RunAs Radio

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!