The Microsoft Cloud OS, which is led by Windows Server 2012 R2, System Center 2012 R2, and Microsoft Azure, enables customers to easily virtualize, deploy, manage and automate their workloads – whether in a private, public, or service provider cloud – and offers a consistent set of tools for development, management, and identity across the entire infrastructure.

3 Key Product Areas: Datacenter, Hybrid Cloud and End User Tools

Datacenter – Microsoft
Compute: Hyper-V allows the creation of VMs with up to 64 vCPUs. Failover Clustering in Windows Server 2012 R2 enables unparalleled scale with up to 64 nodes and 8,000 virtual machines per cluster.

Storage: Hyper-V allows the creation of virtual disks as large as 64TB and maximum pass through disk size of 256TB+1 as well as support for advanced format drives with 4KB sector size.

Network: Windows Server 2012 R2 helps enhance the performance of network-intensive workloads with features like vRSS support which spreads traffic processing across multiple VMs.

Management & Automation: System Center 2012 R2 provides single pane of glass management across physical and virtual environments, on-premises and cloud, reducing complexity through deep cross-component integration through Management Packs, Integration Packs, Connectors, APIs and SDK.

Datacenter – Vmware
Windows Server leapt ahead of VMware with 2012 R2 and vSphere is now catching up to the level of performance and scalability available in Windows Server. Still, only vSphere 5.5 Enterprise Plus supports 64 vCPUs per VM. Enterprise edition supports only 32 vCPUs and all other editions support 8 vCPUs.

vSphere’s maximum virtual hard disk size is 62TB2 with pass through disk size limited to 64TB. vSphere does not support advanced format drives.

vSphere limits vRSS to the VMXNET3 network device, so customers only get this benefit when using that specific vNIC. VMware’s SR-IOV implementation does not support vMotion, HA or Fault Tolerance.

End User Tools on Microsoft
Unified VDI Management: With Windows Server 2012 R2, session-based desktop users, pooled desktop users, and personal virtual desktops are all intuitively managed from the integrated Server Manager.

Rapid VM Provisioning: Microsoft VDI sets up a basic VM, a session-based VDI, a single server pilot, or a highly-available enterprise deployment in just a few clicks. VMware’s management capabilities are spread out over a loosely coupled suite. In fact, one of the components of the suite is a suite itself (Operations Management Suite)!

User Profile & Data Management: Windows Server 2012 R2 provides inbox management of profiles and personalized settings across user logon sessions. With VMware, a customer has to purchase Horizon View software to get persona management capabilities.

End User Tools on Vmware
VDI capability is not included in the box with the vSphere Hypervisor or vSphere.

VMware does not provide session virtualization. It tries convincing customers to use the more costly and complex VDI for all use cases.

View Manager cannot manage physical desktops, applications, sessions or VM operating systems.

Without shared caching, locally provisioned ThinApp applications require more storage space with server-hosted virtualized desktops.

View’s PCoIP was designed to perform best over high bandwidth LAN.

Hybrid Cloud on Microsoft
With Microsoft’s Cloud OS, customers have the control to decide where to extend the platform to –on-premises, on hosting service provider, the Microsoft public cloud, or any mix of these.

With features like hybrid management across workloads running in Microsoft Azure and in customers’ datacenters, customers get a true hybrid service, offering a consistent experience whether they are in their datacenter or in the cloud.

Microsoft products and services are deeply informed by our first-hand experience running enormous datacenters and some of the largest globally-scaled services1 (Bing, Xbox Live, and Office 365) that support over a billion customers and 20 million businesses around the world.

Hybrid Cloud on Vmware
VMware has no direct experience running large public cloud services and has only recently announced a “hybrid” cloud service with very limited presence or availability.

VMware’s hybrid cloud model doesn’t incorporate all benefits of a true cloud model, instead offering a service closer to hosting.

VMware’s hybrid cloud offering is positioned as a complete solution, but in reality consists of individual components packaged as a suite, including vCAC, vCloud Hybrid Service, and VMware’s datacenters as well as partner service providers’ datacenters

VMware’s virtual machine management is limited to only vSphere hosts as it is unable to comprehensively manage other hosts like Hyper-V

How Google ranks sites like yours
Google’s ranking algorithm is constantly evolving and is highly confidential. But it is known that Google’s spiders crawl websites and currently rank based on the following key criteria.

1. Is it relevant?
When a customer searches a keyword, Google crawls websites to rank their relevancy.

Become more SEO friendly by integrating relevant keywords into your website to ensure you appear across a variety of search enquiries.

Be considered a thought leader by featuring over 450 words per page. Depending on industry, this number could be higher. Sign up for Google Adwords to research the most relevant keywords.

Update site content regularly as Google views this as a major indicator of relevancy

Tips: Add some Adwords, Sign up for Google Adwords and research your industry’s most popular search keywords

2. Does it include metadata?
Be sure to include metadata on each webpage. This ensures each page contains a space between thetags to insert metadata, or information about the contents of your page. This works similarly to a catalogue in a library, making your site easily identified.

Title Metadata
Is responsible for the page titles displayed at the top of a browser window and is the most important metadata on a page. It is a good idea to create a unique title relevant for each page.

Description Metadata
Is the textual description that a browser uses in your page search return. Think of it as your site’s window display – a concise description of what your site contains.

Keyword Metadata
Are the search phrases that people type to find your page. Include a variety of phrases, but don’t get greedy keyword stuffing can result in a ranking penalty. Limit it to 6-8 phrases each consisting of 1-4 words. Keep descriptions accurate and a good reflection of the content, create brief and descriptive tags for each page, and avoid being too greedy.

Tips: Meta what? There are different types of Metadata: Title Metadata, Description Metadata, Keyword Metadata

3. Is it secure?
Raise your Google Ranking with Symantec 4 Google wishes to protect users from new and evolving online threats, which is why it now gives a higher SEO ranking to websites that protect visitors throughout their sessions with HTTPS:// SSL*.

Prevent data breaches and protect customers by encrypting your sites with SSL Certificate from Symantec.

Symantec SSL Certificates provide the industry’s strongest available encryption. Based on 2048 bit roots, Symantec certificates have nearly 100% root ubiquity in browsers and wide-reaching mobile browser support.

Symantec SSL Certificates incorporate Seal-in-Search, which displays the Norton Secured Seal next to your site in search results and makes your site stand out from the crowd.

Tips: Secure more traffic, Sites have experienced a 5% increase in traffic from Google and Yahoo! organic searches since using Symantec Seal-in-Search.

4. How fast is it?
Websites that quickly deliver web content rank higher. Website owners should therefore investigate ways to improve their Time to First Byte (TTFB).
Measure your TTFB with a dedicated tool such as WebPageTest

Improve your front-end performance to create a fast, responsive, enjoyable user experience.

To improve your TTFB, your site may also benefit from using an Elliptical Curve Cryptography (ECC) SSL certificate. Requiring less computing power, ECC cuts usage by about 60%.

Tips: The faster, the better ranking, Faster websites make visitors happy, happy users promote sites through linking and sharing.

5. How trusted is it?
Raise your Google Ranking with Symantec 5 Trusted and authoritative sites rank higher. Key indicators include the types of links your website receives, volume of mentions on social media, the time visitors spend on your site and if your website is secured by SSL encryption.

Earning links from highly trusted domains can result in rankings promotion. Banks, Government websites and non-profit organizations are good examples of high-trust
domains.

Include SSL on all web pages within your website. This indicates that your business has been authenticated and is safe. Another way to establish trust is to display the Norton Trust Seal, included in any SSL purchase from Symantec.

Tips: Trust counts, Google penalizes or removes from the search index suspicious sites that include irrelevant metadata or links to spam

6. Is it a positive experience?
Websites that are easy to use, navigate and understand rank high for user experience. Providing a measurable benefit to a site’s external popularity, search engines interpret this as a signal of higher quality.

Search engines understand that sites with low bounce rates, longer visits, returning visits and social mentions are likely a reflection of a loyal customer base, therefore all these items contribute to a significant boost in SEO.

Ensure that your website is built to be accessible by modern browsers and professionally designed for a frictionless user experience.

Tips: Think positive, Usability and user experience are key influences on SEO ranking success.

The Last Word
Google is becoming more sophisticated and ultimately more humanlike with every new release. SEO techniques should be balanced with good user experience if they’re to form part of your business’ long term search strategy. So if you want to increase your websites ranking with Google, don’t try and trick it, give it what it wants! a safe site to visit and a great user experience.

Find out more information about Symantec SSL Certificates. For Additional option on SSL, you may also check out some others SSL provider such as Comodo and GeoTrust.

I love Microsoft Office 365 because it have multiple reason for me to choose it and multiple justification for me to convince my customer to choose it.

First of all, customer not require to pay a huge licensing price upfront compare to purchase Microsoft office open license, they just pay a small amount for month subscription only, and this can reduce their company capital expenditure, and convert it to operation expenditure. For finance point of view, it will be a very strong convincing point.

Secondly customer can have latest update of Office version without require to purchase new version, unlike conventional Microsoft office open license, to enjoy new version, customer have to purchase a new license.

Thirdly, most of us now a day have multiple devices, either for business or personal usage, with Microsoft office 365, each customer can install a copy in multiple devices without require to pay additional license, example mobile phone, laptop, desktop, tablet and etc

Forth, customer can access the work file online with one drive, anywhere, any place as long with Internet connection, this increase greater productivity and have single source of truth, if you edit or make changes to the document, other colleague view the document will see the latest update document.

Fifth, from IT/MIS perspective, it is more easy to control in term of security update and back end system upgrade will be done all by Microsoft;

Lastly, customer not require to invest infrastructure such as Microsoft exchange server  or Lync server and maintain all licensing as well as security product such as deploy strong firewall on premise, they can enjoy peace of mind when using Microsoft Office 365.

What is open source?
In simple, it is free to use software and free to modify for your need, and both of this is guarantee by GPL – General Public License.

Continually improving.
Because source code tested and review by thousand of developer, bug are frequently cut along the way before they can make their way to the production system, if there is a bug discover, it will be quickly patches by the community.

Compare with the proprietary license software, if the software company is big enough like Microsoft, they might patch the bugs quickly, unfortunately if the software company with only few developer, it might take time for them to developed the patches and distribute to their client.

Security
Proprietary license software, you have to place your trust on the Software company, because no one out of the company have the chance to review the code. We have no idea how they code the software and what vulnerability it have.

For open source, it constantly review, help to identify and eliminate the vulnerability by the community.

Flexible
Only the software company can change the proprietary software you purchase, you are unable to change the code to meet your environment need.

With open source, you are free to adapt the code to meet your requirement; if you don’t have the knowledge, you can always hire qualify coder to modify it for you.

Cost
Cost is always the major concern for small to medium business, open source is less expensive then proprietary software, it had no licences to purchase, no maintenance contract needed, no compulsory support fees, and of cause commercial support is available for most top tier open source project such as Redhat.

With the above 4 justification, it will be more then enough to convince a company go for open source.

Before start configure load balancer for webserver, first of all we need to create 2 or more virtual machine with webserver role enable with IIS feature ready. After this load the same content in all web server; or probably a “hello world 1″‘s index.html at webserver A and “hello world 2″‘s index.html at webserver B for testing purposes.

After setting up 2 webserver, let’s start with creating a Load Balanced Set in Azure

1. Click on the demovm1 virtual machine that was created earlier.

2. Click on the ENDPOINTS tab.

3. Click on ADD button at the bottom of the page.

4. Select ADD A STAND-ALONE ENDPOINT and click the next arrow.

5. In the next screen select HTTP under name field drop down menu.

6. Check the check box for CREATE A LOAD-BALANCED SET. Then click on the right arrow button to continue to next screen.

7. Specify LBHTTP (Place any name you like) for the LOAD-BALANCED SET NAME, select HTTP in the PROBE PROTOCOL dropdown and in the PROBE PATH field specify /iisstart.htm (most probably your index page such as index.html). Click the check mark to continue.

8. Wait until the update is complete before proceeding.
9. Within the Microsoft Azure Management Portal open the demovm2 configuration and click ENDPOINTS.

10. Click ADD to launch the add endpoint wizard.

11. In the Add ENDPOINT screen, select the radio button option ADD AN ENDPOINT TO AN EXISTING LOAD-BALANCED SET. Select as LBHTTP load balancer. Then click on the arrow mark at the bottom right corner to continue.

12. Specify HTTP in the NAME field and click the check mark to complete the endpoint addition.

13. Wait until the update is complete before proceeding.

How to verify the Load Balacing

You have done create a load balance set for azure’s web server. So how can we test whether the load balance set had take effective? From here, we need to access the website.

1. Select demovm1 virtual machine and click on the dashboard.

2. Scroll down and copy the cloud services DNS NAME URL under quick glance section.

3. Click on new tab in internet explorer and paste the URL in the address bar.

4. This will serve up the modified content from iisstart.htm. Note the server name (could be demovm1 or demovm2).

5. Now keep pressing the F5 button in your browser until you see the server name change to the second server in the load balanced set.

Done verify on the load balance set. This allow the traffic to be load balance to demovm2 webserver when demovm1 receiving high load.

If you don’t have Microsoft Azure account, you may sign up Microsoft Azure free trial for 1 month with $200 or RM650 credit.

Looking at office application such as word, spreadsheet, presentation & email client; no doubt it is a mandatory application for every individual no matter is for business or personal. When come to licensing, a lot had confusing with the latest Microsoft Cloud Services, Office 365 product.

Most people already know the normal or so call conventional office application such as Office 2013 or older version, and never come across cloud services like Office 365. Below give you some comparison between normal Microsoft Office Product Vs Office 365 Subscription

If you looking to get some extra feature such as Business class email, Unlimited online meetings and Social networking, you may consider Office 365 Business Premium. More information on pricing, please refer to Microsoft Office 365’s website.

Previously I am using wintoflash, and currently I am trying Rufus as alternative. Below few simple step to create your bootable

1. Download latest rufus apps from http://rufus.akeo.ie/ and run it.
2. Insert your USB drive into your computer .
3. From File System, Choose NTFS as the file system.
4. Check ” Quick format ” and ” Create extended label and icon files “
5, Check ” Create a bootable disk using ” and click the drive icon beside it to select your desire ISO file .
6, Now click on start to create a bootable OSUSB flash drive .

For this round, I image the windows server 2012 R2 datacenter’s ISO file (4.4GB) to my USB drive, it took 18 minute to fully create the bootable USB drive.

Now I can boot my server with my USB drive and proceed to setup windows server 2012 R2 datacenter into my server without need any CD Media.

These instances have solid-state disk (SSD)-based local drives and faster processors relative to many of the A-series instances. The D-series instances can be used as VMs, as well as web or worker roles in Cloud Services, and are well suited for applications that demand faster CPU performance, local disk performance, or higher memories. Please note that the SSD drives in the D-series are non-persistent.

Following are the CPU, memory, and disk configurations of the D-series instances:

Through December 31, 2014, the prices for Standard D-Series Virtual Machines will be charged at US South Central rates for all regions. Microsoft are currently offering promotional pricing and any future price increases will be announced with 30 days’ notice.

To start creative suite 6 overview exam; First login URL at adobechanneltraining.com, after login go to My Training/ Creative Suite/ English/ Level 1/ and open “CS6 – 01EN: Level 1 Overview“, after finish the training, click the “Exam: CS6 Overview”

Before you start creative suite 6 exam, here is some prep question you would like to study before taking the exam. No worry as this CS6 Exam you will have 10 chances.

Question 1. Which of the following individual products are brand-new in CS6?
A. Adobe Flash Professional
B. Adobe Creative Cloud
C. Adobe Prelude
D. Adobe Speedgrade

Answer in my opinion will be “Adobe Prelude” and “Adobe Speedgrade”

Question 2. Fill in the blank. Organisations who want access to Creative Cloud membership before the launch of the Creative Cloud Team, can be offered ___________________
A. To be contacted at the second half of 2012
B. Creative Cloud Individual
C. To place a pre-order for the Creative Cloud Team membership
D. Creative Cloud Team Ready Offer

Answer in my opinion will be “Creative Cloud Team Ready Offer”

Question 3. Which of the following are sales tools provided to you from Adobe?
A. Grow your deal
B. Sell Creative Cloud
C. 5 reasons to call
D. Upgrade to CS6
E. Sell up to CS6

Answer in my opinion will be “Sell up to CS6”

Question 4. Which suites have been combined to make a brand new suite?
A. Design & Web Premium
B. Design & Web Standard
C. Design & Video Premium
D. Web & Video Premium

Answer in my opinion will be “Design & Web Premium”

Question 5. From below, select which are our customers, and therefore our, four biggest priorities.
A. Multi-Channel
B. Multi-platform
C. Multi-device
D. Design & interactivity
E. Business Success

Answer in my opinion will be “Multi-Channel”, “Multi-device”, “Design & interactivity” and “Business Success”

Good luck for your CS6 exam prep question above!

The Virtual Machine guest operating systems and their applications see the storage as SCSI attached local disks.

In most cases these virtual SCSI disks are files stored in vSphere datastores, but sometimes it is desirable to map block storage directly to virtual machines using Raw Device Mappings (RDM).

The virtual SCSI disks, or VMDKs, are provisioned as files on vSphere
datastores which may be backed by either local SCSI storage, SAN attached block storage, or NFS NAS storage. The datastore abstraction is a model that assigns storage space to virtual machines while insulating the virtual machine and its guest OS from the complexity of the underlying physical storage technology.

The guest virtual machine is not exposed directly to the Fibre Channel SAN, iSCSI SAN, local storage, or NAS. The storage available to a virtual machine can be extended by increasing the size of the VMDK files.

New virtual disks can be added at any time, but this additional virtual disk
capacity may not be immediately usable without some reconfiguration within the Guest operating system.

Each vSphere datastore is either a physical Virtual Machine File System
(VMFS) volume on a block storage device or an NFS share on a NAS array.

Datastores can span multiple physical storage subsystems if necessary and a single VMFS volume can contain one or more LUNs from a local SCSI disk, a Fibre Channel SAN disk array, or an iSCSI SAN disk array.

New LUNs added to a physical storage subsystem are detected and can be made available to existing datastores, or used to create new datastores. If the physical storage system supports increasing LUN sizes dynamically, vSphere will recognize this increase in available capacity and it can be used to extend a datastore or create a new datastore if needed. Storage capacity on datastores can be extended using either approach without powering down physical hosts or storage subsystems.

When more direct access to block storage is required, this can be provided through an RDM. While RDMs bypass the VMFS layer, they are associated with a mapping file that allows vSphere to interact with and manage them in much the same way as VMDKs located in VMFS or NFS Datastores.

The capacity and performance requirements of the VMFS datastores are provided by the
physical capacity of the storage that is connected to the ESXi host, either locally or via a SAN. Similarly, the capacity and performance of the NFS datastores are provided by the NAS systems to which the NFS datastores are mapped.

vSphere 5.5 sees the introduction of VSAN. VSAN provides customers with a distributed compute and storage architecture which is fully integrated and managed by vCenter. At this time it is in public beta and as such is not covered in this course. It should be noted that its introduction will impact how you design and deploy your environment. The diagram shown on this slide does not reflect these changes.