New role – more blogging

by ezs | Oct 1, 2013 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized

I recently changed role at Microsoft – and blogging about technology and the application of that technology is going to become a lot easier.

My new position is as the Chief Technology Officer – or Chief Technology Architect – for the World Wide Microsoft Technology Centers.

I will be working with a first class global team of technology architects and leads to really define the portfolio view of the entire conversation and offering in the MTC. The MTC is the pinnacle of the Microsoft technical sales organisation – hosting some incredible customers on a daily basis around the globe.

An incredible asset for Microsoft and our customers – and I am feeling both challenged and excited for the new opportunity.

Remote management in Windows Server 2012/2012R2

by ezs | Sep 12, 2013 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized

I remember a few years ago talking to the marvelous Jeffery Snover about PowerShell – and my mind was blown. The possibilities of scripting, remotability, the modular design – were all magical and innovative.

This week I’ve been updating servers on my Hyper-V infrastructure – most of them are server core – reducing the memory and patch requirements significantly.

Using a PowerShell I’ve been able to upgrade them all to Windows Server 2012 R2 with minimal fuss and effort.

Linux upgrades

by ezs | Sep 11, 2013 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized

I took advantage of the enforced, unplanned outage to update SLES 11 from SP2 to SP3.

All good – the only tiny gotcha was running the MySQL upgrade manually at the end.

Otherwise – looks happy so far.

udev, SLES and Hyper-V

by ezs | Sep 11, 2013 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized

I got bitten by the udev GUIDs when I did the move/upgrade/move back of my on-prem blog server this morning.

What should have been a simple evacuation of some VMs, upgrade the host to Windows Server 2012 R2, move the old VMs back in place – turned into another episode of handcrafting grub entries and checking that everything mounted back up correctly.

I got bit by this before – and I need to drill into the best practices for using SLES 11/udev in a virtual environment.

Re-testing Azure

by ezs | Aug 6, 2013 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized

After an initial set of testing in 2011 – I am back testing the Azure IaaS capabilities for the blog.