IPv6 continues to gain traction! Richard talks to Ed Horley about the progress of IPv6, including the recent announcement by Microsoft at the Ignite conference in Atlanta that virtually all of Azure would now support IPv6. That's a lot of new IPv6 traffic added to the internet at large! Ed discusses the big penetration points of IPv6, including mobile networks (there are a lot of smartphones out there), some consumer ISPs and now the public cloud. Where is IPv6 not happening much? Big enterprise...
Oct 10, 2016•36 min•Ep 495•Transcript available on Metacast Ready to move your PBX to the cloud? Richard chats with Avrohom Gottheil about this fundamental shift in telephony. Once upon a time there were analog phone systems, then everything went digital. But now, the location of your phones and phone system is almost irrelevant! Avrohom talks about being able to create unified communications solutions where email, telephony and presence all work together. But how do you get past your old PBX approach? It takes new phones, a careful look at your networki...
Oct 05, 2016•34 min•Ep 494•Transcript available on Metacast Have you heard about Azure Stack? While at Ignite in Atlanta, Richard sat down with Jeffrey Snover to discuss the Azure Stack announcements. Azure Stack is all about bringing Azure architecture to your data center, or the data center of your preferred service provider. The concept is more about architecture than implementation, although as Jeffrey explains, you won't be running Azure Stack on your existing hardware. The hardware and configuration requirements for Azure Stack are very specific, l...
Oct 03, 2016•40 min•Ep 493•Transcript available on Metacast If you could make storage super fast, how much better would things be? Richard chats with Alan Sugano about his discovery of Simplivity, a card added on to certain Dell, Lenovo and Cisco storage arrays to do inline de-duplication so fast that the iOPs load drops massively. And how many problems does that solve? Alan talks about how improving storage performance changed the way he thinks about hyperconvergence. Different kinds of VMs and roles living together on these high-performance devices mak...
Sep 28, 2016•31 min•Ep 492•Transcript available on Metacast What can Azure Site Recovery do for you? Richard chats with Nicolas Blank about his experiences backing up on-premise systems with Azure Site Recovery, including tricky products like Exchange and SQL Server. You may not be ready to move your on-premise systems into the cloud, but often disaster recovery is more acceptable, if for no other reason than it is far less expensive than maintaining a separate data center. The question is, can you test it properly? Just because you've taken backups does...
Sep 21, 2016•33 min•Ep 491•Transcript available on Metacast Ready to move to Exchange 2016? Richard chats with Paul Cunningham about the latest version of Exchange and what it takes to move up to it. The older your version of Exchange, the harder it is to upgrade - as Paul says, moving from 2013 is the least painful. And if you're still on 2007, well, you have to migrate to 2013 first. The conversation dives into the typical problems that are revealed when you start looking at a migration - issues around namespaces, certificates and third party tools. An...
Sep 14, 2016•34 min•Ep 490•Transcript available on Metacast VMWare and PowerShell together? Of course! Regardless of the recent excitement around PowerShell going open source, third party companies have been supporting PowerShell for years, and VMWare is no exception. Chris tells his story of building out a set of PowerShell scripts for automating configuration of the company demo and operations VMWare environments. The conversation also digs into the logical line between automation and control, as well as better source management and testing for PowerSh...
Sep 07, 2016•31 min•Ep 489•Transcript available on Metacast Is there a science to DevOps? Richard talks to Dr. Nicole Forsgren, who has a PhD in Information Management about her work with the DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) organization. Nicole is one of the key people behind the State of DevOps report (published by Puppet). The conversation digs into some of the findings in that report, including the proof that stability and speed are not mutually exclusive - you can bring new features and products to market quickly while keeping your systems stab...
Aug 31, 2016•32 min•Ep 488•Transcript available on Metacast How does the cloud shape your infrastructure? Richard talks with web pioneer and CEO Jon Mittelhauser about the on-going evolution of infrastructure architecture to something more closely resembling the cloud. You might not use public cloud infrastructure, but getting your virtual machines able to be created and destroyed on demand is certainly reflective of cloud architecture. The challenges come in the networking and mixing of the models. In the future, cloud architecture will be the norm - th...
Aug 24, 2016•34 min•Ep 487•Transcript available on Metacast How do you build a blameless post-mortem culture? And should you? Richard chats with Jason Hand from VictorOps about the blameless culture, which is a methodology embraced by the safest and most reliable organizations - think aircraft safety. Having everyone involved in an incident able to discuss everything they did and saw helps to get a clear picture of the truth. Without that information, it's very hard to make real improvements in our organizations. Jason talks about ChatOps as a strategy t...
Aug 17, 2016•34 min•Ep 486•Transcript available on Metacast Here comes the Redstone update for Windows 10! Richard chats with Stephen Rose about the big one year update for Windows 10. Don't call it a service pack - it's full of new features of Windows. The patching normally done in services packs is now a routine thing with Windows 10, they don't even wait for Tuesday. The conversation digs into some of the new features in Redstone and how it can serve the enterprise effectively. A lot of energy has been focused on taking security to the next level, bec...
Aug 10, 2016•36 min•Ep 485•Transcript available on Metacast Infrastructure deserves tests too! While at ChefConf in Austin, Richard sat down with Steven Murawski to talk about Test Kitchen. Test Kitchen allows you to execute code to validate the operation and performance of specific features in your infrastructure. As Steven explains, you can used Desired State Configuration (DSC) to determine whether or not your configuration is correct, but when it isn't, how do you determine what's wrong? Test Kitchen is all about actually exercising the relevant elem...
Aug 03, 2016•27 min•Ep 484•Transcript available on Metacast What does it mean to have application automation? While at ChefConf in Austin, Richard sat down with Jessica DeVita to talk about Habitat, an open source project driven by the folks who created Chef to bring automation to the application itself. As Jessica explains, most applications are dependent on a given infrastructure to provide scaling, security, reliability and all of the other services that make a good application. But what if those elements were part of the application itself, and the i...
Jul 27, 2016•27 min•Ep 483•Transcript available on Metacast How do you manage the security of documents around individual applications on a mobile device? Richard talks to Simon May about Microsoft InTune Mobile Application Management (MAM). MAM allows IT folks to specify security privileges on an app-by-app and document-by-document basis. The identity role is handled by Azure Active Directory, and the entire Office 365 suite is supported - but so are products from Adobe, FoxIt, SAP and more. Documents can be time-limited (very spy novelish!) and even ha...
Jul 20, 2016•28 min•Ep 482•Transcript available on Metacast A whole other area of Windows Server 2016 to dive into - Hyper-V! Richard chats with Aidan Finn about the coming features for Hyper-V in Server 2016, starting with the ability to host older VM version in 2016: You're no longer forced to upgrade immediately! But you'll want to upgrade, because there are some awesome new features, including being able to map GPUs into specific VMs. Aidan also talks about rolling cluster upgrades, where you're able to take your 2012R2 clusters and upgrade them inst...
Jul 13, 2016•29 min•Ep 481•Transcript available on Metacast How does Windows 10 protect your secrets? Richard chats with Mark Minasi about the endless evolution of protecting user information in Windows. What, you don't have any secrets? Sure you do! Start with your login password: You don't want to have to type a password in every time an application runs, so Windows remembers it for you, at least while you're logged in. How can you be sure it's safe? Mark does his usual amazing story telling job of taking you through the history of protected storage an...
Jul 06, 2016•43 min•Ep 480•Transcript available on Metacast Windows Server 2016 is coming soon - but is it all about on-premise, or all about the cloud? Richard talks to John Savill about his favorite features of Server 2016, which is, as he says, "inspired by Azure." Of course, folks are excited about the new containers service that has been in Linux for years, now in Windows in a couple of flavors, based on security level. This also means there's a need for nested virtualization, although typically only one level deep. The idea of limited adm...
Jun 29, 2016•34 min•Ep 479•Transcript available on Metacast Public Folders are a plague! Richard chats with Tony Redmond about the challenges of decades of public folders in Exchange accumulating the data cruft of a company. The need to store information independent of any given individual and discoverable by others has always been a challenge. Public Folders never got a lot of love, but today there are some interesting solutions found in Office 365. Tony talks about Office 365 Groups and how they are becoming what Public Folders ought to have been. Thes...
Jun 22, 2016•31 min•Ep 478•Transcript available on Metacast Is Group Policy dead? Jeremy Moskowitz says no! And he's not alone. Richard chats with Jeremy about the confusion in the marketplace these days around Active Directory, Group Policy, Intune, mobile device management tools and so on. Group Policy continues to represent the best way to manage Windows PCs, which is still a large part of most organizations. And Windows 10 implements even more Group Policy related features. If you manage a domain, you should be using Group Policy. MDM, well, that's a...
Jun 15, 2016•32 min•Ep 477•Transcript available on Metacast Is it time to jump into machine learning? Richard talks to Buck Woody about how he has focused his multi-decade career at the leading edge of using data for business advantage. Buck talks about the differences between business intelligence, data mining, predictive analytics and machine learning. The landscape called Data Science these days is large, but there is lots of opportunities. When you get it right, Data Science represents a huge opportunity for your organization. But it is a young techn...
Jun 08, 2016•40 min•Ep 476•Transcript available on Metacast Hyperconverged storage is coming to Windows Server 2016! Richard chats with Ned Pyle about his work building parts of the Storage Services in Server 2016, including Storage Replica. The term "hyperconvergence" is a bit abused, but Ned talks about how software-defined compute, networking and storage have come together to allow the scaling and reconfiguration of server resources easier, more dynamic and maintainable. The latest incarnation of Storage Services takes using bunches of stora...
Jun 01, 2016•41 min•Ep 475•Transcript available on Metacast Time for another SQL Q and A! Richard moderates an hour long discussion at SQLintersection in Orlando with panelists Paul Randal, Kim Tripp and Brent Ozar as they tackle the questions and concerns of the attendees. A number of other SQL luminaries (including Microsoft SQL team members) chime in about topics ranging from data types to data recovery, noSQL vs RDBMS, query performance strategies, and more! Why should you upgrade to SQL 2016? How long does CheckDB take to run on SQL 2005? What is th...
May 25, 2016•57 min•Ep 474•Transcript available on Metacast So what happens when a country gets hacked? Richard talks to Troy Hunt about the significance of the attacks on Turkey and the Philippines, where entire voter registries have been exposed, including email addresses, passport information, even fingerprint data! Troy digs into the ideas around biometric data, the tepid reactions of the governments in question and a larger conversation about where this will ultimately lead. If you are concerned about data privacy, there are steps you can take, but ...
May 18, 2016•33 min•Ep 473•Transcript available on Metacast Instrumentation and Automation across clouds and on-premise? Yes! Richard chats with Jeremy Winter about his work bringing Microsoft Operations Management Suite to life in the cloud. Think of it as Monitoring and Management as a Service, although it works just fine with your on-premise systems as well. OMS comes from the System Center world, but it isn't dependent on it - you can use OMS with and without System Center. Jeremy also talks about how other existing instrumentation and automation too...
May 11, 2016•31 min•Ep 472•Transcript available on Metacast How much administration do you need? Richard chats with Tech Fellow and Father-of-PowerShell Jeffrey Snover about Just Enough Administration (JEA). The goal of JEA is to get administrators to stop living in admin accounts, to operate day-to-day with regular domain accounts and only escalate up to admin for a specific task, typically written in PowerShell. Jeffrey talks about creating a "break glass in emergency" account that is the superadmin, only to be used when there's no other way ...
May 04, 2016•36 min•Ep 471•Transcript available on Metacast How do you know your systems are compliant with security and industry standards like CIS, SOX, HIIPA, PCI and so on? Chef evangelist Jessica DeVita talks to Richard about the free Chef compliance tools that can help you understand where your systems are exposed and help get you into a compliant state - and stay there. If your only check of compliance is an audit, things are going to be rough. Audits are just spotchecks, not comprehensive evaluations, and it takes time to get things into order. H...
Apr 27, 2016•34 min•Ep 470•Transcript available on Metacast How do you manage your infrastructure like its code? Enter the release pipeline! Richard chats with Steven Murawski and Michael Greene about their recent white paper on the Release Pipeline Model. The conversation digs into the stages of developing and management configuration-as-code, including source code management, building, testing and deploying. There's a ton of tooling around each of these aspects, what you choose is very personal - and it makes sense to use what you already have onsite. ...
Apr 20, 2016•29 min•Ep 469•Transcript available on Metacast Ransomware is in the news, but do you know what to do about it? Richard talks to Paula Januskiewicz about how ransomware works and what you can do to prevent an attack, and how to clean up after one. An awful lot of the power of ransomware is blunted by having a good backup strategy - one that you actually know how to restore from. Paula also talks about running your workstations in a whitelist configuration, where only a known good list of software can run. There are tools built into Windows th...
Apr 13, 2016•30 min•Ep 468•Transcript available on Metacast What's the state of DevOps coming into 2016? Richard chats with Gene Kim, one of the godfathers of the DevOps movement, about what he's seen over the past year and how DevOps is evolving into "the way we build and operate software." Gene talks about getting management more involved in the DevOps process, recognizing that when software is built and operated in a rapidly iterating model, the way that software is sold and utilized changes as well. More and more Gene can see that DevOps is...
Apr 06, 2016•34 min•Ep 467•Transcript available on Metacast What is coming in SQL Server 2016? Richard chats with Brent Ozar about his thoughts on the upcoming version of SQL Server. The conversation digs into how the cloud is impacting SQL Server - features like Query Store were available first in the cloud are now showing up in this new on-premise edition! Speaking of Query Store, who wouldn't want a record of query plans so you can find out exactly why a query in production took a long time? Brent discusses other features including the stretch table t...
Mar 30, 2016•33 min•Ep 466•Transcript available on Metacast 
