This new series from senior IT Pro evangelist Yung Chou provides primers on cloud services and Microsoft’s cloud computing model, and walks you through the various scenarios for deploying cloud technology. The series includes:

• Part 1: What Is Service
• Part 2: What Is Cloud
• Part 3: Windows Azure Computing Model
• Part 4: Fabric Controller and AppFabric
• Part 5: Publishing Windows Azure Application to Public Cloud
• Part 6: Building Private Cloud of IaaS

Thanks for reading,

Mitch

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Microsoft has made significant investments in providing virtualization support for Lync Server across a fully distributed topology. Lync Server can be virtualized by using Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V, or other virtualization solutions that have been tested by Microsoft.

This document outlines a series of best practice recommendations for:

·       Deploying a virtualized Lync Server topology

·       Typical VM host configurations

·       VM guest configuration best practices based on the workload

·       Scale comparison of virtualized and physical Lync Server roles

·       Measuring Performance

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Mitch

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IT administrators will continue to play an active role in security and risk management, even when leveraging cloud services in a utility fashion. You’ll spend less time on maintenance and have more time to polish policies and best practices for the cloud platform in Windows Azure, which already has many security controls in place to keep your data confidential and available.

This edition of TechNet ON collects key guidance and resources to help you clear that major hurdle to realizing the many benefits of a cloud migration. Find guidance such as the Windows Azure Security Overview whitepaper and the executive strategy brief Securing the Cloud Infrastructure.

For recommended approaches to security management for applications and services hosted on the Windows Azure platform, check out Understanding Security Account Management in Windows Azure in TechNet Magazine. Also in the magazine, Secure Access to Your Cloud Services explains how Forefront Threat Management Gateway 2010 can assist your business to securely access cloud service while providing high availability services to on-premises users.

If you, like many IT professionals are now weighing the promised benefits of moving an IT infrastructure to the cloud against the concerns about security an loss of control, this edition of TechNet ON is for you.

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Mitch

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Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 with Service Pack 1 are ready with new virtualization tools, web resources, management enhancements, and Windows 7 integration. You can also evaluate the SP1 edition with the Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 trial. Also find Service Pack 1 evaluation resources here.

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Mitch

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The Microsoft Lync Server 2010, Best Practices Analyzer gathers configuration information from Lync Server 2010 components to determine the overall health of a Lync Server environment.

the Best Practices Analyzer can examine servers running Active Directory Domain Services, Exchange Server Unified Messaging (UM), and Lync Server. You can use Best Practices Analyzer to do the following:

• Proactively perform checks, verifying that the configuration is set according to recommended best practices
• Automatically detect required updates to Lync Server 2010
• Generate a list of issues, such as suboptimal configuration settings, unsupported options, missing updates, or practices that we do not recommend
• Troubleshoot and fix specific problems

Download the Microsoft Lync Server 2010, Best Practices Analyzer.

Thanks for reading,

Mitch

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