Don’t get stuck in the IT past
Watch what happens when you try to buy a cloud solution from the wrong company.
Microsoft pokes fun at VMware with “VMlimited man“.
Tag: Cloud
Microsoft Cloud Talk: Genotec CEO Roger Hofstetter
Cloud Talk: Rapid-fire interview. Roger Hofstetter, CEO, Genotec in Switzerland answers tough questions about cloud computing.
Office 365 important DNS knowledge
Last week Microsoft launched Office 365. Office365 is clearly a great product. Microsoft offers three different “plans”. One is for small businesses, Plan P, maybe stands for Professional or Personal. Plan P is a offer for small businesses with less than 26 users. For bigger companies or Enterprises Microsoft offers Plan E (Enterprise) which also includes Plan K (kiosk workers).
Now there are a lot of differences between this plans which are described on the Office365 website. But there is something I just realized after I used Office 365 the first time. If you want to use Office 365 with your own domain, Microsoft has two ways to do this.
With Plan P you have to delegate all the DNS configuration to Microsofts DNS servers, which means your DNS servers for your domain, will be somednsserver.microsoft.com. Microsoft offers you a simple UI to create additional CNAME and A records. And all your MX records and A records which are used by Office 365 will be created automatically. This makes it very easy, but even for some small businesses this does not work, because they may need more than just some simple additional A records or CNAMEs.
If you wanna use your own DNS servers or the DNS servers of your provider, you have to use one of the Enterprise plans (there are more than one plan). With a Plan E1 for example, you can choose to delegate all the DNS administration to the Microsoft DNS servers or you can choose your own, maybe already existing public DNS servers. In this case Microsoft tells you which DNS records you need to create (MX, TXT and A records).
Powershell: How to connect to Office 365 with Powershell
You can simply manage and administrate Office 365 from your Powershell prompt or with your own Powershell scripts.
Here is how you can connect to Office 365 with Windows PowerShell:
First create a object with your Windows Live Credentials. This command will open a Windows in which you can enter your Windows Live Credentials for your Office365 Accout. In my case [email protected] and my password.
$LiveCred = Get-Credential
You can open a new Session:
$Session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://ps.outlook.com/powershell/ -Credential $LiveCred -Authentication Basic -AllowRedirection
Now join the session with:
Import-PSSession $SessionTo close the Session:
Remove-PSSession $SessionNow if you join the PS session with Enter-PSSession you can now work online and run commands like Get-User. More about working with Powershell and Office 365 in the next posts.
Steve Ballmer in Switzerland
Today from the Steve Ballmer Keynote:
- Windows Phone 7
- Cloud Computing
- Windows Azure
- Switzerland
Cisco UCS and Microsoft Hyper-V R2
Last week we run our first tests with the Cisco UCS Bladecenter, VMware ESXi and Microsoft Hyper-V R2.
I am really excited about the performance and the easy management of the Cisco Bladecenter. Maybe I get some more information about Hyper-V and the UCS out there for next week.
There is also a Microsoft TechNet event next Tuesday:
Hello World! Again!
Posted in Microsoft, Microsoft Azure
Hello my name is Thomas Maurer, I am Cloud Architect and Microsoft MVP. If you want to know more about me, check out my about page. A long time I go, I blog about different technology related things and things which matter in my day to day job. Today, it is time to start again. My blog will focus on around the Microsoft Cloud and Datacenter and my day to day life. This will be a great mix of technology related post and personal post. It will also be my personal notebook, where I note my technical how-to’s.
I hope you will enjoy my new blog! If you like it, you can give me some feedback in the comments and subscribe.
About Thomas Maurer
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My name is Thomas Maurer. I am a Senior Program Manager & Chief Evangelist for Azure Hybrid at Microsoft. I am part of the Azure engineering team (Cloud + AI) and engage with the community and customers around the world. Opinions are my own.
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