RunAs Radio

Richard talks to Alan Burchill about the security aspects of Group Policy Preferences - good and bad! Alan reminds us all about where Group Policy Preferences came from, as an acquisition by Microsoft, and opened the door to reduce or eliminate login scripts, but only when it has sufficient privileges. And how do you do that? By embedding passwords! We all know that's a bad thing, so Alan walks through what is safe and what isn't safe in Group Policy Preferences, and gets you thinking about how to reduce your attack surface by using tools like Metasploit to hack yourself. Check out Alan's Group Policy Central web site for more information.

Richard talks to Paul Cunningham about configuring high-availability features in Exchange 2013. The conversation starts out talking a bit about how Exchange 2013 has evolved, including a mention of the amazing Microsoft Exchange Server Deployment Assistant. If you're planning a role out of Exchange, you want to use this tool! From there, Paul digs into the range of features you need to look at to make Exchange function in a high availability configuration, including creating redundant client access roles, using load balancing (or at least DNS round robin) to support failover, data access groups (DAGs) and transport redundancy. And don't forget about Managed Availability - Exchange 2013's built in capabilities to detect and failover to alternatives, sometimes to your own chagrin! There's a lot to learn to make a highly available Exchange infrastructure, so keep an eye out for Paul's ebook on the subject!

Richard talks to Alan Sugano about his experience building out a private cloud for his customers. The conversation starts out focused on why you would want to build a private cloud, especially for someone else to use - Alan talks about his customers not wanting to go to the public cloud, but also not wanting to upgrade their own hardware. Once committed, Alan got to do the fun part (for a hardware geek) of building a private cloud - finding a great data center provider. From there he implemented VMWare's vCloud Director with some expensive hardware and difficult 10Gb networking to get up and running. From there things getting really challenging - what does it take to run a cloud properly? It's more complex than you think!

So where did Small Business Server go? Susan Bradley knows! After entirely too long, Richard chats with Susan Bradley about the state of affairs for Small Business Server folks. The last version of SBS came out in 2011, and now piece of the bundle have gone to the Cloud, and other bits have morphed into Window Server 2012 R2 Essentials. But just to make things even more interesting, Essentials is both a product and a role - that you can buy as a Cloud product as well as configure on any Server 2012 R2 version. There are lots of choices here, and Susan helps to lay out the options!

Here comes Windows 10! Richard chats with Mark Minasi about the technical preview of Windows 10, but first Mark reels off some humorous reasons why the name "Windows 9" has been skipped. After mocking Apple's iOS 8 for a bit, Mark dives into some of the cool features seen in Windows 10 beyond the return of the Start Menu (with fancy new features). And don't forget about server! There is a technical preview of Windows Server which includes these Windows 10 bits, which brings to the discussion about technologies that are going away, like Network Access Protection (now deprecated). What's the future of Active Directory? Is the cloud permeating everything? Mark always provides a great viewpoint.

Richard chats with Brent Ozar about the amazing new hardware coming out for SQL Server. Yeah, it's time to geek out on hardware. Brent discusses some of the amazing small form factor machines coming from Dell and Hewlett-Packard, including the Dell PowerEdge 13G R730xd. What's new there? 24 RAM slots permits up to 1.5TB of RAM! And that's not all, Brent talks about the power of having three stage storage - room of three PCIe based SSD storage, 18 1.8" SATA SSD slots and 8 3.5" hard drive bays. Not only is that a lot of storage, it also provides the flexibility to let SQL Server structure your data into ultra-fast storage, super-fast storage and plain old fast storage. While the cloud is only offering scale out solutions, the latest hardware shows that you can still scale up!

Richard chats with deployment master and control freak Johan Arwidmark about the latest on Configuration Manager 2012 R2 and the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2013. Johan discusses MDT first, talking about how much power actually exists in this free tool from Microsoft - you can start with light-touch deployment, but it's equally capable of doing zero-touch when you really want to scale. And MDT works nicely alongside the pay-product System Center Configuration Manager 2012 R2. You want both! Johan also talks about where PowerShell fits into the picture for deployment as well as Microsoft InTune. And check out the great notes from Johan and Kent Agerlund for optimal configuration of Configuration Manager!

Richard talks to Aidan Finn about Software Defined Storage. Picking up he left off in April talking about Microsoft's Scale-Out File Server, the whole concept of Software Defined Storage is abstracting the details of the storage hardware away from the actual storage process. Aidan digs into how mixtures of SSD and spinning drives to optimize performance using Windows 2012 R2 Storage Spaces reduces costs and simplifies getting significant amounts of storage without any custom gear. And as Aidan says, in the end, it's all just Windows. Storage continues to evolve, and not just for the big enterprise folks - there are clustered storage solutions for small and medium businesses too!

Richard chats with Venkat Kalyanasundaram and David Apolinar about Azure Active Directory. The conversation starts out with a focus on the whole idea of claims-based security and what it takes to make single sign on work, especially with heterogeneous clients (like mobile phones and tablets) and cloud-based applications. David digs into the use and limitations of Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) letting you keep your AD infrastructure in-house and your cloud-based applications authenticating against it. What happens when you want to scale further? Azure AD opens the door not only to high-scaling authentication infrastructure, but also support for a larger diversity of devices and applications. There are thousands of cloud-based applications supported by Azure Active Directory! Azure AD also opens the door to support for multi-factor authentication and other features to keep identities more secure and resistant to hacking. Check it out!

Richard catches up with Jeffrey Snover, father of PowerShell and one of the moving forces behind Desired State Configuration (DSC). After just over a year since the original version of DSC came out, Windows 2012 R2 has shipped and DSC has gone through a number of revisions. Jeff refers to a Window Powershell Blog post on DSC Resource Wave 6! Not bad for one year. DSC is also part of Windows Management Framework Preview 5.0 which is an ongoing bundling of all sorts of tools you need to really take advantage of the power of Desired State Configuration. The conversation also digs into new version of DSC for Azure and for Linux. The Linux version you can find on GitHub as an open source project! Jeff wraps up the show with some information about the Open Management Initiative and a whitepaper called Just Enough Administration. Huge show with a ton of info, including a callout to our sponsor, ScriptRock!