The big news here for MSFT techies are the releases of update rollups for SysCtr 2012 SP1 and SysCtr 2012 R2. Please wait 1 month before deploying to avoid the inevitable issues (history indicates that I am probably right) and use that time to carefully review the installation instructions.
- Using PowerShell to Provision Member Servers in Microsoft Azure: How to provision a new member server using a couple of simple commands.
- Getting Started with Azure Automation: Automation Assets: What is says on the tin.
- New Office 365 admin tools: You can now receive Office 365 service communications in Microsoft System Center by importing the newly available Office 365 Management Pack. And you can integrate Office 365 service communications into your monitoring systems and tools by interfacing with the Office 365 Service Communications API.
- How to Setup a Microsoft Azure Virtual Network: This article show you how to setup a Microsoft Azure virtual network and talk about the new Azure point-to-site and site-to-site VPN.
- Microsoft Azure Growing Faster than Amazon, IBM, and Google in Cloud Services: A news article I did on Petri.com that also covers Azure in Open Licensing.
- Update Rollup 7 for System Center 2012 Service Pack 1: Wait 1 month and read the instructions CAREFULLY before deploying.
- Update Rollup 3 for System Center 2012 R2: Wait 1 month and read the instructions CAREFULLY before deploying.
- System Center Management Pack for Office 365: Monitor O365 using OpsMgr/SCOM. Through Operations Manager, datacenter admins can monitor the health of their Office 365 subscriptions and provide alerts when subscribed services may be experiencing an outage.
- System Center 2012 R2 Management Pack for Virtual Machine Manger Host and Virtual Machine Dashboards: Two new dashboards focused on visualizing resource consumption of virtualization hosts and VMs.
- Best Practices for Task Sequences in System Center 2012 Configuration Manager R2: Create and manage SCCM 2012 R2 task sequences using Microsoft best practices.
- Avoiding IP Blacklisting with Azure Web Sites: In a multi-tenant environment where customers share a number of IP addresses, it’s not uncommon to have malicious content on a site or two. In some case they may be result of compromise and in other cases this may be intentional. Either way, this can lead to one or more shared IP addresses getting added to the lists of the various black list services that exist on the web. Once a shared IP is blacklisted, this would typically affect innocent sites as well.
- Analyst: Cloud Backup Services Should Be a Consideration: Organizations should strategically consider using public cloud services for backup and disaster recovery (DR) scenarios, according to a Tuesday Forrester Research webinar that was sponsored by Microsoft.
- MICROSOFT: The (US) Government Has A Sneaky Way Of Forcing Tech Companies To Turn Over Your Emails: Microsoft’s general counsel Brad Smith announced in a Wall Street Journal op-ed Tuesday night that the company will fight a tactic used by the U.S. government to force tech companies to turn over customers’ emails stored on remote servers.