Keith Mayer

This month, my fellow IT Pro Technical Evangelists and I are authoring a new articles series on 20 Key Scenarios with Windows Azure Infrastructure Services.  You can catch the full series at http://aka.ms/CloudTop20.  In today's article in this series, we'll discuss extending our On-premises Datacenter into a Hybrid Network Infrastructure with Windows Server 2012, Windows Azure Virtual Networks and Site-to-Site VPN Tunnels. Windows Azure Virtual Networks allow us to securely extend our Private Cloud with a hybrid network infrastructure that leverages the best of two worlds: the low-latency and high-bandwidth available with our on-premise datacenter networks with the elastic, pay-as-you-go cloud model of Windows Azure Virtual Networks and Virtual Machines. Windows Azure Virtual Networks – Guided Lab Scenario Windows Azure Virtual Networks offers the power to open up s... (more)

Study Guide: Upgrade Your Microsoft Certification to MCSA Windows Server

I’ve assembled all of the relevant content from the Windows Server 2012 “Early Experts” Challenge program into an accelerated Certification Study Guide for IT Professionals targeting Exam 70-417, Upgrading Your Skills to MCSA Windows Server 2012. In this article, I’ll provide a summary of this Study Guide along with the information needed to receive your own copy of this Study Guide for FREE! Are you SharePoint, Exchange or Lync Certified? In addition to IT Pros previously certified on Windows Server 2008, the MCSA Windows Server 2012 certification is also very relevant for IT Pro... (more)

Build Your Private Cloud in a Month

Are you virtualizing your servers? Yes, of course! Are you spending less time managing your servers as a result? Hmm … No! Server Virtualization is Great, But … Server virtualization has been a great set of technologies to reduce our capital expenses and some operating expenses by consolidating a larger number of virtualized server workloads in a smaller footprint of physical rack space.  As a result, we’ve been able to purchase less data center hardware and likely have lower power and cooling costs in running our data center. However, most IT Pros are not seeing a reduction in the... (more)

Super-Fast Failover with VM Guest Clustering in Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V

My good friend and colleague, Matt Hester, recently wrote a great article on Hyper-V Host Clustering as part of our latest article series, Become a Virtualization Expert in 20 Days! In this article, I’ll build on Matt’s cluster scenario to walk through the advantages and implementation steps for another type of clustering in a Hyper-V environment: Virtual Machine Guest Clustering.   Along the way, we’ll explore some new features in Windows Server 2012 Failover Clustering that enhance Virtual Machine Guest Clustering: Virtual Fibre Channel SANs, Anti-Affinity and Virtual Machine ... (more)

Step-by-Step: Build Linux VMs in the Cloud with Windows Azure

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. Linux? That’s right, Linux! Windows Azure runs Linux VMs as a first-class citizen on our cloud platform, with support in the Preview offering for four common Linux distributions: SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 11 SP2 OpenSUSE 12.1 CentOS 6.3 Ubuntu 12..04.1 and 12.10 The best news is … you can try t... (more)