RunAs Radio

Ready for the end of Server 2003? Richard chats with Eric Mills about the end of extended support for Windows Server 2003 - it had to come sooner or later! There are still millions of instances of Server 2003 out in the world, and they won't exactly spontaneously combust come July 2015, but the important bit is the end of tech support and security maintenance. The good news is that there are so many improvements that have happened to Server in the past ten years - you're going to love it! Eric talks about various approaches to migrating to a new server, pointing out that there is no way to directly upgrade from 2003 to 2012. Perhaps it's time to look at the cloud for some of your services? It's worth getting some help to make these decisions!

Thinking about getting into Azure? Now is a great time! Rick Claus talks to Richard about how Azure continues to evolve making more entry points at lower levels of friction for a larger variety of customers. The conversation ranges over using Azure for disaster recovery, for application elasticity, building hybrid solutions with parts in the cloud and parts on-premise, and more! Want a VM in the cloud? Azure can do that too. Rick runs down the gamut of options for the IT Pro to get Azure into your organization one step at a time.

It's New Years Eve, time to get scared! Troy Hunt is back and talking about the evolving story that is the Sony hack involving North Korea. The show was recorded on Dec 22 2014, after hackers had threatened movie theaters with "9/11 style attacks" if they showed the movie "The Interview", which was deemed derogatory to the North Korean government. What happens next? Are we entering a new period of cyber warfare? What can we as IT professionals do to protect our companies and customers from these kinds of attacks?

Holy cow, it's show 400! How did this happen? Richard invites his friends Paul Randal and Kim Tripp to have a little celebration, talk about what it takes to make a ton of podcasts. The conversation starts with a more personal discussion about what motivates Kim and Paul beyond SQL Server - animal rescue and exploring the world. Half through the show a fairly serious discussion about SQL topics... who would have thunk it on the 400th show? Thanks to everyone for making this milestone possible, we couldn't do it without you.

Richard talks to Steve Thomas about AppV and AppX. AppV is short for Application Virtualization, a huge growth area of virtualization, providing tools to allow you to encapsulate applications to simplify deployment and configuration - or to not deploy them at all and allow them to run remotely. Steve talks about AppX, based on the Open Packaging Conventions (OPC) that helps to define application configuration and deployment requirements which at this point is focused on Windows 8.1 Store Apps. Beyond AppV is User Experience Virtualization, on the way to full Desktop Virtualization. How far will you go?

Richard talks to Sean Kearney about his work with PowerShell, including being one of the honorary Scripting Guys - including the fellow who makes the crazy Holiday Special songs and events. Sean digs into how PowerShell is penetrating all aspects of operations, including working in the cloud, specifically Azure. And PowerShell isn't just for migrations to Azure, it can handle a ton of administrative tasks, so you can automate and make them more reliable. Isn't that why you moved to the cloud in the first place?

While at the SQLIntersection conference in Las Vegas, Richard hosted a panel discussion of amazing SQL Server rockstars including Paul Randal, Kim Tripp and Brent Ozar to answer questions from the audience about SQL Server. Also listen in for comments and responses from some of the SQL Server team and a number of other great SQL personalities. Great discussions on replication, Always On, indexing, statistics, clustering, features in SQL 2014 and more!

Richard chats with Tom Hollingsworth about the Software Defined Network (SDN) landscape and how it's evolving into a more open set of standards that interoperate well together. Of course, it's never that easy, but one aspect that has really grabbed ahold is whitebox networking - standard hardware with custom software. Normally the two are supplied by the same vendor, but that is starting to change. Remarkably, Hewlett Packard has some leading edge aspects of this, including their own SDN App Store, so that you can choose what networking software you want to run on their hardware. And other hardware vendors while still supplying their own software are supporting OpenFlow, using the OpenFlow protocol to make highly interoperable switches. The future of SDN is very cool!

How do you troubleshoot SQL problems? Kevin Kline talks to Richard about his process for diagnosing SQL Server, starting with Windows and SQL Server event logs, then moving through wait statistics, dynamic managed views and more. The focus is on making sure you're working on the right problem. Kevin also mentions Glenn Berry's awesome blog on DMV Queries, a resource you need to use! He also talks about SQLSentry's free PlanExplorer tool for helping you understand where your query performance problems come from. And don't miss Kevin's great blog post and video on End-to-End Troubleshooting.

Richard chats with Eric Shupps about search in SharePoint. The conversation starts with a state of the union conversation about SharePoint on-premise and cloud. Eric talks about how even folks not using public cloud technology are using the architecture to implement their on-premise systems. He sees the opportunity space for SharePoint professionals expanding. The discussion turns to the on-premise search systems in SharePoint, and how with a bit of effort, you can dramatically improve the ability to find documents and information in your business data. Eric talks about how it's not the same as consumer search - enterprise search has some complexities but can be hugely valuable when you get it right.