One of my initial interests when I started blogging was using performance testing to determine optimal configurations (one of my first posts discussed performance of SCSI versus IDE disk configurations in Virtual Server 2005). I thought recently that it would → Continue Reading.

I’m getting more and more questions on Azure these days and with the general availability of Azure Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), the public cloud is starting to get real for IT pros. Want to ramp up on Azure IaaS quickly? These demo-driven → Continue Reading.

I received an email from a colleague of mine about new functionality available in Azure which they discussed at: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2013/03/04/windows-azure-updates-android-support-sql-reporting-services-active-directory-more.aspx. There was a reference in this to “Endpoint Monitoring” in Azure which I found interesting as I’ve spent some time → Continue Reading.

One of the proposed Birds-of-a-Feather (BOF) sessions at MMS is “Cloud and Datacenter Management Roundtable”. This BOF session is for System Center SME’s, the Cloud and Datacenter MVP’s and product team to roundtable discuss all items in the Cloud and → Continue Reading.

I initially blogged on this topic (using Azure benefits from your MSDN subscription) on 10/1/2012. At that point in time the Azure benefits from MSDN has been significantly lighter than they are as of today. This equated to approximately a → Continue Reading.

I have been reading the 15-part series ‘Kicking the Tires on Windows Azure’ by MVP Cameron Fuller. Below are links to all 15 articles.  Kicking the tires: Creating and deploying a simple application to Azure (#Azure, #SYSCTR) Kicking the tires: → Continue Reading.

This is my last post on System Center 2012 and Azure… This is it – I swear! During my investigating into the various integration points between System Center 2012 and Azure I found there there are a lot of areas → Continue Reading.

With the production released version of GSM, there were a couple of big surprises that I saw. 1) The licensing structure was actually a pleasant surprise. Per the article at http://blogs.technet.com/b/momteam/archive/2013/01/14/system-center-global-service-monitor-getting-started.aspx “GSM is provided by Microsoft as a benefit of → Continue Reading.

This is the last integration point I was looking into between System Center (Configuration Manager in this case) and Azure. Configuration Manager 2012 with SP1 can use use an Azure based distribution point. I did some looking into this and → Continue Reading.

As part of some pre-sales related work that I was asked to look into, I spent some time working with what is available via System Center 2012 to provide monitoring for applications which are deployed in Windows Azure. I quickly → Continue Reading.