AWS

This is usually a sigh that all files were not copied during an install. What software are you using to view the videos?

Source: PCWorld

Source: InfoWorld

Windows Server 2012 R2 is in preview right now and ready for your evaluation. We have been rolling out detailed information on our Cloud OS vision though Brad Andersons Whats New in 2012 R2 blog series. That will continue but we thought you would like a short consolidated list for consideration. Here are some key innovations in Windows Server 2012 R2. Storage transformation Delivers breakthrough performance at a fraction of the cost The storage tiering feature of Storage Spaces in Windows Server 2012 R2 automatically tiers data across hard disks and solid state drives based on usage to dramatically increase storage performance and cost efficiency. Software defined networking Provides new levels of agility and flexibility Network virtualization in Windows Server 2012 R2, along with the management capabilities in System Center 2012 R2 provides the flexibility to place any virtual machine on any node regardless of IP address with isolation. New in-box gateway in Windows Server 2012 R2 extends virtual networks to provide full connectivity to physical networks as well as access to virtual networks over the internet. Virtualization and live migration Provides an integrated and high-performance virtualization platform Cross-version live migration enables virtual machines running on Windows Server 2012 to be migrated to Windows Server 2012 R2 hosts with no downtime. Live migration compression provides dramatic time savings (approximately 50% or greater) by using spare CPU cycles to compress live migration traffic with no special hardware. Live migration with RDMA enables offloading of the process to the NICs (if they support RDMA) for even faster live migrations. Access & Information Protection Empowering your users to be productive while maintaining control and security of corporate information with Windows Server 2012 R2 Enable users to work on the device of their choice (through BYOD programs or on personal devices) by providing a simple registration process to make the devices known to IT and be taken into account as part of your conditional access policies Deliver policy-based access control to corporate applications and data with consistent experiences across devices Protect corporate information and mitigate risk by managing a single identity for each user across both on-premises and cloud-based applications and enabling multi-factor authentication for additional user validation Java application monitoring Enables deep application insight into Java applications. Provides performance and exception events as well as level alerting within Operations Manager for Java applications. Supports Tomcat, Java JDK, and other Java web services frameworks. Line-of-code level traceability with performance and exception metrics for .NET and Java application monitoring for more actionable, tool-driven dev-ops collaboration This is by no means a comprehensive lists of new features and benefits, but we just wanted to give you some information on the key focus areas. For those of you interested in downloading some of the products and trying them, here are some resources to help you: Try Windows Server 2012 R2 on Windows Azure today! Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview download System Center 2012 R2 Preview download SQL Server 2014 Community Technology Preview 1 (CTP1) download Windows 8.1 Enterprise Preview download View the full article

A couple of weeks ago we spoke about our approach to Software Defined Networking (SDN) - an approach that is open and extensible, driven by experience and most importantly, one that lets you leverage your existing investments. Over the last few months, we have also spoken in detail about this with thousands of customers at MMS, Interop, TechEd North America and TechEd Europe . Over the course of these conversations, we realized a few common themes emerging: Confusion around means of realizing SDN that overshadow the benefits offered Questions around opportunities for server and networking admins to enhance their careers Non-traditional players like Microsoft will have significant roles to play We felt this blog would be a good platform to discuss these in more detail since we are sure a lot of you have the same questions. Lets double-click in. Means of realizing Software Defined Networking: SDN does not mean that you rip and replace your existing network devices and replace them with new SDN aware devices. In most cases, the cheapest and most flexible network infrastructure is the one you already own. If your network scales-up to meet your needs with a manageable OPEX, networking as you know it will continue to exist and you shouldnt worry about jumping on the bandwagon just because everyone is talking about SDN. With that said, networking is widely acknowledged to be the final piece of the puzzle requiring simplification in order to meet the agility and flexibility demands of modern datacenters. Centralized provisioning, management and monitoring of compute and storage is very common today. Sadly, networking often remains stuck in the past - inflexible, hard wired and complex. This is the source of many of todays most troublesome and difficult problems responsible for service downtimes and application slowdowns. These are problems experienced by many large customers not just those operating at cloud scale running tens of thousands of hosts. The complexity of the problems arising is beyond what can be manually fixed and/or monitored. These real-world problems drove the need for a software defined solution to manage networking. The two approaches taken in large datacenters to do this are: Isolated virtual networks/network overlays. These sit on top of the physical network and are abstracted from the underlying networking hardware. Since the virtual networks are software defined, it allows admins to create and manage them from a centralized location depending on the needs of the application, templatize it and replicate it across their datacenters. As a result, management overhead is greatly reduced and a lot of mundane, error prone tasks are automated as a part of virtual network definition. A couple of important points to note here are that customers leverage existing hardware investments and this approach does not require any change to the way applications are written. Microsofts Hyper-V Network Virtualization and VMwares Nicira are solutions that fall within this category. Centralized controllers. These control the physical network infrastructure directly from a centralized location. This is often paired with an API for programming the network and gives the ability for software to program the network on the fly. This lets software, potentially even applications, dynamically configure the networks depending on current needs. This requires switches and routers to expose these functionalities (Southbound APIs) and a standardized interface for applications to consume them (Northbound APIs). OpenFlow and Cisco One Platform kit are examples of this approach. Since software directly configures the network, it needs to be rewritten to make use of this functionality. Custom applications that run within large datacenters, network diagnostic tools, apps that requires high fidelity connections, etc. are some examples where having such fine grained control will be helpful. There are other variations of SDN solutions that exist today. But for the sake of simplicity, lets focus on just these two. As you see in both above mentioned cases, the end goal is the same simplifying networking using the power of software. In one solution the application is aware of the underlying network and controls it using different protocols. In the other solution, the network is abstracted depending on application needs and the complexity is hidden. Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012 SP1 support and work with both these approaches. As highlighted in previous blog posts, Network Virtualization is built into Windows Server 2012 and customers can use System Center 2012 SP1 to create and manage virtual networks. With the Hyper-V Virtual Switch extensibility, partners like NEC have added functionality to the virtual switch to make it behave like an OpenFlow controller. Additionally applications like Lync are looking at ways to configure the network on the fly to ensure consistent call and video quality. Opportunities for Server and Networking admins A common discussion that comes up in this new world of Software Define Networking is the opportunity it creates for Server and Network Admins to enhance their careers. Traditionally both these groups have had well defined boundaries that have worked well for the most part after all, network admins are the backbones of the modern internet that we all take for granted today. Having said that, there is definitely room for improvement. When applications encounter performance issues, the blame is usually passed around before the actual issue is identified. Identifying and fixing issues are often considered an art with hundreds of manual steps. We dont have a crystal ball to show us if these pain points will go away with SDN. But all signs are positive and bear good news for the careers of datacenter infrastructure folks and IT organizations in general: Network Admins grow into network architects SDN helps remove the work from the job of network admins. They spend more time designing/architecting the network to meet the needs of the application as opposed to working on fixing low-value issues. This could include helping their organizations decide the right approach to SDN from the choices that we covered earlier. Additionally, since automation is core to SDN, this helps network admins build a new muscle which spans beyond areas that they have traditionally worked on. In the new SDN world, network admins can expect to frequently use tools such as Windows PowerShell, System Center Orchestrator, System Center Virtual Machine Manager, etc. which were once considered exclusive to Server Admins. Server Admins will have a better understanding of how the underlying networking fabric is designed. Newer tools will be available that will not only help better diagnose and isolate network issues, but also be able to automatically fix them in many cases. Finally, they will have the flexibility to define abstractions that meets their business needs irrespective of how the underlying physical infrastructure is designed. Why is Microsoft talking about SDN? The last topic we wanted to talk about here is the role of companies like Microsoft in the transformation the networking industry is going through. In fact, in the keynote panel at Interop a back in May we had an unlikely combination of executives from Microsoft, VMware (both software companies) and Broadcom (chipset manufacturer) talk about SDN. These arent traditional networking players, so why are they talking about SDN? In addition to the obvious term software in SDN, and Microsoft being a software company, there is another important trend that should be noticed. As more workloads are virtualized, the virtual switch is becoming the policy edge in networking as opposed to the physical switch. Networking teams work as much with the virtual switch in a heavily virtualized datacenter as they would do with the physical switch. With customers and partners building rich extensions and adding more functionality to the virtual switch, this trend is only going to improve. These non-traditional players will continue playing a significant role in years to come. Additionally, Microsoft operates some of the largest datacenters in the world where we have faced a considerable number of challenges that many of you see in your datacenters. We onboard over 1000 new customers in Azure datacenters and make tens of thousands of networking changes every single day. Given the paranoia that exists around having every process automated, we have a unique opportunity to bring some of our learnings back into the product that runs both in our datacenters and our customers datacenters. SDN is a paradigm that is evolving. This is not a change that will happen overnight. This is also not an all-in choice that IT organizations has to take today that locks them in with a specific vendor or a protocol. In fact if we were to write a post about what SDN is not, this will be among the first few points that we will list. There are incumbent players like Cisco and Juniper who are investing heavily in SDN. There are non-traditional players like Microsoft who are taking a fresh look at networking, along with a lot of startups innovating in this space as well. Finally, there are industry consortiums like Open Daylight where some of the players we mentioned above are actively working on defining the direction of SDN. Just as we discussed in the previous post, with Windows Server 2012, System Center 2012 SP1 and with the additional work we have delivered, side by side with our partners, you have the opportunity to explore the key benefits of SDN for yourselves. Try it out and let us know what you think: Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview download System Center 2012 R2 Preview download View the full article

BriForum kicks off today in Chicago. BriForum 2013 is the only technical virtualization conference that is 100% dedicated to desktop virtualization, VDI, application virtualization, Remote Desktop Services, and the consumerization of IT. Later this week Microsoft Product Director Jason Leznek will present, Enabling Consumerization Without Compromising Compliance. Jasons session is on Thursday morning and will cover Microsofts approach to delivering people-centric IT is helping customers enable users to work on devices of their choosing with consistent experiences, and providing IT a unified infrastructure for managing and delivering applications and other resources, all while helping organizations protect what is important to them. See how innovations in System Center 2012 R2 Configuration Manager, Windows Intune, and Windows Server 2012 R2 helps organizations enable Consumerization without compromising compliance, with a special focus on the technologies which help reduce VDI storage costs and improve the end user and administrator experience to both session and VM based VDI. If you cant wait until Thursday to be there live or wait for a recorded replay, be sure and checkout What's New in Remote Desktop Services for Windows Server 2012 R2 on the Remote Desktop Services Blog, or Whats New in 2012 R2: Making Device Users Productive and Protecting Corporate Information on Brad Andersons blog. Both blog posts are lengthy but have a ton of good information we think youll find interesting. You might want to view the six minute video below, Empowering People-centric IT in the age of Consumerization to learn more about the topic and where we are headed with personal device management. And for those of you interested in downloading some of the products and trying them, here are some resources to help you: Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview download System Center 2012 R2 Preview download SQL Server 2014 Community Technology Preview 1 (CTP1) download As always, follow us on Twitter via @WindowsServer Written by Keith Combs, Microsoft Server and Tools View the full article

Do a search on Google for it. You can also download it from Technet if you have a subscription.

Howdy and welcome to the community.

I would do a malware scan to see if there is anything infecting the server. Also check the services you have running and task manager to see how much resources they are using.

Lets take a look at mysql. Misconfigured mysql will slow a box to a crawl. Post the content of my.ini and we can tune it. That alone should help.

Although People-centric IT capabilities are great on Windows devices, these capabilities are not limited to Windows devices. We also put a lot of work into enabling first class support for heterogeneous devices in our People Centric IT capabilities. Putting users at the center of what we do includes enabling a broad set of devices. Active Directory is a core service enabling this and other scenarios. This week, Microsoft VP Brad Anderson examines a few examples of holistic end-to-end customer scenarios that are a result of our cross-company collaboration in blog post Whats New in 2012 R2: People Centric IT In Action End-to-End Scenarios Across Products. Specifically, he looks at: Providing users with secure access to their files on their personal devices. Enabling users to provision their iOS devices for work while allowing IT Pros to restrict access to corporate resources. Enabling IT Pros to deliver VPN functionality to corporate and personal devices. This includes both Microsoft and 3rd party VPNs, clients, and gateways and it also covers upcoming support for this on Windows RT. Each of these three examples combine and maximize capabilities from across Windows, Windows Server, System Center and Windows Intune. This is a relatively long and technical blog post with a lot of example screen shots. Stick with it, there is a lot of information in the article. For those of you that havent downloaded the R2 Preview wave of products, this will be a good way to get somewhat acclimated to the new techniques and new device support. And for those of you interested in downloading some of the products and trying them, here are some resources to help you: Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview download System Center 2012 R2 Preview download SQL Server 2014 Community Technology Preview 1 (CTP1) download As always, follow us on Twitter via @WindowsServer! View the full article

I am channeling my early days living and breathing as a U.S. Army Officer. I can't be any more clear about what I am asking you to do. So, here is your mission: Subscribe to this this nine-part Blog Series called: Whats New in Windows Server & System Center 2012 R2. In all seriousness... This 9 post blog series has had many eye balls from pretty much every organization across the company. It is a culmination of all the content that we discussed at events like TechEd in New Orleans and Madrid. The intent is to boil down the core scenarios or pillars for our Windows Server and System Center 2012 R2 release into Four Distinct Groups of articles that if you read them all, you would actually be able to light up each one of these scenarios.... I'm not kidding. Today, we published the second blog post in the series called, Whats New in 2012 R2: Making Device Users Productive and Protecting Corporate Information. This is part 1 of 2 where we talk about lighting up Bring your own device, (BYOD) or what we call People Centric IT (PCIT). This series of posts feature Brad Anderson our VP for Windows Server and System Center along with his leadership team and also the engineering teams that are still hard at work on releasing R2. There is a section at the bottom of every post called NEXT STEPS to all the underlying engineering blogs that light up the scenario. I really hope you all take the time to go read these posts. We based this plan on tons of feedback that you wanted more integrated content from our Product Teams. Thanks and I hope you find these posts useful and if you don't please let me know what you think we should be doing differently, Kevin Beares Senior Community Lead - Windows Server and System Center View the full article

Dont miss this opportunity get your staff together and learn about PowerShell right from the source! Join Jeffrey Snover, the inventor of PowerShell, together with Jason Helmick, Senior Technologist at Concentrated Technology, as they take you through the ins and outs of using PowerShell for real-time problem solutions and automations. This will be a high-speed, fun day aimed at IT pros, admins, and help desk persons who want to know how to use this powerful management tool to improve your management capabilities, automate redundant tasks and manage your environment in scale. Itll prepare you for a second event on August 1, which will go further into scripting, automation, and building tools (cmdlets). Getting Started with PowerShell 3.0 Jump Start | Register Now Date: July 18, 2013 Time: 9:00am 5:00pm Where: Live, online virtual classroom Cost: Free! View the full article

Unless something has changed, I don't use FTP so maybe it has, all you need to do is link to the FTP without any username attached to the URL and the user will connect to the dir set up for anonymous access.

As you will have seen at Microsoft TechEd North America and Europe, we have just delivered the Preview Release of Windows Server 2012 R2 with a stunning amount of new capability that is Cloud First. My name is Adam Hall and I look after one of the solution areas within People-centric IT that we call Access & Information Protection. In this post I will provide more information about what this actually is and the focus areas we have around Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) and the Consumerization of IT. People-centric IT is about helping organizations empower their users to work on the devices they choose without compromising their information integrity or compliance. The challenge this presents to customers is that as soon as their user works on a device that they do not manage or even have any knowledge of, it becomes very difficult to retain control of sensitive corporate information, and to be able to respond to situations such as the device being sold, lost or stolen. With our Access & Information Protection solutions, we deliver capabilities that help our customers solve this very challenging problem in the following ways: Simple registration and enrollment for users adopting Bring Your Own Device programs (BYOD). Users can register their device using Workplace Join which creates a new device object in Active Directory and installs a certificate on the device, allowing IT to take into account the users device authentication as part of conditional access policies. Users can also opt-in to the Windows Intune management service for consistent access to applications (including internal LOB apps and links to public app stores), management of their own devices and to gain access to their data. Users can work from the device of their choice to access corporate resources regardless of location. New in Windows Server 2012 R2 are the Web Application Proxy and Work Folders. The Web Application Proxy provides the ability to publish access to internal resources and perform Multi-Factor Authentication at the edge. Work Folders is a new file sync solution that allows users to sync their files from a corporate file server to all their devices both internally and externally. IT can better protect corporate information and mitigate risk by being able to manage a single identity for each user across both on-premises and cloud-based applications. As users blend their work and personal lives, and organizations adopt a mixture of traditional on-premises and cloud based solutions, IT needs a way to consistently manage the users identity and provide users with a single sign-on to all their resources. Microsoft helps our customers by providing users with a common identity across on-premises or cloud-based services leveraging existing Windows Server Active Directory investments and then connecting to Windows Azure Active Directory. In Windows Server 2012 R2, we have significantly enhanced Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) to be easier to deploy and configure, tightly integrated with the Web Application Proxy for simple publishing and federating between Active Directory and Azure AD. IT can access managed mobile devices to remove corporate data and applications in the event that the device is lost, stolen, or retired from use. Whether a device is lost, stolen or simply being repurposed, there will be times when IT needs to ensure that the corporate information stored on the device is no longer accessible. With Windows Server 2012 R2, System Center configuration Manager 2012 R2 and Windows Intune, companies have the ability to selectively wipe corporate information while leaving personal data intact. IT can set policy-based access control for compliance and data protection. With users working on their own devices, the accessing of corporate resources and storage of information on these devices presents some challenges for ensuring compliance needs are met and information remaining secure. Windows Server 2012 R2, through the Web Application Proxy, ADFS and Work Folders provides compelling and powerful solutions to make it easy for our customers to make resources available but also remain in control of information. As we showed in the TechEd Europe keynote in Madrid this week, Work Folders is integrated with Dynamic Access Control, providing the ability to automatically classify information based on content, and perform tasks such as protecting with Rights Management Services, even for data that is created and stored on clients! To see People-centric IT, including System Center 2012 R2 Configuration Manager, Windows Intune, and Windows Server 2012 R2 in action, you can watch a complete presentation and end-to-end demonstration from the TechEd North America Foundational Session. You can also learn more about People-centric IT by downloading the People-centric IT Preview Guide. Be sure to download System Center 2012 R2 Preview Configuration Manager and Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview today! View the full article

A couple of weeks ago, we addressed how Microsofts Software-Defined Networking solutions can help you transform your datacenter. For those of us who prefer to learn visually, the video below illustrates our approach. Experience the flexibility, automation and control delivered by our SDN solution by deploying Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012 SP1 today. You can also evaluate our latest and greatest SDN capabilities by using the Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview and System Center 2012 R2 Preview bits that we announced this week. View the full article

A few weeks ago, we addressed storage transformation in this blog and how onsite storage, cloud storage, and recovery options are evolving. Below is a brief video overview of some of our key storage solutions. In this post, we will explore how storage is changing inside your datacenter, and how we transform industry standard disks into reliable, high-performance onsite storage for you datacenter. A common model today is for new deployments of important workloads like virtualization and line of business applications to utilize a storage-area network (SAN) to achieve the performance and reliability the workload needs. In this model, the virtual machines running on the physical hosts access virtualized volumes of storage over the network. These volumes are provided by the SAN, which contains a set of physical disks, some hardware, and software that work together to provide performance, reliability, and a level of storage virtualization. If you have a significant investment in a SAN infrastructure, you can rest assured Microsoft is continuing to integrate key technologies into products like Windows Server to keep it the best operating system to use with SANs. Weve introduced Offload Data Transfers (ODX) and virtual fibre channel adapter support to help increase the performance of physical and virtual workloads. We also have TRIM/UNMAP support for thin provisioning and flexible and efficient storage utilization. But there are other options. Historically Windows Server file-based storage was a great option for user data workloads like file servers and SharePoint. But starting with Windows Server 2012, we dramatically improved the performance and reliability of the file server, enabling it to serve as a direct replacement for more traditional storage options. In this model, the Windows Server cluster contains the disks, hardware, and software to provide high-performance, reliable virtualized storage volumes over the network. Storage Spaces, introduced in Windows Server 2012, aggregates the physical disks into these virtual volumes. The performance needed for this solution is delivered by a host of features including improvements in the SMB protocol, such as SMB Direct and SMB Multichannel which make use of multiple network connections and RDMA. Performance is further enhanced with Windows Server 2012 R2 which adds storage tiering capabilities to Storage Spaces. SSDs and spinning disks can both be part of the virtualized volumes, and Windows Server automatically stores the more frequently accessed data on the faster physical storage for dramatically higher total performance. You can read more about the storage performance of Windows Server 2012 in an ESG Lab report. An additional upcoming report includes additional performance validation, such as the table below, which compares 2, 4, 6, and 8 VM SQL workload transactions per second across various storage architectures. Windows Server 2012 also improved the reliability of File and Storage Services clusters. Such clusters no longer suffer the brief downtime previously associated with failover scenarios. Instead, the failure of one node is detected immediately, and service is provided by another cluster node so quickly, the virtualization hosts are not disrupted they retain access to storage. The benefits of such a solution are clear. While its always been possible to achieve high levels of performance and reliability, in the past, this required higher costs and proprietary storage management solutions. As both hardware and software technologies have evolved, these capabilities can be delivered with industry-standard hardware, at lower costs. These solutions are easy to scale out as needs grow as opposed to making bulk investments in proprietary solutions. Your traditional IT administrators can manage familiar file shares with ease You can explore these storage capabilities in your own environment. The Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview is now available for download. Try it out for yourself. View the full article

Today at TechEd Europe 2013 we announced availability of the System Center 2012 R2 and Windows Server 2012 R2 previews. You can download these products right now from the evaluation center. Windows Server 2012 R2 and System Center 2012 R2 provide a wealth of new advancements to help IT organizations build and deliver private and hybrid cloud infrastructure for their businesses. Some of the highlights include: Enabling hybrid cloud Windows Server Hyper-V and System Center enable virtual machine portability across customer, service provider and Windows Azure clouds, while a new System Center Management Pack for Windows Azure enhances cross-cloud management of virtual machine and storage resources. Windows Azure Backup and Hyper-V Recovery Manager provide offsite backup and disaster recovery options. Windows Azure Pack provides Windows Azure technology that enterprises and services providers can run on their Windows Server infrastructure for multi-tenant web and virtual machine cloud services. Built-in software-defined networking Site-to-Site VPN Gateway helps customers seamlessly bridge physical and virtual networks and extend them from their datacenter to service provider datacenters. High performance, cost effective storage Features such as Storage Spaces Tiering, VHDX resizing and de-duplication for virtual desktop infrastructure provide high performance for critical on-premises workloads (like SQL and Hyper-V) using lower-cost, industry-standard hardware. Empowering employee productivity Windows Server Work Folders, Web App Proxy, improvements to Active Directory Federation Services and other technologies will help companies give their employees consistent access to company resources on the device of their choice. This and a number of other announcements are highlighted on the Server and Cloud Blog post, "TechEd Europe Launches with Cloud OS Product Previews, Partner Announcements and Customer Case Studies". Be sure to take a look at it. There is a wealth of information on the products, Brad Andersons keynote and blog post links, press release links and more! For those of you interested in the TechEd sessions for Windows Server, be sure and review the Modern Datacenter track in the catalog. Additional filtering can be applied with the tagging to get right at the Windows Server sessions you might be interested in. There are sessions on virtualization, storage, manage, security, etc. Enjoy! View the full article

We wanted to make sure and remind the Microsoft Partner community that the Hyper-V Surge! program is happening right now. This incentive program is for a limited time so don&rsquot be late. If you are wondering what the &ldquoHyper-V Surge!&rdquo promotion is, here&rsquos a great description: &ldquoPartners who submit eligible claims will receive $500 cash back for every Windows Server Datacenter Edition license that is activated with Hyper-V and $150 cash back for every Windows Server Standard Edition license that is activated with Hyper-V.&rdquo As a Microsoft partner, you have a huge opportunity today to grow revenue by helping SMB customers virtualize their infrastructures. With the Next Steps[/b] Register on the [url="online portal and review the Terms &amp Conditions of the offer. Use the materials provided to communicate the benefits of virtualization to your customers and the cost savings they could realize by virtualizing on Microsoft Hyper-V. Register your qualified deals and submit required documentation. Email Hyper-VSurge@microsoft.com or call (800) 735-5232, for any question on the offer. View the full article

With server virtualization, you are able to decouple a compute instance from the underlying hardware. That enables you to pool compute resources for greater flexibility. However, to truly Defining SDN [/b] Software-defined networking is about enabling software &ndash rather than the hardware &ndash to dynamically manage the network in a way that helps you better meet the requirements of your applications and workloads. This involves: The ability to abstract your apps and workloads from the underlying physical network, which can be accomplished by virtualizing the network. Analogous to server virtualization, you need consistent abstractions that will work with your applications and workloads in a non-disruptive manner. For instance, you would need virtual abstractions for your physical network elements, such as IP addresses, switches, and load balancers. The ability to centrally define and control policies that govern both physical and virtual networks, including traffic flow between them. The ability to implement these network policies in a consistent manner at-scale, even as new workloads are deployed or moved around across virtualized or physical networks. Delivering SDN Microsoft&rsquos approach to SDN is grounded in our experiences designing, building and operating global-scale datacenter networks for services like Windows Azure. We&rsquore adding a thousand customers per day to Windows Azure. Many of these are enterprises who trust that Microsoft will enable them to deliver on-demand capacity to their business while ensuring secure isolation of their infrastructure and data. Secure multitenancy is built into Windows Azure &ndash after all, Windows Azure uses Windows Server 2012 and Hyper-V as the underlying virtualization platform. To enable easy onboarding and workload portability, Windows Azure enables customers to bring their own IP address to our network. Also our global datacenters have to deal with tens of thousands of network changes every day &ndash it would be impossible to manage such scale without software-enabled automation and control. Windows Server and System Center bring our learnings and best practices from operating global scale datacenter networks to you so that you can realize the SDN promise of flexibility, automation and control. Let&rsquos now click-down on the key aspects of Microsoft&rsquos SDN solution to help you assess what this means for your organization. Built-in and production ready Windows Server 2012 delivered Hyper-V Network Virtualization that helps you abstract your apps and workloads from the physical network using virtual networks. Virtual networks provide the necessary multitenant isolation while running on a shared physical network fabric, thereby driving up resource utilization. To ensure that you can carry forward your existing investments, virtual networks can be set up on existing networking gear and are compatible with VLANs. It is also worth noting that virtual networks can scale much better than VLANs for your private and hybrid cloud environments. Check out how [url="EmpireCLS is virtualizing network traffic on top of their physical infrastructure using Hyper-V Network Virtualization. With System Center 2012 SP1 Virtual Machine Manager, you can provision and manage virtual networks at-scale. You can define and control virtual network policies centrally and link them to your apps or workloads. When your workload is deployed or moved, the network configuration adjusts itself automatically. This is important because it removes the need for manual reconfiguration of network hardware, thereby reducing operational complexity while saving your valuable resources for higher-impact work. Virtual Machine Manager also helps you to control traffic flow between virtual networks, including the ability to define guaranteed bandwidth for your critical apps and workloads. To seamlessly help you move your workloads within and across datacenters and clouds, we&rsquore delivering a software gateway in Windows Server 2012 R2 that can be managed by System Center 2012 R2. If you&rsquore in enterprise IT, this gateway will help you easily extend your datacenter boundaries to a service provider or Windows Azure, so that you can deliver hybrid infrastructure on-demand. If you&rsquore a hosting service provider, this means much greater operational efficiency, since this virtual gateway is multitenant-aware and can support multiple customers on a single instance while meeting their throughput and availability needs. Open, extensible and standards-based We want to ensure that customers have the choice of solutions that best support their existing investments and roadmap. We also want to help our partner ecosystem build value-added solutions and extensions on top of Windows Server and System Center. As a testament to our open, extensible and standards-based approach, we have great partner ecosystem momentum for our networking solutions. We&rsquore committed to [url="standards-based management to reduce datacenter complexity. This will help us enable [url="datacenter plug-n-play so that devices &ldquojust work&rdquo. Specifically, we will simplify provisioning and configuration of top-of-rack switches using Windows Server 2012 R2 and System Center 2012 R2. As a great example of ecosystem support, Arista Networks [url="announced full support for the Open Management Infrastructure (OMI) technology across all Arista platforms through the Arista EOS (Extensible Operating System) software. Many customers asked us for the ability to deeply integrate Hyper-V virtual networking into their existing network infrastructure, such as their existing monitoring and security tools. To meet that need, Windows Server 2012 introduced the Hyper-V Extensible Switch, which enables easy extensions of our hypervisor platform. The Hyper-V Extensible Switch also enables partners to build security and manageability extensions. Cisco announced [url="general availability of their Nexus 1000V extension to the Hyper-V Extensible Switch, including integration with System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager. NEC [url="announced System Center 2012 SP1 Virtual Machine Manager based support for their Openflow- based Hyper-V switch extension. Additionally, [url="5NINE and [url="inMon have in-market offerings based on Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V switch extensions. To provide additional flexibility and choice for customers, partners are building gateway appliances to bridge physical and virtual networks. F5 [url="announced an appliance-based gateway that will support Hyper-V Network Virtualization environments, including integration with System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager. Huawei [url="announced Hyper-V Network Virtualization gateway support in their core switches for Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 R2. Finally, Iron Networks [url="announced support for Windows Server 2012 R2 and System Center 2012 R2 in an update to their in-market network gateway appliance. Microsoft is actively participating in industry consortiums like [url="Open Daylight to promote industry standards and customer choice. Hardware and software innovation We believe that both hardware and software innovations are required to make these SDN promises real. This is important for applications that might need direct visibility into the physical network to meet their performance needs, for instance. We continue to work with our network adapter and merchant silicon partners to deliver native hardware performance by ensuring that our platform takes full advantage of their unique hardware capabilities. [url="Mellanox technologies and [url="Emulex announced NVGRE task offload capability in their NICs to optimize network performance. We&rsquore also working with Intel and Broadcom to support Hyper-V Network Virtualization in their chipsets. Next steps Learn more by [url="viewing our TechEd North America session on SDN Check out Microsoft&rsquos perspective on SDN from the Interop [url="keynote panel last month [url="Register to be notified once the Windows Server 2012 R2 and System Center 2012 R2 product evaluation bits become available Over the course of the next few weeks, we&rsquoll be diving much deeper into the Windows Server and System Center networking technologies that can help you eliminate the seams in your network and transform your datacenter. So make sure you&rsquoll check back on this site frequently! As always, we&rsquod really like to hear from you, so please feel free to share your thoughts and comments. [url= View the full article

Organizations face many challenges when it comes to storage. Data volumes are exploding, increasing the cost of storage and the headaches of storage management. The rise of Big Data analytics means more data is being collected and mined than ever before &ndash 90% of the world&rsquos data has been created in the last two years. Enterprise data is expanding at 20% per year or more. But changes in the technologies and products that compose storage solutions are creating new opportunities. And the Microsoft strategy embraces these trends so customers can benefit from them today. First, the level of performance and reliability that storage based on industry-standard hardware and software can achieve in your datacenters is rapidly increasing. Second, customers are moving data to the cloud to experience the flexibility, elasticity, and cost effectiveness the cloud offers. And third, recovery needs and the strengths of the cloud are beginning to come together in the form of data backup/recovery and the orchestration of application recovery. Four years ago, starting with the release of Windows Server 2008 R2 and continued with the release of Windows Server 2012, Microsoft began a journey to fundamentally transform storage and deliver a new range of solutions for customers. Since then, we&rsquove taken steps in each of these three areas. On-premises storage In the past, many customers purchased proprietary storage solutions for the performance and reliability they provide &ndash but at a high cost. Changes to hardware, operating systems, and software are now making high performance, reliable storage possible &ndash with industry standard hardware. Last year, Windows Server 2012 began delivering on our vision of storage transformation with virtualized file-based storage with Storage Spaces and scale-out file servers. At TechEd 2012 we presented View the full article

Over the past 15 months, we&rsquove delivered 3 waves of industry leading datacenter innovations with System Center 2012, Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012 SP1. With these three releases, we have established a solid foundation for our enterprise and service provider customers to cloud-optimize their business. This week at TechEd, we View the full article

About 2 months ago, Brad Anderson kicked off a more regular and in depth cadence of blogging on our Microsoft Server and Cloud Blogs through thedelivering[/i] on our vision with a wave of enterprise products built with this cloud-first approach: Windows Server &amp System Center 2012 R2 and the update to Windows Intune bring cloud-inspired innovation to the enterprise, and enable hybrid scenarios that cannot be duplicated anywhere in the industry." Brad published a new article on his blog this morning that we really think you should go read: If you haven't had a chance to see and hear his keynote you can go see it here, [url="Microsoft TechEd 2012 Brad Anderson Keynote. The Video should be available in about 24-48 hours from the date of this post. We are super excited about Windows Server and System Center 2012 R2. We hope you are too! Thanks, Kevin BearesSenior Community LeadWindows Server and System Center [url= View the full article

Welcome to the start of TechEd North America 2013! So far, we&rsquove kicked off the conference with a [*] - Cloud computing models are changing the technology landscape and providing more opportunity than ever for IT to deliver impact to the business. This Foundational Session will dive into the new Microsoft datacenter technologies and demonstrate how you can be the best provider of technology for your organization. Learn how Windows Server, System Center, Windows Azure, and other new technologies work together to help you provision and manage cloud and datacenter infrastructure, provide business continuity, deliver services, and manage applications. This includes breakthrough capabilities in the areas of storage, networking, virtualization, management, and automation. You will also learn how the latest innovations bring together on-premises approaches and cloud-based technologies to deliver hybrid cloud solutions leveraging your existing resources. (Foundation Session, June 3, 2013 from 11:00AM to 12:00PM) - This Foundational Session will focus on the latest enterprise capabilities and features of Windows to show you why Windows powers the best business tablets, how it empowers BYOD (bring your own device), makes your mobile users productive and connected, and enables you to create great business apps. (Foundation Session, June 3, 2013 from 11:00AM to 12:00PM) - In this lab, learn how to deploy Active Directory Domain Controllers with Windows Server 2012. Deploy domain controllers using the new Server Manager, as well as remote domain controllers using Windows PowerShell. Explore the new Active Directory Management tool and use its PowerShell History Viewer. (Instructor Led lab, June 3, 1:15 &ndash 2:30 pm CT June 5, 1:30 &ndash 2:15 pm CT) &ndash Level 200 Session with Jeff Woolsey (New Session, June 3, 1:15 &ndash 2:30 pm CT) Hyper-V &ndash What&rsquos New in Windows Server 2012 R2 &ndash Level 300 session with Ben Armstrong (New Session, June 3, 4:45 &ndash 6 pm CT) - We begin this session with a quick overview of the Hyper-V over SMB scenario, where we use remote file storage for your live Hyper-V files. Next, we share a few potential continuously available configurations providing specifics around the kind of Hyper-V hosts, networking and storage for each one. We conclude with a look at end-to-end performance and the most common bottlenecks for the Hyper-V over SMB scenario. (Breakout Session, June 3, 4:45 &ndash 6 pm) - Windows Server 2012 provides greater deployment flexibility and richer ongoing management capabilities. We discuss new deployment options for Windows Server 2012 and its roles and features, including the ability to minimize server footprint using Features on Demand. This session also details the flexibility you can enjoy by seamlessly moving between Server Core (recommended), Minimal Server Interface or full GUI installations. We dive deep into Server Manager&rsquos new multi-server remote management capabilities to see how it can centralize management across many servers with a rich unified view, tailored to your environment and the way you want to manage. By understanding the new deployment and management possibilities, you will leave prepared to design your deployments and plan your ongoing management. (Breakout Session, June 3, 4:45 &ndash 6 pm CT) Ask The Expert Picks - Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V (Ask the Experts, June 3, 6:15 &ndash 7:15pm CT) Tuesday, June 4th &ndash Level 300 Session with Gabriel Silva, CJ Williams (New Session, June 4, 8:30 &ndash 9:45 am) - This session gives an overview of the new Windows Azure infrastructure services (IaaS), including support for Windows Server and Linux persistent virtual machines, new networking capabilities for hybrid applications and on-premises/cloud connectivity, and support for applications that consist of PaaS and IaaS roles. Mark explains how IaaS fits into Windows Azure to extend existing server applications to cloud and shows demonstrations of IaaS VM deployment and complex multi-VM applications. (Breakout Session, June 4, 10:15 &ndash 11:30 am CT) - In this demo-driven session we look at how to recover from various Failover Cluster disaster scenarios such as an accidental deletion of the Cluster Name Object, the loss of a shared cluster disk or loss of the quorum resource. We recover an entire Windows Server 2012 Failover Cluster including all of its resources using the Bare Metal Recovery feature of Windows Backup and have a look at how Microsoft System Center 2012 - Data Protection Manager can help with a successful recovery. We also look at how to perform an authoritative restore of the cluster database and recover all cluster resources in case of an accidental deletion. Learn everything you need to prepare for a successful recovery, what lessons we learned after working with many customers on their Windows Server Failover Cluster disaster recovery plans, and how issues were resolved. (Breakout Session, June 4, 10:15 &ndash 11:30 am CT) Wednesday, June 5th - Need to monitor the help state of your applications running on your private cloud? In Windows Server 2012 there are new ways to monitor application health state and have recovery inside of a virtual machine. This session details the new VM Monitoring feature in Windows Server 2012, and discusses Guest Clustering and changes in Windows Server 2012 (such as virtual FC), along with pros, cons and scenarios of when to use each. (Breakout Session, June 5, 5:00 &ndash 6:15 pm) - Hyper-V Replica has seen a lot of positive press and some early customer adoption case studies have been published. The level of interest from customers and the sophistication in the types of questions indicates that the usage is moving from "testing" to "deploy" and we are seeing the interest in deploying it for site-site DR as well as some hosting service providers using it to build their DR-As-A-Service offering. This session covers the types of deployment considerations such as performance, scale, networking when deploying Hyper-V Replica for Disaster Recovery Scenarios. We also demonstrate how an automated solution for disaster recovery can be developed with Hyper-V Replica and Microsoft System Center - Orchestrator. (Breakout Session, June 5, 1:30 &ndash 2:45 pm CT) Hands on Labs - In this lab, you work with the new storage spaces technology in Windows Server 2012. You first create new storage pools and virtual disks, and then work with those virtual disks in both Server Manager and Control Panel. (Hands on Lab) - You are updating your network implementation for core Windows servers. As a standard practice you want to have redundancy in DHCP so you implement DHCP Failover. You then configure IPAM to track IP address allocation of your DHCP servers. Next you implement DNS Sec for DNS resolution. Finally you configure all servers to have at least a two NIC teams to ensure failover in the event of a switch failure. Featured: 1. Deploy DHCP Failover, 2. Deploy IPAM, and create a new DHCP Scope with IPAM, 3. Implement DNSSec, 4. Validate DNS traffic is encrypted, and 5. Validate that single DCHP failover does not affect address acquisition. (Hands on Lab) [url= View the full article

From jambalaya to Po boys, from Windows Server to SQL Server, New Orleans is the place to be next week for TechEd North America 2013. At this premiere event for IT pros and enterprise developers alike, you&rsquoll be able to get a grip on Microsoft products at the Hands on Labs, flock together to join your peers at the Birds of a Feather sessions and lay the groundwork you need to build upon your knowledge and expertise at our Foundational Sessions. In fact, TechEd offers so much technical goodness that we wanted to share some tips on how to get the most out of your trip in advance. Start by attending one of the seven Foundational Sessions, which include [url="four specifically from the Server-Cloud-Tools group, and then check this off our list of [url="11 ways to get the most out of TechEd North America. Of course, all work and no play makes the IT pro a dull boy, so we&rsquove also set out some of the many opportunities to [url="relax and play at the event. Of course, if TechEd isn&rsquot in your plans for next week, you can still [url="stay connected to TechEd 2013 from anywhere. Also be sure to visit us here next week for the latest event and product news direct from the conference floor! [url= View the full article