Category - interviews

The Ops Team #006 – “The Pelican Brief”

December 10, 2015
Rick
CH9 Videos, interviews, Microsoft

The Ops Team is a new weekly show where 4 Technical Evangelists specializing in IT Operations get together to give you the deets on their 4 areas of expertise: Microsoft Azure/Cloud, On-premises datacenter technologies, Enterprise Mobility / Windows and DevOps.

This week on The Ops Team, Rick, Matt and Simon make it into the studio, whilst ‘the new guy’, Oguz, gets his timezones mixed up and misses the recording slot! By the power of editing, I catch up with him in his office later, to bring you the latest in the world of DevOps.

In the news, Rick brings you up to speed on some the updates on the Azure Portal, along with new services such as the Azure Backup Server and the Container Services. Oguz gives us more depth on the Azure Container Service, as well as the gossip on Visual Studio Team Services. Matt gives us the lowdown on more innovation in OMS, along with his Hyper-V challenges over the last week, and finally, Simon gives us the news on some new Intune capabilities, along with some Azure AD news.

As is becoming customary on The Ops Team, aside from still having a dysfunctional dongle, this week’s incorrectly configured AV component was Matt’s microphone, only noticed after the shoot! Doh!

Here’s all the links and info on the topics we covered, along with the time stamps to jump to specific points in the video.

Global Cloud Datacenters with Rick Claus

DevOps with Oguz Pastirmaci

On-Premises Systems with Matt McSpirit

Enterprise Mobile/Gadgets with Simon May

What do you think? Send us an email, comment below in the comments area on Channel 9, or tweet us at @TheOpsTeam.





Microsoft Mechanics: Hybrid Infrastructure Automation with Azure Resource Manager Templates

November 19, 2015
Rick
Azure, CH9 Videos, interviews, Microsoft

Here’s a new video series I am participating in with the larger Microsoft engine: Microsoft Mechanics… I was on deck to work with Corey Sanders on explaining Azure Resource Manager and ARM templates.  Turned out great – have a look and SUBSCRIBE to the YouTube channel to keep up to date as new episodes kick out.

If you’ve ever had to set up a test or production environment for something like SharePoint, you know there are several pieces to set up – like Active Directory, SQL for your backend data, and then your SharePoint servers. While it’s possible to automate this with advanced scripting or level 400 task sequencer skills, imagine just choosing a template or manifest file and clicking go to spin up a dozen or so VMs all wired together and talking to each other. That is effectively what Azure Resource Manager templates do and what Corey Sanders lead engineer for Azure compute, demonstrates on the show. He also steps back to illustrate how they work as a unified resource automation model for both Microsoft Azure Cloud resources and on premises with the upcoming Azure Stack.

For more information and next steps, check out:

Read: Using Azure PowerShell with Azure Resource Manager – https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/doc…

Learn: Advanced PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC) – https://mva.microsoft.com/en-us/train…

and Custom Resources or review the fundamentals here: Getting Started with PowerShell 3.0 – https://mva.microsoft.com/en-US/train…

Try: Azure Resource Manager on Microsoft Azure – https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pri…

Can’t make it to Microsoft Ignite? Here’s the details on the LiveStream

April 29, 2015
Rick
Azure, Community, Events, interviews, Microsoft

On a recent countdown show, we talked about the general format of the Live Stream. I thought it deserved a little more detail and highlights on the schedule.  Since I’m not presenting at Microsoft Ignite this year – my way of contributing during the event centers around this livestream.  I’ve been working overtime with my team to get the right people into the interview chair.

LiveStream

First off: WHERE do you catch it? simple. http://ignite.microsoft.com

Need a reminder? Here’s an ICS calendar reminder for ya.

WHAT is going on? Well – since the conference is just around the corner, I can share MOST of the details of what will be in the livestream. Some things I still can’t share, others I can’t give you too much granularity as of yet. Sorry – that’s just the way it is for now. 😉

Day 1 – May 4th.

This is the highly orchestrated day where we’re trying to hit new audiences with a new level of production Microsoft livestream broadcasts have seen before.  A whole lot of moving parts (some are still moving) in order to bring you the following:

  • Keynote Pre-Show
  • Mainstage keynote
  • Post-Keynote discussion
  • CH9 – Inside Identity and Deployment for Windows 10
  • “hot room” session
  • CH9 – Jeff Woolsey on the Microsoft Datacenter Platform vNext
  • “hot room” session
  • CH9 – View from the Azure CTO, Mark Russinovich
  • Keynote Pre-show
  • Showcase Keynote
  • Post-Keynote discussion and Wrap

Day 2 – May 5th

We’re hitting the Channel 9 Stage for the remainder of the conference. There will be some cool “recaps” that are produced / pre-recorded from the day before and a couple of folks you might know setting the stage and kicking things off with a cuppa coffee.

  • Daily Welcome / morning show
  • “hot room” session
  • CH9 – Corey Sanders and an update on Azure IaaS
  • “hot room” session
  • CH9 – The Endpoint Zone LIVE with Brad Anderson
  • CH9 – Containers on Windows, Azure and beyond with Taylor Brown
  • CH9 – Sharing Protected Information
  • “hot room” session
  • CH9 – SQL unplugged with Scott Klein
  • “hot room” session
  • CH9 – All Things DevOps with Donovan Brown
  • “hot room” session

Day 3 – May 6th

  • Daily Welcome / morning show
  • “hot room” session
  • CH9 – Microsoft’s Security and Assurance strategy in vNext with Anders Vinberg
  • “hot room” session
  • CH9 – <redacted – sorry>
  • CH9 – <redacted – sorry>
  • CH9 – Lead Architect’s vision on Server vNext with Jeffrey Snover
  • “hot room” session
  • CH9 – Microsoft Azure technology introspective with Mark Russinovich
  • “hot room” session
  • CH9 – Microsoft Intune and Mobile Application Management
  • “hot room” session

Day 4 – May 7th

  • Daily Welcome / morning show
  • “hot room” session
  • CH9 – Microsoft’s Storage Strategy & Capabilities in vNext
  • “hot room” session
  • CH9 – Microsoft’s Networking Strategy & Capabilities in vNext
  • CH9 – The Patch and Switch Show LIVE
  • “hot room” session
  • CH9 – Identity in Azure Active Directory
  • “hot room” session
  • CH9 – Linux and Open Source in Azure
  • “hot room” session
  • Microsoft Ignite recap

Day 5 – May 8th

  • Daily Welcome /Recap
  • “hot room” sessions

New Azure Planned Maintenance logs and Premium Storage details

February 19, 2015
Rick
Azure, CH9 Videos, interviews, Microsoft

A while back I chatted with Drew McDaniel about G-Series machines on Azure and he teased about Premium Storage (SSD based) availability in Azure. Well – that was enough to pique my interest, so I invited him back to talk about it in more detail.  He talks about Premium Storage and some more details on our “Scale Up” G-Series machines on this episode of The Edge Show.

But Wait – there’s more!

Kenaz Kwa comes along and gives us the details on the new availability of Log data around Planned Maintenance in Azure.  In the past – you knew your machines might have been rebooted due to scheduled maintenance, but not much more details. Now you can query and have access to detailed logs about the maintenance and restart details on each of your VMs – all via PowerShell. More info is always good when it comes to planned downtime.

Check out the full details in the video below:

Useful Links:

Azure News:

Connect with the Edge Team:




Facebook

High Level Docker Overview – for IT Pros

December 3, 2014
Rick
Azure, Azure 4 ServerHuggers, Helpful Tech, interviews

A while back I shot a quick video with Madhan Arumugam and Ross Gardler talking about what this containerization technology is all about. Looking for information to understand the concepts and options yourself? Have a look at this High Level explanation / whiteboarding of container technologies and their advantages over individual processes and traditional IaaS Virtual Machines.

Madhan Arumugam, Principal Program Manager with the Azure compute team

Ross Gardler, Sr. Technical Evangelist with Microsoft OpenTech

Azure IaaS Week for IT Pros: Day 4 Speaker Lineup

November 28, 2014
Rick
Azure, Events, interviews, Microsoft

I talked about this event I’ve been wrangling speakers for a while back, so I thought I’d put together a quick little post brokenhh down by DAY with all the details about speakers and their sessions in one spot. I’ve been capturing these quick intros for each speaker with details about their session and also some fun tidbits about them outside of work. This is the ONE STOP SHOP for day FOUR – a comprehensive list of topics and Speaker Bios you can review before the big event on December 1st through the 4th at http://channel9.msdn.com.

There are four 1 hour sessions per day, each wrapped around a theme. Todays theme is:

Day 4:  Optimize Windows Workload Architecture and Administration Capabilities Within Azure

Identity which of your applications and services are critical in your on-premises environment. Leverage your investment in Active Directory (and other directories) and setup a synchronization with Azure Active Directory to simplify authentication in this Cloud world. You will learn what capabilities each offering has as well as how to configure them to be used for single sign on with over 2000+ Software-As-A-Service offerings like Office365, Salesforce, DropBox enterprise and more.

As an IT Professional managing applications that are currently on premises, you understand what is involved in maintaining all the underpinnings to the IIS Application. What if you could take those applications and move them to a Platform as a Service offering like Azure Websites, where you no longer need to worry about the underlying infrastructure hosting platform, allowing you to focus on what is important to you – your applications. The first step is understanding Azure Websites. Learn how to work with your development team to target a PaaS offering like Azure Websites in order to get ease of scale, load balancing, rapid deployment, staging sites and more

Need a complementary database technology to go along with those PaaS solutions? Want to get some geo-diversified protection that isn’t going to break the bank? With the recent announcements around SQL Azure, more and more organizations are looking at how to leverage these capabilities.

Now that SharePoint is a supported workload on Azure IaaS, the next step is determining the design considerations and limitations that you need to be aware of before deploying your next SharePoint solution. This session has you covered. Learn from the team who has created the detailed spec on how to deploy SharePoint in Azure IaaS and also see how MSIT is doing it for our internal customers.

It is going to be an action packed day!

Don’t forget to register!!!!

Register Now Button

Register through Microsoft Virtual Academy to receive reminder mails for this event and to obtain details for receiving a voucher for 50 percent off the exam price if taken by January 31st. Join the conversation on Twitter using #LevelUpAzure.

Azure IaaS Week for IT Pros: Day 3 Speaker Lineup

November 25, 2014
Rick
Azure, Events, interviews, Microsoft

I talked about this event I’ve been wrangling speakers for a while back, so I thought I’d put together a quick little post broken down by DAY with all the details about speakers and their sessions in one spot. I’ve been capturing these quick intros for each speaker with details about their session and also some fun tidbits about them outside of work. This is the ONE STOP SHOP for day THREE – a comprehensive list of topics and Speaker Bios you can review before the big event on December 1st through the 4th at http://channel9.msdn.com.

There are four 1 hour sessions per day, each wrapped around a theme. Todays theme is:

Day 3:  Embrace Open Source Technologies (Chef and Puppet Configurations, Containerization with Docker, and Linux) to Accelerate and Scale Solutions

Most people do not believe that Linux and OSS tools / application layers are first class citizens in our Azure services. We have come a long way in a short period of time to reverse that line of thought. Learn from experts in the Linux and OSS world how to design and deploy Linux and supporting technologies in your Azure environment. You can deploy machines from our Gallery or pull images from our VMDepot to get started quickly without having to re-invent the wheel.

If you are a SysAdmin who already supports solutions on the Linux platform at scale, you are probably familiar with Chef and Puppet. Did you know they are also available in Azure for both Linux and Windows Machines? You can take your existing instructions and configurations and configure agents on your IaaS instances to point to your servers for deployment. Learn how to implement these amazing technologies for your Linux and Windows Azure hosted solutions.

You might have heard about containerization technologies like Docker that allow you to achieve greater density and better performance than traditional full-fledged IaaS Virtual Machines. We recently announced support for Docker on Azure and all the goodness that it brings to your solutions. How should an IT Implementer / SysAdmin deploy and leverage this new technology? This session will tell you everything you need to know.

Attend this session to learn how to leverage the scale and infrastructure of Azure to deploy large sets of Linux VMs in the cloud. If you are running a large Linux server farm and are wondering what steps it takes to move it to Azure, this session will provide you with guidance and best practices. You will see how to script and simplify this effort as well as learn key considerations and principles. We will also walk through best practices for configuring and deploying the data tier of your workload.

It is going to be an action packed day!

Don’t forget to register!!!!

Register Now Button

Register through Microsoft Virtual Academy to receive reminder mails for this event and to obtain details for receiving a voucher for 50 percent off the exam price if taken by January 31st. Join the conversation on Twitter using #LevelUpAzure.

Azure IaaS Week for IT Pros: Day 2 Speaker Lineup

November 25, 2014
Rick
Azure, Events, interviews, Microsoft

I talked about this event I’ve been wrangling speakers for a while back, so I thought I’d put together a quick little post broken down by DAY with all the details about speakers and their sessions in one spot. I’ve been capturing these quick intros for each speaker with details about their session and also some fun tidbits about them outside of work. This is the ONE STOP SHOP for day TWO- a comprehensive list of topics and Speaker Bios you can review before the big event on December 1st through the 4th at http://channel9.msdn.com.

There are four 1 hour sessions per day, each wrapped around a theme. Todays theme is:

Day 2:  Dive Deep into Networking, Storage and Disaster Recovery Scenarios

. YushWang

Yu-Shun Wang is a Program Manager in Azure Networking team working on Hybrid Connectivity and Network Virtual Appliances in Azure. In his free time, he likes camping, skiing, and swimming.

Your infrastructure in Azure can be isolated and purpose built for public consumption. How do you design your virtual networks and access controls to ensure everything is as desired? Now that you understand the fundamentals of Virtual Networks in Azure, let’s dive deeper into hybrid connectivity options using Site to Site VPNs, allowing your datacenter to extend to your Azure environment.  Concerned about speed and latency for your applications? Don’t want your internal data being routed over the public internet? Explore what ExpressRoute can offer as the ultimate connectivity option

Unlike other cloud providers, our story on storage is consistent across all of our Azure offerings. This means as new technologies are introduced to our storage platform, they become available to all of our services in a timely manner. Learn how to get the maximum IOps for your workloads and what new technologies are coming soon.

Disaster Recovery and OffSite replicas of critical workloads used to be a very costly and complex thing to orchestrate. With System Center and Microsoft Azure, you can leverage Azure Site Recovery to coordinate a site failover from one datacenter to another. We recently announced that Microsoft datacenters could be a possible failover target, provided you are aware of the dependencies. Lean how to set up Azure Site Recovery to use your Azure environment as your replica destination to coordinate a failover before disaster strikes. If you’re not ready for a full solution, but looking to migrate specific machines from On-Premises to Azure, we have you covered in this session as well. See how InMage can migrate your workloads from VMware, AWS and Hyper-V to your Azure IaaS environment.

When transitioning your skillset from on-premises to a more hybrid cloud environment, you have to also transition your management techniques from GUI and One-Off solutions to a more reproducible Automated environment.  Learn the ins and outs of Azure Automation Services and the new Automation Script Gallery. Leverage existing scripts or publish your own for others to use in their environments. Looking to take this to the next level – bring in some new DesiredStateConfiguration skills to standardize, configure and maintain your deployments at scale in the cloud.

It is going to be an action packed day!

Don’t forget to register!!!!

Register Now Button

Register through Microsoft Virtual Academy to receive reminder mails for this event and to obtain details for receiving a voucher for 50 percent off the exam price if taken by January 31st. Join the conversation on Twitter using #LevelUpAzure.

Azure IaaS Week for IT Pros: Day 1 Speaker Lineup

November 25, 2014
Rick
Azure, Events, interviews, Microsoft

I talked about this event I’ve been wrangling speakers for a while back, so I thought I’d put together a quick little post broken down by DAY with all the details about speakers and their sessions in one spot. I’ve been capturing these quick intros for each speaker with details about their session and also some fun tidbits about them outside of work. This is the ONE STOP SHOP for day ONE – a comprehensive list of topics and Speaker Bios you can review before the big event on December 1st through the 4th at http://channel9.msdn.com.

There are four 1 hour sessions per day, each wrapped around a theme. Todays theme is:

Day 1:  Establish the Foundation: Core IaaS Infrastructure Technical Fundamentals

Mark Russinovich will share his vision on what Azure is today and where Microsoft is taking it in the future. As one of the most trusted Technical Fellows at Microsoft and with his new role as CTO for Azure, Mark has a unique perspective of how Azure is architected and what individuals can do to get the most out of this platform.

Who better than Corey Sanders to take us through the nuts and bolts of what Azure IaaS is and how it works for IT professionals. Corey leads the team that designed and created Azure IaaS and is very passionate about all that it can do. He will move rapidly from the fundamentals to advanced configurations and how to use and interact with your environment.

AND

Drew picks up where Corey left off, going even deeper. He’ll focus on the specifics of how to get the most from your Windows workloads with Azure IaaS.

How do you design your IaaS implementations for optimal performance, maximum redundancy and geo-diversity? How do new machine series gain you better performance and leverage new hardware capabilities in our datacenters? Learn how to design your systems to minimize reboots and downtime due to user error or planned maintenance. This session has it all the answers and more.

It is going to be an action packed day!

Don’t forget to register!!!!

Register Now Button

Register through Microsoft Virtual Academy to receive reminder mails for this event and to obtain details for receiving a voucher for 50 percent off the exam price if taken by January 31st. Join the conversation on Twitter using #LevelUpAzure.

Hyper-v Extensible Switch in Windows Server 2012 R2

February 12, 2014
Rick
interviews, Microsoft, Networking, Windows Server 8

A while back, when Windows Server 2012 was codenamed “Windows Server 8”, I sat down and talked with Bob Combs, a Sr. Program Manager on the Windows Core Networking Team about the newly released “Hyper-V Extensible Switch”.  Well, now that Windows Server 2012 R2 has been released and planning has already begun for whatever comes next – I decided it was time to pay Bob a visit and get the details on what was new in Extensible Switch land…

Pretty cool stuff.

This is the start of a bunch of video interviews I’ll be doing over the next while. Let me know if you have teams / topics you’d like me to reach out to and see if they are interested in sitting down to chat.