If you’re looking for an easy way to start evaluating Windows Server 2012 this couldn’t really be any easier, quicker, cheaper or faster (if you have 30 mins you can do this). Windows Azure’s IaaS features make it is as simple as it could possibly be to setup a test lab without the use of any hardware but with the full features of the OS and the platform. It’s also a really good way to start getting a handle on Windows Azure’s IaaS features and to start understanding how they come together.
Over the festive period I had some time to play with some new features of some of our technology and to make some videos, in this first video I’ll take you through the simple signup process for Windows Azure. It’s free for 90 days and has a £0 spending limit set so you won’t get charged (unless you remove that limit). Next we’ll setup a private network on Windows Azure to connect our virtual machines, then we’ll use PowerShell to connect to Azure and provision our first VM. Finally in my next post I’ll show you how to setup your first Active Directory Domain Controller in your first AD Forest in Windows Server 2012.
You won’t need much in the way of resources for this, you’ll just need:
A credit card (as above, it won’t be charged by default).
You’ll need to signup for Windows Azure – the video shows you how.
Last week Andrew and I presented a number of sessions at TechDays Online in the UK and we received numerous requests during the day to publish the decks so that people can peruse them at their leisure. Well those decks are now here available for you to click through and download if you so wish.
One of the questions that I often get into when talking with folks normally have a dev head on around Windows Azure is why you’d want to be able to monitor a Windows Azure application with System Center and why you wouldn’t just build a bespoke monitoring solution since you’re building an application already. The answer is actually a very obvious one to integrate with existing systems. Anyone with an ounce of IT operational background or ITIL training will tell you that you rightly need to centralise monitoring and ultimately to simplify it. The first obvious reason why you’d do that is to save money but there’s a second reason:
That amazing application probably isn’t running in isolation.
You’ll find that it requires other components like network connectivity (yes even in the cloud) to be in place and available – particularly if you’re running in a hybrid environment. A holistic management solution, such as System Center will help you to achieve an overall view of what’s going on, of all the dependencies on various components of the system.
Interestingly we’ve just moved such a system to Windows Azure, along with the required monitoring and documented the whole process with a case study of moving a Business Critical application to Windows Azure. The article is well worth a read for anyone thinking about moving an application to the cloud but the following stuck out for me as benefits:
Accurate and timely monitoring and alerting for [application] critical components
A large number of reusable monitoring components that can be leveraged in future Windows Azure applications
Accuracy and timeliness are so important in IT Operations it’s untrue but that second benefit around reusability is also so important. Not only will you have developed a reusable system monitoring Windows Azure applications but you’ll also have reusable skills.
A few weeks ago now we made the following video tour of our Datacentres available for all to see on the GFS website and also on YouTube. At the time I forgot to post it but having just happened across it I thought it worth sharing. I constantly get asked about the size and scale of our DCs and this really shows them off…and yes the Dublin DC is one of the worlds largest DCs at 330,000 square foot or about the size of 3 of the UKs largest Super Markets all under one roof. Why does that matter? Because building and learning about Data Centers at that scale is something few others can do.
Just another short post to provide the signposts to some of the resources I talked about in my Windows Azure for IT Professionals session. First up is access to the free Windows Azure trial I mentioned and next is the training course that will take you through using learning how to use PowerShell with Windows Azure (actually it’s blog post that’s part of a series).
You’ll be in need of some tools too, so grab the Azure MMC here or just the PowerShell cmdlets but to use either you’ll need the AzureSDK. You’ll also need some code to deploy so I’d suggest getting yourself along to Planky’s labs on Friday (there are two sessions, Friday morning and Friday afternoon, scroll to the bottom to reg) and you only need to do one!
Sound scary? Well it’s not, but it’s critically important in spurring cloud adoption in your organisation and therefore a set of key skills for IT Professionals. We have a technology toolset called Active Directory Federation Service (ADFS 2.0) that uses a set of secure protocols like SSL and Public Key encryption to provide Single Sign On to applications that are not hosted inside your network. It doesn’t even require a physical connection between your Active Directory Directory Service (AD DS) and the application, or even for you to dangle your AD DS on the internet like tasty shark bait. In fact you don’t even have to place your AD DS into a DMZ. All this means you can provide secure single sign on…but why would you and how do you? (hint the how is at the bottom).
Lets take a look why. What are the applications that your users use most frequently and easily? Probably Word, Excel, PowerPoint…then probably some line of business apps (LOB). How do people sign onto those LOB apps? If you’re in a good place then they don’t need to, they just launch the app and get signed in automatically but if you aren’t then they probably need extra user names and passwords. How many helpdesk calls does that create? What perception of IT services in your organisation does that create? I know, I’ve been there….the answer is usually lots of calls, poor perception. That user experience can be better with simple AD authentication for the application.
The pain not having single sign on with a cloud application can be extreme. Imagine this scenario:
But with ADFS 2.0 in place all that has to happen is that the user remembers their Windows password and logs in. Just once and it’s far more secure because your organisation is in charge of the password reset policy, the complexity policy and most importantly – because they don’t have to remember lots of passwords they stop writing them down on their desks.
We’re pretty serious about this being a major piece of the cloud for the IT Professional, so much so that both @deepfat and I took two days out a week or so ago for offsite training on how to build ADFS 2.0 infrastructures. It’s not all that complex either…once you have an understanding of PKI. But to make it even easier you’ll find whitepapers that take a step by step approach to the technology just here: Single Sign-On from Active Directory to a Windows Azure Application Whitepaper . Not only is this essential for Azure it’s also essential to know for the best possible Office365 integration.
I was just thumbing around the Sysinternals site (for some handy tools for a deployment I’m doing) and happened across Mark’s PDC presentation which he re-ran at TechEd Europe last week and which I happened to be at. It’s a fantastic way for the IT Professional to understand some of the (very) interesting back end of Windows Azure. How it works, what it does, what fabric is, how it heals how it deploys how it all bolts together. When you’re done watching the vid, go get an Azure trial.
Thanks to Simon May for writing this post and being as bouncy as ever the morning after UKPDC10, when the rest of us are just about managing to operate at all. You can also read this post on Simon’s blog.
I love it when we put on a good show, geeks, streams, quizzes, phones and most importantly TECH! Last night we played host to a whole bunch of people at the Microsoft Campus in Reading who all left happy (twitter says so #ukpdc10) and who all learnt some new stuff about Azure, Windows Phone 7, and IE9. There were some stonking announcements on the HD feed from Redmond given by a Steve Ballmer, and Bob Muglia and special guest stars like Pixar studios and Buzz Light-year. This was a developer conference so what’s important to the IT Pro in what was announced?
Windows Azure
TIP: If you don’t know what Azure is yet jump to my blog and subscribe where I’ll be explaining it next week but…
Windows Azure is true PaaS self scale-able (elastic) computing that grows and shrinks as the application needs to. At PDC10 we announced new Virtual Machine(VM) role which is a rock star move because with the VM role you can move an existing application to the cloud. How is such a feat achieved? Simple, take your application, install it on Windows 2008 R2 and take an image to a VHD file (super easy if you’re using Hyper-V ‘cos you already have the file) then copy-and-paste to file to the cloud server. With this new VM role you can do pretty much what you want, run the services you want and run scheduled tasks if you want to. Because it’s your server in the cloud you get to be the race car driver, make the decisions and be involved in the engineering process. I can’t stress how excited this role makes me as an IT Professional…but it gets even better.
Next your the VM role will be able to take your Windows 2003 Servers (but do yourself a favour and go to 2008 R2, you might as well) and you’ll be able to build the VMs in the cloud rather than just on premise.
The Web Role gets the enhancement of full features IIS, meaning that one role can run multiple sites and you can install IIS modules…oh yeah and management becomes familiar with Remote Desktop (RDP) and by elevating privileges you can do more complex deployments. So it’s now possible to install MSI files on a web role for example. By the way the PDC site and even Channel 9 are running on Azure.
The announcement of Windows Azure Connect means you can plumb Windows Azure into your internal network. That’s right you can domain join your Azure server roles so it’s just like it’s on premise, in your private data centre. Just by way of an example that means you could deploy your Intranet site to a Web Role or your expenses application to a VM Role and bosh it’s just there…you can probably use the VM Role to poke a DC up there too! It’s all done using familiar IP networking and VPN like connections. That sounds like a job for the IT Professional to me. Next year will bring SSL/TLS encryption for the pipes and Dynamic content caching so less stuff goes over the pipes (a bit like branch cache for the cloud) and a build out of the networking infrastructure.
Azure Licensing can be seen as too costly for some people so we’ve downsized! There’s a new Extra Small instance that costs just $0.05 per hour for a 1Ghz CPU, 768MB RAM and 20GB of storage…that sounds like the perfect kit to base my first instance on of an elastic application. All the Windows Azure Roles are Compute Instances and so are charged the same. There’s no CAL requirement to connect to an Azure VM role (awesome) and the Azure role license is covered through the compute costs…making it as cheap as (silicone) chips!
It’s all about to go Beta and we at UK TechNet will let you know when we drop the beta bomb.
So IT Pro’s need to skill up on:
Server 2008 R2
Hyper-V
IP
IIS7
You’ll be wanting to Azure to get your head around it…trials are included as part of your MSDN subscription too.
SQL Azure
Community Technology Previews were announced for a bunch of new features including Reporting so reports can be authored using SQL Services Reporting tools and embedded in the database. Data SyncCTP 2 can sync databases across datacentres and with the data on your premises in your own SQL Server. That means you can have multiple geo-redundant SQL database or even just keep the data closest to the people who need it. So say you have your business has 10 people in Japan, 10 people in Europe and 100 people data mining in India the guys in Japan and Europe can access the DB from SQL Azure from their fastest local DC and the guys in India receive a “caching” effect of having the data sync to their local SQL Server saving on the cost of the main Internet pipe to the office.
The lightweight Database Manager formerly known as “Houston” (stunning Siverlight based app if you have a look) has entered CTP too and will become part of the developer portal.
DBAs and IT Pros doing SQL stuff need to skill up on:
not a whole lot…but if you aren’t on SQL 2008 you need to nail that.
You’ll be wanting to Try SQL Azure to get your head around it…trials are included as part of your MSDN subscription too.
IE9
Platform Preview 6 of Internet Explorer 9 was introduced at PDC10 and whilst the Beta is out and has rocked 10 million downloads already PP6 is important. It’s what you need to run to assess your stuff against IE9 whilst still using IE8 – which is exactly what you need to do right now, you’d don’t want to be deploying Beta code (even if it’s awesome) to your user base. There’s not a huge amount of IT Professional stuff in IE9 just yet, but this video (which is HTML5 by the way if your browser is capable) shows off the new platform preview and IE Test Drive Site.
Windows Phone 7
Oh boy was there a lot of love in the room for this last night. We gave a couple away, more devs came with their own phones…everyone loved them!
You might not know who Scott Guthrie is but he’s a demo-god, dev-god and he’s famed for his red shirts. He live built a Windows Phone 7 app that dynamically searches eBay using odata to help you buy red shirts…it took about 5 minutes. Do that on another mobile device.
We’ve only just released the phone so there were no new announcements other than the inclusion of oData. I’ll be releasing some info on how WP7 can be used by business and by IT Pros next week so stay tuned to my blog.
Summary
I’m excited by the VM Role, it adds a whole new dimension to Azure, Windows Phone 7 is amazing and the developer experience, just like the user experience is 2nd to none , IE9 is beautifying the web for 10 million people already. Oh yeah, we also had a Kinect at the event and this is what people had to say about it (#nowhereneardeadyet!):
@pauliom: Trying to decide what to concentrate on after #ukpdc10. Better wp7 storage/tombstoning, tfs in azure, rx, or getting an xbox kinect? about 5 hours ago via TweetStation
@pauliom: RT @mtaulty: I only played with kinect at #ukpdc10 tonight for 5 minutes and it won me over - seems just as natural as it looks on the demos. about 5 hours ago via MetroTwit
@JonAlb: Thanks to all organisers of #ukpdc10 a fantastic evening just two requests... can I have a phone and can I have an xbox kinect? about 14 hours ago via MetroTwit
@ajnt: Xbox Kinect is amazing! Great idea having it at #UKPDC10. 3d person tracking including face recognition. 10th November UK launch. about 14 hours ago via web
@JonAlb: playing on the xbox kinect was very cool, the ping pong game (wiff waff) was ace! you REALLY get into it, realistic tennis elbow! #Ukpdc10 about 14 hours ago via MetroTwit
@GrahamWilmott: #ukpdc10 just played with #kinect about 15 hours ago via HTC Peep
s@tack72: RT @simonster: can I just ask, who at #ukpdc10 thinks Kinect is AWESOME? about 16 hours ago via MetroTwit
@gthevenot: OK Microsoft, no free #WP7 at #ukpdc10, what about free #kinect then ? about 16 hours ago via web
@brandondjmurphy: Remember when wii was first released. Triple that and double that and you will come close to the kinect experience #ukpdc10 about 17 hours ago via Mobile Web
@Paul_Dunscombe: Playing with kinect. Looks like a wii killer. #ukpdc10 about 17 hours ago via Tweets60
@westleyl: Noooooo, our beer .. RT @petemill: Finally made it to #ukpdc10 - helping myself to beer. Played with the kinect. Recognition is incredbile! about 17 hours ago via Seesmic for Android
@CLaueR: RT @petemill: Finally made it to #ukpdc10 - helping myself to beer. Played with the kinect. Recognition is incredbile! Bowling arm hurts about 17 hours ago via Twitter for Windows Phone
@petemill: Finally made it to #ukpdc10 - helping myself to beer. Played with the kinect. Recognition is incredbile! Bowling arm hurts about 17 hours ago via Twitter for Windows Phonef
@blakepender: SB: Kinect is remarkable! Talking about it being great #ukpdc10 about 19 hours ago via txt
@pauliom: At #ukpdc10 as a backing dancer to lady gaga apparently #kinect making a t1t of myself about 20 hours ago via TweetStation
@brandondjmurphy: At #ukpdc10, impressed with the kinect. about 20 hours ago via Mobile Web
I love it when we put on a good show, geeks, streams, quizzes, phones and most importantly TECH! Last night we played host to a whole bunch of people at the Microsoft Campus in Reading who all left happy (twitter says so #ukpdc10) and who all learnt some new stuff about Azure, Windows Phone 7, and IE9. There were some stonking announcements on the HD feed from Redmond given by a Steve Ballmer, and Bob Muglia and special guest stars like Pixar studios and Buzz Light-year. This was a developer conference so what’s important to the IT Pro in what was announced?
Windows Azure
TIP: If you don’t know what Azure is yet jump to my blog and subscribe where I’ll be explaining it next week but…
Windows Azure is true PaaS self scale-able (elastic) computing that grows and shrinks as the application needs to. At PDC10 we announced new Virtual Machine(VM) role which is a rock star move because with the VM role you can move an existing application to the cloud. How is such a feat achieved? Simple, take your application, install it on Windows 2008 R2 and take an image to a VHD file (super easy if you’re using Hyper-V ‘cos you already have the file) then copy-and-paste to file to the cloud server. With this new VM role you can do pretty much what you want, run the services you want and run scheduled tasks if you want to. Because it’s your server in the cloud you get to be the race car driver, make the decisions and be involved in the engineering process. I can’t stress how excited this role makes me as an IT Professional…but it gets even better.
Next your the VM role will be able to take your Windows 2003 Servers (but do yourself a favour and go to 2008 R2, you might as well) and you’ll be able to build the VMs in the cloud rather than just on premise.
The Web Role gets the enhancement of full features IIS, meaning that one role can run multiple sites and you can install IIS modules…oh yeah and management becomes familiar with Remote Desktop (RDP) and by elevating privileges you can do more complex deployments. So it’s now possible to install MSI files on a web role for example. By the way the PDC site and even Channel 9 are running on Azure.
The announcement of Windows Azure Connect means you can plumb Windows Azure into your internal network. That’s right you can domain join your Azure server roles so it’s just like it’s on premise, in your private data centre. Just by way of an example that means you could deploy your Intranet site to a Web Role or your expenses application to a VM Role and bosh it’s just there…you can probably use the VM Role to poke a DC up there too! It’s all done using familiar IP networking and VPN like connections. That sounds like a job for the IT Professional to me. Next year will bring SSL/TLS encryption for the pipes and Dynamic content caching so less stuff goes over the pipes (a bit like branch cache for the cloud) and a build out of the networking infrastructure.
Azure Licensing can be seen as too costly for some people so we’ve downsized! There’s a new Extra Small instance that costs just $0.05 per hour for a 1Ghz CPU, 768MB RAM and 20GB of storage…that sounds like the perfect kit to base my first instance on of an elastic application. All the Windows Azure Roles are Compute Instances and so are charged the same. There’s no CAL requirement to connect to an Azure VM role (awesome) and the Azure role license is covered through the compute costs…making it as cheap as (silicone) chips!
It’s all about to go Beta and we at UK TechNet will let you know when we drop the beta bomb.
So IT Pro’s need to skill up on:
Server 2008 R2
Hyper-V
IP
IIS7
You’ll be wanting to Azure to get your head around it…trials are included as part of your MSDN subscription too.
SQL Azure
Community Technology Previews were announced for a bunch of new features including Reporting so reports can be authored using SQL Services Reporting tools and embedded in the database. Data SyncCTP 2 can sync databases across datacentres and with the data on your premises in your own SQL Server. That means you can have multiple geo-redundant SQL database or even just keep the data closest to the people who need it. So say you have your business has 10 people in Japan, 10 people in Europe and 100 people data mining in India the guys in Japan and Europe can access the DB from SQL Azure from their fastest local DC and the guys in India receive a “caching” effect of having the data sync to their local SQL Server saving on the cost of the main Internet pipe to the office.
The lightweight Database Manager formerly known as “Houston” (stunning Siverlight based app if you have a look) has entered CTP too and will become part of the developer portal.
DBAs and IT Pros doing SQL stuff need to skill up on:
not a whole lot…but if you aren’t on SQL 2008 you need to nail that.
You’ll be wanting to Try SQL Azure to get your head around it…trials are included as part of your MSDN subscription too.
IE9
Platform Preview 6 of Internet Explorer 9 was introduced at PDC10 and whilst the Beta is out and has rocked 10 million downloads already PP6 is important. It’s what you need to run to assess your stuff against IE9 whilst still using IE8 – which is exactly what you need to do right now, you’d don’t want to be deploying Beta code (even if it’s awesome) to your user base. There’s not a huge amount of IT Professional stuff in IE9 just yet, but this video (which is HTML5 by the way if your browser is capable) shows off the new platform preview and IE Test Drive Site.
Windows Phone 7
Oh boy was there a lot of love in the room for this last night. We gave a couple away, more devs came with their own phones…everyone loved them!
You might not know who Scott Guthrie is but he’s a demo-god, dev-god and he’s famed for his red shirts. He live built a Windows Phone 7 app that dynamically searches eBay using odata to help you buy red shirts…it took about 5 minutes. Do that on another mobile device.
We’ve only just released the phone so there were no new announcements other than the inclusion of oData. I’ll be releasing some info on how WP7 can be used by business and by IT Pros next week so stay tuned to my blog.
Summary
I’m excited by the VM Role, it adds a whole new dimension to Azure, Windows Phone 7 is amazing and the developer experience, just like the user experience is 2nd to none , IE9 is beautifying the web for 10 million people already. Oh yeah, we also had a Kinect at the event and this is what people had to say about it (#nowhereneardeadyet!):
@pauliom: Trying to decide what to concentrate on after #ukpdc10. Better wp7 storage/tombstoning, tfs in azure, rx, or getting an xbox kinect? about 5 hours ago via TweetStation
@pauliom: RT @mtaulty: I only played with kinect at #ukpdc10 tonight for 5 minutes and it won me over - seems just as natural as it looks on the demos. about 5 hours ago via MetroTwit
@JonAlb: Thanks to all organisers of #ukpdc10 a fantastic evening just two requests... can I have a phone and can I have an xbox kinect? about 14 hours ago via MetroTwit
@ajnt: Xbox Kinect is amazing! Great idea having it at #UKPDC10. 3d person tracking including face recognition. 10th November UK launch. about 14 hours ago via web
@JonAlb: playing on the xbox kinect was very cool, the ping pong game (wiff waff) was ace! you REALLY get into it, realistic tennis elbow! #Ukpdc10 about 14 hours ago via MetroTwit
@GrahamWilmott: #ukpdc10 just played with #kinect about 15 hours ago via HTC Peep
s@tack72: RT @simonster: can I just ask, who at #ukpdc10 thinks Kinect is AWESOME? about 16 hours ago via MetroTwit
@gthevenot: OK Microsoft, no free #WP7 at #ukpdc10, what about free #kinect then ? about 16 hours ago via web
@brandondjmurphy: Remember when wii was first released. Triple that and double that and you will come close to the kinect experience #ukpdc10 about 17 hours ago via Mobile Web
@Paul_Dunscombe: Playing with kinect. Looks like a wii killer. #ukpdc10 about 17 hours ago via Tweets60
@westleyl: Noooooo, our beer .. RT @petemill: Finally made it to #ukpdc10 - helping myself to beer. Played with the kinect. Recognition is incredbile! about 17 hours ago via Seesmic for Android
@CLaueR: RT @petemill: Finally made it to #ukpdc10 - helping myself to beer. Played with the kinect. Recognition is incredbile! Bowling arm hurts about 17 hours ago via Twitter for Windows Phone
@petemill: Finally made it to #ukpdc10 - helping myself to beer. Played with the kinect. Recognition is incredbile! Bowling arm hurts about 17 hours ago via Twitter for Windows Phonef
@blakepender: SB: Kinect is remarkable! Talking about it being great #ukpdc10 about 19 hours ago via txt
@pauliom: At #ukpdc10 as a backing dancer to lady gaga apparently #kinect making a t1t of myself about 20 hours ago via TweetStation
@brandondjmurphy: At #ukpdc10, impressed with the kinect. about 20 hours ago via Mobile Web
just two requests... can I have a phone and can I have an xbox kinect? about 14 hours ago via MetroTwit
#ukpdc10 about 19 hours ago via txt