Harold Wong

Just in case you weren’t paying attention this morning, the Preview (Beta) of Windows Server 2012 R2 and System Center 2012 R2 are now available for download and testing!

If you have a TechNet or MSDN Subscription, you are more than welcome to download from your subscriber site like I did earlier this morning – only took 20 minutes and 7 seconds to download the Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter Preview!

If you don’t have one of these subscriptions, fear not for you can download from the TechNet Evaluation Center or you can just use one of the links below that I copied from the site.  There are more items available on the Evaluation Center site so please do visit it as well.

Windows Server Evaluations

• Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview for IT Professionals
• Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview on Windows Azure
• Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview for Developers
• Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials Preview

System Center and Windows Intune Evaluations

• System Center 2012 R2 Preview Datacenter/Private Cloud
• System Center 2012 R2 Configuration Manager & Endpoint Protection Preview
• Windows Intune 30 Day Free Trial

SQL Server Evaluations

• SQL Server 2014 Community Technology Preview 1
• SQL Server 2014 Community Technology Preview 1 on Windows Azure

Please download and start testing out the new awesome capabilities of the next release of these products.

Harold Wong

I found this simple article from Mike Terrill (works for 1E) with instructions to perform this tedious task using PowerShell.  I am including a quick snippet below.  For the full article, please go directly to Mike’s blog post.

How many times have you had the need to delete multiple packages in a ConfigMgr test site?  In order to do this, you right-click on the package and select Delete.  You get presented a welcome screen, then you are asked if you want to see more information.  If you select no, then you are presented a summary screen, progress and then a completion screen (in which you need to click close).  That is something like six clicks just to delete a package.  In addition, you cannot multi-select a bunch of packages and delete them.  So, if you have 100 packages that you want to delete, you are looking at about 600+ clicks.  I am not sure about you, but that does not sounds like fun.

After launching PowerShell (this can be done from the ConfigMgr Admin Console), you can avoid all of these clicks with just a few commands.

If you just simply want to remove a package without using the console and have to click through all dialogs, simply use the following command:

Remove-CMPackage -Name "Test Package" –Force

The Name parameter does take wildcards, so if you have multiple packages with a common name (i.e. Test Package 1, Test Package 2, etc.), then you can simply add the asterisk:

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Harold Wong

• Mark Minasi
• Jeff Hicks
• Laura Hunter
• Steve Evans
• Richard Campbell
• Chris Avis
• Kevin Remde
• CA Callahan
• Sam Bowne
• Nick Hawkins
• Glenn Block
• Christa Anderson
• Jennelle Crothers
• Aleksandar Nikolic

Most of these folks are either MVPs or Microsoft employees. 

There are quite a few topics including PowerShell, Windows Server 2012 (Hyper-V, Storage, etc.), Windows Azure, IPv6, SharePoint, Windows 8 and Lync.  I was originally going to speak at this event as well, but since I changed job roles, I was not able to make it.  If you are in the Bay Area, I would definitely encourage you to set aside the time to attend.  More information can be found at their website: http://techdays.org.

Harold Wong

Back in February, I placed an order for my new work laptop – Lenovo Carbon X1 and I also got the USB 3.0 Dock.  It took over a month before I received it, but I did get it and finally got everything configured and working nicely on it.  I thought I would just share my experience so far with my new machine.  I am going to section off my comments into three sections – Overall thoughts, What I like and What I wish were better.

Overall Thoughts

Overall, I am very happy with this new laptop.  I am happy with the power of the laptop and how it performs when running my applications.  The ability to have four monitors while working at home (with docking station) is a HUGE plus.  Since I have a Core i7 with 8 GB of RAM, I am able to run Client Hyper-V with no problems for some of my basic testing and demoing.  Having used a Lenovo T61p and W510 for the last 5+ years (3 for W510), I totally DON’T miss the weight in my backpack.  In fact, I think the fancy travel adapter (with all the cords) for the Carbon X1 weighs almost as much as the laptop itself.

I do miss the 15.6” screen on my T61p, but am getting used to the 14” with the multi monitor abilities while working at home.  I am bummed that I can’t just easily plug in my eSATA hard drive since there is no built in adapter like I have on my W510.  I have also gotten used to having a large hard drive with a secondary drive in the multi purpose bay from my T61p and W510, but have really started using SkyDrive Pro a lot more to compensate for that.  That is actually a nice benefit when moving between machines so it’s a good thing.  Plus, I am now forced to clean up more. 

I would definitely recommend this laptop as a very solid corporate laptop (has TPM)!

What I Like

• Light weight
• Thin
• Long battery life
• Capable of Client Hyper-V
• Touch screen
• Supports 4 screens with no problems using laptop screen, dock and video out (See screenshot below)
• Has the eraser head mouse stick (I like this feature)
• Boot time (True cold boot) is super fast – from initial Lenovo Post to logged into Start screen / desktop in 30 seconds
• Small USB dock that I can actually take with me for long road trips (has 5 USB 3 ports and 2 DVI ports) – See screenshot below

What I wish were Better

• SSD hard drive is only 240 GB.  Wish it were 500 GB
• Had more USB ports (comes with 2)
• Missing an eSATA port.  Would be fine if the dock had it, but it doesn’t either
• Larger screen (had a 15.6” and now working with 14”)
• Display is not HD (but still good)
• Graphics could be better (See Windows Experience Index screenshot below)
• Would be nice to have an included Video adapter that also supports HDMI (comes with VGA)

Screenshots

4 Monitor configuration

Windows Experience Index

Thinkpad USB 3.0 Dock

I am including a brief snippet from Yung’s post below.  For the full article, please visit Yung’s post directly.

There are two important concepts in VMM 2012 SP1 to understand Microsoft private cloud solutions. “Fabric” and “Service Template” they are.

Fabric, Cloud Computing Abstraction Integrated in VMM

In Microsoft private cloud solutions, VMM is the management solution for virtualized resources. In the context of cloud computing, virtualization now encompasses three disciplines. In addition to server virtualization which many IT professionals are familiar with, network virtualization and storage virtualization are included as the three resource pools to together form the so-called fabric. VMM 2012 and later has the (fabric) abstraction architected in. Designed with constructing and managing fabric in mind, VMM has becomes a key enabler in implementing a private cloud solution.

In cloud computing, fabric is an abstraction signifying the ability to discover, identify, and manage a resource. And there are three resource pools: Compute, Network, and Storage integrated with one another to collectively form the fabric. Namely a resource added into one of the three resource pools will by default become part of the fabric and automagically a managed object. Here the Compute pool represents all resources relevant to the computing power, cpu cycles, and execution of code. The Network pool is how resources are glued together or isolated. And the Storage pool is where digital assets are stored.

In VMM 2012 SP1, Admin Console (as shown on the left) substantiates the concept of fabric and the three resources pools with visual presentations. Clicking the Fabric workspace will display the three resource pools on the navigation pane as Servers (as Compute), Networking, and Storage. Each pool includes groups of components and configurations to support designated functions. One major part of building a private cloud is to establish the three resource pools by adding and configuring server, network, and storage virtualization solutions and components into an associated resource pool.

Above the fabric are resources available for consumption. While under the fabric are three resource pools managed by VMM offering computing power, networking capabilities, and storage space to fulfill requests with elasticity. Fabric offers simplicity and shield a user from those complexities under the hood.

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Harold Wong

I am including a brief snippet from Keith’s post below.  If you want to read the full article, please go directly to Keith’s post.

When designing your virtualization host framework for your Private Cloud, it's important to select platforms that use widely supported standards and provide cost-effective solutions for elastically scaling a resilient compute foundation.  With this criteria in check, you'll be able to grow your compute foundation to support additional capacity as needed while taking advantage of the latest advancements in hypervisor technologies ... AND without risk of being locked in to a single-vendor solution.  Virtualization and private cloud capabilities are expanding rapidly, and you definitely want to be sure that your ability to capitalize on new impactful features isn't being "boxed in".

For these reasons, a ton of IT Pros that I speak with are experiencing great success today by expanding their compute capacity with the FREE Hyper-V Server 2012 product, regardless of their current "incumbent" hypervisor. As an enterprise-grade, bare-metal hypervisor solution, Hyper-V Server 2012 offers the same level of scale, clustering, live migration and DR-replication capabilities as the Hyper-V role in Windows Server 2012, but at an unmatched feature/cost pricepoint in the industry -  an enterprise hypervisor feature set for FREE.  In terms of widely supported standards, Hyper-V uses the VHD virtual hard disk standard for broad industry compatibility - so there's no risk that your data will be locked inside a proprietary disk format. This provides unprecedented flexibility for growing your Private Cloud compute foundation via a hybrid mix of on-premise hypervisor hosts, public cloud fabric ( Windows Azure VMs also support VHDs ) and/or third-party service providers/hosting partners ... all of which empowers us to select the options which best support each of our individual application workloads.

In this article, I'll walk through the resources you'll need to get started with Hyper-V Server 2012, and I'll also include more advanced resources for building a scalable and highly-available clustered compute foundation for FREE!

• Did you miss the other articles in this series?
  DO IT: Get the FULL SERIES of articles in Build Your Private Cloud in a Month at https://aka.ms/BuildYourCloud.

What is Hyper-V Server 2012?

Hyper-V Server 2012 is a FREE (yes, completely free!) purpose-built product that includes the core of Windows Server 2012 and Hyper-V.  The result is a streamlined Type-1 hypervisor that is optimized for remote management and provides the same virtualization scalability and high availability features as the Hyper-V role in the full version of Windows Server - including up to 320 logical processors per Hyper-V host, up to 4TB of physical memory, Live Migration, Storage Migration, Virtual Machine Replication, Clustering and more!

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Harold Wong

I am including a brief snippet of Keith’s post below, but you will want to read the full article by going directly to his post.

When planning network infrastructure for a Private Cloud, there’s a number of technologies to consider and leverage in Windows Server 2012.  At many of my events, IT Pros have lots of questions on when to use various network technologies in their overall Private Cloud design, such as:

• Teaming modes: Switch independent, Static or Dynamic ( LACP ) network teaming?
• Load balancing modes: Address hash or Hyper-V port hash?
• Network isolation: VLAN tagging vs Windows Network Virtualization ( aka WNV or NV-GRE )?

In this article, I’ll walk through a sample architecture for building a Private Cloud network foundation and discuss “when” to leverage each of these components in your overall design.  At the end of this article, I’ll also provide additional references for “how” to implement each configuration item.

• Did you miss the other articles in this series?
  DO IT: Get the FULL SERIES of articles in Build Your Private Cloud in a Month at https://aka.ms/BuildYourCloud

Private Cloud Foundational Architecture

When building a Private Cloud, most environments find that they really have two main types of network connections from their Hyper-V hosts: Datacenter Networks and Client VM Networks.

Sample Network Architecture for Private Cloud Foundation – Datacenter and Client VM networks

Datacenter Networks

Datacenter networks are the “back-end” networks that Hyper-V hosts use for:

• Connecting to storage
• Live migration of running VMs
• Internal Cluster networks
• Host management networks
• Data backup networks

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Harold Wong

I am including a brief snippet from Matt’s post below, but you will want to read the full article by going directly to Matt’s blog.

When you start to think of building a private cloud into your datacenters, you might naturally think you need run out and buy a SAN.  While you still may want to go buy a SAN, with Windows Server 2012 you do not necessarily need to.  In Windows Server 2012 there has been a tremendous amount of improvement done to the storage capabilities.  Specifically you now can have continuously available file shares on your cluster servers.  This is mainly due to the new SMB 3.0 protocol built-in to the server, it really has made storage a first class citizen in Windows Server 2012.  So for todays post I am going to take a look at how to build a Windows Server 2012 storage environment using Storage Pools and inexpensive Serial-Attached SCSI (SAS) disks to provide the necessary storage backend for your private cloud infrastructure.  The best part is if you assigned the storage pool to your cluster you know have a continuous available share all built on fairly inexpensive disks.  Even better than that is that Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V can leverage the clustered share now you have a virtualized environment that is always at your fingertips.

Create a storage pool is actually fairly straight forward, after you have the drives connected to the system.  However, if you are going to build the storage out on a cluster there are some things you need to do that are unique to working with a clustered environment.  Before you begin the process you will want to review the list of prerequisites located here: Deploy Clustered Storage Spaces Prerequisites.

The first thing you will need to install the multipath I/O software (MPIO).  This feature allows for multiple physical paths to physical path as a single logical path for data access.  In other words if you have a lot of drives configured in a JBOD enclosure with multiple SAS connections to each host, MPIO allows the hosts to see each physical drive path via a single redundant path.  In a cluster, MPIO can be combined with
Storage Spaces and Cluster Shared Volumes ( CSV ) to treat these physical drives as a single highly-available shared volume.

To install MPIO via the Add Roles and Features wizard in Server Manager or you can run the following PowerShell script:

Install-WindowsFeature –ComputerName servername –Name Multipath-IO

You will also want to make sure sharing is working on your servers but a bulk of your work will come from making the storage spaces for your cluster to use.  Storage Spaces offers an easy way to combine your drives into one logical volume.  You can either create the storage spaces before you create the cluster or after creating the clustering.  Either way is effective, I am going to take you through a quick look at creating the storage spaces, you can find some really detailed steps here: Deploy Storage Spaces on a Stand-Alone Server.  Overall the procedure looks like this:

1. Create your Storage Pool
2. Create your Virtual Disk
3. Create your Volume

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Harold Wong

In this part, Yung Chou explains what a Private Cloud is (it’s not virtualization).  I am including a brief snippet from Yung’s article.  To read the full article, please go directly to Yung’s Blog Post.

Some IT decision makers may wonder, I have already virtualized my datacenter and am running a highly virtualized IT environment, do I still need a private cloud? If so, why?

The answer is a definitive YES, and the reason is straightforward. The plain truth is that virtualization is no private cloud, and a private cloud goes far beyond virtualization. (Ref 1, Ref 2)

Virtualization Is No Private Cloud

Technically, virtualization is signified by the concept of “isolation.” By which a running instance is isolated in a target runtime environment with the notion that the instance consumes the entire runtime environment despite the fact that multiple instances may be running at the same time with the same hosting environment. A well understood example is server virtualization where multiple server instances running on the same hardware while each instance runs as if it possesses the entire runtime environment provided by the host machine.

A private cloud on the other hand is a cloud which abides the 5-3-2 Principle or NIST SP 800-145, the de facto definition of cloud computing. In other words, a private cloud as illustrated above must exhibit the attributes like elasticity, resource pooling, self-service model, etc. of cloud computing and be delivered in a particular fashion. Virtualization nonetheless does not hold, for instance, any of the three attributes as a technical requirement. Virtualization is about isolating and virtualizing resources, while how a virtualized resource is allocated, delivered, or presented is not particularly specified. At the same time, cloud computing or a private cloud, is visualized much differently. The accessibility, readiness, and elasticity of all consumable resources in cloud computing are conceptually defined and technically required for being delivered as “services.”

Essence of Cloud Computing

The service concept is a center piece of cloud computing. A cloud resource is to be consumed as a service. This is why these terms, IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, ITaaS, and XaaS (everything and anything as a service), are frequently heard in a cloud discussion. A service is what must be presented to and experienced by a cloud user. So, what is a service?

A service can be presented and implemented in various ways like forming a web service with a block of code, for example. However in the context of cloud computing, a service can be precisely captured by three words, capacity on demand. Capacity here is associated with an examined object such as cpu, network connections, or storage. One-demand denotes the anytime readiness with any network and any device accessibility. It is a state that previously takes years and years of IT disciplines and best practices to possibly achieve with a traditional infrastructure-focused approach, while cloud computing makes “service” a basic deliver model and demand all consumable resources including infrastructure, platform, and software to be presented as services. Consequently, replacing the term, service, with “capacity of demand” or simply “on demand’ brings clarity and gives substance to any discussion of cloud computing.

- See more at: http://blogs.technet.com/b/yungchou/archive/2013/04/02/why-private-cloud.aspx#sthash.jgWMArDq.dpuf

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Harold Wong