Microsoft News – 17 November 2014

I’ve had a crazy few weeks with TechEd Europe 2014, followed by the MVP Summit, followed by a week of events and catchup at work. Today, I’ve finally gotten to go through my news feeds. There is a LOT of Azure stuff from TEE14.

Hyper-V

• What’s New in Windows Server vNext Hyper-V: A post by me on Petri.com
• Cluster Shared Volume Failure Handling: How CSV handles storage failures and how it hides failures from applications.
• Updating Integration Components over Windows Update: Microsoft announced that they would be releasing updated integration components over Windows Update from now on.
• Windows 10 Technical Preview: Hot Add / Remove of Network Adapter: You can now add and remove network adapters from running Generation 2 virtual machines.

Windows Server

• vNext Failover Clustering in Windows Server Technical Preview: A video with clustering master, Elden Christensen.
• Storage Quality of Service Guide Released for Windows Server Technical Preview: A step-by-step guide.
• RemoteFX vGPU Updates in Windows Server Next: Capabilities that improve the experience for end users in a Windows VDI environment for ‘Engineering/Designer’ application workloads that require OpenGL API support and all graphics applications (DX and OpenGL) that require higher video memory.

System Center

• Update Rollup 4 for System Center 2012 R2: Wait 1 month. Trust me.
• Update Rollup 8 for System Center 2012 Service Pack 1: See previous. Trust me.

Windows Client

• Windows 10 – Making Deployment Easier: Using an in-place upgrade instead of the traditional wipe-and-load approach that organizations have historically used to deploy new Windows versions. This upgrade process is designed to preserve the apps, data, and configuration from the existing Windows installation, taking care to put things back the way they need to be after Windows 10 has been installed on the system. And support for traditional deployment tools.
• Windows 10 – Manageability Choices: Ensuring that Windows works better when using Active Directory and Azure Active Directory together. When connecting the two, users can automatically be signed-in to cloud-based services like Office 365, Microsoft Intune, and the Windows Store, even when logging in to their machine using Active Directory accounts. For users, this will mean no longer needing to remember additional user IDs or passwords.

Azure

• New Marketplace, Network Improvements, New Batch Service, Automation Service, more: TechEd announcement by Scott Guthrie
• SAN Replication based Enterprise Grade Disaster Recovery with ASR and System Center: Enterprises that seek to leverage the snapshot and replication capabilities of their Storage Area Network (SAN) Arrays to enable high performance synchronous and asynchronous replication between their on-premises private clouds can now orchestrate end-to-end storage array-based replication and disaster recovery with ASR and System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM).

ASR SAN replication topology

• Announcing the Azure Marketplace: Offers Microsoft Azure Certified and open-source community virtual machine images including SAP, Cloudera, DataStax, CommVault, Veeam, Trend Micro, and Core OS as well as virtual machine extensions including McAfee and Octopus Deploy.
• Migrate your Websites to Azure in just a Few Clicks: A new tool from MSFT. See this Getting Started Guide & this video.
• Windows Docker Client Demo Highlights Linux Containers on Azure: Docker, CoreOS, and Linux Documentation on Azure.
• New Networking features and partnerships for Enterprise scenarios: A whole bunch of announcements: ExpressRoute enhancements include new strategic partnerships, a Meet-Me location in Australia, multi-site ExpressRoute for better disaster recovery, multiple subscriptions sharing the same ExpressRoute circuit, and support for 4,000 routes. We are improving overall security with Network Security Groups for easier subnet isolation in multi-tier topologies, Site to Site Forced Tunneling which sends network traffic back to on-premises for policy validation to meet compliance requirements, and VPN support for Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS). A new high-performance gateway, multiple virtual NICs in a VM, access to VPN operations logs, nested Traffic Manager policies and Azure load balancer source IP affinity demonstrate our commitment to continually enhance Azure networking capabilities.
• New – Azure Traffic Manager Nested Profiles: his feature enables you to create more flexible and powerful load-balancing and failover schemes to support the needs of larger, more complex deployments. Note you can also do hybrid site balancing now.
• Azure Load Balancer new distribution mode: Adding a new distribution mode called Source IP Affinity (also known as session affinity or client IP affinity).
• Azure Site Recovery – Announcing Windows Azure Pack integration and PowerShell Support: As part of update roll up of Windows Azure Pack UR 4.0, now cloud service providers will be able to offer Windows Azure Pack Plan or ADDONS with ASR capabilities. You now have the ASR PowerShell cmdlets for recovery solution between two on-premise hyper-V datacenters available as part of Azure PowerShell 0.8.10 release.
• Using VNET integration and Hybrid connections with Azure Websites: This will outline the example of getting WordPress running on Azure Websites with a remote MySQL database and will be covered in two parts.
• Microsoft Antimalware for Azure Cloud Services and Virtual Machines: Real time protection from the latest threats, on-demand scheduled scanning, and collection of antimalware events to your storage account via Azure Diagnostics at no additional charge.
• Introducing PowerShell support for Azure Site Recovery: PowerShell support for recovery between two Hyper-V sites managed by Azure Site Recovery.
• Red Teaming – Using Cutting-Edge Threat Simulation to Harden the Microsoft Enterprise Cloud: How Microsoft performs penetration tests on Azure and Office 365.
• Deploying Your Own Private Docker Registry on Azure: In order to ship your containerized applications to the cloud, you use Docker tools to construct a Docker container image. Although the Docker Hub is a paid service for storing private images, Docker respects developers’ needs and provides the open source “Docker Registry” software used to build the Docker Hub. It is designed to store and provide container images, but the best part about it is that you can host your own private registry with it.
• Offering Managed DR for IaaS Workloads with ASR and Azure Pack: Service Providers can now offer Managed DR as a premium service to their customers on top of IaaS workloads.
• Deploy to Azure Button for Azure Websites: Deploying to Azure Websites from a Git repository just got a little easier with the Deploy to Azure Button.
• Azure Websites Authentication / Authorization: Azure Websites Authentication / Authorization allows you to quickly and easily restrict access to your websites running on Azure Websites by leveraging Azure Active Directory.
• Encrypting Azure Virtual Machines with CloudLink SecureVM: CloudLink SecureVM Agent which enables for disk encryption for your Azure Virtual Machines.
• AzCopy – Announcing General Availability of AzCopy 3.0 plus preview release of AzCopy 4.0 with Table and File support
• Create a VM with multiple NICs in Azure: Done using updated version of Azure PowerShell.
• Monitoring Azure Site Recovery: The monitoring capabilities of Azure Site Recovery.
• Microsoft announces Exchange Support for Azure VM as a Witness Server: As of January 1, 2015, Microsoft will support using an Azure laaS file server VM as a witness server for an on-premises DAG .

Office 365

• Enterprise Mobility TechEd Announcements: Lots of stuff.
• Configuring AD FS Servers in an Internal Load-Balanced Set in Azure for Office365 Single Sign-On: Third post in a series on how to enable hybrid single using-in solution using a hybrid Azure deployment.
• Office 365 Business Users Getting New ‘Clutter’ E-Mail Feature: Don’t know if I’d trust this.
• Microsoft To Rename Lync as ‘Skype for Business’ Next Year:

Intune

• New Microsoft Intune capabilities coming this week: The Intune team will be rolling out a service update between November 17, 2014 and November 19, 2014 that introduces new capabilities to Intune standalone (cloud only).

Operational Insights

• Microsoft Releases Azure Operational Insights Preview: Starting with a limited free option. The preview is available in the Azure U.S. East region.

Licensing

• Microsoft to make per-user Windows licensing available to enterprise customers: A popular move.