RunAs Radio

Richard and Greg talk to Susan Bradley, the SBS Diva! Susan digs into the new features of Small Business Server 2011. Check out the Microsoft SBS site at http://www.microsoft.com/oem/en/products/servers/Pages/sbs_overview.aspx. Susan also talks about the balance between SBS "on-premise" and the cloud offerings of Azure, BPOS and Office 365. Check out the SBS forums at http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/smallbusinessserver/threads. The conversation also explores the kinds of internet connections small businesses are going to need in the connected and cloud-enabled world. Susan is a Small Business Server Specialist, and points to http://www.microsoft.com/sbs/en/us/find-partner.aspx to find a specialist in your area if you want help setting up and maintaining Small Business Server.

Richard and Greg talk to Joel Oleson from Quest Software about Microsoft Office 365. Office 365 is Microsoft's cloud based offering for Office, Exchange, Sharepoint and Lync.

Richard talks to Amit Agarwal from Quest Software about Project Lucy. Projecy Lucy is a free Azure-based utility that analyzes SQL Traces to find performance bottlenecks and other problems. Check out Project Lucy at http://www.projectlucy.com/.

Richard talks to Ned Pyle from Microsoft Directory Services support. Ned, with his associate Ted Stephens, developed FRS2DFSR, a utility for assisting administrations migrating from File Replication Services (FRS) to Distributed File System Replication (DFSR). Check out Ned's blog post on the subject, with links to the white paper, the tool and operations guides on the subject at http://blogs.technet.com/b/askds/archive/2010/05/27/frs-to-dfsr-migration-tool-released.aspx.

Richard flies solo in a discussion with Kevin Kline about PASS and all things SQL Server. The conversation ranges over business intelligence, OLTP, SSDs, you name it! Check out the upcoming PASS SQLRally at http://www.sqlpass.org/sqlrally/2011/.

Richard and Greg talk to Alan Sugano about migrating from VMWare ESX to ESXi. VMWare announced that the next version of ESX is the last one, only ESXi will be developed further. ESXi is a far lighter weight version of ESX, lowering the security risk, memory consumption and a host of other advantages, but in exchange you give up a lot of the tools you're used to working with in ESX. Regardless, this is the direction that VMWare is going, so give a listen to how Alan has solved these challenges.

Another Connections conference show, Richard talks to the one-and-only Mark Minasi about his keynote at the conference. Mark aims his sights at cloud computing, asking the important questions about pricing, reliability and implementation challenges.

While at DevConnections, Richard talks to Jeremy Moskowitz about what every IT person needs to know about troubleshooting group policy.

Richard and Greg talk to David Mills about System Center Essentials (SCE). SCE is the core parts of the System Center suite aimed at the small to medium businesses. David digs into how SCE fits into your organization, how it works with existing infrastructure and the path to grow beyond it.

Richard and Greg talk to Clint Huffman about Performance Analysis of Logs (PAL) 2.0. PAL makes the performance counters in perfmon far more manageable - by providing a breakdown of important counters and reasonable values. With PAL you turn on perfmon, collect a log and use the tool to find important numbers. Check out PAL at http://pal.codeplex.com. You can find Clint's blog at http://blogs.technet.com/b/clinth/.