At TechEd 2013, we announced a new enhancement around VMs that are stopped from the Windows Azure Management Portal - Stopped VMs will no longer accumulate compute charges, because the fabric resource reservations that were previously maintained are now deallocated when VMs are stopped. This is great news for some interesting "hybrid" cloud scenarios, such as: • On-demand dev/lab/test VM environments in the Cloud • "Bursty" load-balanced web applications • Disaster Recovery fail-over scena

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Today, April 16th 2013, the Windows Azure team has announced that Windows Azure Infrasructure Services ( Virtual Machines and Virtual Networks ) has been released for General Availability ( GA ) for production workloads! Over 200,000 customers are actively using Windows Azure as their cloud platform. In this article, I’ll review the step-by-step scenarios with which these customers have experienced great value – so that YOU can easily get started leveraging the low-cost and flexibility of W

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Windows Azure Active Directory ( WAAD ), a cloud-friendly REST-based implementation of Active Directory for identity management of cloud applications, is now generally available for production cloud apps as a FREE service. WAAD provides consistent centralized identity management for Microsoft Office 365, Windows Intune and your own cloud-based applications. In addition, WAAD can be integrated with an on-premise Windows Server Active Directory via DirSync and Active Directory Federation Service

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Virtual Machine Guest Clustering allows us to extend the high availability afforded to us by Windows Server 2012 Failover Clustering directly to applications running inside a set of virtual machines that are hosted on a Hyper-V Host Cluster. This allows us to support cluster-aware applications running as virtualized workloads. In this article, I’ll walk through the advantages and implementation steps for Virtual Machine Guest Clustering. Along the way, we’ll explore some new features in Wind

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Traditional file sharing protocols, such as Server Message Block ( SMB ) in Windows Server 2012, are primarily designed for low-latency, high-bandwidth scenarios commonly found in Local Area Networks ( LANs ). When attempting to move file server workloads to the cloud, many IT Pros find that the unpredictable latency and limited bandwidth related to most Internet connections can make it challenging to deliver file services from the cloud in a reliable manner. In this Do-It-Yourself ( DIY ) a

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Windows Server 2012 and our completely FREE Hyper-V Server 2012 certainly have some really cost effective new storage options, with Storage Spaces and Hyper-V over SMB 3.0. However, many IT Pros have already invested in iSCSI shared storage and, as a result, many Hyper-V deployments also need to be able to leverage these existing storage investments. iSCSI? No problem! Windows Server 2012 and Hyper-V Server 2012 include native support for a software iSCSI initiator as well as MPIO ( Multipat

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Among a whole host of new management features, Service Pack 1 for System Center 2012 Configuration Manager adds the ability to now deploy and manage Windows 8 apps for enterprises. These Windows 8 apps could be internal apps that have been created by your corporate developers, or they could simply be published Windows Store apps that you have reviewed and would now like to distribute to your Windows 8 users. In this article, I’ll step through the process of deploying internal Windows 8 apps

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The Windows Azure Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering supports running Windows virtual machines and Linux virtual machines in the Cloud. In this article, I provide step-by-step guidance for running a new Linux virtual machine in the cloud using our Windows Azure platform ...

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Now that SharePoint Server 2013 has been released, I frequently get asked about ways in which a SharePoint 2013 lab environment can be easily built for studying, testing and/or performing a proof-of-concept. You could certainly build this lab environment on your own hardware, but due to the level of SharePoint 2013 hardware requirements, a lot of us may not have sufficient spare hardware to implement an on-premise lab environment. This makes a great scenario for leveraging our Windows Azure

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In today's TechNet Radio show, I'm back again for another episode in our System Center 2012 ConfigMgr SP1 series with Wally Mead, Senior Program Manager from the System Center Client Management team and all-around ConfigMgr Guru. Tune in as we discuss new support for App-V 5 virtual applications and virtual environments. In this episode, we'll be covering ... •New Support for App-V 5 virtual applications •App-V 5 Connection Groups •Deploying App-V 5 virtual applications •Converting App-V

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