Microsoft last week released a new tool which is capable of assessing your on-premise infrastructure and make recommendenations for migration of Active Directory, SharePoint or SQL Server workloads to Windows Azure, Microsoft’s Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solution.
Year: 2014
Microsoft DirSync to be replaced by Azure Active Directory Sync Services
Microsoft is actively working on enhancements to connect on-premises Active Directory to Azure Active Directory.
DirSync and Active Directory Federation Services are two options to connect. DirSync can now be used as a backup for ADFS. See my post here.
Microsoft is working on a replacement for DirSync. DirSync is a software tool used to synchronize objects located in an on-premises, single forest Active Directory to Azure Active Directory. Azure Active Directory is the Microsoft multi-tenent cloud version of Active Directory used for identity management for services like Office 365.
DirSync is basically an implementation of Forefront Identity Manage but with limited features. For example it is not able to sync objects of multiple on-premises AD forests nor is it able to handle multiple Exchange organizations.
To support these scenarios enterprises are at the moment required to use Forefront Identity Manager. However, configuring FIM can be challenging and can take considerable time.
The new tool which replaces DirSync will be named Azure Active Directory Sync Services or AADSync. AADSync significantly simplifies the configuration and makes it more predictive.
Release: Mirantis OpenStack 5.0
Last week Mirantis announced the availability of version 5.0 of its OpenStack distribution updated with Icehouse, the latest OpenStack release.
The key features of this new release is the support for interoperability with VMware vCenter Server that allows to deploy and control workloads through OpenStack Horizon console on both vSphere and KVM.
Mirantis OpenStack 5.0 also includes Fuel, the open source deployment and management tool for OpenStack able now to manage the future releases of OpenStack alongside the Icehouse-based.
A day with OpenStack
I like attending events and conferences because they allow to measure the temperature of a given technology within its target market.
You could argue that an Italian event, maybe, could not be so relevant on the world stage (even if we Italians have a long time culture of Open Source) but a ratio of ten to one between vendors and customers is a first significant information that can be desumed from this first OpenStack Day in Milan.
On stage, after the-always-excellent Jonathan Bryce (Executive Director at OpenStack Foundation), have been represented some of the vendors (all platinum members of the OpenStack Foundation) that are developing one or more products based on OpenStack, in order: Rackspace, HP, Red Hat and Suse.
The feeling that comes from the speeches, added to those that I, and other analysts, already expressed in the past can be quickly resumed with “confusion” and “lack of focus”.
Amazon announces availability of Windows Server 2012 R2 and SQL Server 2014 Virtual Machine Images
Amazon yesterday announced the availability of Virtual Machine Images (AMI’s) for Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 and SQL Server 2014 running on top of Windows Server 2012 R2.
The AMIs provide paravirtualized drivers certified by Microsoft allowing them to run on top of AWS. Customers who already have Windows Server 2012 R2 running can now also import those VMs using the VM Import functionality. SQL Server 2014 is provided in the Standard, Web and Express edition.
Gartner releases its Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service
Research firm Gartner this week updated its Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) for the year 2014. The Magic Quadrant for 2013, was released in August last year as covered by cloudcomputing.info. The Magic Quadrant aims to provide a qualitative analysis into a market and its direction, maturity and participants. The report details for each company in the Quadrant its Strengths and Cautions.
Gartner defines Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) as a standardized, highly automated offering, where compute resources, complemented by storage and networking capabilities, are owned by a service provider and offered to the customer on demand.
Book: Introducing Microsoft Azure HDInsight Technical Overview
Microsoft has released a free book titled: "Introducing Microsoft Azure HDInsight Technical Overview". Microsoft Azure HDInsight is Microsoft’s 100 percent compliant distribution of Apache Hadoop on Microsoft Azure. This means that standard Hadoop concepts and technologies apply, so learning the Hadoop stack helps you learn the HDInsight service. At the time of this writing, HDInsight (version 3.0) uses Hadoop version 2.2 and Hortonworks Data Platform 2.0.
VMware vCHS will offer pay-as-you-go and NSX
VMware vCloud Hybrid Service is a VMware owned and operated Infrastructure as a Service Offering. vCHS is available at the moment in the US and in the UK. Datacenters are located in Santa Clara CA, Las Vegas NV, Dallas TX, Sterling VA and Slough UK (west of London). VMware is likely to expand in Europe this year with datacenters in France and Germany.
The big difference with other public IaaS cloud offers like those of Microsoft Azure and Amazon is that vCHS is a so called ‘reliable cloud’. This means the platform has features built in to protect the virtual machines running on it. Think about features like vMotion and HA. Azure and Amazon EC2 are designed such that the application must provide resiliency (best effort cloud). When Microsoft has to reboot a host, an evacuation of virtual machines running on that host using a migration technology is not possible.
Release: Virtual Bridges Bridgepoint
Virtual Bridges can claim a significative history in the VDI market, starting with its Win4VDI and reaching VERDE, sold also in partnership with IBM.
This week the company announced the immediate availability of its new cloud orchestration system called Bridgepoint.
Bridgepoint is described as an agnostic solution, specifically intended for virtual desktops and able to leverage existing VMware and OpenStack infrastructures to deploy and manage virtual workloads including the possibility to migrate between these two environments and even public or hybrid clouds, this new product makes guess that the company is riding the vendor lock-in phenomenon that once again facing in the private cloud market as in other IT’s markets in the past.
Microsoft Azure announcements from TechEd 2014
Yesterday, during the keynote of its annual TechEd event, delivered by Brad Anderson, Corporate VP of Windows Server and System Center at Microsoft several Microsoft Azure related announcements were made. Besides announcing a technical preview of Microsoft Azure RemoteApp, which cloudcomputing.info covered yesterday, several other announcements were made.
Microsoft Azure Site Recovery expected to go in preview in June this year, which is the new name for Hyper-V Recovery Manager, which was released in January this year. Site Recovery is a cloud based service which coordinates failover and failback between two Microsoft System Center 2012 managed datacenters. Site Recovery will provide the option to failover a site with Virtual Machine Manager managed VM’s based on Hyper-V to Microsoft Azure. Some more information about Site Recovery is available on the blog of Marcel van den Berg.