Happy New Year Everyone!!! I know Azure Stack is just around the corner, but I still get lots of questions around configuring WAP and portals. So to follow-up my Windows Azure Pack (WAP) series, I am going to talk about reconfiguring server names and ports as well as assigning trusted certificates to my WAP Portals.
Category Archives: Microsoft
A Tale of Two DAGs – Deploying Exchange 2013 DAG Environment on Nutanix
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As always, I try to blog on questions I get from the field and recently, I helped some colleagues and customers build a DAG on Nutanix 2 times last week ;). The process is pretty straightforward, but there are some best practices that everyone should follow to ensure a healthy DAG environment.
Microsoft SQL Server High Availability Options on Nutanix
To give credit, this content was taken from my buddy Mike McGhem’s blog and I added some more color to it, but his content is right on.
Exchange Backup Craziness – Log File Cleanup
“Often, you hear about something weird and un-supported, and feel like you have to share it”.
I often get calls and questions regarding backups and Exchange Server, and most backup technologies are not always working as required or as you would expect, but that’s off-topic.
Deploying a Test Lab SQL 2012 AlwaysOn Availability Group with Hyper-V on Nutanix – Failover Cluster Configuration – Part 1
In my various blog series, you need a SQL 2012 server setup for hosting databases with different Microsoft Solutions. Testing out on a SQL AlwaysOn AG will give you a feel of a real world scenario.
If you want to understand SQL 2012 Always-On Availability Group, check my blog post on SQL 2012 AlwaysON Feature – What is it? How does it work?.
To learn more about SQL Server on Nutanix Check out the Microsoft SQL Server on Nutanix Best Practices!
To give credit, most of the content was taken from Steve Poitras’s blog. He did a series on Configuring SQL Server on VMware ESXi that is awesome and I altered it for Hyper-V and added more details for installing.
In the following blog post, I’ll go over how to install and configure a test lab Microsoft SQL Server AlwaysOn AG with Hyper-V on Nutanix.
NPP Training series – How does it work – CVM – Software Defined
To continue NPP training series here is my next topic: How does it work – CVM – Software Defined
If you missed other parts of my series, check out links below:
Part 1 – NPP Training series – Nutanix Terminology
Part 2 – NPP Training series – Nutanix Terminology
Cluster Architecture with Hyper-V
Data Structure on Nutanix with Hyper-V
I/O Path Overview
Drive Breakdown
To give credit, most of the content was taken from Steve Poitras’s “Nutanix Bible” blog as his content is the most accurate and then I put a Hyper-V lean to it. Also, he just rocks…other than being a Sea Hawks Fan :).
Software-Defined
As mentioned before (likely numerous times), the Nutanix platform is a software-based solution which ships as a bundled software + hardware appliance. The controller VM or what we call the Nutanix CVM is where the vast majority of the Nutanix software and logic sits and was designed from the beginning to be an extensible and pluggable architecture. A key benefit to being software-defined and not relying upon any hardware offloads or constructs is around extensibility. As with any product life-cycle, advancements and new features will always be introduced.
By not relying on any custom ASIC/FPGA or hardware capabilities, Nutanix can develop and deploy these new features through a simple software update. This means that the deployment of a new feature (e.g., deduplication) can be deployed by upgrading the current version of the Nutanix software. This also allows newer generation features to be deployed on legacy hardware models. For example, say you’re running a workload running an older version of Nutanix software on a prior generation hardware platform (e.g., 2400). The running software version doesn’t provide deduplication capabilities which your workload could benefit greatly from. To get these features, you perform a rolling upgrade of the Nutanix software version while the workload is running, and you now have deduplication. It’s really that easy.
Similar to features, the ability to create new “adapters” or interfaces into Distributed Storage Fabric is another key capability. When the product first shipped, it solely supported iSCSI for I/O from the hypervisor, this has now grown to include NFS and SMB for Hyper-V. In the future, there is the ability to create new adapters for various workloads and hypervisors (HDFS, etc.).
And again, all of this can be deployed via a software update. This is contrary to most legacy infrastructures, where a hardware upgrade or software purchase is normally required to get the “latest and greatest” features. With Nutanix, it’s different. Since all features are deployed in software, they can run on any hardware platform, any hypervisor, and be deployed through simple software upgrades.
The following figure shows a logical representation of what this software-defined controller framework (Nutanix CVM) looks like:
Next up, NPP Training Series – How does it all work – Disk Balancing
Until next time, Rob…
Deploying ADFS on Nutanix – Installing and Configuring – Part 2
Deploying and configuring Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) 2012 R2 for Office 365 can be broken down into 4 blog posts:
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Install and Configuring ADFS (this post)
- Configuring Name Resolution and additional nodes
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Install ADFS Proxy (Coming Soon)
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Leverage ADFS with Office 365 (Coming Soon)
- New automated methods of setting up ADFS with Office 365 (Coming Soon)
Exchange Server 2016 RTM Released: Forged in the cloud. Built for Web-Scale
Exchange Server 2016 is here and available to download!!!
What sets this version of Exchange apart from the past, is that it was forged in the cloud. This release brings the Exchange bits that already power millions of Office 365 mailboxes to your on-premises environment. And deploying Exchange 2016 on Nutanix, you can truly create the ultimate email web-scale environment.
Email remains the backbone of business communication and the one that workers consider the most essential tool for getting things done. Because of this, it’s vital to have a modern messaging infrastructure that meets today’s business expectations of scale. With the volume of email and other communications continuing to grow, people need tools that help them focus on what’s most important in their inboxes, schedules and interactions with others at work. And as the quantity of email data grows, so do the demands on IT to manage, preserve and protect it. This is why Web-Scale so important in an Exchange 2016 environment.
Web-Scale Fundamentals
To help you meet these challenges with Exchange Server, Microsoft has deepened the integration between Exchange and other Office products, so your organization can be more productive and collaborate more effectively. They’ve made it easier to manage your email with new ways to focus on what’s important, work more efficiently, and accomplish more with your devices. Microsoft has also simplified the Exchange architecture and introduced additional recovery features.
Exchange 2016 builds on and improves features introduced in Exchange 2013, including Data Loss Prevention, Managed Availability, automatic recovery from storage failures, and the web-based Exchange admin center.
- Better collaboration: Exchange 2016 includes a new approach to attachments that simplifies document sharing and eliminates version control headaches. In Outlook 2016 or Outlook on the web, you can now attach a document as a link to SharePoint 2016 (currently in preview) or OneDrive for Business instead of a traditional attachment, providing the benefits of coauthoring and version control.
- Improved Outlook web experience: Continuing our effort to provide you with a first class web experience across devices, Microsoft has made significant updates to Outlook on the web. New features include: Sweep, Pin, Undo, inline reply, a new single-line inbox view, improved HTML rendering, new themes, emojis, and more.
- Search: A lightning-fast search architecture delivers more accurate and complete results. Outlook 2016 is optimized to use the power of the Exchange 2016 back-end to help you find things faster, across old mail and new. Search also gets more intelligent with Search suggestions, People suggestions, search refiners, and the ability to search for events in your Calendar.
- Greater extensibility: An expanded Add-In model for Outlook desktop and Outlook on the web allows developers to build features right into the Outlook experience. Add-ins can now integrate with UI components in new ways: as highlighted text in the body of a message or meeting, in the right-hand task pane when composing or reading a message or meeting, and as a button or a dropdown option in the Outlook ribbon.
- eDiscovery: Exchange 2016 has a revamped eDiscovery pipeline that is significantly faster and more scalable. Reliability is improved due to a new search architecture that is asynchronous and distributes the work across multiple servers with better fault tolerance. You also have the ability to search, hold and export content from public folders.
- Simplified architecture: One Role…! Exchange 2016’s architecture reflects the way we deploy Exchange in Office 365 and is an evolution and refinement of Exchange 2013. A combined mailbox and client access server role makes it easier to plan and scale your on-premises and hybrid deployments. Coexistence with Exchange 2013 is simplified, and namespace planning is easier.
- High availability: Automated repair improvements such as database divergence detection make Exchange easier than ever to run in a highly available way. Stability and performance enhancements from Office 365, many of which were so useful that Microsoft shipped them in Exchange 2013 Cumulative Updates, are also baked into the product.
That’s just quick list of highlights; I encourage you to get a full view of what’s new by reviewing the Exchange 2016 documentation on TechNet.
Or, if you are in the mood for something more bite-sized, check out these short demo videos in which a few members of the Exchange team show off their favorite features:
- Better Collaboration
- Outlook on the Go
- Architecture and Security/Compliance Improvements
- Smarter Inbox
Exchange 2016 will follow the same servicing rhythm as Exchange 2013, with Cumulative Updates (CUs) released approximately every three months that contain bug fixes, product refinements, and selected new investments from Office 365. The first CU is expected to arrive in the first quarter of 2016.
Until next time, Rob….