RunAs Radio

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!

Richard talks to Aidan Finn about Software Defined Storage. Picking up he left off in April talking about Microsoft's Scale-Out File Server, the whole concept of Software Defined Storage is abstracting the details of the storage hardware away from the actual storage process. Aidan digs into how mixtures of SSD and spinning drives to optimize performance using Windows 2012 R2 Storage Spaces reduces costs and simplifies getting significant amounts of storage without any custom gear. And as Aidan says, in the end, it's all just Windows. Storage continues to evolve, and not just for the big enterprise folks - there are clustered storage solutions for small and medium businesses too!

Richard chats with Venkat Kalyanasundaram and David Apolinar about Azure Active Directory. The conversation starts out with a focus on the whole idea of claims-based security and what it takes to make single sign on work, especially with heterogeneous clients (like mobile phones and tablets) and cloud-based applications. David digs into the use and limitations of Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) letting you keep your AD infrastructure in-house and your cloud-based applications authenticating against it. What happens when you want to scale further? Azure AD opens the door not only to high-scaling authentication infrastructure, but also support for a larger diversity of devices and applications. There are thousands of cloud-based applications supported by Azure Active Directory! Azure AD also opens the door to support for multi-factor authentication and other features to keep identities more secure and resistant to hacking. Check it out!

Richard catches up with Jeffrey Snover, father of PowerShell and one of the moving forces behind Desired State Configuration (DSC). After just over a year since the original version of DSC came out, Windows 2012 R2 has shipped and DSC has gone through a number of revisions. Jeff refers to a Window Powershell Blog post on DSC Resource Wave 6! Not bad for one year. DSC is also part of Windows Management Framework Preview 5.0 which is an ongoing bundling of all sorts of tools you need to really take advantage of the power of Desired State Configuration. The conversation also digs into new version of DSC for Azure and for Linux. The Linux version you can find on GitHub as an open source project! Jeff wraps up the show with some information about the Open Management Initiative and a whitepaper called Just Enough Administration. Huge show with a ton of info, including a callout to our sponsor, ScriptRock!

Richard chats with Troy Hunt about some of the crazy things being said in the same of security these days. Troy's first story involves a UK cell phone company that decided that short passwords made their customer experience better - insanity! This event a number of others inspired Troy to start @infosecinsanity. Follow to see some amazing bad security statements by companies that really ought to know better. The conversation also digs into the state of affairs around SSL, why CPUs have the cycles to encrypt everything and the need to use a decent certificate in the first place.

Richard talks to Alan Sharp-Paul about the challenges of building a DevOps culture in your organization. Alan talks about the problem just defining DevOps - it's approaching the abused word state with so many organizations piling onto the term. The discussion digs into the early stages of DevOps culture, focusing first on discovery: Do you really know how your infrastructure is set up and configured? For sure? How do you check? And what about drift? Providing visibility into how your systems actually work starts the conversation about making them better, and those conversations start you down the path of a DevOps culture. Have a listen!

Richard chats with Microsoft Evangelist Scott Klein about the Microsoft Azure Management Libraries (MAML). MAML wraps up the REST calls to Azure to allow you to do a huge host of cloud tasks, such as provisioning new instances, monitoring, configuration, maintenance and more. Yeah, it's a dev library, but it can build things that the operations people want! Scott discusses three pretty powerful scenarios for MAML: automating elasticity/scaling, testing in the cloud and creating Software as a Service apps. You can get more info from Brady Gaster's Blog Post on MAML.

Richard chats with David Tesar about DevOps for the Microsoft-oriented IT Pro. DevOps has been a big thing in the Linux/Open Source community for the past few years, and it's starting to really resonate in the Microsoft world also. David focuses on the core ideals of DevOps - that it is first and foremost of culture of building better systems faster. Resist the tools and focus on the people! Not that tools don't have a role, but without culture, the tools can't help you. David has a blog post of IT Pro Learning Resources that points to other interviews, conference sessions and a Microsoft Virtual Academy course on getting started with DevOps. Check 'em out!

Richard chats with Microsoft Premier Field Engineer Clint Huffman about his book the Windows Performance Analysis Field Guide. Clint is also the genius behind the Performance Analysis of Logs (PAL) Tool on CodePlex. See a theme here? Clint is focused on understand why things in Windows (and elsewhere) go fast or slow. And he's willing to share his insight! The book focuses primarily on Windows challenges, and also references the Windows Performance Analyzer (WPA). Between PAL and WPA, you have all the tools you need to understand Windows performance better - and they're free! But the book isn't free, and you should buy it. It's real world advice from a guy who's been there and done that.