RunAs Radio

Richard and Greg talk to Mark Minasi about the state of Windows today. There's a bit of discussion about Vista (Mark seems to be its only fan), then over to Windows 7 (it's Vista with love!), but most of the discussion focuses on the chocolatety goodness of Windows 2008 R2. Mark digs into Active Directory Undelete, Managed Service Accounts and more.

Richard and Greg talk to David Lowe about the Microsoft Web Platform. The web platform spans from development and designer tools, through the web server (IIS) and the databases. David starts out digging into running PHP and mySQL on Windows before moving on into the IIS extensions, including: Application Resource Routing, Dynamic IP Restrictions, Live Smooth Streaming, Windows Media Services and Search Engine Optimization. Check out the web platform at http://www.microsoft.com/web and the IIS extensions at http://www.iis.net/extensions.

Richard and Greg talk to Phil Peery of Microsoft's Premier Field Engineering team about 64 bit operating systems. Phil also talks extensively about the /3GB switch for 32 bit operating systems - a tricky switch that has to be handled carefully. The discussion also digs into running 32 bit apps on 64 bit operating systems.

Richard and Greg talk to Mitch Garvis about System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM). SCVMM handles Physical-to-Virtual (P2V) migration of computers into virtual machines. It also does Virtual-to-Virtual (V2V) migration from VMWare VMDK to VHD. Besides migration, SCVMM allows operators to understand the load across different VM host machines and move VMs from one machine to another, to handle failover clustering and to provision new VMs as needed.

Richard and Greg talk to Stephen Rose about Windows 7 RC. The show focuses on what the enterprise customer is going to care about around Windows 7, including reducing maintenance costs, managing compatibility and better remote access options.

Richard and Greg tak to Brian Gregor from Microsoft Premier Field Engineering about BizTalk. BizTalk has a variety of roles for IT Pros in the infrastructure: orchestration, integration, workflow.

Richard and Greg talk to Ken Brumfield from Microsoft Premier Field Engineering on the challenges of working in really large infrastructures. What's large? Try 250,000 workstations and 40,000 servers large! Ken talks about how tactical solutions create strategic problems in IT management at this scale, and how to balance "getting things done" with "not making the mess worse." Check out Ken's active directory utilities at http://activedirectoryutils.codeplex.com/.

Richard and Greg welcome Clint Huffman back to the show to talk about analyzing performance monitor logs. Clint is the author of Performance Analysis of Logs (PAL) at pal.codeplex.com. Clint has another collection of favorite tools, including Process Monitor (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645.aspx), xPerf (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/hh162920.aspx) and DebugDiag (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=49924).

Richard and Greg talk to Buck Woody... they had planned on talking about sqlcms.codeplex.com but ended up instead digging into what it takes to be in an IT career in today's economy. The discussion ranges from the advantages of generalists vs. specialists, consulting vs. employment and how technology is evolving to support these different styles.

Richard and Greg welcome Susan Bradley back on the show. The SBS Diva (www.sbsdiva.com) talks about Windows Server 2008 Foundation, the smaller cousin of Small Business Server. Foundation is aimed at businesses of 15 users or less. Think Microsoft Home Server for small business!