Category: XP

Microsoft is back in the US for another Springboard Series Tour! If you never attended this event and it local you should go. May 2 – Toronto | May 4 – Detroit | May 6 – Chicago | May 9 – Indianapolis | May 11 – Dallas | May 13 – Columbus The Springboard Series Tour is back! This 6 city tour brings the top product teams from Microsoft to you. We understand the questions and issues that IT pros deal with every day. How do I manage end users bringing consumer devices into the office? Should we look to the cloud for key solutions? Should I virtualize? What are the best tools to manage application compatibility and deployment? The Springboard Series Tour brings the experts and the answers. Join us for a full day’s deep dive into the tools, solutions and options to help you do more with less. We will cover managing the flexible workspace, a first look at Windows Intune and Office 365. We’ll also show you some of the new Windows Slates and give you details around Microsoft’s strategy for Slate devices. We will preview  the new tools in the MDOP 2011 suite, a deep dive into managing and deploying Office 2010 and great tips and tricks to help you deploy Windows 7 and move your users from Windows XP with speed and ease. REGISTER NOW and save your seat for this free day of technical demos, Q&A sessions, and real-world guidance from Microsoft experts. www.springboardseriestour.com Technorati Tags: Springboard Series Tour

Here is another example of how 1 small problem can affect many customers.

Late last week, Epsilon detected that customer information of a subset of Epsilon’s email clients had been exposed by an unauthorized entry into its email system. The affected clients represent approximately 2% of Epsilon’s total client base.

The data stolen from Epsilon — names and email addresses — isn’t considered as sensitive as social-security and credit-card numbers. But security experts warn that a cybercriminal could still use the information to commit fraud, especially if they know which email addresses are associated with customers of particular businesses.

The Secret Service is investigating this breach and people who receive spam should report it to phishing-report@us.cert.gov.

The Epsilon computer system was accessed by an unauthorized party. College Board customer first and last names and email addresses may have been obtained. The College Board sent out a warning about opening links and attachments from unknown senders and spam.

UPDATE (4/3/2011): In addition to The College Board, about 50 businesses who were clients of Epsilon at some point have also been affected. Customer names and email addresses from the following businesses were exposed:

Companies that use Epsilon include;

1-800-Flowers

AbeBooks

AIR MILES Reward Program (Canada)

Ameriprise

Barclays Bank of Delaware (Barclay’s L.L. Bean Visa card)

Beachbody

bebe

Best Buy

Best Buy Canada Reward Zone

Benefits Cosmetics

Brookstone

Capital One

Citi

City market

College Board

Dillons

Disney Destinations (The Walt Disney Travel Company)

Eddie Bauer Friends

Eileen Fisher

Ethan Allen

Food 4 Less

Fred Meyer

Fry’s

Hilton Honors

Home Shopping Network (HSN)

Jay C

JPMorgan Chase

King Soopers

Kroger

Lacoste

Marriott Rewards

McKinsey Quarterly

MoneyGram

New York & Company

QFC

Ralphs

Red Roof Inn

Ritz-Carlton Rewards

Robert Half International

Smith Brands

Target

TD Ameritrade

TiVo

US Bank

Visa (Barclays Bank of Delaware/L.L. Bean Visa, BJ’s Visa)

Walgreens

As of 4/4/2011, Epsilon estimates that the breach affected about 2% of its clients.

 

If you are new to PowerShell, I found some good tutorial exercises here.

Addition links for PowerShell tools and scripts and blogs

• Learn PowerShell Live: March 28–April 1, 2011 go here

• 2011 Scripting Games: All Links on One Page can be found here

BLOGS

• Jonathan Medd  blog is Here
• The Windows PowerShell Team blog here
• The Windows PowerShell Script Center here

Additional Docs- Windows Power Shell Owner guide is found here

Neat tool – PowerGUI, a graphical user interface and script editor for Microsoft Windows PowerShell can be found here

Podcasts on PowerShell can be found at;

http://get-scripting.blogspot.com/

Powerscripting Podcast

The 3 sessions that Scott Hanselman did on the subject

A great book Bruce Payette’s ‘Windows PowerShell in Action’

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.