Month: March 2011

Microsoft announced the following, the public release availability of SCVMM 2012 Beta.

With this release you will be able to do:

• Fabric Management
  • Hyper-V and Cluster Lifecycle Management – Deploy Hyper-V to bare metal server, create Hyper-V clusters, orchestrate patching of a Hyper-V Cluster
  • Third Party Virtualization Platforms – Add and Manage Citrix XenServer and VMware ESX Hosts and Clusters
  • Network Management – Manage IP Address Pools, MAC Address Pools and Load Balancers
  • Storage Management – Classify storage, Manage Storage Pools and LUNs
• Resource Optimization
  • Dynamic Optimization – proactively balance the load of VMs across a cluster
  • Power Optimization – schedule power savings to use the right number of hosts to run your workloads – power the rest off until they are needed.
  • PRO – integrate with System Center Operations Manager to respond to application-level performance monitors.
• Cloud Management
  • Abstract server, network and storage resources into private clouds
  • Delegate access to private clouds with control of capacity, capabilities and user quotas
  • Enable self-service usage for application administrator to author, deploy, manage and decommission applications in the private cloud
• Service Lifecycle Management
  • Define service templates to create sets of connected virtual machines, os images and application packages
  • Compose operating system images and applications during service deployment
  • Scale out the number of virtual machines in a service
  • Service performance and health monitoring integrated with  System Center Operations Manager
  • Decouple OS image and application updates through image-based servicing.
  • Leverage powerful application virtualization technologies such as Server App-V

Production Support:  The SCVMM 2012 Beta is NOT Supported in production environments.

Resources and Feedback:

Use the SCVMM Community Forums to obtain general help, guidance, and assistance with the SCVMM 2012 Beta. You are welcome to submit suggestions or bugs via the feedback link on the SCVMM 2012 Beta Connect Site. When submitting bugs, please attach trace log details to help our team diagnose the issue. Information on collecting trace logs is provided in the SCVMM 2012 Troubleshooting Guide on SCVMM 2012 TechNet Library.

TechNet Library

The SCVMM 2012 TechNet Library is the definitive content source for all step-by-step instructions.

Go more information go here

But wouldn’t it be great if there was a simple, effective way to get the skills and training you needed to take advantage of this opportunity – and get the recognition and rewards you deserve?

That’s where Microsoft can help give your career a boost.
Take your career to the next level

The Microsoft Virtual Academy offers no-cost, easy-access training for IT professionals who want to get ahead in cloud computing.

Developed by leading experts in this field, these modules ensure that you acquire essential skills and gain credibility as the cloud computing specialist in your organization.

MVA guides you through real-life deployment scenarios and the latest cloud computing technologies and tools. By selecting the training modules that match your needs, you can use valuable new skills that help take your career to the next level.

MVA courses include:

Introduction to SCVMM, Architecture & setup

Creating VMs, Template & Resources in VMM

Managing Windows Azure

SQL Azure Security

Identity & Access

Data security and cryptography

…and more at Microsoft Virtual Academy

To learn more go here

Here  is some information on a new threat for you. Many of the customers I have talked to, particularly in the finance industry, have been very concerned about a threat called Zbot (a.k.a. Zeus). Win32/Zbot can be used for a variety of illicit purposes including sending spam email messages, executing distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, and distributing malware. However, its primary purpose, and the one for which it was specifically developed, is to steal financial information from infected computers. The Microsoft Malware Protection Center (MMPC) has released a special edition of the Microsoft Security Intelligence Report (SIR) called Battling the Zbot Threat to bring you up to speed on this threat and the work that the MMPC has been doing to fight it.

(copy from Microsoft Security Newsletter but crossed posted due to relevancy)

Get the report here

Here are some new files  about High Performance Computing (HPC)that have been added to the Microsoft site.

First a simple example on how to build a small HPC cluster including a Video

• The guide can be found here
• A video of the process can be found here

Some new or additional documentation added;

• Final batch of V3 APIs published to HPC Class Library can be found here
• Configuring the Azure management certificate can be found here 
• Steps to Perform Before and After Restoring the HPC Databases from a Backup can be found here
• More MPI resources added to MPI Application Development for Windows HPC Server can be found here

Docs re-published on Download Center

• Deploying Windows Azure Worker Nodes in Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 SP1 Step-by-Step Guide can be found here 
• Deploying iSCSI Boot Nodes in Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 Step-by-Step Guide can be found here

 

On April 19^th GITCA and Microsoft are running an event called “24 Hours in the Cloud”. There will be 24 one hour sessions around the world covering a wide range of Cloud Computing topics. The presenters will be live on Twitter to answer your questions. There is something for everybody, developer, IT pro and SQL enthusiast. There is no question that Cloud Computing is here to stay and this is a unique opportunity to be educated and gain an insight as to where Cloud Computing is going. Stay tuned for more details, such as how to join the “Cloud 24 hour party”, as the event date approaches.

Click here for more info

 

Here are a bunch of links that you can use to learn more about Microsoft HPC server.

What is HPC Server 2008 R2 ? –

A set of Windows machines working as an HPC system to give users massive computing power.

 

Some of the nodes can be on-premise, like computer node or using Windows 7 computers as workstation nodes and yes you can use Azure as well.

Link to resources and whitepapers:

Microsoft Windows HPC

What’s new in HPC Server 2008 R2

Technical documentation, IT resources:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/hpc/default.aspx

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc514029.aspx

http://resourcekit.windowshpc.net/

Blogs and forums:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/windowshpc/

http://social.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/category/windowshpc

https://blog.mir.net

HPCS PowerShell, e-book:

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=184183

http://powershell.com/Mastering-PowerShell.pdf

General DOS and PowerShell scripting:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc498722.aspx

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff943787.aspx

HPC-specific scripting:

HPC

HPCS API

Server 28 R2

Whitepapers:

Design and Deployment Guide for Windows HPC Server 2008 R2

HPC Server 2008 R2: Step-by-Step

Security in HPC Server 2008 R2

FAQ on HPC Pack editions & licensing

Design and Deployment Guide for Windows HPC Server 2008 R2

Networking and firewall configuration

Guide to Diagnostics Extensibility in HPC Server 2008 R2

Guide to Reporting Extensibility in HPC Server 2008 R2

Submission / activation filters:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff919469.aspx

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd346636.aspx

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd346637.aspx

 

Do you have an Excel spreadsheet that takes hours or day to complete?

Do you have that really fast computer with the note on it that says "Do not touch" while the computer working doing complex calculations complex..

Have you played the game of buying faster and faster computer to get you excel spreadsheet processing done faster

Yes you could go to Excel 2010 version 64 bit to address more memory, but if I am using custom XLL UDF there may not be a version of the custom UDF for 64 bit so what one to do ? And does that make my spreadsheet much faster? Excel allows you to create custom functions, called "User Defined Functions" (UDF’s) that can be used the same way you would use SUM() or some other built-in Excel function or I can user Automation add-ins are suitable if your UDF deals a lot with the Excel object model; XLL add-ins are faster in financial and mathematical calculations. Note however that native code XLL add-ins work faster than managed UDFs.

I have clients who have these problems and have just resolved themself to it is just going to take day to get the data out; for example;

Insurance company

• Insurance company who need to do reserve requirements calculation which answer the question do the company have the minimum reserves require buy regulators’ this is based on Hundreds of thousands of policies and can take 4 weeks to calculate each monthly.

• A controller at big company who doing, what if scenarios on budgets and forecasting the same formulas over and over again and the process takes 1 week s each time

• Assist with Monte Carlo simulation for risk analytics and other suitable scenarios in Financial Services and Energy trading in Oil & Gas industry verticals.

If you look at your company you probably find this is an issues for someone who user the big, complex, spreadsheet I have a solution for you!

HPC Services for Excel 2010

Here is a way to have MUTIPLE Computers share the workload

*** What new is now you can use Excel 2010 PLUS edition and have multiple computers share the workloads ***

HPC Services for Excel 2010 – HPC is part of Microsoft Technical Computing solution

HPC stand for High Performance Computing

HPC is a group of computers or a cluster of computer consists of several servers networked together where each server in the cluster performs one or more specific tasks. Cluster components include Head Nodes, and Compute Nodes, Job Scheduler and sometimes Broker Nodes (for SOA enabled clusters.)

(Graphic from Microsoft HPC site)

Head Node – is point of management and job scheduling for the cluster. It provides failover and controls and mediates access to the cluster resources.

Compute Node(s) -Carries out the computational tasks assigned to it by the job scheduler.

There are many ways that you can run a cluster, here are the methods.

Method 1: use 7 computer that at night or during the week end can be used as computer nodes

Method 2: use Widows Azure as a cloud solution

Method 3: Build a Windows HPC cluster in house

To learn more about HPC and to use HPC with Excel go here

I will be creating more Blogs detailing this solution.

Overview
I will be presenting  a webinar for a cyber disaster makes recovering from one much easier. Still, as important as disaster planning is, it’s often overlooked or put off until it is too late. In this webinar, I will discuss planning for the unexpected, and he’ll teach simple tricks to reduce your company’s downtime before, during, and after a disaster.

Using a fictional company as an example, I will walk you through the disaster planning process a security professional should use.

Outline

• What a disaster is
• How to plan
• Techniques to reduce the impact of a disaster
• What BCP is
• Five rules for creating a good disaster plan
• Testing your disaster plan
• Funding the plan
• How and where to get help with your disaster planning process

Date: April 27, 2011
Time: Noon – 1 PM ET
To Registration Here