Recently a great series of 15 introductory videos have been completed and made available up on Microsoft Showcase, all focusing on SQL Azure. (You may recall that I blogged about SQL Azure in my “Cloudy April” series a few weeks ago.)Here are the episodes: Getting Started: SQL Azure at a Glance Getting Started: Basic Architectural … Continue reading So you want to learn SQL Azure?
If you’re living under a rock (or have better things to do) you may have missed the fact that all this month (April 2011) I’ve been creating one post each day having something to do with “the cloud”.“Yeah. I saw that.”And today, as a grand finale, I thought I’d list out titles and link to … Continue reading The Cloudy Summary (“Cloudy April” – Part 30)
System Center Advisor is: “That’s very pretty, Kevin. But what does it all mean?”Here’s the idea. You have servers, infrastructure roles (like Active Directory) and server applications that are configured and running. But are they configured and running properly? “Yes, I think so.”But do you KNOW?“No.”Exactly. And of course Microsoft has tools such as various Best … Continue reading Cloudy Server Configuration Advice (“Cloudy April” – Part 29)
As you may recall from part 16 (Hyper-V Cloud), one key aspect of what we define as “a cloud” has to do with it providing some level of “self-service”. You provide a portal or some other method of requesting and then being granted IT resources. “Yeah, I’d love to let my users do that, Kevin.”Of … Continue reading Serve Yourself (“Cloudy April” – Part 28)
System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 R2 is a powerful virtualization management tool. It does a great job of organizing and managing your virtualization hosts, clusters, virtual machines, and libraries of resources (virtual hard disks, saved machines, machine templates, profiles for hardware and operating systems, etc.) And it does this for the management of … Continue reading What’s new in SCVMM 2012 – (“Cloudy April” – Part 27)
As you may recall from Part 6 (PaaS), Windows Azure is Microsoft’s implementation of Platform-as-a-Service. In a nutshell, it means that you build your application, configure your data, and load it up into “the cloud”, where it can be easily scaled and managed on top of our operating-system-in-the-cloud. And that’s great if you have or … Continue reading The Role of the VM Role Role (“Cloudy April” – Part 26)
Let me ask you something… Are you like many IT Pros I talk to Windows Azure about, who think, “Oh.. that’s cool. But it’s for developers. How am I going to manage it?”“Yeah.. that’s what I’m thinking! It’s like you can read my mind!”Exactly. And I’ve heard it a lot from the IT Pros I’ve … Continue reading Manage Your Windows Azure Cloud (“Cloudy April” – Part 25)
Are you a developer?“No.”Well, perhaps you’re not.. but someone reading this blog is. And they may have seen my articles about Windows Azure or the Windows Azure Appliance and may be wondering how exactly they’re going to get started building applications for it. “Okay.. for the sake of argument, let’s say I am a developer. … Continue reading Building Cloudy Apps (“Cloudy April” – Part 24)
In part 6 of my “Cloudy April” series we talked about the PaaS solution from Microsoft, Windows Azure. And more and more companies are realizing the benefits of building applications that can run on stateless, easily scalable machine instances that are quickly deployed or decommissioned as the demand on their applications changes. Also, the benefit … Continue reading Cloud-in-a-Box (“Cloudy April” – Part 23)
Do you manage an Exchange organization? What about a company SharePoint? “Yeah.. but we’re a couple versions back.” You’re in good company. I hear that a lot. There are some amazing capabilities in the latest versions - Exchange 2010 and SharePoint 2010, but as usual, moving to the next version is not something we always … Continue reading Your Office in the Clouds. 24×7. “365” (“Cloudy April” – Part 22)
Absolutely Full of I.T. 