Visualizing usage for multiple Azure subscriptions using the new portal
The new Azure portal provides a customizable experience where you can easily change the home page for the site. [For reference https://portal.azure.com/ is a quick way to get to the new portal, and https://manage.windowsazure.com is a quick way to get to the old portal.] One of the challenges I have had with the old portal…
Looking for online technical training courses?
When people ask me where to go for online training and technical information I tend to point them to two places: Channel9: https://channel9.msdn.com/ Microsoft Virtual Academy: https://mva.microsoft.com/ A colleague of mine however recently pointed me towards the technical content which is appearing at Lynda.com. If you are looking for information on Windows 10 for small…
Full, Nano and Core memory stats in Server 2016 TP4
Key benefits to Nano include smaller VHD sizes and less updates resulting in less reboots and less downtime. From my testing another one of the key benefits is the memory footprint. For my tests I ran three Windows Server 2016 TP4 systems: One as a Full operating system, one as Core and one as Nano.…
Making Operations Manager alerts actionable
Clint Wyckoff and I have teamed up on our first whitepaper for Operations Manager where we discuss “The Admin Who Cried Alert”. Techniques included in this whitepaper are: 1. Methods available to group objects by their Business Service Level Agreement (SLA) that can result in more actionable alerting 2. How the difference between monitoring and…
New solutions shown as Coming Soon for OMS and Preview Features
One of the best ways to know what is on the roadmap for Microsoft OMS is to log in and check out the Solutions Gallery (shown below). This blog post contains information which is publicly available if you access the Solutions Gallery from the Microsoft OMS site (http://www.microsoft.com/oms) with your account. During a recent view…
Fun with OpsMgr and Windows Media Center (Part 6): Wrapping up
My concept of a weekly edition of having fun with Operations Manager and Windows Media Center ended up going far longer than I had expected it would. The blog posts and their summaries are below: In the first part of this series we discussed why it is beneficial to create your own class structure. In…
SCUniverse returns to Dallas TX and the world on January 19th 2016!
I am pleased to be able to announce the return of System Center Universe in America on January 19th 2016 for our 5th year! The first round of speaker information for SCU was recently released and is available at: http://tinyurl.com/SCU2016Speakers (The list includes Symon Perriman, Johan Arwidmark, Kent Agerlund, Dieter Wijckmans, Pete Zerger, Wally Mead…
Fun with OpsMgr and Windows Media Center (Part 5): Creating views and customizing subscriptions
Welcome this week’s edition of having fun with Operations Manager and Windows Media Center. In the first part of this series we discussed why it is beneficial to create your own class structure. In the second part of this series we discussed a wizard driven method to create your own class structure and discovery. In…
Connecting Server Manager to TP4 Nano and Core servers running in Azure
One of the more interesting features of the new Windows Server 2016 release which has been show as of TP4 is Nano. Nano provides a 93% smaller VHD size, 92% fewer critical bulletins, 80% fewer reboots and installs as less than 500 MB in size (for details see http://windowsitpro.com/windows-server/what-nano-server). As a result Nano boots extremely…