Tag: Windows Server 2019

Cloud Camp 2018 – It’s A Wrap!

Yesterday, Cloud Camp 2018, run by MicroWarehouse and sponsored by Microsoft Surface and Veeam, ran in the Dublin Convention Centre here in Ireland. 4 tracks, 20 (mostly MVP) sessions, 2 keynotes, and hundreds of satisfied attendees. It was great fun – but we’re all a little tired today Smile

Photo by Gregor Reimling

The message of the day was “change” and that was what I talked about in the opening keynote. In nature, change is inevitable. In IT, you cannot accept change, you’re pushed aside. Business pressure, security & compliance needs, and the speed of cloud make change happen faster than ever. And that’s why we had 20 expert-lead breakout sessions covering Azure IaaS, Azure PaaS, productivity, security, management & governance, Windows Server 2019 and hybrid cloud solutions. The conference ended with renowned Microsoft-watchers Mary Jo Foley and Paul Thurrott discussing what the corporation has been up to and their experiences in covering the Redmond giant.

We had a lot of fun yesterday. Everything ran quite smoothly – credit to John & Glenn in MWH and Hanover Communications.

After the conference, Paul & Mary Jo hosted their Windows Weekly podcast from Dogpatch Labs in the IFSC.

And then we had a small after party in Urban Brewing next door, where one or two beverages might have been consumed until the wee hours of the morning Smile

Picture by Gerald Versluis

Thank you to:

  • MicroWarehouse for running this event – Rory for OK-ing it and the team for promoting it.
  • John and Glenn who ran the logistics and made it so smooth
  • Hanover Communications for the PR work
  • All the breakout speakers who travelled from around Ireland/Europe to share their knowledge and experience
  • Kartik who travelled from India to share what Azure Backup are up to
  • Paul & Mary Jo for travelling from the USA to spend some time with us
  • Alex at TWiT for make sure things worked well with the podcast
  • Everyone who attended and made this event possible!

A Twitter competition with the #CloudCamp18 tag was run – a winner will be selected (after the dust settles) for a shiny new Surface Go. At one point the #CloudCamp18 tag was trending #3 for tweets in Dublin. Now I wonder what will happen with #CloudCamp19?

Windows Server 2019 Did Not RTM – And Why That Matters

I will start this article by saying there is a lot in Windows Server 2019 to like. There are good reasons to want to upgrade to it or deploy it – if I was still in the on-premises server business I would have been downloading the bits as soon as they were shared.

As you probably know Microsoft has changed the way that they develop software. It’s done in sprints and the goal is to produce software and get it into the hands of customers quickly. It doesn’t matter if it’s Azure, Office 365, Windows 10, or Windows Server, the aim is the same.

This release of Windows Server is the very first to go through this process. When Microsoft announced the general availability of Windows Server 2019 on October 2nd, they shared those bits with everyone at the same time. Everyone – including hardware manufacturers. There was no “release to manufacturing” or RTM.

In the past, Microsoft would do something like this:

  1. Microsoft: Finish core development.
  2. Microsoft: RTM – share the bits privately with the manufacturers.
  3. Microsoft: Continue quality work on the bits.
  4. Manufacturing: Test & update drivers, firmware, and software.
  5. Microsoft & Manufacturing: Test & certify hardware, drivers & firmware for the Windows Server Catalog, aka the hardware compatibility list or HCL.
  6. Microsoft: 1-3 months after RTM, announce general availability or GA
  7. Microsoft: Immediately release a quality update via Windows Update

This year, Microsoft has gone straight to step 6 from the above to get the bits out to the application layer as quickly as possible. The OEMs got the bits the same day that you could have. This means that the Windows Server Catalog, the official listing of all certified hardware, is pretty empty. When I looked on the morning of Oct 3, there was not even an entry for Windows Server 2019 on it! Today (October 4th) there are a handful of certified components and 1 server from an OEM I don’t know:

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So my advice is, sure, go ahead and download the bits to see what Microsoft has done. Try out the new pieces and see what they offer. But hold off on production deployments until your hardware appears on this list.

I want to be clear here – I am not bashing anyone. I want you to have a QUALITY Windows Server experience. Too often in the past, I have seen people blame Windows/Hyper-V for issues when the issues were caused by components – maybe some of you remember the year of blue screens that Emulex caused for blade server customers running Windows Server 2012 R2 because of bad handling of VMQ in their converged NICs driver & firmware?

In fact, if you try out the software-defined features, Network Controller and Storage Spaces Direct (S2D), you will be told that you can’t try them out without opening a free support call to get a registry key – which someone will eventually share online. This is because those teams realize how dependent they are on hardware/driver/firmware quality and don’t want you judging their work by the problems of the hardware. The S2D team things the first wave of certified “WSSD” hardware will start arriving in January.

Note: VMware, etc, should be considered as hardware. Don’t go assuming that Windows Server 2019 is certified on it yet – wait for word from your hypervisor’s manufacturer.

Why would Microsoft do this? They want to get their software into application developers hands as quickly as possible. Container images based on Windows Server will be smaller than ever before – but they’re probably on the semi-annual channel so WS2019 doesn’t mean much to them. Really, this is for people running Windows Server in a cloud to get them the best application platform there is. Don’t start the conspiracy theories – if Microsoft had done the above process then none of us would be seeing any bits maybe until January! What they’ve effectively done is accelerate public availability while the Windows Server Catalog gets populated.

Have fun playing with the new bits, but be careful!

Microsoft Ignite 2018–Windows Server 2019 Deep Dive

Speaker: Jeff Woolsey

Azure

Hybrid is a first-thought thing in MS. It’s not bolted on. How do they make Azure one-click away for customers who need to connect.

Azure Pillar #2 is hybrid. Windows Server 2019 pillar #1 is Hybrid.

Admin Center

1.7 million servers under management since it launched a few months ago. All new features in Windows Server are in this free download. MMC development has stopped. It’s also the portal to hybrid. Feedback driven evolution. Partner solutions built in – Fujitsu and DataON for hardware management highlighted. SquaredUp SCOM and Azure monitoring highlighted. RiverBed highlighted too. HPE is in development (looks limited compared to Fujitsu and DataON). Lenovo has something coming too. No mention of Dell/EMC who are stuck in the 1990s Sad smile

Still a place for System Center – bare metal deployment, application monitoring, etc.

Hybrid

The Azure Network Adapter. If you have a machine in an isolated location that needs to connect to an Azure vNet then one click in Admin Center and it creates a point-to-site VPN connection to an existing gateway. ASR is a one-click replication. Azure Backup now can be enabled on WS2012+ without installing MARS via Admin Center. W2008 R2 still requires a manual MARS installation. Very simplified deployment for file/folder and system state backup from the OS.

Azure Update Management

Extending Windows Update management from Azure to on-premises. This was a very complex deployment in the past. But through Admin Center it’s a short wizard.

Storage Replica TO Azure

This is in preview. You create a VM in Azure via Admin center, join it to a domain, etc via Admin Center. That’s the target. Then replication magically happens – didn’t see the required networking piece here so it might be a bit of an over-simplification.

Hyper-Converged Infrastructure

Hyper-converged is a play in server hardware modernisation – performance, security, support, etc. A video from Lenovo on their XClarity server management solution, that also integrtes into Admin Center – in preview today.

Storage Class Memory

Flash first came by USB. Then it moved to SAS/SATA. Then to PCI. Then NVMe to make it faster. Moving closer to the processor to reduce latency and increase performance. Storage Class Memory is next to the processor in a DIMM socket. It can be configured to look like storage, memory, or a mix of both. Can be an “insanely high speed cache”.

Demo on HCI by Cosmos Darwin. Previous demo in 2016 was 6.69million IOPS from 16 servers. This year they tested with Intel hardware (Optane) to get more performance. They deployed 12 nodes running with just these drive (2 per node) s for caching and NVMe for capacity. Also used future version Xeons. 100 TB of usable storage with free PCI slots and drive bays. The caching devices are striped at the memory controller level. Each NVMe is 8 TB each. They fire up VMs on one node and hit 1 million IOPS. Turn on node 2 and hit 2 million IOPS. Then they power up all 12 nodes VMs and hit 13 million IOPS from 24 U of servers. The growth was linear.

System Insights

  • Via Admin Center
  • Predictive capabilities for Windows Server 2019 locally on the server.
  • Predictive analytics
  • In the charts, it shows historical metrics, and projects how this will continue into the future.
  • Suggested actions, e.g. Extend volume Azure File Sync, Disk cleanup
  • Transform reactive emergencies into proactive management experiences.

Storage Migration

Customers find moving data to be hard. Means that old OS versions are hanging around. Need data to move, shares to move, folder/share ACLs, EFS, IP address, computer naming, etc must be possible to move. Storage Migration Service allows you to move data to Azure or file servers. It has support back to W2003 and up to WS2019 as a source. It inventories the source server. It then copies the data over to target server. Cutover hides the source server, freezes it, and transfers names/addresses to the new server so it becomes the active file server. You can export a CSV file with a log of every file transfer transaction with all the file attributes.

Azure File Sync

Modernize the file server to give it virtually bottomless capacity in Azure. 100 TiB per share support.

Storage

  • Admin center integratin
  • Deduplication with ReFS
  • Mirror accelerated parity
  • Storage class memory support
  • Cluster sets: a cluster of clusters with hundreds of nodes in a single unified namespace
  • Industry leading scale

Cosmos Darwin comes back out. Storage Spaces Direct isn’t just for VMs. Another scenario is a backup target where customers want larger capacity. Now it supports 4 PB of raw storage in a single cluster. With cluster sets, that increases. 4 PB is wikipedia in every language with the complete edit history 50 times. Demo of QCT servers with 527 drives – 72 dives per physical server. 3.64 PB of raw capacity. QCT is selling this today. They’ve benchmarked with Veeam, doing 25 GB/s of sustained data writes per hour.

Scales are up. 400 TB per server, 64 volumes per cluster.

Software-Defined Networking

  • Virtual network peering
  • Encrypted subnets
  • Egress bandwidth metering
  • IPv6 support, single and dual stack
  • Fabric ACLs, SDN ACL logging
  • Gateway performance improvements

Management is coming. Windows Admin Center management for Software-defined networking. Add network Controller to Admin Center. Then add subnets. SDN for mere mortals. SDN monitoring is coming to Admin Center too.

Security

Shielded VMs.

Password Protection with Windows Server AD

Central risk: Passwords. Azure AD solved this issue in Premium. This has been projected down into ADDS. You get the same password checking on-prem that you can in the cloud. A free download that can be installed on WS2012 R2 domain controllers and later. Password enforcement will be the same in the cloud as in on-prem.  Can be deployed in audit or enforcement modes. The agent on the DC talks to a proxy service and the proxy talks to the cloud. You register the proxy with the cloud and then install the agent on DCs. And then cloud-based enforcement starts to work. You can define your own weak password lists.

Features on Demand

  • Server Core numbers are allegedly increasing because of Admin Center.
  • What if I have to go to the VM and I need local tools.
  • What it s/w installer won’t install on Server Core?
  • Features on Demand is Server Core with an additional ISO of around 340 MB.
  • It’s to support those apps that won’t install.
  • It also adds local debugging and tools.
  • When installed you get MMC.EXE, Event Viewer, File Explorer, Device Manager, Resource Monitor, Performance Monitor, PowerSehll ISE, Faulover Cluster Manager.
  • Internet Explorer is in a special ISO by itself.

Exchange Server 2019 supports Core out of the box. SQL Server supports Core already.

Best practices:

  1. Start with Windows Server Core with Admin Center – best way for server hygene
  2. Add FOD – use it – remove it.
  3. Finally use Windows Server with Full Desktop

Looking Forward

  • A new release of Windows Server and Admin Center every 2 weeks for Insiders.
  • There is the semi-annual channel for application innovation twice per year.
  • The next LTSC will be out in 2-3 years time.

Call For Speakers – Cloud Camp, October 17th

My employers, MicroWarehouse, are running a community event in the Dublin Convention Centre on October 17th. Cloud Camp is a tech event, with four tracks covering:

  • Azure Infrastructure: Virtual machines, storage, networking, etc
  • Azure Platform: Web Apps, Containers, etc
  • Productivity & Security: Office 365, EMS, etc
  • Windows Server 2019 & Hybrid: Windows Admin Center, virtualization, clustering, storage, networking, private cloud, etc

UPDATE: We have enough submissions on Office, Intune, and M365 overviews. We need more on Azure IaaS and Azure PaaS. But we really want sessions on Windows Admin Center, Windows Server 2019, and data protection using Azure Information Protection & Client App Security.

9563009141_9152529403_z

Samuel Beckett bridge and Dublin Convention Center – Daniel Dudek, https://www.flickr.com/photos/dansapples/9563009141

We’re looking for speakers from around Europe to fill the slots. Expenses are being covered:

  • Flights
  • 2 nights accommodation – the nights before and after the event
  • Tickets to the event

If you’re interested in speaking then please submit your bio and session proposal(s) here.

Feedback Required By MS – Storage Replica in WS2019 STANDARD

Microsoft is planning to add Storage Replica into the Standard Edition of Windows Server 2019 (WS2019). In case you weren’t paying attention, Windows Server 2016 (WS2016) only has this feature in the Datacenter edition – a large number of us campaigned to get that changed. I personally wrecked the head of Ned Pyle (@NerdPyle) who, when he isn’t tweeting gifs, is a Principal Program Manager in the Microsoft Windows Server High Availability and Storage group – he’s one of the people responsible for the SR feature and he’s the guy who presents it at conferences such as Ignite.

What is SR? It’s volume based replication in Windows Server Failover Clustering. The main idea what to enable replication of LUNs when companies couldn’t afford SAN replication licensing. Some SAN vendors charge a fortune to enable LUN replication for disaster recovery and SR is a solution for this.

A by product of SR is a scenario for smaller businesses. With the death of cluster-in-a-box (manufacturers are focused on larger S2D customers) the small-medium business is left looking for a new way to build a Hyper-V cluster. You can do 2-node S2D clusters but they have single points of failure (4 nodes are required to get over this) and require at least 10 GBE networking. If you use SR, you can create an active/passive 2-node Hyper-V cluster using just internal RAID storage in your Hyper-V hosts. It’s a simpler solution … but it requires Datacenter Edition today, and in the SME & branch office scenario, Datacenter only makes financial sense when there are 13+ VMs per host.

Ned listened to the feedback. I think he had our backs Smile and understood where we were coming from. So SR has been added to WS2019 Standard in the preview program. Microsoft wants telemetry (people to use it) and to give feedback – there’s a survey here. SR in Standard will be limited. Today, those limits are:

  • SR replicates a single volume instead of an unlimited number of volumes.
  • Servers can have one partnership instead of an unlimited number of partners.
  • Volume size limited to 2 TB instead of an unlimited size.

Microsoft really wants feedback on those limitations. If you think those limitations are too low, then TALK NOW. Don’t wait for GA when it is too late. Don’t be the idiot at some event who gives out shite when nothing can be done. ACT NOW.

If you cannot get the hint, complete the survey!

Online Windows Server Mini-Conference – June 26th

Microsoft wants to remind you that they have this product called Windows Server, and that it has a Windows Server 2016 release, a cool new administration console, and a future (Windows Server 2019). In order to do that, Microsoft will be hosting an online conference on June 26th with some of the big names behind the creation of Windows Server called the Windows Server Summit.

This event will have a keynote featuring Erin Chapple, Director of Program Management, Cloud + AI (which includes Windows Server). Then the event will break out into a number of tracks with multiple sessions each, covering things like:

  • Hybrid scenarios with Azure
  • Security
  • Hyper-converged infrastructure (Storage Spaces Direct/S2D)
  • Application platform (containers on Windows Server)

The event, on June 26th, starts at 5pm UK/Irish time and runs for 4 hours (12:00 EST). Don’t worry if this time doesn’t suit; the sessions will be available to stream afterwards. Those who tune in live will also have the opportunity to participate in Q&A.

Q&A Webinar with Ben Armstrong (Microsoft/Hyper-V)

Altaro are hosting an “AMA” webinar where you will get the chance to ask your burning questions to Ben Armstrong (previously known as The Virtual PC Guy), Principal Program Manager at Microsoft, and one of the brains behind Hyper-V … and thus the platform of Azure!

if you’ve ever wondered where some of my uber-detailed posts on odd little hyper-V details came from … it was from Ben. He’s got tonnes of stories, lots of info, and this shouldn’t be missed if you have the chance to tune in.

Video–Azure File Sync

I’ve produced and shared a short video (12:33 minutes) to explain what Azure File Sync is, what it will do for you, and there’s a quick demo at the end. If you want to:

  • Synchronise file shares between offices
  • Fix problems with full file servers by using tiered storage in the cloud
  • Use online backup
  • Get a DR solution for file servers, e.g. small business or branch office

… then Azure File Sync is for you!

Was This Post Useful?

If you found this information useful, then imagine what 2 days of training might mean to you. I’m delivering a 2-day course in Amsterdam on April 19-20, teaching newbies and experienced Azure admins about Azure Infrastructure. There’ll be lots of in-depth information, covering the foundations, best practices, troubleshooting, and advanced configurations. You can learn more here.

Windows Server 2019 Announced for H2 2018

Last night, Microsoft announced that Windows Server 2019 would be released, generally available, in the second half of 2018. I suspect that the big bash will be Ignite in Orlando at the end of September, possibly with a release that week, but maybe in October – that’s been the pattern lately.

LTSC

Microsoft is referring to WS2019 as a “long term servicing channel release”. When Microsoft started the semi-annual channel, a Server Core build of Windows Server released every 6 months to Software Assurance customers that opt into the program, they promised that the normal builds would continue every 3 years. These LTSC releases would be approximately the sum of the previous semi-annual channel releases plus whatever new stuff they cooked up before the launch.

First, let’s kill some myths that I know are being spread by “someone I know that’s connected to Microsoft” … it’s always “someone I know” that is “connected to Microsoft” and it’s always BS:

  • The GUI is not dead. The semi-annual channel release is Server Core, but Nano is containers only since last year, and the GUI is an essential element of the LTSC.
  • This is not the last LTSC release. Microsoft views (and recommends) LTSC for non-cloud-optimised application workloads such as SQL Server.
  • No – Windows Server is not dead. Yes, Azure plays a huge role in the future, but Azure Stack and Azure are both powered by Windows, and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of companies still are powered by Windows Server.

Let’s talk features now …

I’m not sure what’s NDA and what is not, so I’m going to stick with what Microsoft has publicly discussed. Sorry!

Project Honolulu

For those of you who don’t keep up with the tech news (that’s most IT people), then Project Honolulu is a huge effort by MS to replace the Remote Server Administration Toolkit (RSAT) that you might know as “Administrative Tools” on Windows Server or on an admin PC. These ancient tools were built on MMC.EXE, which was deprecated with the release of W2008!

Honolulu is a whole new toolset built on HTML5 for today and the future. It’s not finished – being built with cloud practices, it never will be – but but’s getting there!

Hybrid Scenarios

Don’t share this secret with anyone … Microsoft wants more people to use Azure. Shh!

Some of the features we (at work) see people adopt first in the cloud are the hybrid services, such as Azure Backup (cloud or hybrid cloud backup), Azure Site Recovery (disaster recovery), and soon I think Azure File Sync (seamless tiered storage for file servers) will be a hot item. Microsoft wants it to be easier for customers to use these services, so they will be baked into Project Honolulu. I think that’s a good idea, but I hope it’s not a repeat of what was done with WS2016 Essentials.

ASR needs more than just “replicate me to the cloud” enabled on the server; that’s the easy part of the deployment that I teach in the first couple of hours in a 2-day ASR class. The real magic is building a DR site, knowing what can be replicated and what cannot (see domain controllers & USN rollback, clustered/replicating databases & getting fired), orchestration, automation, and how to access things after a failover.

Backup is pretty easy, especially if it’s just MARS. I’d like MARS to add backup-to-local storage so it could completely replace Windows Server Backup. For companies with Hyper-V, there’s more to be done with Azure Backup Server (MABS) than just download an installer.

Azure File Sync also requires some thought and planning, but if they can come up with some magic, I’m all for it!

Security

In Hyper-V:

  • Linux will be supported with Shielded VMs.
  • VMConnect supported is being added to Shielded VMs for support reasons – it’s hard to fix a VM if you cannot log into it via “console” access.
  • Encrypted Network Segments can be turned on with a “flip of a switch” for secure comms – that could be interesting in Azure!

Windows Defender ATP (Advanced Threat Protection) is a Windows 10 Enterprise feature that’s coming to WS2019 to help stop zero-day threats.

DevOps

The big bet on Containers continues:

  • The Server Core base image will be reduced from 5GB by (they hope) 72% to speed up deployment time of new instances/apps.
  • Kubernetes orchestration will be natively supported – the container orchestrator that orginated in Google appears to be the industry winner versus Docker and Mesos.

In the heterogeneous world, Linux admins will be getting Windows Subsystem on Linux (WSL) for a unified scripting/admin experience.

Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI)

Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) has been improved and more changes will be coming to mature the platform in WS2019. In case you don’t know, S2D is a way to use local (internal) disks in 2+ (preferably 4+) Hyper-V hosts across a high speed network (virtual SAS bus) to create a single cluster with fault tolerance at the storage and server levels. By using internal disks, they can use cheaper SATA disks, as well as new flash formats don’t natively don’t support sharing, such as NVME.

The platform is maturing in WS2019, and Project Honolulu will add a new day-to-day management UI for S2D that is natively lacking in WS2016.

The Pricing

As usual, I will not be answering any licensing/pricing questions. Talk to the people you pay to answer those questions, i.e. the reseller or distributor that you buy from.

OK; let’s get to the messy stuff. Nothing has been announced other than:

It is highly likely we will increase pricing for Windows Server Client Access Licensing (CAL). We will provide more details when available.

So it appears that User CALs will increase in pricing. That is probably good news for anyone licensing Windows Server via processor (don’t confuse this with Core licensing).

When you acquire Windows Server through volume licensing, you pay for every pair of cores in a server (with a minimum of 16, which matched the pricing of WS2012 R2), PLUS you buy User CALs for every user authenticating against the server(s).

When you acquire Windows Server via Azure or through a hosting/leasing (SPLA) program, you pay for Windows Server based only on how many cores that the machine has. For example, when I run an Azure virtual machine with Windows Server, the per-minute cost of the VM includes the cost of Windows Server, and I do not need any Windows Server CALs to use it (RDS is a different matter).

If CALs are going up in price, then it’s probably good news for SPLA (hosting/leasing) resellers (hosting companies) and Azure where Server CALs are not a factor.

The Bits

So you want to play with WS2019? The first preview build (17623) is available as of last night through the Windows Server Insider Preview program. Anyone can sign up.

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Would You Like To Learn About Azure Infrastructure?

If you found this information useful, then imagine what 2 days of training might mean to you. I’m delivering a 2-day course in Amsterdam on April 19-20, teaching newbies and experienced Azure admins about Azure Infrastructure. There’ll be lots of in-depth information, covering the foundations, best practices, troubleshooting, and advanced configurations. You can learn more here.