So how has the Cloud changed Exchange? And how will those changes affect you? Richard talks to Tony Redmond about the on-going evolution of Exchange, primarily through Microsoft's cloud efforts with Office 365. Running Exchange at massive scale has changed the way Microsoft thinks about many of its products. Tony talks about what happens when an organization starts to move mail to the cloud - an obvious move, but it makes you look at a number of practices around email, especially with attachment...
Mar 18, 2015•36 min•Ep. 412
So how is IPv6 doing, anyway? Ed Horley knows! Richard chats with Ed about IPv6 adoption. And Ed delivers - turns out there's a lot more going on in the IPv6 world that folks know about. Looking at the stats on World IPv6 Launch, Ed talks about how Comcast has been quietly implementing IPv6 in their DOCSIS3 routers. If you're a Comcast customer, you maybe running IPv6 without even knowing it! The conversation also turns to the cloud providers and their challenges around implementing IPv6. There'...
Mar 11, 2015•35 min•Ep. 411
Mike O'Neill is back with some free tools you need to know about! Richard chats with Mike about his roster of go-to tools for a Microsoft Premier Field Engineer. All of the tools are free to download and use. Mike starts out talking about The Problem Steps Recorder, a tool that lets you record every keystroke and mouse movement while using an app for playback in a web browser. Next up is a regular on RunAs, Performance Analysis of Logs Tool. PAL analyzes your PerfMon data and shows what are good...
Mar 04, 2015•32 min•Ep. 410
Paula is back - with stories of hacking her customer's systems! Richard talks to Paula Januszkiewicz about her work as a penetration tester and what it has revealed about the common vulnerabilities for corporate systems. There are lots of simple things you can do to make your systems less vulnerable - starting with getting patched up! There's a lot of conversation about passwords and account restrictions too, such as making sure that local machine admin accounts do not all have the same password...
Feb 25, 2015•33 min•Ep. 409
Where did PowerShell come from and where is it going? Richard chats with Principle Software Engineer Lee Holmes about his experiences building PowerShell, going all the way back to 2003/2004 when Jeffrey Snover was trying to convince folks that Monad (the code name for PowerShell) was a good idea! Lee mentions a number of great resources along the way including AutoIt CmdLets and an Overview on PowerShell as a Hosting Solution. The conversation then turns to the future of PowerShell including to...
Feb 18, 2015•41 min•Ep. 408
How do you look at the potential security threats in your organization? Richard talks to Robert Hurlbut about threat modeling. Robert talks out talking about we all threat model in our day-to-day lives, after all, we put locks on doors and windows for a reason. But when applied to technology, things get more complex. Are you resisting specific attacks or casual hackers? How much security is enough? Robert references the book Threat Modeling by Adam Shostack and the acronym STRIDE: Spoofing, Tamp...
Feb 11, 2015•33 min•Ep. 407
Where is your DevOps practice at? Richard catches up with Gene Kim, the godfather of DevOps, to recap 2014 and talk about what DevOps in 2015 is going to be like. But you can't look into the future without being informed by the past, and Gene points to Puppet Labs 2014 State of DevOps Report as a way to understand the impact DevOps has had so far, and where things are going. The discussion also digs into the DevOps Enterprise Summit held in October 2014, you can see the sessions on YouTube at ww...
Feb 04, 2015•35 min•Ep. 406
How secure is your data? Richard talks to Simon Sabin about securing your databases and making sure you know they're actually secure. The conversation digs into various aspects of security including access control, restricting permissions and effective record keeping. Audits don't have to be the enemy, they're also the best proof that you've protected your data, and help point out when you haven't! With all the stories out in the world about data breaches, isn't it a good time to start really th...
Jan 28, 2015•33 min•Ep. 405
Does web performance just mean moving to the cloud today? Richard talks with Scott Forsyth about a variety of web performance strategies. Scott explains that moving to the cloud isn't the panacea that some folks think it is - any more than scaling out a web site ever was. There's still hard work to be done along the way, and it helps to have the tools to actually understand what's going on with your site. At the lowest level, when you have a crashing server, you want DebugDiag. At a higher level...
Jan 21, 2015•37 min•Ep. 404
Ready for the end of Server 2003? Richard chats with Eric Mills about the end of extended support for Windows Server 2003 - it had to come sooner or later! There are still millions of instances of Server 2003 out in the world, and they won't exactly spontaneously combust come July 2015, but the important bit is the end of tech support and security maintenance. The good news is that there are so many improvements that have happened to Server in the past ten years - you're going to love it! Eric t...
Jan 14, 2015•32 min•Ep. 403
Thinking about getting into Azure? Now is a great time! Rick Claus talks to Richard about how Azure continues to evolve making more entry points at lower levels of friction for a larger variety of customers. The conversation ranges over using Azure for disaster recovery, for application elasticity, building hybrid solutions with parts in the cloud and parts on-premise, and more! Want a VM in the cloud? Azure can do that too. Rick runs down the gamut of options for the IT Pro to get Azure into yo...
Jan 07, 2015•32 min•Ep. 402
It's New Years Eve, time to get scared! Troy Hunt is back and talking about the evolving story that is the Sony hack involving North Korea. The show was recorded on Dec 22 2014, after hackers had threatened movie theaters with "9/11 style attacks" if they showed the movie "The Interview", which was deemed derogatory to the North Korean government. What happens next? Are we entering a new period of cyber warfare? What can we as IT professionals do to protect our companies and customers from these...
Dec 31, 2014•35 min•Ep. 401
Holy cow, it's show 400! How did this happen? Richard invites his friends Paul Randal and Kim Tripp to have a little celebration, talk about what it takes to make a ton of podcasts. The conversation starts with a more personal discussion about what motivates Kim and Paul beyond SQL Server - animal rescue and exploring the world. Half through the show a fairly serious discussion about SQL topics... who would have thunk it on the 400th show? Thanks to everyone for making this milestone possible, w...
Dec 24, 2014•43 min•Ep. 400
Richard talks to Steve Thomas about AppV and AppX. AppV is short for Application Virtualization, a huge growth area of virtualization, providing tools to allow you to encapsulate applications to simplify deployment and configuration - or to not deploy them at all and allow them to run remotely. Steve talks about AppX, based on the Open Packaging Conventions (OPC) that helps to define application configuration and deployment requirements which at this point is focused on Windows 8.1 Store Apps. B...
Dec 17, 2014•32 min•Ep. 399
Richard talks to Sean Kearney about his work with PowerShell, including being one of the honorary Scripting Guys - including the fellow who makes the crazy Holiday Special songs and events. Sean digs into how PowerShell is penetrating all aspects of operations, including working in the cloud, specifically Azure. And PowerShell isn't just for migrations to Azure, it can handle a ton of administrative tasks, so you can automate and make them more reliable. Isn't that why you moved to the cloud in ...
Dec 10, 2014•35 min•Ep. 398
While at the SQLIntersection conference in Las Vegas, Richard hosted a panel discussion of amazing SQL Server rockstars including Paul Randal, Kim Tripp and Brent Ozar to answer questions from the audience about SQL Server. Also listen in for comments and responses from some of the SQL Server team and a number of other great SQL personalities. Great discussions on replication, Always On, indexing, statistics, clustering, features in SQL 2014 and more!
Dec 03, 2014•52 min•Ep. 397
Richard chats with Tom Hollingsworth about the Software Defined Network (SDN) landscape and how it's evolving into a more open set of standards that interoperate well together. Of course, it's never that easy, but one aspect that has really grabbed ahold is whitebox networking - standard hardware with custom software. Normally the two are supplied by the same vendor, but that is starting to change. Remarkably, Hewlett Packard has some leading edge aspects of this, including their own SDN App Sto...
Nov 26, 2014•32 min•Ep. 396
How do you troubleshoot SQL problems? Kevin Kline talks to Richard about his process for diagnosing SQL Server, starting with Windows and SQL Server event logs, then moving through wait statistics, dynamic managed views and more. The focus is on making sure you're working on the right problem. Kevin also mentions Glenn Berry's awesome blog on DMV Queries, a resource you need to use! He also talks about SQLSentry's free PlanExplorer tool for helping you understand where your query performance pro...
Nov 19, 2014•36 min•Ep. 395
Richard chats with Eric Shupps about search in SharePoint. The conversation starts with a state of the union conversation about SharePoint on-premise and cloud. Eric talks about how even folks not using public cloud technology are using the architecture to implement their on-premise systems. He sees the opportunity space for SharePoint professionals expanding. The discussion turns to the on-premise search systems in SharePoint, and how with a bit of effort, you can dramatically improve the abili...
Nov 12, 2014•35 min•Ep. 394
Richard talks to Alan Burchill about the security aspects of Group Policy Preferences - good and bad! Alan reminds us all about where Group Policy Preferences came from, as an acquisition by Microsoft, and opened the door to reduce or eliminate login scripts, but only when it has sufficient privileges. And how do you do that? By embedding passwords! We all know that's a bad thing, so Alan walks through what is safe and what isn't safe in Group Policy Preferences, and gets you thinking about how ...
Nov 05, 2014•37 min•Ep. 393
Richard talks to Paul Cunningham about configuring high-availability features in Exchange 2013. The conversation starts out talking a bit about how Exchange 2013 has evolved, including a mention of the amazing Microsoft Exchange Server Deployment Assistant. If you're planning a role out of Exchange, you want to use this tool! From there, Paul digs into the range of features you need to look at to make Exchange function in a high availability configuration, including creating redundant client acc...
Oct 29, 2014•39 min•Ep. 392
Richard talks to Alan Sugano about his experience building out a private cloud for his customers. The conversation starts out focused on why you would want to build a private cloud, especially for someone else to use - Alan talks about his customers not wanting to go to the public cloud, but also not wanting to upgrade their own hardware. Once committed, Alan got to do the fun part (for a hardware geek) of building a private cloud - finding a great data center provider. From there he implemented...
Oct 22, 2014•36 min•Ep. 391
So where did Small Business Server go? Susan Bradley knows! After entirely too long, Richard chats with Susan Bradley about the state of affairs for Small Business Server folks. The last version of SBS came out in 2011, and now piece of the bundle have gone to the Cloud, and other bits have morphed into Window Server 2012 R2 Essentials. But just to make things even more interesting, Essentials is both a product and a role - that you can buy as a Cloud product as well as configure on any Server 2...
Oct 15, 2014•36 min•Ep. 390
Here comes Windows 10! Richard chats with Mark Minasi about the technical preview of Windows 10, but first Mark reels off some humorous reasons why the name "Windows 9" has been skipped. After mocking Apple's iOS 8 for a bit, Mark dives into some of the cool features seen in Windows 10 beyond the return of the Start Menu (with fancy new features). And don't forget about server! There is a technical preview of Windows Server which includes these Windows 10 bits, which brings to the discussion abo...
Oct 08, 2014•36 min•Ep. 389
Richard chats with Brent Ozar about the amazing new hardware coming out for SQL Server. Yeah, it's time to geek out on hardware. Brent discusses some of the amazing small form factor machines coming from Dell and Hewlett-Packard, including the Dell PowerEdge 13G R730xd. What's new there? 24 RAM slots permits up to 1.5TB of RAM! And that's not all, Brent talks about the power of having three stage storage - room of three PCIe based SSD storage, 18 1.8" SATA SSD slots and 8 3.5" hard drive bays. N...
Oct 01, 2014•35 min•Ep. 388
Richard chats with deployment master and control freak Johan Arwidmark about the latest on Configuration Manager 2012 R2 and the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2013. Johan discusses MDT first, talking about how much power actually exists in this free tool from Microsoft - you can start with light-touch deployment, but it's equally capable of doing zero-touch when you really want to scale. And MDT works nicely alongside the pay-product System Center Configuration Manager 2012 R2. You want both! Joh...
Sep 24, 2014•31 min•Ep. 387
Richard talks to Aidan Finn about Software Defined Storage. Picking up he left off in April talking about Microsoft's Scale-Out File Server, the whole concept of Software Defined Storage is abstracting the details of the storage hardware away from the actual storage process. Aidan digs into how mixtures of SSD and spinning drives to optimize performance using Windows 2012 R2 Storage Spaces reduces costs and simplifies getting significant amounts of storage without any custom gear. And as Aidan s...
Sep 17, 2014•36 min•Ep. 386
Richard chats with Venkat Kalyanasundaram and David Apolinar about Azure Active Directory. The conversation starts out with a focus on the whole idea of claims-based security and what it takes to make single sign on work, especially with heterogeneous clients (like mobile phones and tablets) and cloud-based applications. David digs into the use and limitations of Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) letting you keep your AD infrastructure in-house and your cloud-based applications authent...
Sep 10, 2014•37 min•Ep. 385
Richard catches up with Jeffrey Snover, father of PowerShell and one of the moving forces behind Desired State Configuration (DSC). After just over a year since the original version of DSC came out, Windows 2012 R2 has shipped and DSC has gone through a number of revisions. Jeff refers to a Window Powershell Blog post on DSC Resource Wave 6! Not bad for one year. DSC is also part of Windows Management Framework Preview 5.0 which is an ongoing bundling of all sorts of tools you need to really tak...
Sep 03, 2014•40 min•Ep. 384
Richard chats with Troy Hunt about some of the crazy things being said in the same of security these days. Troy's first story involves a UK cell phone company that decided that short passwords made their customer experience better - insanity! This event a number of others inspired Troy to start @infosecinsanity. Follow to see some amazing bad security statements by companies that really ought to know better. The conversation also digs into the state of affairs around SSL, why CPUs have the cycle...
Aug 27, 2014•33 min•Ep. 383
