System Center Universe DACH/Europe (SCU DACH) announced

Posted on April 29, 2013 by Thomas Maurer

SCU2013

Have you ever heard of the famous System Center Universe (SCU) hosted by Catapult Systems? If not then it’s about time to visit http://www.systemcenteruniverse.com and check out the excellent content.

After talking to Catapult Systems we decided to bring this great event to Europe. We are now in the planning phase, talking to partners, speakers, sponsors etc. that are interested to partner with us and help making this event coming true. Visit the event web site where we will start publishing more information shortly!

http://www.systemcenteruniverse.ch

Windows Azure Recovery Services: Backup & Hyper-V Recovery Manager (Preview)

Posted on April 8, 2013 by Thomas Maurer

Microsoft just released Windows Azure Recovery Services (Preview) for the features like Backup and Hyper-V Recovery Manager.

Windows Azure Backup (Preview) – This is your offsite backup to cloud solutions, which integrates in Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 Essentials, or System Center 2012 Data Protection Manager. These tools provide similar experiences configuring, monitoring, and recovering backups whether to local disk or Windows Azure storage. After data is backed up to the cloud, authorized users can easily recover backups to any server.

Windows Azure Hyper-V Recovery Manager (Preview) – This allows you to easily failover private clouds to a secondary datacenter- This feature integrates in System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager and uses the Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Replica technology to replicate your private cloud. It helps you to orchestrate datacenter failovers or recovery of virtual machines. The solution offers also the same features as Hyper-V replica but in a much bigger scale.

You can get more information here: Windows Azure Recovery Services

The State of Cloud Storage in 2013

Posted on February 22, 2013 by Thomas Maurer

Mark Russinovich just posted a tweeted with the Infographic for The State of Cloud Storage in 2013 which compares, Microsoft Windows Azure, Google, Amazon, Rackspace and HP.

Windows Server 2012 – Build from the Cloud up – Infographic

Posted on September 5, 2012 by Thomas Maurer

Windows Server 2012 Infographic

Source: WPC Blog: Partners, Windows Server 2012 has Launched!

Cisco UCS C200 M2 – Microsoft Hyper-V

Posted on June 13, 2012 by Thomas Maurer

For my Lab I could buy some Cisco UCS C200 M2 rack servers. Of course I am running Hyper-V on my lab servers to get the most out of it, and I am very happy with the performance of the Cisco UCS standalone servers.

But still I did some changes in the BIOS settings to get some more performance.

Processor Configuration:

Intel Turbo Boost Technology: enabled
Enhanced Intel Speedstep Technology: enabled
Intel Hyper-Threading Technology: enabled
Number of Enabled Cores: All
Execute Disable: Enabled
Intel Virtualization Technology: enabled
Intel VT for Directed IO: enabled
Intel VT-d Interrupt Remapping: enabled
Intel VT-D Coherency Support: enabled
Intel VT-d Address Translation Services: enabled
Intel VT-d PassThrough DMA: enabled
Direct Cache Access: enabled
Processor C3 Report: disabled
Processor C6 Report: disabled
CPU Performance: High Throughput
Hardware Prefetcher: enabled

Memory Configuration:

NUMA Optimized: enabled

Microsoft Cloud for SMB

Posted on January 17, 2012 by Thomas Maurer

Last year I did a little research project about Microsoft’s public cloud and how it cloud affect Small and Medium sized businesses. So I created a paper which should help Microsoft partners to decide how they can improve their services and solutions by using the Microsoft public cloud. I the paper I focused on Microsoft Office 365 and Windows Intune. This should be for the partner which do infrastructure solutions like Active Directory, Exchange and PC Management.

You can download this paper from my Windows Live SkyDrive.
The paper includes a lot of text copied from Microsoft documents and websites, and research I did by myself. All the sources should be marked, but if you find anything which is not marked please feel free to contact me.

First KTSI Project done

Posted on October 25, 2011 by Thomas Maurer

Now after the something over three months I finished my first project for the 5th KTSI semester. As a project I created a overview of the Microsoft Cloud for Small and Medium sized businesses. I wrote about the big partner and customer opportunity with Windows Intune and Office 365.

After I finished the review I may will publish this document on my blog.