Customers and partners alike often ask the question, “How does Microsoft manage its vast network of data centers worldwide that power our 200+ cloud services such as  Office 365, Windows Live and Xbox Live, and our cloud platform Windows Azure?”

Microsoft’s Global Foundation Services (GFS) is the team that builds, manages, and secures Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure and today we are launching our new external web site on the Windows Azure platform to address these questions and to more broadly share our cloud infrastructure best practices with external audiences!

The GFS team has a newly revamped website that contains content and tools that that addresses the following:

• Customer Priorities that dive deep into infrastructure architecture, operations, reliability, security and compliance, and the sustainability strategies for our data centers and fiber optic network – all top of mind for customers, including:
• 20-30 minute interactive presentations featuring data center subject matter experts addressing some of the top 3-5 customer questions we receive
• Strategy Briefs for downloading and sharing
• Video overviews from strategy leads addressing key priorities
• Related whitepapers, technical content, and slideshows
• Future Insights that explore the forward-looking challenges of providing cloud services at massive scale and the business impact, reliability, security, sustainability opportunities and roadmap
• Blogs with industry relevant discussions on cloud infrastructure issues and best practices
• Video tours of our data center facilities

The resources available via this website have been designed to help customers better understand Microsoft’s data center strategy, and to more broadly share our best practices as we make strides towards more efficient and operationally robust infrastructures.

Check out this great resource if you want a deeper understanding out how Microsoft does what it does in the cloud!

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Microsoft Application Virtualization (App-V) version 4.5

Infrastructure Planning and Design guides have been updated with the introduction of Microsoft Application Virtualization (App-V) version 4.5.  Download the ensire IPD series or download the entire IPD series or download the individual guide.

This guide provides you with key information to bring your infrastructure up to date, saving you time and money.  Find out how App-V’s HTTP streaming of virtual applications from an IIS server will impact your performance and scalability decisions.  Using App-V 4.5 with its many new features to strategically plan your application virtualization infrastructure can hep you avoid problems before they begin, allowing you to serve your customers more accurately and reliably.

Use these guides to determine the scope of the services to be provided and choose to partially or completely redesign your infrastructure. Have confidence in knowing that the steps in each phase are described in detail and that the necessary tools are provided to manage the process.

Join the Beta

Additional Infrastructure Planning and Design series guides are available as beta releases on the Connect Web site. They are open beta downloads. See below for instructions on how to access the beta guides.

To join the Infrastructure Planning and Design Beta, follow these steps:

1. Visit the Infrastructure Planning and Design Beta on the Microsoft Connect website.
2. Sign in using a valid Windows Live ID to continue to the invitations page.
3. Scoll down to Infrastructure Planning and Design.

If you have not previously registered with Microsoft Connect, you might be required to register before continuing with the invitation process.

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I'd been racking my brain trying to remember the configuration steps for configuring a Virtual PC -based VM that's running as a Domain Controller (with DNS enabled) to access the internet.  I've done this many times in the past and just couldn't remember the steps.  This is a tricky thing because with a DC, DNS is also installed, therefore if you run your VM on say…your corporate network, and you have DNS enabled, then the DNS server within your VM could potentially be handing out IPs to DHCP-enabled networked clients.  This doesn't make your IT department (most notably, your Network Administrators) happy  because whenever you shut down the VM, everyone who had an IP issued by your DNS server can't resolve and thus looses network connectivity  I can't count how many times I've seen folks give demos and wound up hosing almost every one of their colleagues in their office because they just hard-wired into the corporae network with VMs running as DCs with DNS enabled

I stumbled across this post, from the UK Dynamics CRM Blog, that provides a nice summary of the steps.  Hopefully this will be a good reference in case you get into some configuration scenarios where you need to do this.  For those of you doing development or giving demos using a Virtual PC, hopefully this will save you (and your Network Admins) a lot of pain

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