Microsoft.com Operations Team Blog

Today at TechEd Europe 2013 we announced availability of the System Center 2012 R2 and Windows Server 2012 R2 previews.  You can download these products right now from the evaluation center.

Mark’s TechEd Sessions Available On-Demand:  Mark delivered four top-rated sessions at Microsoft’s TechEd US conference two weeks ago, and the recordings are available now for on-demand viewing. In Windows Azure Infrastructure Services, he gives an overview of the deployment and operation of Virtual Machines and Virtual Networks; in Windows Azure Internals Mark goes under the hood of Windows Azure to show its physical and logical datacenter architecture and operation; in Case of the Unexplained you’ll see how to use the Sysinternals tools to solve impossible problems; and in Malware Hunting with the Sysinternals Tools you’ll learn how to use Sysinternals tools to identify and clean malware infestations.

Trustworthy Computing in partnership with Microsoft IT, Microsoft Consulting and the product groups just released a series of videos on targeted attacked and how to defend.

We wanted to make sure and remind the Microsoft Partner community that the Hyper-V Surge! program is happening right now.  This incentive program is for a limited time so don’t be late.  If you are wondering what the “Hyper-V Surge!” promotion is, here’s a great description:

We already talked about Darren's tool to investigate Group Policy performance, so here's what some other GP MVPs are up to:

With server virtualization, you are able to decouple a compute instance from the underlying hardware.  That enables you to pool compute resources for greater flexibility. However, to truly transform your datacenter, you’ve also got to deliver your storage, compute, and networking resources as a shared, elastic resource pool for on-demand delivery of datacenter capacity. Indeed, this datacenter-level abstraction is a critical part of Microsoft’s Cloud OS vision.    

Organizations face many challenges when it comes to storage.  Data volumes are exploding, increasing the cost of storage and the headaches of storage management.  The rise of Big Data analytics means more data is being collected and mined than ever before – 90% of the world’s data has been created in the last two years.  Enterprise data is expanding at 20% per year or more. 

Autoruns v11.6: Autoruns is a utility for enumerating and disabling executables and DLLs configured to activate in dozens of autostart registration points.  This update fixes some minor bugs and adds Authenticode SHA1 and SHA256 hash reporting to Autorunsc output.