video previews, and table support in the Outlook Web App editor means you can do more without leaving your browser.
Support for SAML 2.0 federation with Office 365 – Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) 2.0 is now a federation option for Office 365. You can configure Windows Azure AD for use with SAML 2.0. Windows Azure AD already supports WS-Federation, WS-Trust and Shibboleth for sign-in federation. SAML 2.0 is an additional, commonly-used federation standard for user sign-in.
OneDrive for business improvements and new subscription – OneDrive for Business (formerly SkyDrive Pro) is personal online storage for a company’s employees. It’s the place where you can store, sync, and share your work files across multiple devices with ease and security. With OneDrive for Business you can collaborate with others in real time right from within Office and edit documents from virtually anywhere via a web browser in real time using Office Online. Accessing your files from multiple devices is a cinch with native OneDrive for Business and Office Mobile apps (including Windows Phone, Windows 8, iOS, and Android devices).
Given that our Charlotte, NC site is located in Mecklenburg County, NC, I thought the announcement that the local county is adopting our Devices and Services strategy was really encouraging.
According to the press release:
North Carolina’s Mecklenburg County has decided to go “all-in” with the Microsoft platform by deploying 6,500 seats of Microsoft Office 365, 175 Microsoft Surface Pro devices and 50 terabytes of Windows Azure. Together, these modern solutions have helped the county save time and money, and the county’s employees have responded positively to being able to work easily from virtually anywhere, anytime.
The quote that really impressed me was the one about the drop in storage costs:
Our storage costs used to be $21 per GB; now, with Windows Azure, we are around 30 cents per GB.”
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/press/2014/mar14/03-19mecklenburgcopr.aspx
The recently released MBAM 2.0 supports integration with System Center Configuration Manager. This integration eliminates the MBAM compliance infrastructure and moves it into the native environment of Configuration Manager. IT administrators who use Configuration Manager in their enterprise can now view the compliance status of their enterprise in the Management Console and drill into reports to view individual computers.
Dynamic Memory is a Hyper-V feature that was introduced with Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 and is used to automatically reallocate memory between virtual machines that are running on a Hyper-V host. Dynamic Memory helps you to allocate virtual machine memory resources more efficiently while dramatically increasing virtual machine consolidation ratios. A number of improvements were made for Windows guests in Windows Server 2012, and - new in Windows Server 2012 R2 - Hyper-V now offers full dynamic memory support for Linux guests including:
Also, up until now, if you wanted to take advantage of Linux Integration Services (LIS) for your Hyper-V environment, you had to go to the Microsoft download center, download the correct LIS package for your Linux distribution, and then manually install it on your Hyper-V servers. New for Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V hosts, key Linux vendors are going to include LIS for Hyper-V in their standard distributions, so there is no manual step involved any longer in order for you to take advantage of the latest LIS capabilities.
Storage QoS is a new feature in Windows Server 2012 R2 that allows you to restrict disk throughput for overactive or disruptive virtual machines and can be configured dynamically while the virtual machine is running. For maximum bandwidth applications, it provides strict policies to throttle IO to a given virtual machine to a maximum IO threshold. For minimum bandwidth applications, it provides policies for threshold warnings that alert of an IO starved VM when the bandwidth does not meet the minimum threshold.
With MBAM 2.0 (Microsoft Bitlocker Administration and Monitoring), end-users can use the Self-service Portal to recover their recovery keys. The portal can be deployed on a single server with the other MBAM components, or on a separate server that gives IT administrators the flexibility to expose the portal to users, as required. Once users are authenticated by the portal, they need to enter only the first eight digits of the recovery key to receive the recovery key.
MBAM also secures the key by allowing users to recover keys only for the computers on which they are users. This means that users can retrieve only their own keys, reducing the risk of unauthorized access by other users.
Today’s (Cloud) Tip… What the heck are Windows Azure and Office 365?
Windows Azure
Windows Azure is Microsoft's application platform for the public cloud. You can use this platform in many different ways. For instance, you can use Windows Azure to build a web application that runs and stores its data in Microsoft datacenters. You can use Windows Azure just to store data, with the applications that use this data running on-premises (that is, outside the public cloud). You can use Windows Azure to create virtual machines for development and test or to run SharePoint and other applications. You can use Windows Azure to build massively scalable applications with lots and lots of users. Because the platform offers a wide range of services, all of these things-and more-are possible.
Check out the poster! http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=35473
Office 365
Office 365 is Office transformed into a powerful service that keeps you securely connected to all your personal documents, notes, and presentations. It comes with all the things you know and love about Office, but it´s also different from the version of Office you have today in a few exciting ways.
It roams with you.
You can access your files from almost anywhere.
You´ll have access to Office on more devices.
You can get Office when you´re away from your PC.
Today’s (Cloud) Tip…PaaS
PaaS offers hosted application servers that have near-infinite scalability resulting from the large resource pools they rely on. PaaS also offers necessary supporting services like storage, security, integration infrastructure and development tools for a complete platform.
A service provider offers a pre-configured, virtualized application server environment to which applications can be deployed by the development staff. Since the service providers manage the hardware (patching, upgrades and so forth), as well as application server uptime, the involvement of IT pros is minimized. Developers build applications and annotate the applications with resource descriptors. Upon deployment, the provisioning engine binds the necessary infrastructure capabilities declared in the descriptors to the application. The resources may include network endpoints, load balancers, CPU cores, memory and software dependencies. On-demand scalability combined with hardware and application server management relieves developers from infrastructure concerns and allows them to focus on building applications. PaaS is generally suitable for brand-new applications, as legacy applications often require extensive refactoring to comply with sandbox rules.
Our PaaS offering is Windows Azure Cloud Services.
Today’s (Cloud) Tip…SaaS
Software as a Service (SaaS) is a software delivery business model in which a provider or third party hosts an application and makes it available to customers on a subscription basis. SaaS customers use the software running on the provider’s infrastructure on a pay-as-you-go basis. There are no upfront commitments, so the customer is spared any long-term contracts.
Based on the contractual terms, customers may elect to quit using the software at any time. The underlying infrastructure and the software configuration are invisible to the users, and, hence, customers have to settle for the functionality that is provided out of the box. SaaS uses a highly multi-tenant architecture, and user contexts are separated from one another logically at both runtime and rest.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/ee309870.aspx
We have a number of SaaS offerings: Office 365, Team Foundation Service, CRM Online, Outlook.com, SkyDrive, and Intune are just a partial list.
MBAM 2.0 prevents IT administrators from leaving BitLocker suspended for prolonged periods of time, which leaves a computer in an unprotected state. If an IT administrator suspends BitLocker, MBAM will re-enable it automatically when the computer is rebooted, reducing the risk of computers being unprotected.
Today’s (Cloud) Tip…Sign up for Office 365
Customers can sign up for Office 365 at http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/. They can start out by signing up for a free preview and then can convert it to a paid subscription after that.
MSDN subscribers can get access to a developer subscription via their MSDN benefits.
College students can get access via Office 365 University ($80 for a four year subscription!)
Today’s (Cloud) Tip…On-Premises
Hang out in the cloud space for even a brief amount of time and you will hear someone make a comparison between cloud services and traditional applications installed locally. What you won’t hear is consistency on how to describe these local services. Personally, I prefer the term “on-premises”. You will also often hear the term “on-premise”. I won’t ever stand up and correct someone publically, but as the son of an English minor, I would be remiss if I didn’t at least touch on this.
According to Dictionary.com:
Premises:
a tract of land including its buildings building together with its grounds or other appurtenances the property forming the subject of a conveyance or bequest
a tract of land including its buildings
building together with its grounds or other appurtenances
the property forming the subject of a conveyance or bequest
Premise:
proposition supporting or helping to support a conclusion
Based on this, the correct term is “on-premises”.
FYI: Internally most of us just say “on-prem”.
A FDD (fixed data drive) policy can now be configured to allow automatic unlocking of a drive without having had a password set for the drive. Users will not be prompted for a password prior to encrypting the FDD, and the FDD will be secured and auto-unlocked with the operating system drive.