RunAs Radio

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.