You can get more details about all this new features and enhancements from the Scott Guthrie blog post.

And if you are interested on the TechEd North America 2014 on-demand content please visit the Channel 9 site where you have lots of content.

Every Solution Architect or IT Manager eventually, needs take care of one of the most challenging tasks for an IT organization: dispose of disaster recovery capabilities to support the business continuity requirements.

These concerns are not different when you are using a Cloud platform as Windows Azure, you always need bear in mind that anything (under your control or not), would fail in any moment (Black swan theory), so, you must plan and design your Cloud solution from a disaster-proof perspective following a process to build resilient solutions very similar to the process that you can follow for an on-premises solution, but, the main difference is that with Windows Azure you don’t need take care of expensive specialized hardware or build a nuke-proof bunker.

I define the process in five steps:

1. Get business requirements: getting from different business sources the critical processes where IT need to invest for business continuity and what are exactly the requirements to keep the business running. The basic idea is that redundancy is not necessary for every IT service. You need use a criteria to define what IT services need high availability and disaster recovery; I do usually use the following:

a. Critical Systems: services that need keep up and running in any circumstance (service outages of a critical system means business interruption and potentially could have financial and legal implications).

b. Essential Systems: services that need keep up and running to support business operations and are typically integrated with Critical Systems. These services need priority in the disaster recovery plan.

c. Necessary Systems: services that help to improve business operations and provide productivity improvements for employees, but are not required for business continuity. Necessary Systems can be left in the background in the recovery plan.

d. Optional Systems: These services may or may not improve business productivity, here I include test systems, historical data archiving, Intranet (not vital to the business, etc.). These services may be excluded from the recovery plan.

2. Set business continuity IT requirements: where we need to define recovery time objectives for the previously classified systems, recovery point objectives for application data, how you are going to manage the process and the IT support that you need to provide resiliency for the systems; in the same time that you are balancing between high availability and disaster recovery costs vs. the possible business losses in case of outages because 9’s in the availability percentage means more or less money.

3. Define High Availability and Disaster Recovery strategies: as a first planning phase where you need define what strategy are you going to follow to minimize impact of outages. The outage categories that you must cover are: software outages, operation errors outages (these two have aprox. 50% of the typical service outages), hardware outages, scheduled outages and facility outages.

4. Plan and Design the solution: at this step you need to plan for application data, state and infrastructure resiliency following cloud design patterns and defining the IT service management and operational processes (including disaster recovery protocol, etc.).

5. Build solution: now you are in the middle of the battlefield developing the solution, and here is where you can use Windows Azure services as the building blocks to build your disaster-proof solution, using any of the application, data or infrastructure services to deploy a solution created with the features that I call the Cloud DNA: Health and Monitoring model, Automation, Availability sets (grouped components so that are always available during scheduled outages), Security, Data and Compliance, component distribution and geo-dispersion according with business requirements, load balancing and autoscaling, Development for Operations and Configuration Management; using the programming language and computing platform that better fits for you.

Some useful links:

Best Practices for the Design of Large-Scale Services on Windows Azure Cloud Services.

Cloud Design Patterns: Prescriptive Architecture Guidance for Cloud Applications

Windows Azure SDKs.

Windows Azure Patterns & Practices

Windows Azure

The reality is that Hyper-V is installed under Windows Server (between the hardware and the host operating system). Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 is a hypervisor-based server virtualization product is a dedicated stand-alone product that contains the hypervisor, Windows Server driver model, virtualization capabilities, and supporting components such the same scale, performance, high-availability (Windows Failover Clustering), flexibility (supporting Live Migration and Live Storage Migration), as in the version of Hyper-V installed under Windows Server at no cost.

The difference is that does not contain the complete set of features and roles (Directory Services, Application Server, etc), as the Windows Server operating system. As a result, Hyper-V Server produces a small footprint and requires minimal overhead. Organizations consolidating servers where no new Windows Server licenses are required or where the servers being consolidated are running an alternative OS may want to consider Hyper-V Server.

Download and install the full-featured software from here.

Bed of Cloud by Prashant Dobhal

As probably you know (if not, now you know), Windows Server 2012 R2 and System Center 2012 R2 will be available for download evaluation version for elegible customers through the TechNet Evaluation Center on October 18, 2013. They comes with a lot of new features and more power to enable the Datacenter Transformation and the cloud adoption at any level (private, public, or hybrid), and as part of the preparation for that day Brad Anderson has published a serie of blog posts about What’s new in 2012 R2, all posts are very recommendables, so, reserve some time to read it.

If you have specific questions or scenarios that you want The Coud Pilot write about it (architecture examples, migrations, automation, etc), please send us an email, tweet or comment and we will try to answer with a post about it.

But this post is committed to the features the end-user will have on their hands and the enabled scenarios. In our experiences with end-users we see how the improvements we've talked about are changing the way they work, and the impact it creates. It empowers people, it makes the people more efficient and agile,… this is called value realization. Some of the most significant features that falls in this description are:

• SkyDrive Pro: easy to use, easy to share, forget your hard drive
• PC extended: work with your documents from all your devices like if you have only one
• Be social: get the information you want to follow and share knowledge

SkyDrive Pro

The companies are experimenting big changes and challenges. Not so much time ago the technology in the enterprise was high end, while at home it was limited. Right now is the opposite. The users have very powerful tools to create content from anywhere, to share it with their friends and families, and to sync with all their devices. In most of the cases these tools are not allowed in the companies for security reasons, and until now there were not an integrated tool in a corporate environment. Yes, until now.

Office 365 provides the new SkyDrive Pro, a personal storage for your corporate documents, where you can easily upload (drag and drop), create and edit (with Office Web Apps or Office client) , share (with internal and external users) and sync (with your multiple PCs). At first the synchronization feature was only included in Office 2013, but just some days ago we announced the availability of the SkyDrive Pro standalone client.

If I had to choose one of the above, I think it would be the ability to share with one click with your internal and external contacts, even allowing to edit the document simultaneously between multiple users. Not more attachments, no more problems.

Forget the hell of saving documents in your hard drive: not accessing from outside of your PC, attaching to mails, different versions of the documents, backup of your documents, not being able to coauthoring with a colleague…

PC Extended

We live in a world with multiple devices. What I need is the ability to access my documents from anywhere at any time. You can do it with a web browser, but in Office 2013 (my daily productivity tool) is just awesome.  Once I install Office 2013 in any of my devices (remember that Office 365 Pro Plus allow you to install it in until 5 PCs or Macs per user), or with my Office 2013 RT included in my Windows RT, I'm asked to enter my Office 365 account. Just with it I have access to my Recent Documents, even if I've never opened before in that device. If I open any of these documents, I can see where I left in the last device I was editing or reading it. Do you remember the time you spent in the past going back to the page 76 (if you are lucky enough to remember it) in your large document?

If accessing the document is so fast, you have to see how easy is to share it from your Office.

Be Social

'The e-mail will die someday'. Not, it's not my sentence, is the comment that one customer told me the other day. And yes, I'm agree (and many people as well). The youngest people in our companies don't use this 'legacy' tool, they interact with social networks (consumer and professional) to speed up their processes, and they don't understand why the organizations in the XXI century are so slow sending, replying and forwarding mails. Social networks empower you with an easy way to ask for information and to be informed with what you want. You decide it. And if you want to receive e-mail notifications you can configure it as well.

In Office 365 you have right now two different options: SharePoint Online Newsfeeds or Yammer. In both you have the ability to follow the information you need, and to publish and consume information from multiple apps (browser, mobile, desktop,…). It almost has no adoption curve, because once the people use it they see how powerful it is.

I could tell you more about other tools I see the people love in Office 365, but this post could be really long. I could write about Communications (Presence, IM, Audio/Video IP, and Online Meetings), Office Web Apps (create and edit documents with a web browser), Office On Demand (one of the most incredible technology and innovation), etc Do you want to know the most important thing? Everything is included in the Office 365 suites.

I encourage you to try it, to experiment it from yourself. I'm pretty sure you'll love it as much as I do.

Diego Gómez

Enterprise Strategy Senior Consultant - Enterprise Services

Image: Simple Cross-premises connectivity using software VPN device. 

Please refer to the Windows Azure documentation site to learn more about Windows Azure Virtual Networks and to the Windows Azure Developer Center to learn more about how to build apps with Windows Azure. Follow our Twitter account @TheCloudPilot to be update.

Guillermo.

Everyone here at Microsoft are proud and excited with the announce of the Windows Azure Infrastructure Services General Availability, and maybe you are asking yourself ¿what is it Windows Azure Infrastructure Services?, well Infrastructure Services is the name of the Windows Azure services set of Virtual Machines and Virtual Networks services, the same Virtual Machines and Virtual Networks that you have tested previously with the Preview phase, but adding a new set of high memory VM instances to run memory intensive workloads, the SLAs and price reductions on Virtual Machines and Cloud Services.

Now, this open an entire new set of options and opportunities to you, now you can extend you datacenter to the cloud using Azure Virtual Networks and deploy new services in minutes with Azure Virtual Machines creating hybrid scenarios (ex. to use Azure Infrastructure Services to deploy your ADFS infrastructure to enable federation services for your cloud applications, O365 and more); you can deploy Virtual Machines to extend your apps deployed on Platform as a Service (Web Roles and Worker Roles), you can manage your Virtual Machines with System Center App Controller, you can monitor your Virtual Machines with System Center Operations Manager; the possibilities are huge and the flexibility for your organization is amazing.

Maybe now, if you are planning a new infrastructure deployment, you are thinking if it is a good idea try to deploy that infrastructure or part of that infrastructure on Azure Infrastructure Services, and I recommend you that take a minute to think about it, analyze it, consult it with you team, partner, Microsoft Consulting Services contact, Microsoft contact or with your Technical advisor to compare pros and cons and try it.

• Virtual Machine Manager
  • Improved Support for Network Virtualization
  • Extend the VMM console with Add-ins
  • Support for Windows Standards-Based Storage Management Service, thin provisioning of logical units and discovery of SAS storage
  • Ability to convert VHD to VHDX, use VHDX as base Operating System image
• Configuration Manager
  • Deployment and management of Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012
  • Distribution point for Windows Azure to help reduce infrastructure costs
  • Automation of administrative tasks through PowerShell support
  • Management of Mac OS X clients and Linux and UNIX servers
  • Real-time administrative actions for Endpoint Protection related tasks
• Data Protection Manager
  • Improved backup performance of Hyper-V over CSV 2.0
  • Protection for Hyper-V over remote SMB share
  • Protection for Windows Server 2012 de-duplicated volumes
  • Uninterrupted protection for VM live migration
• App Controller
  • Service Provider Foundation API to create and operate Virtual Machines
  • Support for Azure VM; migrate VHDs from VMM to Windows Azure, manage from on-premise System Center
• Operations Manager
  • Support for IIS 8
  • Monitoring of WCF, MVC and .NET NT services
  • Azure SDK support
• Orchestrator
  • Support for Integration Packs, including 3rd party
  • Manage VMM self-service User Roles
  • Manage multiple VMM ‘stamps’ (scale units), aggregate results from multiple stamps
  • Integration with App Controller to consume Hosted clouds
• Service Manager
  • Apply price sheets to VMM clouds
  • Create chargeback reports
  • Pivot by cost center, VMM clouds, Pricesheets
• Server App-V
  • Support for applications that create scheduled tasks during packaging
  • Create virtual application packages from applications installed remotely on native server

Wait no more, download it immediately: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=a171bcea-2dbb-4fc5-8dd1-4ec22f2eb4ef