RunAs Radio

Richard chats with Stephen Foskett about where storage is at these days. The conversation spans far and wide, talking about how Microsoft's latest products (like Exchange 2013) are rather SAN-hostile, why we're all happy to get away from FibreChannel, our indifference toward iSCSI and the impact of NFS and SMB3 on file systems. Stephen also talks about just how fast fast is these days - whether it's SSDs, PCI-E based storage or USB3 thumb drives! It's all about the iOPs! Make sure you check out Tech Field Day!

Richard talks to Brian Komar about the issues around Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies and Public Key Infrastructure (PKI). Brian starts out talking about being a responsible PKI authority within your organization and how certificate revocation lists (CRLs) are a bigger issue than ever. From there, the conversation turns to the challenges of actually securing the delivery of certificates to devices that are never going to be joined to active directory. Actually understanding the costs of BYOD are an important part of the equation - maybe it's cheaper, simpler and safer to just distribute company devices to everyone?

Richard chats with Justin Morris about his experiences deploying Lync 2013 to customers. Lync 2013 has been out for a little less than a year and offers awesome levels of integration between email, instant messaging and telephony. Justin digs into some of the key features of using Lync before the conversation digresses into a debate on smartphones, comparing Skype with Lync and the idea of universal endpoints. Along the way there are some audio quality issues, the humor of which isn't lost on anyone when talking about Lync! Justin also talks about the advantages and disadvantages of on-premise, hybrid and cloud deployment options with Lync. They aren't the same features everywhere!

Richard chats with David Jones about identity security. The conversation starts out talking about the wonders of Single Sign On, followed by the horrors - the security exploits that can and do occur. David sites the Mandiant Security Report for more info on the exploits taking place. From there, David talks about using multi-factor authentication and the potential risks, as per the xckd on security. As we get more serious about managing identity, the idea of outsourcing to companies like PingIdentity is discussed. What's the best way to get identity right?

Richard chats with Mickey Gousset about System Center Orchestrator 2012. Mickey talks about the role orchestrator plays interacting between other System Center products (like Operations Manager and Service Manager), and/or third party apps, creating a place for all your scripts to live. Yes, it's true, scripts live on with Orchestrator, although you can use other tools to build runbooks using drag-and-drop tools as well. The conversation also digs into the thriving third-party community for Orchestrator, including Orchestrator on CodePlex. Check it out!

Richard talks to Brian Desmond about some of the new features coming to Active Directory in Server 2012 R2. The conversation starts off talking about the focus on Federation Services in Server 2012 R2, including support for non-Windows devices connecting to a domain via Workspace Join. Brian also digs into features that were added in Server 2012 like multi-factor authetication and refers to the Active Directory Team Blog post on Multi-Factor Security. Is Active Directory getting old? Perhaps, but it's getting regular work done to keep it relevant in the modern IT space.

Richard talks to Mitch Garvis about his experiences comparing vSphere and Hyper-V. Which one is better? Mitch gets right to the point - they're both incredibly capable virtualization solutions. It's all about the tools around the hypervisor - whether that's vSphere on the VMWare side and System Center on the Microsoft side. So they both have their merits, but Mitch is all about Hyper-V. The conversation dives deep on the evolution of IT using virtualization, not just in the data center, but all the way out to the desktop.

Richard chats with Robert Bogue about the current state of SharePoint 2013. As Robert states, there still isn't a shrink-wrap version of SharePoint 2013, but if you have a Volume License Agreement or similar, you can download SharePoint 2013 today. But should you? The conversation digs into the cloud focus of SharePoint 2013, and how installation and configuration has gotten substantially more complex - it's all about the certificates! Or you can run in the cloud. If you can, take a SharePoint 2013 VM out for a spin and decide for yourself!

Richard talks to Jeffrey Snover about Desired State Configuration (DSC). DSC is part of the Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview, although it is also available as the Windows Management Framework 4.0 Preview that can run on Windows 7 SP1 and Server 2008 R2 SP1. Jeffrey explains that DSC is all about building configuration information that can be applied to a server to install and configure services exactly to specification and resist 'drifting' of the configuration over time. DSC takes Powershell to the next level!

Richard chats with Scott Forsyth about IIS 8 and 8.5. IIS 8 shipped with Server 2012, and IIS 8.5 with Server 2012 R2 (which at publication was still in preview). Scott talks about the new features of IIS 8, many of which are focused on large scale web hosting, where hundreds of web sites are hosted together. The conversation also digs into the back porting of features, including dynamic IP restriction and FTP Login restrictions, while being released with IIS 8, are also now available for IIS 7. Scott also talks about specific features new to IIS 8.5, including dynamic web site activation and next generation logging. Lots of cool new features in the latest IIS!

Richard chats with Steven Murawski about building a DevOps culture at your organization. The conversation talks about the fundamentals of DevOps, digging into bringing operations and developers closer together to be able to iterate on features more rapidly - as Steve says, it's about deploying small changes more frequently. Steven refers to a .NET Rocks episode with Jez Humble about Continuous Delivery as well as a RunAs Radio episode with Jeffrey Snover on DevOps. Want to get going on DevOps? Check out the Server Fault blog and Steven's blog.

Richard brings Richard Hicks back to talk about Software Defined Networks (SDN). Windows Server 2012 brings many new capabilities to the role, but Hyper-V's advancements in virtual networking are especially important. Richard talks about how Windows Server 2012 R2 takes virtual networking to another level, making SDNs more a reality than ever before. The conversation digs into the challenges around bridging between the virtual network and the rest of the world, as well as new generation tools for monitoring your network. SDNs are in their early days on the Microsoft stack, but they are here to stay!

Back in the studio at last, Richard talks to Konstantinos Theos about disaster recovery strategies for Active Directory. Backup and restore, test environments, policy management and practice - all the essentials of keeping Active Directory alive through a disaster. AD isn't much different from any other system, it takes all of these things (and did we mention practice?) to be effective in a disaster.

While hanging at TechEd US in New Orleans, Richard chatted with Paula Januszkiewicz about her talks and experience working the 'black hat' side of security. Paula describes some of the amazing tools that hackers have today to break into servers and desktops - including an amazing discussion on how to break into a PC using the recovery options in Windows! This is a discussion that will get you thinking hard about your policies around patching, security-in-depth and auditing!

While at TechEd US in New Orleans, Richard sat down with Stephen Rose to talk about the new features in Windows 8.1. Don't call it a service pack! Stephen runs down all the cool features in Windows 8.1, including the return of the Start button (sort of), being able to boot directly to desktop and Mirrorcast - a wireless way to connect to external displays. Digging deeper into enterprise related features, the conversation also digs into new workplace join and the open mobile device management support. You're gonna want this update!

While at DevTeach in Toronto, Richard sat down with Ed Musters to talk about document management in SharePoint. The conversation starts out exploring why SharePoint is used for document management - resisting sending files in email, better security, document control and actually knowing where everything is. Ed describes the challenges of setting up a coherent taxonomy of documents, how everything needs to be tagged and organized in a way that makes it discoverable and controlled. And the same rules apply to outward facing web sites - great taxonomies make sure the right data is shown to the right people! Ultimately, everything is a document.

While at DevTeach, Richard chatted with Richard Baumet about his experiences at the 2012 PASS conference, including the sneak peeks at the upcoming version of SQL Server. The conversation largely focuses on how changes in hardware, including faster and more CPU cores, faster and larger memory and storage, ultimately shape how SQL Server works. An exciting time to be a DBA!

While at DevTeach in Toronto, Richard talks to Craig Utley about his experiences building business intelligence systems. The discussion starts out with the concepts of data warehousing, OLAP and business intelligence, and how many business owners get fooled into focusing only on the results of the business intelligence effort without acknowledging the huge body of work that goes into it with ETL, data cleansing and coherency. Craig talks about the right ways to get into a business intelligence project (it's about the business) so that you can avoid the pitfalls that lead to a failed project.

While at TechDays in San Francisco, Richard sat down with Steve Evans to talk about the new virtual networking features in Server 2012 Hyper-V. The conversation starts with a focus on the challenges of networking in a virtualized world - problems around assigning NICs to individual VMs, dealing with failover, etc. But as Steve describes, once you get to 2012, physical NICs are entirely about bandwidth - teaming as necessary. And the virtual side creates a separate NIC for each role, assigned to VLANs and moving across the collective physical hardware. It takes a lot of planning, but networking has never been more flexible!

While at TechDays SF, Richard moderated a panel on Women in IT. The panelists include Jennelle Crothers, Jessica DeVita, Christa Anderson and CA Callahan. The panel discussed the role of community in engaging more women into IT, finding peer support, and dealing with the various challenges of being a part of a still male-dominated industry. There are a number of questions posed by the audience and the conversation ultimately ends up focusing on getting kids involved in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) at an earlier age.

While in San Francisco at TechDays, Richard runs into Mark and ends up with a recording about their favorite science topics. Not exactly an IT show, but good fun!

Richard talks to Dana Epp about using cloud technology for disaster recovery. Dana digs into Microsoft Azure first, talking about how the new Azure Storage Services and secure connectivity make it much easier to maintain replicas of your virtual machines in Azure, synchronizing only the changes on a regular basis. The conversation also covers some of the Amazon EC2 features available for disaster recovery, as well as focusing on not giving up your responsibilities and an IT Pro - it's still your data and needs protecting, the cloud won't do everything for you! Dana also refers to Scott Guthrie's Blog Post on the new IaaS features of Azure, including even better pricing!

Richard talks to Johan Arwidmark about his experiences doing deployment with Windows, using Microsoft Deployment Toolkit, Configuration Manager and more!

Richard chats with Aidan Finn about Windows 8 Hyper-V Client. With Windows 8, Microsoft brings Hyper-V support to the desktop. Aidan discusses a variety of use cases for Hyper-V on the client, including presentations, testing, security and that darn XP/IE6 app you just can't seem to get rid of. The conversation also digs into the licensing requirements for using Hyper-V on the desktop as well as the differences between Hyper-V on Windows 8 and Hyper-V on Server 2012.

Richard chats with Ed Horley about something other than IPv6 - building private cloud infrastructure. Ed talks about the innovations happening in the cloud space at the biggest level (large enterprise) and smallest (start ups)... but relatively little in between. The conversation digs into some of the standards emerging such as OpenStack to make utility computing even simpler. Also check out Microsoft's Private Cloud offering which explores the tooling and techniques for getting your own infrastructure more like the cloud.

Richard chats with Brent Ozar about his experiences deploying SQL Server 2012. The conversation digs into the challenges of running SQL 2012 on Windows 2008R2 - and why you'd want to upgrade to SQL 2012 in the first place. For Brent's projects, it came down to utilizing Always On technology, which depends on advanced clustering features that 2008R2 struggles with - so SQL 2012 is best on Server 2012! From there, Brent talks about the impact of the cloud on on-premise servers, the need for better instrumentation and understanding of your data when talking to business. It's a fun time to be a DBA!

Richard talks to PFE Jeff Stokes about the Microsoft Assessment and Deployment Kit (ADK). The ADK is a web installer that pulls together a bunch of free tools from Microsoft that can help you understand how PCs are performing. Jeff talks about the Assessment Toolkit, which is a small app that can run on a PC and determine problems with drivers such as memory leaks, as well as whether or not a better video card would improve browser performance. Also mentioned in the show is KB 2775511, which is a roll up for 90 hotfixes for Windows 7 SP1 and Server 2008 R2 SP1 that can significantly improve performance and reliability. It's recommended for everyone, but doesn't show up in Windows Update - you have to go get it from the Windows Update Catalog. Finally, the conversation also digs into risk assessments done by PFE, and Jeff brings up a video on the new Risk Assessment As a Service. Check it out!

Richard chat with PFE Nibin PM from Microsoft Gulf in Kuwait about his work deploying Active Directory domain controllers in virtualized environments. Nibin digs into the history of virtualized domain controllers first, with the biggest caution of all: don't do snapshots of domain controllers! At least, not until Server 2012. The conversation digs into the challenges of Active Directory maintaining synchronization between different domain controllers, how virtualization influences that and ultimately how Server 2012 solves some of these problems. Nibin also recommends checking out the Premier Field Engineering blog as well as the Directory Services blog.

Richard talks to Microsoft Premier Field Engineer Heath Graves about the Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF). MOF is Microsoft's guidance document for IT, covering every day practices and activities, as well as digging into governance, risk and compliance. Heath discusses how his experiences in the Air Force taught him to value clear documentation and procedure to not only get things working right, but to pass that information along to other reliably. Take a look at the Microsoft Operations Framework.

Richard talks to Robert Cain about getting started with business intelligence. The conversation starts out talking about the role of SQL Server, Analysis Service and various tools needed to get business intelligence up and running. Robert discusses using tools like Excel PowerPivot to do rapid prototyping for potential business intelligence solutions versus the big bang approach of building a data warehouse. Thinking about getting your company using business intelligence? Here's a place to start!

While at the MVP Summit, Richard chats with Tony Redmond about his experiences with Exchange 2013 so far. Exchange 2013 shipped in October of 2012, but as of mid-February, could only be deployed in greenfield scenarios - to get to co-existence with Exchange 2007 and 2010, you need current service packs as well as a yet-to-be-released cumulative update to Exchange 2013. Tony talks about how the interplay between Exchange 2013, Sharepoint 2013, Office 2013 and Lync offer awesome features, but at the expense of some additional deployment and configuration challenges. And don't forget about the cloud! Exchange 2013 is being rolled out to Office 365 as well, which has an impact on the on-premise features also. Awesome discussion about where Exchange is going!

Richard chats with Robert Smith about his experiences tuning Windows to operate with Virtualized Desktops. Robert starts out with dealing with boot times with Windows 7 - some customers were waiting up to ten minutes to boot! Careful boot log analysis finds answers. The conversation also digs into the whole cycle of patching, WSUS, service packs, hot fixes - every time a base image has to change, it impacts users. If you're even thinking about VDI, there's some great tips here!

Richard talks to Dana Epp about his on-going battles with password security. The conversation digs into various security issues, including public WiFi exploits, rainbow and hash tablets and more. Dana also talks about the rash of account hijacking in 2012 that made a mess of online identities - and the danger of single sign on when that happens. While he's still looking for the perfect solution to not having a password, Dana has a bunch of tips for doing a better job with yours, and your company's security.

Richard talks to Chris Conte about his experiences deploying SharePoint into the military. Chris talks about his early days in the Navy as a yeoman, first learning the potential of personal computers to make the work of handling the huge amount of data the military produces easier. The conversation digs into how SharePoint governance is as much a challenge for the military as industry, and how strong metadata infrastructure has made data more findable, understandable and useable. Chris also talks about the concept of 'Responsibility to Share' as opposed to 'Need to Know' - a deep change for the military, but also a huge one to apply to the enterprise. Are you sharing the data you need to share with the people who need to know it? Can SharePoint help?

Richard chats with Benny Lakunishok about storage performance in Exchange 2010. The new storage systems in Exchange 2010 substantially changed the way Exchange works with storage systems. Benny talks about the surprise of having performance problems with Exchange on SANs because of these changes - Exchange 2010 tends to write much larger blocks of data than older versions. Benny mentions JetStress, a free tool from Microsoft for testing the storage system of an Exchange server before Exchange is deployed on it. It can also be used to test how the system behaves under various failure modes, such as a missing LUN, failed disk or array recovery. Lots to think about for the future of your Exchange infrastructure!

Richard chats with Steven Murawski about his work at StackExchange. The conversation starts out digging into how StackExchange avoided hurricane Sandy by failing the site over from New York to Oregon. Steven also talks about the DevOps attitude at StackExchange, how the developers work closely with operations to test new features, keeping performance and reliability at peak. With his primary responsibility at StackExchange being SQL Server, Steven also discusses the benefits he's gotten from moving SQL Server 2012 over to Server 2012 from Server 2008 R2. Check out the blog posts on ServerFault about Moving to SQL 2012, Working towards failure and Failing over for Sandy.

Hey, it's show 300! For the 300th show, Richard chats with Mark Minasi about a variety of topics, including the good and bad of Windows 8. And somehow the metric system creeps in also. Stick around for the next 300 shows!

Richard talks to Alan Burchill about some of the improvements to Group Policy in Server 2012. The conversation starts out with the new reporting features, including the infrastructure status report that will actually show you when policies have been synchronized between AD servers as well as improve group policy reports to help you understand what policies are (and are NOT) being applied to a given account. Alan then digs into local group policy features in Windows RT (yes, the ARM edition) - you can't join a domain, but you can push local policies onto tablets! For more information around group policy in Server 2012, check out Alan's blog.

Richard talks to Microsoft PFE Bruce Adamczak about the new high availability features for DHCP in Server 2012. The conversation digs into the problems in DHCP and some of the fundamental strategies for dealing with implementing DHCP to be survivable. Bruce then talks about how Server 2012 allows active-active and active-passive groups (don't call them clusters!) of DHCP servers in Server 2012. You can read more about DHCP high availability at Bruce's Blog. Also check out the Windows Team DHCP Blog. Time to think about a more robust DHCP implementation!

For the first show on 2013, Richard chats with Dan Rosanova about big data in the Microsoft space. While the conversation starts out speaking about big data in general, Don focuses in on Hadoop, an open source distributed data manipulation technology that Microsoft has adopted in a big way. Hadoop specializes in doing MapReduce across massive numbers of machines, and if you don't have that many machines, you can always use the cloud. Check out Windows Azure HDInsight for the simplest way to get Hadoop running on Azure. And don't worry if you think you need to run on premise, the SQL Server team is there with Microsoft Big Data. Happy New Year!

While on the US Thanksgiving break of the .NET Rocks Visual Studio 2012 Launch Road Trip, Richard talked to Tom Canter about the changes in healthcare information technology going on today. The conversation starts out on the architectural challenges of healthcare information systems. Ultimately, Tom digs into what everyone can learn from building large scale integrated systems, showing advanced data discovery that can turn operations into profit centers. Healthcare technology can lead the way!

Richard talks to Aydin Aslaner about his work deploying IPv6 in the mideast and Europe. Aydin talks about how the Turkish government is mandating externally accessible web sites having IPv6 in the next year and government organizations having internal IPv6 in 2014. The conversation also walks through the evolution of IPv6 implementations in your organization, between internal networks, external networks, public facing and bridging. IPv6 can't be ignored any longer!

While on the US Thanksgiving break of the .NET Rocks Visual Studio 2012 Launch Road Trip, Richard talked with Kamal Abburi about risk assessments around Exchange server. Kamal talks about the common issues he's found in doing risk assessments of Exchange for companies all over the world. Along the way, he talks about a number of powerful tools for doing your own assessment, including the Exchange 2010 Mailbox Server Role Requirements Calculator, the Exchange Performance Data Collection tool, Exchange 2010 Servicing and the Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Build Guide Templates.

During the US Thanksgiving break of the .NET Rocks Visual Studio 2012 Road Trip, Richard chatted with Stephen Rose about the new generation of Windows 8 tablets being deployed into the Enterprise. Stephen talks about the differences between Windows 8 RT and Windows 8 Pro and the strengths and weaknesses of each in the enterprise. He also suggests that we not focus solely on Surface devices - that there are lots of great third party hardware out there as well with their own unique advantages. Is it time for surface in the enterprise?

During the US Thanksgiving break of the .NET Rocks Visual Studio 2012 Launch Road Trip, Richard chatted with Jeremy Moskowitz about the new group policy features in Windows 8. The discussion starts out with a digression talking about how to influence features in the Microsoft stack before steering back on the subject of Group Policy, specifically Group Policy Preferences with Server 2012 and Windows 8. Jeremy digs into some of the new features available, as well as talking about how his product PolicyPak can help with applying policies to third party products. He also mentions a number of blogs including his own GP Blog, Darren Mar-Elia's GPOGuy and Alan Burchill's Group Policy Central for finding out more about group policy.

While on the break week of the .NET Rocks Visual Studio 2012 Launch Road Trip, Richard talked to Steve Evans about his experiences with Hyper-V in the field. Steve talks about a company he's working with that uses Windows 2008 R2 Hyper-V (effectively version two) and runs down a number of specific tuning elements around networking, VM sizing, CPU allocation, hardware and software redundancy.

While on a break from the .NET Rocks Visual Studio 2012 Launch Road Trip, Richard talked to Clint Huffman about some of the internal changes to Server 2012. The discussion starts out talking about better utilization of multiple cores, including new NUMA architecture and Performance Monitor counters. Clint also talks about scheduling of threads in relation to NUMA, memory fragmentation and processor allocations. Finally he talks about the new Automatic Memory Dump feature that deals with huge amount of memory you can have in Server 2012 more effectively.

During a break on the .NET Rocks Visual Studio 2012 Launch Road Trip, Richard talks to Jeff Stokes about Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). Jeff digs into the differences between running a desktop in a virtual environment and a physical environment, especially when the environment resets on shut down. He talks about a script originally developed by Jonathan Bennett of Auto IT Script. This script is modified for the latest features, you can get it on Jeff Stokes Blog. The conversation also talks about the challenges of VDI in general, including a mention of The VDI Delusion.

During a break on the .NET Rocks Visual Studio 2012 Launch Road Trip, Richard chats with Steven Murawski about web farm management in the Microsoft space. Steve helps to organize the thinking around an array of free Microsoft products including Web Platform Installer 2.0, Web Deploy v2.0, the Web Farm Framework and the Windows Management Framework 3.0.

While on the .NET Rocks Visual Studio 2012 Road Trip Richard chatted with Mark Minasi about some of the new features in Server 2012 - and ended up focusing on the new storage services. Mark explains that with Server 2012, Microsoft has taken software-based storage to a whole new level. No need for expensive SANs (at least at the low end) or even fancy RAID controllers, Server 2012 Storage Services will do it all for you!