RunAs Radio

Have you looked at everything available in an Office 365 subscription? It's easy to stop at Exchange or SharePoint online, but what about the services side of Office 365 including OneDrive for Business and Azure Active Directory Applications. Office 365 is more than just the Office suite in the cloud, there are APIs available to allow developer to build mash-up style applications that integrate with Exchange, SharePoint (both on-prem and cloud) as well as a huge number of third party applications. Jeremy Thake walks through the opportunities for doing overall application installation management from Office 365 - not just Microsoft apps!

So how interesting can power management be? More than you might believe! Richard chats with Microsoft PM Joao Botto about how Surface has taken power management to a new level. While it's easy to just think about power management as a tool to reduce company power consumption over night, when you get into the tablet space, it's also about conserving battery life. Joao talks about Connected Standby mode, which utilizes hardware, drivers, operating system and software together to minimize power consumption while still being able to receive notifications about updates, messages and more! This is some next generation power management!

Ready to manage Azure from the command line? While at That Conference in Wisconsin Dells, Richard chatted with Brian Lewis about the PowerShell support available for Azure. Every command and more available in the Azure GUI Dashboard works from PowerShell. Brian talks about the advantages of using scripting to control Azure, creating repeatable, consistent execution plans through scripts for all sorts of configuration changes, including creating new VMs, configuring networking and activating services. Don't use a Word doc to set up your Azure apps - use PowerShell!

How do you build a data warehouse in Azure? While at That Conference in Wisconsin Dells, Richard sat down with Michael Blumenthal to talk through a particular case study. Michael talks about the early days of Azure, and how for this particular project, Azure was used only as a VM host - entirely an Infrastructure-as-a-Service solution. Using SQL Server and Integration Services, the system gathered data from a number of disparate systems and loaded into separate databases. Then the consolidation! Great stories about making the cloud work!

Ready for a new version of Desired State Configuration (DSC)? Richard chats with Don Jones about the second version of DSC, although it's bundled as part of The Windows Management Framework 5.0. Don discusses the evolving nature of server management and DSC's role in it, and how the tools need to improve to manage your scripts and configuration files. The conversation also turns to testing, and the tool Pester on GitHub as the ideal way to do testing for PowerShell. Don also suggests that if you're new to PowerShell, the ideal way to learn it is in the context of DSC - it gets you focused on a few key capabilities that can provide a ton of power!

How do you provide granular administrative privileges to junior administrators? Richard talks to Mark Minasi about the idea of Just Enough Administration (JEA). And it's not just for junior administration - the conversation dives into this idea that administrators should be domain users most of the time, and only elevate their privileges for specific tasks. JEA helps you organize privilege sets for those tasks so that you have no more capability than necessary. Administrator accounts are the hot new exploit vector, it's time to lock them down! Check out Just Enough Administration on TechNet.

Is ITIL still relevant in a cloud-centric world? Carroll Moon says yes! Richard talks to Carroll about his work building out the service management infrastructure of Office 365 and how those learnings can apply to your organization as it moves to the cloud. Carroll focuses first and foremost on monitoring - until you can see how your applications are operating in real time, other DevOps-type improvements are hard to quantify. And the instrumentation needed should be going down to the client, just monitoring servers is not enough. Getting great monitoring working on your apps means involving development - there's no getting around that. You can read Carroll's entire blog post series on Service Monitoring on Axelos.

How do you filter spam and malware for your mail server? Richard chats with Peter Schmidt about Exchange Online Protection (EOP). Remember Forefront? This is where the product went, into the cloud. As an Azure product, EOP is available when you use Exchange Online - but you can also put it in front of your on-premise Exchange server at a stunning price of one dollar per user per month. Peter discusses the spam and malware filtering, but EOP also offers mail proxying in general so that your mail has a place to live when your server is down. This is the first step to moving your mail to the cloud, check it out at Exchange Online Protection.

Are you ready for Windows 10? Richard chats with Mark Minasi about the impending release of Windows 10. Mark talks about the new features of Windows 10 that will make you happy you're upgrading, including Universal Apps (no really, they're good!), the new store mechanism and the new browser - Edge. This leads to a conversation about managing updates, browser compatibility and keeping your business environment stable. Not everything will be ready in July, but the upgrades will be ongoing through the rest of 2015, so keep your eyes open!

Desired State Configuration and SQL Server? Richard talks to Patrick Curran about using DSC for more than just setting up a web farm. In fact, Patrick uses DSC to set up an entire SharePoint infrastructure - including SQL Server! And that is the tricky bit, since SQL Server isn't quite as PowerShell friendly as IIS. Patrick talks about battling the SQL PowerShell bits which sometime install, sometimes not so much - ultimately you're better off using SQL internal scripting for a reliable install. Lots of interesting thoughts about taking DSC to the max!

Does your organization need Yammer? Richard talks to Chris Poteet about the whys and hows of Yammer. The conversation starts out on the why of Yammer - what does this tool bring to the table? There are lots of pseudo-social-media products out there for the enterprise, but they only work if people use them. But Yammer's approach makes it familiar and easy to have conversations within the organization that can be searched and shared. Chris then digs into the install process: There almost isn't one! Totally cloud based, you sign up to Yammer with your business email and things pretty much start happening from there. Check it out!

How does Microsoft use SharePoint? Richard chats with MS IT SharePoint Server owner Jared Shockley about how Microsoft uses SharePoint internally. As it turns out, Jared has been part of the team moving Microsoft SharePoint sites into Office 365 - according to him, 93% of the on-premise sites are now in the cloud! The last 7% represent the tricky bits. Serious customizations are the main issue, and the mechanisms for customizing SharePoint on-premise are very different from SharePoint in Office 365. Jared talks about evaluating projects for rewriting - SharePoint isn't the only choice these days!

An update on Windows update? Richard talks to PFE Robert Smith about the announcements coming out of build around how Windows will be updated going forward. No more rollups! Well, almost. The conversation digs into the on-going evolution of updating Windows, the lack of Service Packs (and their meaning), rollups, hotfixes, and so on. As Terry Myerson said on stage at Ignite, for unmanaged environments, updating is going to be far more automatic. If you run a strict update environment with WSUS, nothing needs to change, expect that hotfixes will now appear in the Windows Update Catalog. So things are getting better!

What burning questions do you have about SQL Server? Richard moderates a panel discussion with Paul Randal, Kim Tripp and Brent Ozar and a host of other folks at the SQL Intersection conference in Scottsdale Arizona. Taking questions from the audience, which are sometimes answered by other audience members (who happened to be speakers and/or Microsoft employees), the conversation ranges over SQL 2016, indexing, high availability, federation, data types, query governors and more!

PAL is growing up! After a few months of rest from publishing his book Windows Performance Analysis Field Guide, Richard talks to creator Clint Huffman about the latest update to PAL - Performance Analysis of Logs. PAL helps you sort out PerfMon to understand your performance problems in all sorts of Microsoft products. Clint has added a new auto-detect feature to check through your perfmon log file and know what profiles from PAL to pull in. And the latest features is the PAL Collector tool, which will analyze your machine and auto-configure PAL for data collection - and you can set it up to start on boot!

Rights Management in the Cloud? Richard talks to Morgan Simonsen about Azure Rights Management. Azure RMS works with Office 2010-13 and a variety of other applications to provide rights like read-only, modifiable, even limit viewing times - as well as letting you know when secured docs are viewed. And it can work outside of your systems as well, through Azure Active Directory. For other applications, there is the general RMS service that handles text files and images at portal.aadrm.com. It doesn't work with everything (gmail for example), but it does work in the field - if you need rights management, you should check it out!

So what happened at Ignite? Stephen Rose chats with Richard about the keynotes, sessions and announcements at Ignite. One of the biggest shows Microsoft has ever done, more than 22,000 people soaked up a huge amount of knowledge over a week in Chicago. Stephen also talks about the upcoming Mobility Transformed Tour around the US in May and June 2015!

Are Public Folders evil? Peter Schmidt says no! Richard chats with Peter about Modern Public Folders that come with Exchange 2013. Treated more like regular mailboxes (only BIGGER), the public folders in Exchange 2013 are much easier for the administrator to handle while being essentially the same as far as the users are concerned. The migration is a bit tricky, but you can do it on-premise as well as to Office 365. Peter has a great video about migrating to 2013 public folders from NICConf. Check it out!

How do you tune your stored procedures? While visiting Kim Tripp at her home, Richard chats with her about her approach to turning stored procedures. The conversation starts out focused on query plans, which applies to all sorts of things, but stored procedures have some special foibles around parameter sets and recompilation - there are good techniques and bad! Kim also digs into session parameters. If you've ever had a stored procedure that performed great in Management Studio but sucked out in the world, there's a good chance the session configurations are different. Also listen for a quick discussion on stored procedure techniques that can help fight SQL Injection attacks!

How do you manage your SQL Servers? Richard talks to Boris Hristov about using Policy-Based Management tools in SQL Server. These tools have been in the box since SQL Server 2008, but it's amazing how many folks still don't use them - are you really RDPing into every SQL Server? Hristov talks about using the Policy-Based Management tools to sweep across all of your SQL Servers and check what various settings are at - and change them if you need to! The conversation also digs into creating a Central Management Server to have a repository of all SQL Server instances and make it easy to propagate changes. Finally, if you're ready to step up your SQL management game, take a look at the Enterprise Policy Management Framework, a CodePlex project to do detailed analysis and reporting on your entire SQL Server landscape.

So what does it take to live stream the largest sporting events in the world? Richard chats with Ian Philpot, Premier Field Engineer at Microsoft, about his work troubleshooting streaming issues for events like the Winter Olympics in Sochi, 2014 FIFA World Cup and Super Bowl XLIX. Of course it takes a team to make a project like this happen, and Phil talks about the entire service chain, from NBC's broadcast to iStreamPlanet to Azure Media Serviecs, Akamai and Adobe's Primetime Player. The conversation also turns to the Azure Media Services Explorer, a GitHub project to make it easier to integrate your software into Azure Media Services. If AMS can handle the Super Bowl, they can handle your streaming project too!

Are you looking at Chef for deploying your infrastructure yet? Steven Murawski is back to talk about the latest development in Chef, including his role as the Community Software Development Engineer. Chef integrates with DSC and PowerShell to make managing your Windows instances and everything else much simpler when you roll out applications. Steven also talks about Chef going all open source, with some paid services if you need them. You should check it out!

How fast can you analyze incoming data? Richard talks to Scott Klein about Azure Stream Analytics. Scott discusses how stream analytics is different from data warehousing, being an additional "near real time" service you can add to your application infrastructure to let you react faster to business opportunities. The conversation digs into gradual adoption of stream analytics, taking small bites into the new technology to give your applications and services new capabilities without having to go "all-in" at once. Check it out!

Virtualization at Microsoft continues to evolve! Richard chats with Aidan Finn about the on-going evolution of virtualization and the options available in Azure to use it. It's not just about Azure-hosted virtual machines any more! The conversation ranges over a number of Azure technologies in use today, including Active Directory. You need AD in the cloud to make your hybrid infrastructure work effectively, but it does take time to figure out all the options. Aidan also talks about Microsoft Azure RemoteApp and the options it brings to making applications available in the cloud. Also mentioned is the Azure Speed Test for evaluating which data centers give your location the best performance. The Azure story continues to evolve. Have you checked out the latest?

So how has the Cloud changed Exchange? And how will those changes affect you? Richard talks to Tony Redmond about the on-going evolution of Exchange, primarily through Microsoft's cloud efforts with Office 365. Running Exchange at massive scale has changed the way Microsoft thinks about many of its products. Tony talks about what happens when an organization starts to move mail to the cloud - an obvious move, but it makes you look at a number of practices around email, especially with attachments. How do you share that information effectively without clogging up your mailbox? And, most importantly, how do you change people's habits with email?

So how is IPv6 doing, anyway? Ed Horley knows! Richard chats with Ed about IPv6 adoption. And Ed delivers - turns out there's a lot more going on in the IPv6 world that folks know about. Looking at the stats on World IPv6 Launch, Ed talks about how Comcast has been quietly implementing IPv6 in their DOCSIS3 routers. If you're a Comcast customer, you maybe running IPv6 without even knowing it! The conversation also turns to the cloud providers and their challenges around implementing IPv6. There's lots of little problems, but they are getting solved... 2015 should be an amazing year for IPv6!

Mike O'Neill is back with some free tools you need to know about! Richard chats with Mike about his roster of go-to tools for a Microsoft Premier Field Engineer. All of the tools are free to download and use. Mike starts out talking about The Problem Steps Recorder, a tool that lets you record every keystroke and mouse movement while using an app for playback in a web browser. Next up is a regular on RunAs, Performance Analysis of Logs Tool. PAL analyzes your PerfMon data and shows what are good numbers and bad. And to help you get Exchange PerfMon data, Mike mentions ExPerfWiz, which actually helps you collect the right counters in Exchange. There's a similar tools for SQL Server called SQL Monitor. For Active Directory, check out ADReplStatus, which gives you details on how replication is going in your domain. If you want to visualize your domain, check out Active Directory Topology Diagrammer. For PowerShell, check out Script Browser and Analyzer which comes with some 9000 script samples. Finally, two tools for Office 365, including ID Fix for cleaning up your Office directory structures before moving to the cloud and Office Configuration Analyzer which can identify configuration problems before they bite you. It's a lot of tools for a half hour, but well worth checking out!

Paula is back - with stories of hacking her customer's systems! Richard talks to Paula Januszkiewicz about her work as a penetration tester and what it has revealed about the common vulnerabilities for corporate systems. There are lots of simple things you can do to make your systems less vulnerable - starting with getting patched up! There's a lot of conversation about passwords and account restrictions too, such as making sure that local machine admin accounts do not all have the same password, that service accounts do not allow interactive logins and so on. In Paula's experience, you're always going to get penetrated by some zero-day exploit, so be prepared to defend in depth!

Where did PowerShell come from and where is it going? Richard chats with Principle Software Engineer Lee Holmes about his experiences building PowerShell, going all the way back to 2003/2004 when Jeffrey Snover was trying to convince folks that Monad (the code name for PowerShell) was a good idea! Lee mentions a number of great resources along the way including AutoIt CmdLets and an Overview on PowerShell as a Hosting Solution. The conversation then turns to the future of PowerShell including tools like Desired State Configuration and OneGet. More PowerShell!

How do you look at the potential security threats in your organization? Richard talks to Robert Hurlbut about threat modeling. Robert talks out talking about we all threat model in our day-to-day lives, after all, we put locks on doors and windows for a reason. But when applied to technology, things get more complex. Are you resisting specific attacks or casual hackers? How much security is enough? Robert references the book Threat Modeling by Adam Shostack and the acronym STRIDE: Spoofing, Tampering, Repudiation, Information disclosure, Denial of service and Elevation as an approach to planning the overall threat models to your software, systems and organization.

Where is your DevOps practice at? Richard catches up with Gene Kim, the godfather of DevOps, to recap 2014 and talk about what DevOps in 2015 is going to be like. But you can't look into the future without being informed by the past, and Gene points to Puppet Labs 2014 State of DevOps Report as a way to understand the impact DevOps has had so far, and where things are going. The discussion also digs into the DevOps Enterprise Summit held in October 2014, you can see the sessions on YouTube at www.youtube.com/user/DOES2014. The DevOps Movement is progressing - are you coming?

How secure is your data? Richard talks to Simon Sabin about securing your databases and making sure you know they're actually secure. The conversation digs into various aspects of security including access control, restricting permissions and effective record keeping. Audits don't have to be the enemy, they're also the best proof that you've protected your data, and help point out when you haven't! With all the stories out in the world about data breaches, isn't it a good time to start really thinking about data security? Check out Simon's SQLBits session about not becoming the next Sony in the links below!

Does web performance just mean moving to the cloud today? Richard talks with Scott Forsyth about a variety of web performance strategies. Scott explains that moving to the cloud isn't the panacea that some folks think it is - any more than scaling out a web site ever was. There's still hard work to be done along the way, and it helps to have the tools to actually understand what's going on with your site. At the lowest level, when you have a crashing server, you want DebugDiag. At a higher level, you better have SysInternals in your toolkit too - these are must have tools, and they're free. Gotta talk web for episode 404, and Scott delivers!

Ready for the end of Server 2003? Richard chats with Eric Mills about the end of extended support for Windows Server 2003 - it had to come sooner or later! There are still millions of instances of Server 2003 out in the world, and they won't exactly spontaneously combust come July 2015, but the important bit is the end of tech support and security maintenance. The good news is that there are so many improvements that have happened to Server in the past ten years - you're going to love it! Eric talks about various approaches to migrating to a new server, pointing out that there is no way to directly upgrade from 2003 to 2012. Perhaps it's time to look at the cloud for some of your services? It's worth getting some help to make these decisions!

Thinking about getting into Azure? Now is a great time! Rick Claus talks to Richard about how Azure continues to evolve making more entry points at lower levels of friction for a larger variety of customers. The conversation ranges over using Azure for disaster recovery, for application elasticity, building hybrid solutions with parts in the cloud and parts on-premise, and more! Want a VM in the cloud? Azure can do that too. Rick runs down the gamut of options for the IT Pro to get Azure into your organization one step at a time.

It's New Years Eve, time to get scared! Troy Hunt is back and talking about the evolving story that is the Sony hack involving North Korea. The show was recorded on Dec 22 2014, after hackers had threatened movie theaters with "9/11 style attacks" if they showed the movie "The Interview", which was deemed derogatory to the North Korean government. What happens next? Are we entering a new period of cyber warfare? What can we as IT professionals do to protect our companies and customers from these kinds of attacks?

Holy cow, it's show 400! How did this happen? Richard invites his friends Paul Randal and Kim Tripp to have a little celebration, talk about what it takes to make a ton of podcasts. The conversation starts with a more personal discussion about what motivates Kim and Paul beyond SQL Server - animal rescue and exploring the world. Half through the show a fairly serious discussion about SQL topics... who would have thunk it on the 400th show? Thanks to everyone for making this milestone possible, we couldn't do it without you.

Richard talks to Steve Thomas about AppV and AppX. AppV is short for Application Virtualization, a huge growth area of virtualization, providing tools to allow you to encapsulate applications to simplify deployment and configuration - or to not deploy them at all and allow them to run remotely. Steve talks about AppX, based on the Open Packaging Conventions (OPC) that helps to define application configuration and deployment requirements which at this point is focused on Windows 8.1 Store Apps. Beyond AppV is User Experience Virtualization, on the way to full Desktop Virtualization. How far will you go?

Richard talks to Sean Kearney about his work with PowerShell, including being one of the honorary Scripting Guys - including the fellow who makes the crazy Holiday Special songs and events. Sean digs into how PowerShell is penetrating all aspects of operations, including working in the cloud, specifically Azure. And PowerShell isn't just for migrations to Azure, it can handle a ton of administrative tasks, so you can automate and make them more reliable. Isn't that why you moved to the cloud in the first place?

While at the SQLIntersection conference in Las Vegas, Richard hosted a panel discussion of amazing SQL Server rockstars including Paul Randal, Kim Tripp and Brent Ozar to answer questions from the audience about SQL Server. Also listen in for comments and responses from some of the SQL Server team and a number of other great SQL personalities. Great discussions on replication, Always On, indexing, statistics, clustering, features in SQL 2014 and more!

Richard chats with Tom Hollingsworth about the Software Defined Network (SDN) landscape and how it's evolving into a more open set of standards that interoperate well together. Of course, it's never that easy, but one aspect that has really grabbed ahold is whitebox networking - standard hardware with custom software. Normally the two are supplied by the same vendor, but that is starting to change. Remarkably, Hewlett Packard has some leading edge aspects of this, including their own SDN App Store, so that you can choose what networking software you want to run on their hardware. And other hardware vendors while still supplying their own software are supporting OpenFlow, using the OpenFlow protocol to make highly interoperable switches. The future of SDN is very cool!

How do you troubleshoot SQL problems? Kevin Kline talks to Richard about his process for diagnosing SQL Server, starting with Windows and SQL Server event logs, then moving through wait statistics, dynamic managed views and more. The focus is on making sure you're working on the right problem. Kevin also mentions Glenn Berry's awesome blog on DMV Queries, a resource you need to use! He also talks about SQLSentry's free PlanExplorer tool for helping you understand where your query performance problems come from. And don't miss Kevin's great blog post and video on End-to-End Troubleshooting.

Richard chats with Eric Shupps about search in SharePoint. The conversation starts with a state of the union conversation about SharePoint on-premise and cloud. Eric talks about how even folks not using public cloud technology are using the architecture to implement their on-premise systems. He sees the opportunity space for SharePoint professionals expanding. The discussion turns to the on-premise search systems in SharePoint, and how with a bit of effort, you can dramatically improve the ability to find documents and information in your business data. Eric talks about how it's not the same as consumer search - enterprise search has some complexities but can be hugely valuable when you get it right.

Richard talks to Alan Burchill about the security aspects of Group Policy Preferences - good and bad! Alan reminds us all about where Group Policy Preferences came from, as an acquisition by Microsoft, and opened the door to reduce or eliminate login scripts, but only when it has sufficient privileges. And how do you do that? By embedding passwords! We all know that's a bad thing, so Alan walks through what is safe and what isn't safe in Group Policy Preferences, and gets you thinking about how to reduce your attack surface by using tools like Metasploit to hack yourself. Check out Alan's Group Policy Central web site for more information.

Richard talks to Paul Cunningham about configuring high-availability features in Exchange 2013. The conversation starts out talking a bit about how Exchange 2013 has evolved, including a mention of the amazing Microsoft Exchange Server Deployment Assistant. If you're planning a role out of Exchange, you want to use this tool! From there, Paul digs into the range of features you need to look at to make Exchange function in a high availability configuration, including creating redundant client access roles, using load balancing (or at least DNS round robin) to support failover, data access groups (DAGs) and transport redundancy. And don't forget about Managed Availability - Exchange 2013's built in capabilities to detect and failover to alternatives, sometimes to your own chagrin! There's a lot to learn to make a highly available Exchange infrastructure, so keep an eye out for Paul's ebook on the subject!

Richard talks to Alan Sugano about his experience building out a private cloud for his customers. The conversation starts out focused on why you would want to build a private cloud, especially for someone else to use - Alan talks about his customers not wanting to go to the public cloud, but also not wanting to upgrade their own hardware. Once committed, Alan got to do the fun part (for a hardware geek) of building a private cloud - finding a great data center provider. From there he implemented VMWare's vCloud Director with some expensive hardware and difficult 10Gb networking to get up and running. From there things getting really challenging - what does it take to run a cloud properly? It's more complex than you think!

So where did Small Business Server go? Susan Bradley knows! After entirely too long, Richard chats with Susan Bradley about the state of affairs for Small Business Server folks. The last version of SBS came out in 2011, and now piece of the bundle have gone to the Cloud, and other bits have morphed into Window Server 2012 R2 Essentials. But just to make things even more interesting, Essentials is both a product and a role - that you can buy as a Cloud product as well as configure on any Server 2012 R2 version. There are lots of choices here, and Susan helps to lay out the options!

Here comes Windows 10! Richard chats with Mark Minasi about the technical preview of Windows 10, but first Mark reels off some humorous reasons why the name "Windows 9" has been skipped. After mocking Apple's iOS 8 for a bit, Mark dives into some of the cool features seen in Windows 10 beyond the return of the Start Menu (with fancy new features). And don't forget about server! There is a technical preview of Windows Server which includes these Windows 10 bits, which brings to the discussion about technologies that are going away, like Network Access Protection (now deprecated). What's the future of Active Directory? Is the cloud permeating everything? Mark always provides a great viewpoint.

Richard chats with Brent Ozar about the amazing new hardware coming out for SQL Server. Yeah, it's time to geek out on hardware. Brent discusses some of the amazing small form factor machines coming from Dell and Hewlett-Packard, including the Dell PowerEdge 13G R730xd. What's new there? 24 RAM slots permits up to 1.5TB of RAM! And that's not all, Brent talks about the power of having three stage storage - room of three PCIe based SSD storage, 18 1.8" SATA SSD slots and 8 3.5" hard drive bays. Not only is that a lot of storage, it also provides the flexibility to let SQL Server structure your data into ultra-fast storage, super-fast storage and plain old fast storage. While the cloud is only offering scale out solutions, the latest hardware shows that you can still scale up!

Richard chats with deployment master and control freak Johan Arwidmark about the latest on Configuration Manager 2012 R2 and the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2013. Johan discusses MDT first, talking about how much power actually exists in this free tool from Microsoft - you can start with light-touch deployment, but it's equally capable of doing zero-touch when you really want to scale. And MDT works nicely alongside the pay-product System Center Configuration Manager 2012 R2. You want both! Johan also talks about where PowerShell fits into the picture for deployment as well as Microsoft InTune. And check out the great notes from Johan and Kent Agerlund for optimal configuration of Configuration Manager!