microsoft

Running Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V inside ESXi 5.1

    

It is possible to run Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V inside a VMware ESXi 5.1, free edition. Using a “nested” hypervisor is not straight forward. Still it is quite simple.

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Windows Server on virtualization infrastructure cheat sheet

    

Once upon a time, the way to decide which Microsoft Windows Server license to get was only a matter of checking the servers number, a bit of their configuration and features you wanted to get. Basically, the Standard Edition was good for anything that had less than 32GB of RAM and/or wasn’t used in clustered configuration ; else you would require the Enterprise Edition. There were also options for Web, Datacenter, Storage Edition but I never had to look at those. Virtualization, Cloud computing and IaaS have turned servers into instances with virtual resources which made those licenses quite inapplicable ; especially OEM license and CPU limitations. Here’s the way I understood the Microsoft documentation. It may enable you to understand and decide which licenses to use in your particular case. I’m writing it with VMware vSphere implementation in mind, but it should apply to apply virtualization technology.

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Exploring Active Directory with Free Software

    

In an Active Directory environments, you have (Windows) computers joined to a domain that does a lot a magic to allow you to use services without really thinking of it. You have Network Browsing, Exchange auto discovery… I’m going to use general I.T. tools to explore the Active Directory and guess what we can connect to with our non-Microsoft system.

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Quick'n'Dirty "About Windows Azure"

    

The Platform-As-A-Service solution from Microsoft Windows Azure is a service that allows the execution of applications and data storage in the Microsoft’s Cloud. This platform provides a runtime environment (Windows Azure) and a service pack (SQL Azure, Windows Azure AppFabric) that can be used together or independently.

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