Today’s (Cloud) Tip… Did you know that you can configure your Cloud Services to scale up and down based on load? AutoScale enables you to configure Windows Azure to automatically scale your application dynamically on your behalf (without any manual intervention...

Today’s Tip… Do you know what to do if your system crashes with a STOP 9E? If not, you should watch this video! Microsoft has begun publishing videos available on YouTube to provide additional information on System Crash Troubleshooting. Bob Golding,...

Today’s Tip… Microsoft has begun publishing videos available on YouTube to provide additional information on System Crash Troubleshooting. Bob Golding, a Senior Escalation Engineer at Microsoft, visually explains Special Pool, a Windows diagnostic tool...

Today’s (Cloud) Tip… Windows Azure Cloud Services support the ability for developers to RDP into web and worker role instances. Administrators can dynamically configure remote desktop support – even when it was not enabled during the initial app deployment...

Today’s (Cloud) Tip… Limiting access to Office 365 based on the location of the client AD FS has a feature for Office 365 customers named Client Access Policy. Some organizations may want to create policies that limit access to Office 365 services, depending...

Today’s Tip… Windows Server 2012 R2 delivers something to Hyper-V that we have not had before, Cross Version Live Migration. What this means is that VMs running on a downlevel version of Windows can be easily moved to an up level server. Example 1: Server...

Today’s Tip… In Windows Server 2012 R2, quite a bit of work was put into elevating our support for Linux. One of these areas was in the realm of dynamic memory. For supported Linux distributions, this means that not only can memory be hot added to a virtual...

Today’s Tip… Systems with Intel’s Ivy Bridge, Ivy Town, and Haswell processors (E5 v2/v3 and E7 v2/v3) may experience random system crashes. To assist, Microsoft has release a microcode update for the Intel processors to improve the reliability of Windows...

Today’s Tip… In yesterday’s tip, I mentioned the faster Live Migration options for Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V. In the SMB option, it is possible to take advantage of multiple RDMA NICs to reduce network latency and CPU utilization.

Today’s Tip… Windows Server 2012 R2 brings us faster and more options for Live Migration of virtual machines. Option Description TCP/IP This same method as used in Windows Server 2012. Compression The memory content of the virtual machine that is being...

Today’s Tip… In 2012 R2, administrators can customize the overall look and feel of the web pages using a set of Windows PowerShell scripts. Default look and feel… The administrator can: Change the company name Add a logo Change the image to the left Add...

Today’s Tip… In AD FS 2.x, users receive a generic error message if their password is expired. In Windows Server 2012 R2, AD FS adds a password update feature. If a user's password is expired, they are prompted to update it. Users can also go to this...

Today’s Tip… In 2.x, users would have to choose their IDP from a drop down list. This posed a few issues. If there were a large number of IDPs, it may be difficult to find the correct one, especially if they are unsure of the correct name. Choosing the...

For companies that have low account lockout thresholds, adding an AD FS proxy to their DMZ (which is required for Exchange Online) exposes a Denial of Service method. Many companies have their email addresses set as their UPN and executive emails are...

One of the most amazing things about working in the Azure space is how open we are to people who want to use Azure, but don’t want to use .NET. Not only do we allow our Azure customers to use whatever language/environment they want, we even go so far...

One of the recent supportability wins was an increase in the maximum number of objects allowed in an Office 365 tenant. Prior to the increase, the default limit was 50K objects for all customers. Unfortunately, that meant that many of our largest customers...

Today’s Tip… In Windows 8.1, when you press Windows + X, you may still want to see Command prompt (admin) instead of Windows PowerShell (admin), you can get this setting back by going to the task bar properties and selecting the check box for the command...

Today’s Tip… New to Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012 R2, this functionality provides administrators with the ability to export a virtual machine while it is still in a running state. Simply put, you can now export a VM without having to take it out of production...

Today’s Tip… One of the neat little things that we get in Windows Server 2012 R2 is the ability to resize virtual hard disks while the VMs are still online. And it really does seem like a little thing because there’s not much to it. It just allows us...

In Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview you can now view the state of a CSV on a per node basis. For example, you can see whether I/O is direct or redirected, or whether the CSV is unavailable. If a CSV is in I/O redirected mode, you can also view the reason...

Today’s Tip… In previous versions of Windows Server, if you had a Hyper-V server running virtualized cluster nodes, you had to use an iSCSI server for your shared storage. This usually meant either creating an additional VM to act as an iSCSI server or...

On the heels of our release of Office Mobile for the iPad and iPhone, Microsoft announced OWA for Android. http://blogs.office.com/b/office365tech/archive/2013/07/31/office-mobile-for-android-phones.aspx Not that anybody reading this tip should be using...

Today’s (Cloud) Tip…Check out our Cloud data centers Although this video from January 2011 is a bit dated now (exactly how long is two years when moving at Cloud speed? J) and the exact numbers are no longer accurate, the rest of the content is still...

Today’s (Cloud) Tip…Halo and Azure – Better together Who says work cannot include some gaming? Check out the way Halo 4 leveraged Windows Azure both for normal operations and burst traffic right around title launch. http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/Subscribe...

Today’s (Cloud) Tip…OWA for iPhone and OWA for iPad Microsoft has disclosed OWA for iPhone and OWA for iPad with a blog post on the Office 365 technology blog: http://blogs.office.com/b/office365tech/archive/2013/07/16/owa-for-iphone-and-owa-for-ipad...