RunAs Radio

How does data analytics fit into your business intelligence strategy? While at Ignite in Atlanta, Richard sat down with Jen Stirrup to discuss her experiences helping companies really take advantage of the data they have to understand how their businesses are doing, and what they could be doing better. The conversation starts out with a discussion on data warehousing, which is still valuable in this day and age. Jen talks about how the ETL process sometimes "shaved off the corners" of important data, and that new data analytics strategies are better at avoiding that behaviour. The discussion also turns to R and the statistical analysis approaches available today to really understand data. It's a brave new data world!

Holy smokes, 500 episodes! Richard brings in Carl Franklin to do hosting duties while guest stars on his own show - taking a look at the changes to the IT landscape in the past nearly 10 years. Back in April 2007, Vista was brand new (and not doing well), PowerShell was new also, Cloud was just starting out and DevOps didn't even really exist. 64 bit computing was something that was going to be important and smartphones were just starting to take off. Amazing what can happen in 500 shows... and now on to the next 500!

How granular can mobile application management be? Richard talks to Mike Crowley about the Microsoft Enterprise Mobility Suite, and it's ability to allow Bring-Your-Own-Device to work effectively without taking over the device. Mike focuses in on three key aspects in the suite, starting with identity - being able to identify users through Azure Active Directory. From there, the next aspect is application management, controlling what capabilities certain applications have on the device. And finally, there is document rights management so that you can protect docs on the device. This works, check it out!

What can App Service do for you? While at Ignite in Atlanta, Richard sat down with Jeremy Thake to talk about his new role with the Azure team, working with App Service. The conversation starts out focused on the truth that App Service is for operations folks, not developers. App Service is a set of tools for managing applications in the cloud effectively, being able to measure their health, scale instances, restart, reconfigure, and so on. Jeremy also talks about the role App Service takes in deploying your cloud applications at scale for testing and pre-production reasons, as well as out in the production space. No matter how you use Azure, App Service can help!

Is your IT group in the dark? Richard chats with Mattias Karlsson about his experiences as a consultant coming into companies where IT really doesn't know how well their infrastructure is operating - place where the mantra is "if no one is complaining, we're fine." But life can be better than that! Mattias talks about deploying an instrumentation solution like PRTG to start getting insight on whether or not applications and infrastructure are healthy and in use. You can't get better if you don't know what is going well and what isn't, so you need to do measurements. It starts out knowing what normal looks like, and then trying to do better. You need instrumentation to know if you're improving!

How do Small Business Server and Windows 10 get along? Richard chats with Susan Bradley about her experiences continuing to support Small Business Server and Server Essentials even though the products aren't available for the latest builds of Windows Server. There are some challenges working with Windows 10 as security and access rules continue to evolve. The conversation also digs into the move to the cloud for small businesses - where it works for an organization, there are some significant advantages, but it isn't always an option. And who knows what will happen with Server 2016!

IPv6 continues to gain traction! Richard talks to Ed Horley about the progress of IPv6, including the recent announcement by Microsoft at the Ignite conference in Atlanta that virtually all of Azure would now support IPv6. That's a lot of new IPv6 traffic added to the internet at large! Ed discusses the big penetration points of IPv6, including mobile networks (there are a lot of smartphones out there), some consumer ISPs and now the public cloud. Where is IPv6 not happening much? Big enterprises. Adoption in some countries (including the US) are well past 25% - IPv6 is becoming mainstream!

Ready to move your PBX to the cloud? Richard chats with Avrohom Gottheil about this fundamental shift in telephony. Once upon a time there were analog phone systems, then everything went digital. But now, the location of your phones and phone system is almost irrelevant! Avrohom talks about being able to create unified communications solutions where email, telephony and presence all work together. But how do you get past your old PBX approach? It takes new phones, a careful look at your networking and thinking through what's possible when location and connectivity aren't tied together.

Have you heard about Azure Stack? While at Ignite in Atlanta, Richard sat down with Jeffrey Snover to discuss the Azure Stack announcements. Azure Stack is all about bringing Azure architecture to your data center, or the data center of your preferred service provider. The concept is more about architecture than implementation, although as Jeffrey explains, you won't be running Azure Stack on your existing hardware. The hardware and configuration requirements for Azure Stack are very specific, look at this as more of a partnership with Microsoft doing a fair bit to maintain your new Azure Stack infrastructure - perhaps even more than you do! This is a new kind of on-premises solution and bears careful study!

If you could make storage super fast, how much better would things be? Richard chats with Alan Sugano about his discovery of Simplivity, a card added on to certain Dell, Lenovo and Cisco storage arrays to do inline de-duplication so fast that the iOPs load drops massively. And how many problems does that solve? Alan talks about how improving storage performance changed the way he thinks about hyperconvergence. Different kinds of VMs and roles living together on these high-performance devices makes your private cloud solution so much simpler!

What can Azure Site Recovery do for you? Richard chats with Nicolas Blank about his experiences backing up on-premise systems with Azure Site Recovery, including tricky products like Exchange and SQL Server. You may not be ready to move your on-premise systems into the cloud, but often disaster recovery is more acceptable, if for no other reason than it is far less expensive than maintaining a separate data center. The question is, can you test it properly? Just because you've taken backups doesn't mean you can restore them. Nicolas talks through the fine details about being able to organize and test disaster recovery with Azure Site Migration.

Ready to move to Exchange 2016? Richard chats with Paul Cunningham about the latest version of Exchange and what it takes to move up to it. The older your version of Exchange, the harder it is to upgrade - as Paul says, moving from 2013 is the least painful. And if you're still on 2007, well, you have to migrate to 2013 first. The conversation dives into the typical problems that are revealed when you start looking at a migration - issues around namespaces, certificates and third party tools. And speaking of tools, Microsoft provides the Exchange Server Deployment Assistant to help you started on your own migration!

VMWare and PowerShell together? Of course! Regardless of the recent excitement around PowerShell going open source, third party companies have been supporting PowerShell for years, and VMWare is no exception. Chris tells his story of building out a set of PowerShell scripts for automating configuration of the company demo and operations VMWare environments. The conversation also digs into the logical line between automation and control, as well as better source management and testing for PowerShell scripts. Check out Chris' open source project called Vester that can help you manage your VMWare environment with PowerShell!

Is there a science to DevOps? Richard talks to Dr. Nicole Forsgren, who has a PhD in Information Management about her work with the DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) organization. Nicole is one of the key people behind the State of DevOps report (published by Puppet). The conversation digs into some of the findings in that report, including the proof that stability and speed are not mutually exclusive - you can bring new features and products to market quickly while keeping your systems stable. Have a listen and a read!

How does the cloud shape your infrastructure? Richard talks with web pioneer and CEO Jon Mittelhauser about the on-going evolution of infrastructure architecture to something more closely resembling the cloud. You might not use public cloud infrastructure, but getting your virtual machines able to be created and destroyed on demand is certainly reflective of cloud architecture. The challenges come in the networking and mixing of the models. In the future, cloud architecture will be the norm - the question is, how long will it take you to get there?

How do you build a blameless post-mortem culture? And should you? Richard chats with Jason Hand from VictorOps about the blameless culture, which is a methodology embraced by the safest and most reliable organizations - think aircraft safety. Having everyone involved in an incident able to discuss everything they did and saw helps to get a clear picture of the truth. Without that information, it's very hard to make real improvements in our organizations. Jason talks about ChatOps as a strategy to get there, using tools like Slack to let people see the conversations going on and capture the critical information during an incident to address problems.

Here comes the Redstone update for Windows 10! Richard chats with Stephen Rose about the big one year update for Windows 10. Don't call it a service pack - it's full of new features of Windows. The patching normally done in services packs is now a routine thing with Windows 10, they don't even wait for Tuesday. The conversation digs into some of the new features in Redstone and how it can serve the enterprise effectively. A lot of energy has been focused on taking security to the next level, because the black hats sure are! Steven talks about some new security devices and a shift in attitude from an administrator's point of view - we're security risks too!

Infrastructure deserves tests too! While at ChefConf in Austin, Richard sat down with Steven Murawski to talk about Test Kitchen. Test Kitchen allows you to execute code to validate the operation and performance of specific features in your infrastructure. As Steven explains, you can used Desired State Configuration (DSC) to determine whether or not your configuration is correct, but when it isn't, how do you determine what's wrong? Test Kitchen is all about actually exercising the relevant elements of your infrastructure so you know what's working and what isn't, and how well it all runs. Since it's open source, you can download it and take it out for a spin for free!

What does it mean to have application automation? While at ChefConf in Austin, Richard sat down with Jessica DeVita to talk about Habitat, an open source project driven by the folks who created Chef to bring automation to the application itself. As Jessica explains, most applications are dependent on a given infrastructure to provide scaling, security, reliability and all of the other services that make a good application. But what if those elements were part of the application itself, and the infrastructure could change? That's the promise of Habitat. It's still early days, but well worth a look!

How do you manage the security of documents around individual applications on a mobile device? Richard talks to Simon May about Microsoft InTune Mobile Application Management (MAM). MAM allows IT folks to specify security privileges on an app-by-app and document-by-document basis. The identity role is handled by Azure Active Directory, and the entire Office 365 suite is supported - but so are products from Adobe, FoxIt, SAP and more. Documents can be time-limited (very spy novelish!) and even have individual parts of a document (like a paragraph) have different privileges. This looks to be a lighter-weight way to allow bring-your-own-device to protect corporate documents while leaving personal content alone. Check it out!

A whole other area of Windows Server 2016 to dive into - Hyper-V! Richard chats with Aidan Finn about the coming features for Hyper-V in Server 2016, starting with the ability to host older VM version in 2016: You're no longer forced to upgrade immediately! But you'll want to upgrade, because there are some awesome new features, including being able to map GPUs into specific VMs. Aidan also talks about rolling cluster upgrades, where you're able to take your 2012R2 clusters and upgrade them instance-by-instance to 2016, and only after they're all done, upgrade to new functionality. The feature list continues with the role of Nano Server and new security features - have a listen!

How does Windows 10 protect your secrets? Richard chats with Mark Minasi about the endless evolution of protecting user information in Windows. What, you don't have any secrets? Sure you do! Start with your login password: You don't want to have to type a password in every time an application runs, so Windows remembers it for you, at least while you're logged in. How can you be sure it's safe? Mark does his usual amazing story telling job of taking you through the history of protected storage and digging into how Windows 10 (and Server 2016) will do it better - check out the links in the show notes for more!

Windows Server 2016 is coming soon - but is it all about on-premise, or all about the cloud? Richard talks to John Savill about his favorite features of Server 2016, which is, as he says, "inspired by Azure." Of course, folks are excited about the new containers service that has been in Linux for years, now in Windows in a couple of flavors, based on security level. This also means there's a need for nested virtualization, although typically only one level deep. The idea of limited administrator privilege factors largely with shielded VMs and Just Enough Administration. Bring more cloud thinking to your on-premise infrastructure!

Public Folders are a plague! Richard chats with Tony Redmond about the challenges of decades of public folders in Exchange accumulating the data cruft of a company. The need to store information independent of any given individual and discoverable by others has always been a challenge. Public Folders never got a lot of love, but today there are some interesting solutions found in Office 365. Tony talks about Office 365 Groups and how they are becoming what Public Folders ought to have been. These are the new emerging features of Office 365 and are worth a look!

Is Group Policy dead? Jeremy Moskowitz says no! And he's not alone. Richard chats with Jeremy about the confusion in the marketplace these days around Active Directory, Group Policy, Intune, mobile device management tools and so on. Group Policy continues to represent the best way to manage Windows PCs, which is still a large part of most organizations. And Windows 10 implements even more Group Policy related features. If you manage a domain, you should be using Group Policy. MDM, well, that's another show!

Is it time to jump into machine learning? Richard talks to Buck Woody about how he has focused his multi-decade career at the leading edge of using data for business advantage. Buck talks about the differences between business intelligence, data mining, predictive analytics and machine learning. The landscape called Data Science these days is large, but there is lots of opportunities. When you get it right, Data Science represents a huge opportunity for your organization. But it is a young technology now that benefits generalists, and you do need to learn some things. Check the show notes for great places to get started!

Hyperconverged storage is coming to Windows Server 2016! Richard chats with Ned Pyle about his work building parts of the Storage Services in Server 2016, including Storage Replica. The term "hyperconvergence" is a bit abused, but Ned talks about how software-defined compute, networking and storage have come together to allow the scaling and reconfiguration of server resources easier, more dynamic and maintainable. The latest incarnation of Storage Services takes using bunches of storage devices (hard drives, SSDs, NVME and so on) and making them allocate out based on your needs for performance, reliability and scalability. There's a ton to talk about, so this is a long show - and worth it!

Time for another SQL Q and A! Richard moderates an hour long discussion at SQLintersection in Orlando with panelists Paul Randal, Kim Tripp and Brent Ozar as they tackle the questions and concerns of the attendees. A number of other SQL luminaries (including Microsoft SQL team members) chime in about topics ranging from data types to data recovery, noSQL vs RDBMS, query performance strategies, and more! Why should you upgrade to SQL 2016? How long does CheckDB take to run on SQL 2005? What is the longest answer to a question that Kim Tripp can give? All this and more in this show full of great answers and debates!

So what happens when a country gets hacked? Richard talks to Troy Hunt about the significance of the attacks on Turkey and the Philippines, where entire voter registries have been exposed, including email addresses, passport information, even fingerprint data! Troy digs into the ideas around biometric data, the tepid reactions of the governments in question and a larger conversation about where this will ultimately lead. If you are concerned about data privacy, there are steps you can take, but only to a limited degree - anywhere that you share your data is vulnerable, even your government. Protect yourself!

Instrumentation and Automation across clouds and on-premise? Yes! Richard chats with Jeremy Winter about his work bringing Microsoft Operations Management Suite to life in the cloud. Think of it as Monitoring and Management as a Service, although it works just fine with your on-premise systems as well. OMS comes from the System Center world, but it isn't dependent on it - you can use OMS with and without System Center. Jeremy also talks about how other existing instrumentation and automation tools integrate with OMS so that you don't have to do any rip-and-replace, just add OMS on the top for a broader view of your systems. Lots of great links, check them out!

How much administration do you need? Richard chats with Tech Fellow and Father-of-PowerShell Jeffrey Snover about Just Enough Administration (JEA). The goal of JEA is to get administrators to stop living in admin accounts, to operate day-to-day with regular domain accounts and only escalate up to admin for a specific task, typically written in PowerShell. Jeffrey talks about creating a "break glass in emergency" account that is the superadmin, only to be used when there's no other way to do something. This account should be heavily logged and scrutinized, so that root cause analysis can extract the needs for the event and create more automation and security granularity around it. JEA works on Server 2008R2 and above, and will be built into Server 2016!

How do you know your systems are compliant with security and industry standards like CIS, SOX, HIIPA, PCI and so on? Chef evangelist Jessica DeVita talks to Richard about the free Chef compliance tools that can help you understand where your systems are exposed and help get you into a compliant state - and stay there. If your only check of compliance is an audit, things are going to be rough. Audits are just spotchecks, not comprehensive evaluations, and it takes time to get things into order. Having a system that can continuously check compliance state, even as code is being written, makes life much, much simpler. Check it out!

How do you manage your infrastructure like its code? Enter the release pipeline! Richard chats with Steven Murawski and Michael Greene about their recent white paper on the Release Pipeline Model. The conversation digs into the stages of developing and management configuration-as-code, including source code management, building, testing and deploying. There's a ton of tooling around each of these aspects, what you choose is very personal - and it makes sense to use what you already have onsite. Michael and Steven also dig into crisis management - taking advantage of the pipeline to respond more effectively when there are problems, and to help make sure those problems never happen again!

Ransomware is in the news, but do you know what to do about it? Richard talks to Paula Januskiewicz about how ransomware works and what you can do to prevent an attack, and how to clean up after one. An awful lot of the power of ransomware is blunted by having a good backup strategy - one that you actually know how to restore from. Paula also talks about running your workstations in a whitelist configuration, where only a known good list of software can run. There are tools built into Windows that can help you there. At the same time, having good communication between IT and users helps - sometimes the reason a computer is slow is that it is encrypting everything, and reporting that to IT gives you a chance to get a jump on the malware!

What's the state of DevOps coming into 2016? Richard chats with Gene Kim, one of the godfathers of the DevOps movement, about what he's seen over the past year and how DevOps is evolving into "the way we build and operate software." Gene talks about getting management more involved in the DevOps process, recognizing that when software is built and operated in a rapidly iterating model, the way that software is sold and utilized changes as well. More and more Gene can see that DevOps is not just about the unicorn companies, but about what every business can do to build and operate better software. Have a listen!

What is coming in SQL Server 2016? Richard chats with Brent Ozar about his thoughts on the upcoming version of SQL Server. The conversation digs into how the cloud is impacting SQL Server - features like Query Store were available first in the cloud are now showing up in this new on-premise edition! Speaking of Query Store, who wouldn't want a record of query plans so you can find out exactly why a query in production took a long time? Brent discusses other features including the stretch table to azure, always encrypted, row level security... the list goes on! The question is, when do we get this great version?

Does the cloud represent the end of the world for ISPs? Hardly, according to Barnaby Jeans. Barnaby and Richard chat about how service providing is still an important part of the equation for many customers, but the workloads are evolving. Microsoft has a Cloud Solution Provider Program to help ISPs utilize features of Azure and Office 365 as part of their overall offering. Every service provider has some unique element to their own product line up, and Azure can be used to augment or expand that offering. Looking the other way, there are opportunities for consultants to offer services in the form of Azure and Office 365 as well - take a look!

How do you diagnose performance problems in Windows? Richard chats with Microsoft Senior Premier Field Engineer Clint Huffman about the tooling he builds and use to get Windows running as fast as possible. The conversation starts out with a bit of a digression around Clint's efforts to get his Surface RT devices running fast - using the same techniques he uses everywhere! A huge long list of links in the show notes reflect all the different tools available for free to tune Windows - including Clint's own brand new ICU (Clue) Tool. Take it out for a spin!

Is the cloud really secure? Richard chats with Orin Thomas about his work developing a doctoral thesis on cloud security. Recognizing that security at this level is less about products and more about principles, Orin digs into thoughts around encryption, physical security, breach identification and more. Inevitably there are some references to particular tools like the Azure Key Vault, but the challenge is in evaluating a technology in the context of a broader principle. Lots of great thinking about security!

How do you host Linux in the cloud? Richard talks to Tim Warner about his experience managing Linux instances in Azure. According to Microsoft, about 25% of Azure's VMs are Linux! Tim focuses on the key issue of working with Linux, which is getting familiar with the command line approach of management. Sure, there are GUIs for Linux, but it's all about the command line. The CLI is becoming central to Windows server management as well, and Tim talks about setting up tooling for managing both from the command line. Development on Linux is a common practice in the open source world and becoming an important supported platform in the Microsoft space - dive in!

What are your disaster recovery plans? Richard chats with Jennelle Crothers about Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery products - two different types of backup into the cloud. Jennelle talks about getting started simply with file backup into the cloud - being able to get copies of data outside of your organization without the mess and reliability problems associated with tapes. You can do the backup rotation style that you like, and just pay for the storage you use. Site Recovery is a far more sophisticated product, to the point where it becomes your recovery orchestration engine - call it Disaster Recovery as Code. Backup has evolve - have you?

How are you managing desktop updates? Richard chats with Andrew Laurence about his work using IBM BigFix to manage updates for Windows and OSX desktop machines. Most update technologies are platform specific, which means in an environment with Windows PC and Macs, you're doing many things twice. Andrew talks about using IBM BigFix to provide a comprehensive update solution, but only if you work with its strengths, rather than insist that it works the way you've always done things. Living in a cross-platform world has its challenges, but it's not optional, and there are tools to make your life easier. Check 'em out!

How can you increase the digital resilience of your organization's systems? Richard chats with Alan Sharp-Paul about exactly what it means to be resilient, starting with knowing when your systems are changing, either intentionally or otherwise. All too often security starts and stops at the edge, which means when a breach happens, the breach is total. Worse yet, as Alan discusses, the organization often doesn't even know there's a breach for months! Resilience really focuses in on being able to deal with security and systems problems with graceful degradation. Without an ability to fail and measure the failure, how can you even know there's a problem?

Ready to put your PBX in the cloud? Richard chats with Tom Arbuthnot about the Cloud PBX offering as part of Office 365 Skype for Business. Skype for Business has been around for awhile, as part of an overall cloud-based unified communication strategy - so what makes the Cloud PBX offering unique? Tom talks about how Microsoft is talking on the PSTN services as well - in the United States (at least for now), they've become a full-fledged carrier and can sell you PSTN numbers that bridge into Office 365. Elsewhere in the world you can work with your local carrier to provide SIP and TDM access up to Office 365 and get pretty much the same result. If you're looking to update your PBX, you need to check this out!

Have you looked at Microsoft Operations Management Suite (OMS)? Richard chats with Cameron Fuller about OMS and its relationship with System Center Operations Manager - other than caring about operations, they aren't the same thing at all. Cameron discusses the cloud-centric nature of OMS, but not necessarily an Azure-centric view: OMS can help with instrumentation and management of Amazon's cloud as well as other platforms as a whole. While OMS will integrate with Operations Manager, it will also take data from Nagios, which is a great instrumentation system from the open source world. The conversation also digs into different approaches to automation and backup - OMS covers a ton of important functionality!

Patching is hard, but patching clusters is worse! Richard chats with Luke Sword about the challenges of getting patches done right when systems are mission critical and complex. Luke runs down the range of options for managing patch, including Windows Update Services, the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit and System Center Configuration Manager (which depends on the previous two). But that only works when the patches are all independent - what happens if you have to patch one server before another? The conversation digs into System Center Orchestrator in the role of coordination and all the PowerShell scripts you need to write and manage to make it all work. Check it out!

Are you using Chef for your configuration management? Richard chats with Steven Murawski about the on-going open source project that is Chef. Steven talks about how the community leads and builds the project as much as the folks from Chef themselves do - and its free to use, but Chef offers pay services above and beyond the core product to make your life easier. The conversation also digs into the relationship between Chef, PowerShell and Desired State Configuration - they all work together to keep your servers on the straight-and-narrow of delivering reliable software services. Whether you're on-premise or in the cloud, this is configuration-as-code at it's best!

When should move your storage to the cloud? Richard chats with Kevin Evans about migrating off of an on-premise SAN onto Azure's StorSimple hybrid cloud storage solution. Kevin discusses the data requirements of a graphics packaging company, making multi-gigabyte files for printing. When the on-premise storage solution was due for replacement, looking at the massive increase in storage available in the cloud was hard to resist. When combined in a hybrid configuration so that you have the performance of local storage as well, it was an unbeatable combination. Disaster recovery, continuous online storage and archiving... is the cloud the perfect storage solution?

How is Windows 10 working out for you? To finish 2015, Richard chats with Mark Minasi about the on-going changes to Windows that should result in this idea of Windows-as-a-Service. Mark talks about the almost continuous building process going on with Windows, and how various rings of folks get access to those builds. Most of those builds are only visible to Microsoft employees, but you can see them at BuildFeed - and you can get further into the new builds with the Windows Insider Program. The challenge of this new model will be the demand to keep up to date. How often and you and your organization stand new versions of Windows? Every year? Every few months?

With last names like Claus and Snow, what else could we talk about but Christmas gifts? Richard chats with Patch and Switch, aka Joey Snow and Rick Claus, about all the gifts you wish you'd thought of for your IT loved ones. Oh wait, that's the listeners, isn't it? Right, offer this show up to your loved ones and let them know this is the kind of stuff you want - geeky and cool! Whatever you celebrate this time of year, all the best to you and yours!