The content below is taken from the original (Mercedes unveils world’s first completely electric semi truck), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

European car companies are starting to invest more heavily in green vehicles. Audi unveiled three more electric cars on Monday and Porsche added 400 jobs to how many it estimates it will create to make its electric Model E come to life. Today, Daimler revealed its milestone that wasn’t in the consumer space: The first non-fossil-fuel big rig, the Mercedes-Benz Urban eTruck.

Like most electric vehicles, the eTruck is relatively whisper-quiet, especially compared to a typical diesel truck. With a weight capacity of 29 US tons (26 metric tonnes), it’s the first electric big rig concept to hit the road, beating out the semi Tesla has been working on that it announced last week.

Of course, big rigs move freight across long distances, so the eTruck’s current 124-mile maximum range likely won’t be adequate for long hauls. But the "Urban" prefix denotes its use case: As a clean, quiet load-bearing vehicle ideal for cities. Daimler has already heavily tested the utility of close-range hauling with its Fuso Canter E-Cell pilot program, sending the all-electric 4.8-tonne capacity light trucks around Portugal last fall. The eTruck scales that concept up to the loads and conditions typically endured by semis.

Daimler envisions that its electric truck won’t roll off the assembly lines until early in the next decade, according to their press release. By then, technological improvements will drive battery costs down by a factor of 2.5 and efficiency up by the same metric, the truck company estimates.

Via: Popular Mechanics

Source: Daimler Trucks press release

The content below is taken from the original (Getting comfortable with cloud-based security: Who to trust to do what), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

The content below is taken from the original (Here are the key security features coming to Windows 10 next week), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

The content below is taken from the original (What if you could run the same, everywhere?), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

Posted by Miles Ward, Global Head of Solutions

Is multi-cloud a pipe dream? I think not!

From startups to enterprises, despite material increases in efficiency and the price to performance ratio of the compute, network and storage resources we all use, infrastructure continues to come at substantial cost. It can also be a real risk driver; each implementation choice affects future scalability, service level and flexibility of the services being built. It’s fair to say that “future-proofing” should be the primary concern of every system architect.

Providers of infrastructure aren’t disinterested actors either; there are huge incentives for any vendor to increase lock-in through contractual, fiscal and technical constrictions. In many cases, interest in cloud infrastructure, particularly existing consumers of infrastructure, has been driven by a huge urge to break free of existing enterprise vendor relationships for which the lock-in costs are higher than the value provided. Once they have some kind of lock-in working, infrastructure companies know that they can charge higher rents without necessarily earning them.

So, how can you swing the power dynamic around so that you, as the consumer of infrastructure, get the most value out of your providers at the lowest cost?

A good first step is to actively resist lock-in mechanisms. Most consumers have figured out that long-term contractual commitments can be dangerous. Most have figured out that pre-paid arrangements distort decisionmaking and can be dangerous. Technical lock-in remains one of the most difficult to avoid. Many providers wrap valuable differentiated services in proprietary APIs so that applications eventually get molded around their design. These “sticky services” or “loss leaders” create substantial incentives for tech shops to take the shorter path to value and accept a bit of lock-in risk. This is a prevalent form of technical debt, especially when new vendors release even more powerful and differentiated tools in the same space, or when superior solutions rise out of OSS communities.

In the past, some companies tried to help users get out from under this debt by building abstraction layers on top of the proprietary APIs from each provider, so that users could use one tool to broker across multiple clouds. This approach has been messy and fragile, and tends to compromise to the lowest-common denominator across clouds. It also invites strategic disruption from cloud providers in order to preserve customer lock-in.

Open architectures

Thankfully, this isn’t the only way technology works. It’s entirely possible to efficiently build scaled, high performance, cost-efficient systems without accepting unnecessary technical lock-in risk or tolerating the lowest-common denominator. You can even still consume proprietary infrastructure products, as long as you can prove to yourself that because those products expose open APIs, you can move when you want to. This is not to say that this isn’t complex, advanced work. It is. But the amount of time and effort required is shrinking radically every day. This gives users leverage; as your freedom goes up, it becomes easier and easier to treat providers like the commodities they ought to be.

We understand the value of proprietary engineering. We’ve created a purpose built cloud stack, highly tuned for scale, performance, security, and flexibility. We extract real value from this investment, through our advertising, applications as well as our cloud businesses. But GCP, along with some other providers and members of the broader technology community, recognize that when users have power, they can do powerful things. We’ve worked hard to deliver services that are differentiated by their performance, stability and cost, but not by proprietary, closed APIs. We know this means that you can stop using us when you want to; we think that gives you the power to use us at lower risk. Some awesome folks have started calling this approach GIFEE or “Google Infrastructure For Everyone Else. But given the overwhelming participation and source code contributions — including those for kubernetes — from individuals and companies of all sizes to the OSS projects involved, it’s probably more accurate to call it Everyone’s Infrastructure, For Every Cloud — unfortunately that’s a terrible acronym.

A few salient examples:

Applications can run in containers on Kubernetes, the OSS container orchestrator that Google helped create, either managed and hosted by us via GKE, or on any provider, or both at the same time. Kubernetes ensures that your containers aren’t locked in.

Web apps can run in a PaaS environment like AppScale, the OSS application management framework, either managed and hosted by us via Google AppEngine, or on any provider, or both at the same time. Importantly this includes the NoSQL transactional stores required by apps, either powered by AppScale, which uses Cassandra as a storage layer and vends the Google App Engine Datastore API to applications, or native in App Engine. AppScale ensures that your apps aren’t locked in.

NoSQL k-v stores can run Apache HBase, the OSS NoSQL engine inspired by our Bigtable whitepaper, either managed and hosted by us via Cloud Bigtable, or on any other provider, or both at the same time. HBase ensures that your NoSQL isn’t locked in.

OLAP systems can be run using Druid or Drill, two OSS OLAP engines inspired by Google’s Dremel system. These are very similar to BigQuery, and allow you to run on any infrastructure.   Druid and Drill ensure that your OLAP system isn’t locked in.

Advanced RDBMS can be built in Vitess, the OSS MySQL toolkit we helped create, either hosted by us inside Google Container Engine, or on any provider via Kubernetes, or both at the same time. You can also run MySQL fully managed on GCP via CloudSQL. Vitess ensures that your relational database isn’t locked in.

Data orchestration can run in Apache Beam, the OSS ETL engine we helped create, either managed and hosted by us via Cloud Dataflow, or on any provider, or both at the same time. Beam ensures that your data ETL isn’t locked in.

Machine Learning can be built in TensorFlow, the OSS ML toolkit we helped create, either managed and hosted by us via CloudML, or on any provider, or both at the same time. TensorFlow ensures that your ML isn’t locked in.

Object storage can be built in Minio.io which vends the S3 API via OSS, either managed and hosted by us via GCS which also emulates the S3 API, or on any provider, or both at the same time. Minio ensures that your object store isn’t locked in.

Continuous Deployment tooling can be delivered using Spinnaker, a project started by the Netflix|OSS team, either hosted by us via GKE, or on other providers, or both at the same time. Spinnaker ensures that your CD tooling isn’t locked in.

What’s still proprietary, but probably OK?

CDN, DNS, Load Balancing

Because the interfaces to these kinds of services are network configurations rather than code, so far these have remained proprietary across providers. NGINX and Varnish make excellent OSS load balancers/front-end caches, but because of the low friction low risk switchability, there’s no real need to avoid DNS or LB services on public clouds. Now, if you’re doing some really dynamic stuff and writing code to automate, you can use Denominator by Netflix to help keep your code connecting to open interfaces.

File Systems

These are still pretty hard for cloud providers to deliver as managed services at scale; Gluster FS, Avere, ZFS and others are really useful to deliver your own POSIX layers irrespective of environment. If you’re building inside Kubernetes, take a look at CoreOS’s Torus project.

It’s not just software, it’s the data
Lock-in risk comes in many forms, one of the most powerful being data gravity or data inertia. Even if all of your software can move between infrastructures with ease, those systems are connected by a limited, throughput constrained internet and once you have a petabyte written down, it can be a pain in the neck to move. What good is software you can move in a minute if it takes a month to move the bytes?

There are lots of tools that help, both native from GCP, and from our growing partner ecosystem.

• If your data is in an object store, look no further than the Google Storage Transfer Service, an easy automated tool for moving your bits from A to G.
• If you have data on tape or disk, take a look at the Offline Media Import/Export service. You might need to regularly move data to and from our cloud, so take a look at Google Cloud Interconnect for leveraging carriers or public peering points to connect reliably with us.
• If you have VM images you’d like to move to cloud quickly we recommend Cloud Endure to move and transform your images for running on Google Compute Engine.
• If you have a database you need replicated, take a look at Attunity CloudBeam. If you’re trying to migrate bulk data, try FDT from CERN.
• If you’re doing data imports, perhaps Embulk.

Conclusion

We hope the above helps you choose open APIs and technologies designed to help you grow without locking you in. That said, remember that the real proof you have the freedom to move is to actually move; try it! Customers have told us about their new-found power at the negotiating table when they can demonstrably run their application across multiple providers.

All of the above mentioned tools, in combination with strong private networking between providers, allow your applications to span providers with a minimum of provider-specific implementation detail.

If you have questions about how to implement the above, about other parts of the stack this kind of thinking applies to, or about how you can get started, don’t hesitate to reach out to us at Google Cloud Platform, we’re eager to help.

The content below is taken from the original (Windows 10’s Anniversary Update makes a great OS better), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

"It’s nice, for once, to be able to recommend a new version of Windows without any hesitation." That’s how I summarized my review of Windows 10 last year, and for the most part, it’s lived up to my expectations. Other than Microsoft’s bafflingly forceful automatic upgrade policy (which has led to lawsuits and plenty of ticked off users), the operating system’s first year on the market has been relatively smooth.

Microsoft says the software is now running on over 350 million devices worldwide, and it’s seeing the highest customer satisfaction ratings ever for a Windows release. So expectations are running pretty high for the Windows 10 Anniversary Update, which arrives August 2nd. But while it definitely delivers some useful upgrades to key features like Cortana and Windows Ink, don’t expect any massive changes to Windows 10 as a whole.

Cortana

Expect to see Microsoft’s virtual assistant just about everywhere in the Anniversary Update. Cortana is accessible through the lock screen, allowing you to ask simple questions or do things like play music, without even having to log in. She’ll also control some apps like iHeartRadio and Pandora, with voice commands. (Unfortunately, there’s no Spotify support yet.)

Perhaps most intriguingly, Cortana will also work across different platforms, with the ability to talk to Windows Phone and Android devices. You’ll be able to see notifications from your phone right on the Windows desktop, as well as alerts like when your phone is running low on battery. While there’s a Cortana app on iOS, this extensive integration won’t be available to iPhone users just yet. Microsoft reps say one reason for that is that it’s simply harder to implement it on Apple’s platform.

Cortana is also getting the smarts to act like a real assistant. Just like before, you can send her reminders and have her recall them at any point. Now, you’ll also be able to add photos to those reminders, as well as create them from Windows apps directly. And yes, those reminders carry over to Cortana’s mobile apps too. They’re particularly useful for things like frequent flyer numbers or complex parking spot locations, where asking your phone to look it up is easier than searching through your notes manually. She can also search within your documents for specific bits of text.

While I still find Google Now to be more accurate at listening to voice commands, Cortana stands out as the only voice-powered digital assistant on a desktop OS. Apple’s Siri will be the highlight of MacOS Sierra this fall when it’s officially released (though you can try it in beta form now), but Cortana still has that beat feature-wise.

Windows Ink

With the Windows 10 Anniversary Update, Ink finally steps out from behind the scenes for stylus users with an interface all its own. Clicking the eraser button on the Surface Pen, for example, brings up a new menu on the right side of the screen. From there, you can create a Sticky Note (basically a digital Post-It), access a blank sketch pad or jot notes down on a screenshot of whatever you’re looking at. Other active stylus models will have access to the feature too, and you’ll even be able to use it with a keyboard and mouse (right-click on the taskbar and choose "Show Windows Ink Workspace" button).

While it’s still fairly rudimentary, the current Ink interface is a lot more useful than what Microsoft offered in the past. Previously, hitting the Surface Pen’s eraser button would simply open up a blank OneNote document. It was great for people who liked to sketch or jot down handwritten notes, but that was about it. I’ve found myself using the stylus even more now with the Surface Pro 4 to create Sticky reminders, or simply caption an image to share with friends.

Just like Cortana, you can also access all of the new Ink features from the lock screen. So if you have to take some emergency notes for class, or simply want to jot down a burst of inspiration, you won’t have to wait to log into Windows to do so.

Windows Hello

Microsoft’s biometric authentication feature is branching out from the lock screen to let you sign into apps like DropBox and iHeartradio. It’ll even log you into some websites when you’re using the Edge browser. Hello was one of the best additions to Windows 10, so it was only a matter of time until its zippy login capabilities spread throughout the OS.

Still, the problem with Windows Hello is actually being able to use it. Fingerprint sensors and depth-sensing cameras (like Intel’s RealSense) still aren’t all that common. You’ll find them on the Surface machines and some high-end notebooks and tablets, but you can forget about them if you’re on a budget. And if you’re using a desktop, you’re even worse off. You can buy a third-party fingerprint sensor, but it won’t be as fast or accurate as the hardware used inside phones. And, for some reason, external depth-sensing cameras are still practically non-existent (unless you pay through the nose for a RealSense developer device).

At this point, Microsoft doesn’t have an answer to the lack of Windows Hello-compatible hardware out there. But company reps say they hope that once Microsoft adds more features to Windows Hello, manufacturers will feel more compelled to add the necessary hardware.

Microsoft Edge

Remember all the promises of browser extension support on Edge? Well, they’re finally here with the Anniversary Update. You’ll be able to choose from a handful of popular options like LastPass, AdBlock, Pocket and Evernote’s Clipper. The selection was pretty limited during my testing, but hopefully developers will adopt Edge’s extensions quickly. Microsoft claims that Edge is more power efficient now (something it already touted over its competitors), and it has even more support for newer web standards.

Start Menu and other changes

Rather than just highlighting a few apps in the Start Menu, the Anniversary Update brings all of your installed apps into a single (and very long) drop-down list. It might seem a bit overwhelming to new users, but it saves power users an extra click when they need to peruse their apps. Live Tiles are smarter now as well: If you click on a news app displaying a specific story, you’ll be directed to that story once the app launches. Sure, neither change is as drastic as the return of the Start Menu, but they’re still helpful tweaks.

The Anniversary Update also marks the first time Microsoft has made Bash command line support for Ubuntu Linux available in Windows. That’s not something most users will notice, but it’s a boon for developers.

Wrap-up

If you were expecting a huge change with the Windows 10 Anniversary Update, then you’ll probably be disappointed here. But, in a way, its lack of any major additions says a lot about how much Microsoft got right when it first launched Windows 10. It’s a stable, secure and fast OS. The Anniversary Update simply makes it better, and that’s something I think every PC user will appreciate.

The content below is taken from the original (New imaging method reveals how Alzheimer’s reshapes the brain), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

Researchers at Yale University have led development in to a new type of brain scan designed to detect changes in synapses associated with common brain disorders. Until now, researchers have only be able to detect these changes during autopsies, but by combining a Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scan with a new type of injectable tracer, Yale radiology and biomedical imagining professor Richard Carson was able to measure the synaptic density in a living brain. According to the findings published in Science Translational Medicine Wednesday, the technique could help doctors better understand and treat a wide range of neurological conditions from epilepsy to Alzheimer’s disease.

To achieve their goal, Dr. Carson and his team developed a new radioactive tracer that binds with a key protein in the synapses of the brain. The tracer is visible through a traditional PET scan and Dr. Carson’s team applied a mathematical formula to the results to determine the synaptic density. According to the university, the imaging technique has already been used on both baboon and human subjects, and it has already been used to show lower synaptic density in three patients with epilepsy compared to healthy individuals.

"This is the first time we have synaptic density measurement in live human beings," Dr. Carson said. "Up to now any measurement of synaptic density was postmortem."

Moving forward, Carson and the team believe this method could be use to track the progression of degenerative brain disorders or to track the effectiveness of medications meant to slow the loss of neurons. The team is already planning to use the same method in similar studies for Alzheimer’s schizophrenia, depression and Parkinson’s disease.

The content below is taken from the original (Azure Usage and Billing Portal Released), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

In today’s Ask the Admin, I’ll take a closer look at the recently released Azure Usage and Billing Portal.

Azure Usage and Billing Portal (Image Credit: Microsoft)

Understanding Azure resource use, and more importantly, how much it’s costing, can be a difficult puzzle to unravel, especially when you are dealing with multiple subscriptions. At the end of 2015, Microsoft released a set of APIs providing programmatic access to this information so that developers could create reports, a portal summarizing usage and billing information, or just ensure that resources weren’t being consumed after a project has finished by generating alerts.

But unless you had the necessary skills and resources to develop your own portal, this wasn’t a solution that provided an easy way to visualize usage and billing data. It’s difficult to say that Microsoft has solved this issue, but has come to the rescue partly with the release of the Azure Usage and Billing Portal – a set of resources that can be deployed in Azure to provide visual access to usage and billing data.

Rather than a readymade dashboard, the Azure Usage and Billing Portal is a set of open-source building blocks that enables you to deploy a portal based on a Power BI dashboard. And while it doesn’t require any scripting knowledge as such, it may not be suitable for small organizations that don’t have some experience of dealing with IT infrastructure directly.

The portal can retrieve up to 3 years’ worth of usage data from multiple subscriptions. All you need to do is register subscriptions with the system using a valid username and password. The portal system consists of a public website where subscriptions can be registered, a dashboard website where authenticated users can view usage and billing data for registered subscriptions, and behind the scenes there’s AzureSQL Server and an Azure Storage Queue that holds data requests.

Alerts and Additional Reporting

Hopefully Microsoft will at some point in the future package this solution to provide an out-of-the-box experience that everyone can access easily. But for now, the Azure Usage and Billing Portal should appeal to enterprises and service providers. Microsoft has promised to continue developing the solution, with the ability to trigger alerts based on usage anomalies, additional reporting capabilities, and subscription rate codes. And if PowerShell scares you, Microsoft also wants to simplify deployment of the portal system, along with many other improvements.

Deploy the Azure Usage and Billing Portal

The Azure Usage and Billing Portal project can be found on GitHub here, along with detailed setup instructions and a PowerShell script that can be used to set up the necessary Azure resources.

The post Azure Usage and Billing Portal Released appeared first on Petri.

The content below is taken from the original (Businesses are rushing into IoT like lemmings), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

The content below is taken from the original (New POPs available for all CDN integrated Azure Media Services customers), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

Last November 2015 we annouced the general availability of new CDN delivering POPs and pricing zones in India, Autralia and South America for Azure CDN customers. These new POPs are now available for all CDN integrated Azure Media Services customers. All the new POPs have been enabled for existing CDN integrated AMS streaming endpoints.

In addition, Azure Media Services customers can now enable CDN for streaming endpoints created from all regions (India, Australia, South America, Canada etc.). Note that CDN is a global service. All the CDN POPs will be turned on by default when you enable CDN from any region.

What’s next 

In the next few months we’ll work on an integrated solution to provide premium tier and multiple CDN options to AMS customers. Today customers can go to Azure CDN service directly to use these capabilities.

Additional resources

• Azure Media Services MSDN Forum
• Azure CDN MSDN forum
• UserVoice

The content below is taken from the original (Attach a Data Disk to a VM in the Azure Portal), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

In this Ask the Admin, I’ll show you how to attach a data disk to a virtual machine (VM) in the new Azure Management Portal.

Adding an additional disk to an Azure VM was easy and intuitive in the classic Azure management portal, but while the new portal has some benefits, sometimes the endless array of options and sliding panels makes it harder to find basic configuration options.

There are lots of reasons why you might want to attach additional disks to VMs in Azure, but one common situation is the requirement to host Active Directory database files on a volume that doesn’t use write caching. By default, Azure deploys OS volumes with write caching enabled, and this can cause issues, such as data loss, with some applications.

If you’ve never deployed a VM in Azure before, see Deploy VMs Using Azure Resource Manager on the Petri IT Knowledgebase. Azure Resource Manager (ARM) is the default deployment model for provisioning VMs, and other resources, in Azure using the new management portal. For more information on Azure resource groups, see What are Microsoft Azure Resource Groups? on Petri.

Create and attach a data disk to a VM

Before starting, you need to already have a virtual machine deployed in Azure. It doesn’t necessarily need to be running.

• Log in to the Azure management portal here.
• In the Azure management portal, click Virtual machines in the list of options on the left.
• In the Virtual machines pane, click the VM you want to attach a disk to.
• A dashboard for the VM will appear, and the VM’s Settings panel to the right. In the Settings panel, click Disks under GENERAL.

Adding a disk to a VM in Azure (Image Credit: Russell Smith)

• In the Disks pane, click the Attach new icon. Optionally, you can choose to add an existing disk.
• In the Attach new disk pane, change the disk parameters to meet your needs. You can choose between standard and premium SSD disk, if your VM size supports it; change the disk size, location, and caching options: None, Read only, and Read/Write.
• Once you’re done adjusting the settings, click OK at the bottom of the Attach new disk pane.

Adding a disk to a VM in Azure (Image Credit: Russell Smith)

Creating and attaching the disk might take a few minutes, and once the task is complete, you should see a notification appear in the top right of the management portal. The new disk will also appear in the Disks pane if you haven’t already closed it.

Adding a disk to a VM in Azure (Image Credit: Russell Smith)

In this article, I showed you how to create and attach a new disk to an existing virtual machine in Azure.

The post Attach a Data Disk to a VM in the Azure Portal appeared first on Petri.

The content below is taken from the original (If managing PCs is still hard, good luck patching 100,000 internet things), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

The content below is taken from the original (Seagate unveils a 10TB hard drive for your home PC), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

It’s no longer far-fetched to buy a 10TB hard drive if you’re running a server, but what if you need gobs of space for your games and 4K videos at home? Seagate has your back after today, as it’s releasing a trio of 10TB drives (mainly focused on networked and surveillance storage) that include one designed for your desktop. The new Barracuda Pro doesn’t do anything remarkable beyond its capacity (it’s a standard 3.5-inch, 7,200RPM disk), but that still means getting a massive amount of room in a drive that’s meant for a run-of-the-mill PC. Just brace yourself for the cost. Seagate pegs the 10TB Barracuda Pro’s price at $535 — it’ll be tempting to settle for ‘just’ an 8TB disk unless you know you need as much storage as possible in a single drive bay.

Source: Seagate

The content below is taken from the original (Deploy Remote Desktop Services using PowerShell), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

In today’s Ask the Admin, I’ll show you how to deploy Remote Desktop Services in Windows Server 2012 R2 using PowerShell.

In a previous Ask the Admin, Installing Remote Desktop Services in Windows Server 2012 R2, I demonstrated how to deploy Remote Desktop Services (RDS) using the standard deployment model. For more information on the RDS components and deployment models, take a look at Remote Desktop Services Deployment Options in Windows Server 2012 R2 on the Petri IT Knowledgebase.

Remote Desktop Services in Windows Server 2012 R2 (Image Credit: Russell Smith)

Deploy RDS using PowerShell

Servers that you want to use in your deployment need to be added to the Server Pool in Server Manager before you start the process below. For more info, see Managing Windows Server 2012 with Server Manager on Petri. You’ll need an Active Directory domain and an account that has permission to install the server roles on your chosen server(s). The RD Connection Broker role can’t be installed on a domain controller, and installation should not be carried out on the server where the RD Connection Broker role will be installed.

• Log into the Windows Server 2012 R2 server where you want to run the PowerShell cmdlets. The account should have administrative access to the server(s) where the RDS roles will be installed.
• Open a PowerShell prompt from the taskbar or Start screen.
• In the PowerShell window, type Import-Module RemoteDesktop and press ENTER.
• To install the three compulsory RDS components in a standard deployment, use the New-SessionDeployment cmdlet as shown below, replacing the values for the -ConnectionBroker, -WebAccessServer, and -SessionHost parameters with the name(s) of the servers on which you want to install these roles.

New-SessionDeployment -ConnectionBroker srv1.ad.contoso.com -WebAccessServer srv1.ad.contoso.com -SessionHost srv1.ad.contoso.com

If you want to manage the new deployment using Server Manager, you’ll need to add the server where the RD Connection Broker role is installed to the Server Pool and then click Remote Desktop Services in the list of options on the left of Server Manager. For more information on working with Server Manager, see Managing Windows Server 2012 with Server Manager on Petri.

Installing Remote Desktop Services using PowerShell in Windows Server 2012 R2 (Image Credit: Russell Smith)

If you want to add an additional RD Session Host or RD Licensing, you can use the Add-RDServer cmdlet as shown below:

Add-RDServer -Server srv1.ad.contoso.com -Role RDS-RD-SERVER -ConnectionBroker

You should specify an existing RD Connection Broker server, although it is also possible to add an additional Connection Broker to your deployment (maximum 2), and the -Role parameter value should be set to RDS-RD-SERVER to install a RD Session Host, or RDS-LICENSING to install the RD Licensing role.

Adding a RD Session Host using PowerShell in Windows Server 2012 R2 (Image Credit: Russell Smith)

If you opt to install RD Licensing, you’ll need to use the management console on the licensing server to activate the server and install your licenses from Microsoft. Once you have done that, you can use PowerShell to associate the new license server with your existing Connection Broker using the Set-RDLicenseConfiguration cmdlet. The -Mode parameter can be set to PerDevice or PerUser. Select ‘Y’ for yes to confirm the operation.

Set-RDLicenseConfiguration -LicenseServer srv1.ad.contoso.com -Mode PerUser -ConnectionBroker srv1.ad.contoso.com

In the next article in this series, I’ll show you how to configure RDS collections so you can get started publishing RemoteApps.

The post Deploy Remote Desktop Services using PowerShell appeared first on Petri.

The content below is taken from the original (Introduction to Azure Automation Desired State Configuration), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

In today’s Ask the Admin, I’ll explain the ins and outs of Azure Automation Desired State Configuration.

Azure Automation Desired State Configuration (DSC) is composed of two key technologies: Azure Automation, a cloud service that’s been around for a couple of years, and PowerShell DSC, a declarative syntax based on PowerShell that allows system administrators to define device configuration.

Azure Automation

If you’re not already familiar with Azure Automation, it’s a management platform for automating and maintaining cloud resources using a PowerShell-based workflow engine (runbooks). Azure Automation can be used to automate and schedule routine tasks, such as starting and stopping virtual machines, restarting web services or doing anything that is supported by Azure PowerShell. And just like PowerShell, the platform is extensible, so in theory, any internet-connected service or platform can be managed.

For more information on Azure Automation, see Getting Started with Microsoft Azure Automation and How to Use Microsoft Azure Automation on the Petri IT Knowledgebase.

PowerShell DSC

PowerShell Desired State Configuration is similar to Puppet and Chef, and is used for configuring servers and preventing configuration drift. Rather than scripting a configuration, for instance install this component, set registry keys and then reboot the server, DSC uses a declarative syntax that defines how servers should be configured without specifying a list of tasks needed to achieve the result. It’s like Group Policy on steroids, allowing servers to be configured without specialist knowledge of how components should be installed.

For more information on DSC, see Why PowerShell’s Desired State Configuration Should Matter to You and Deploying a Desired State Configuration Web Host Using PowerShell on Petri.

Azure Automation DSC

One of the problems with DSC is that to be really useful, it requires some infrastructure, usually in the form of a pull server from which nodes retrieve configurations, and even then doesn’t scale well. That’s where Azure Automation DSC comes in. When you create an Azure Automation account, a DSC pull and reporting server are automatically configured from which your cloud or on premise Windows and Linux VMs (nodes) can get MOF files, meaning that you don’t need to have a VM running 24/7 for the purposes of DSC.

A key advantage of Azure Automation DSC is the cloud-based pull server that’s automatically deployed and managed by Microsoft, but there are also a host of other features. The service allows organizations to control who can access DSC configurations and assign them to nodes. Changes to configuration can also be tracked, recording when and how configurations are applied to nodes. There’s also a reporting server so you can check for VM compliance against your configurations.

It’s also possible to combine the use of Azure Automation runbooks and DSC. For example, runbooks can come in useful if you want to coordinate a process and configure VMs as part of a larger operation.

Pricing

Azure Automation DSC comes in Free and Basic tiers, and is charged according the number of nodes registered with the pull server. The free tier supports up to five nodes, after which you need to switch to the basic tier, which costs $6/month per node. Click here for more information on pricing.

Look out for more articles on Petri soon, where I’ll show you how to work with Azure Automation DSC.

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Is there a plan for me and/or my organization?

Plans for individuals and families

The smallest plan is Office 365 Personal for $6.99 a month (or $69.99 a year). For this price you gain access to the most up-to-date desktop Office programs (PC or Mac), 1TB of OneDrive storage, and 60 minutes of Skype calling. This plan is perfect for anyone who uses the Office programs on one or several devices because documents can be stored locally and synced using OneDrive. This plan makes financial sense for the 1TB cloud storage alone since the same amount of space is $8.25 per month on Dropbox and $9.99 per month on Google Drive.
The only other plan for individuals/families is Office 365 Home for $9.99 a month (or $99.99 a year). Office 365 Home is basically the Personal plan times five. Instead of sharing a login and password with your family members, this plan can (and should) be shared with five people who each get their own login and their own Office programs, 1TB of cloud storage, and 60 Skype minutes each. This plan is a no-brainer for families especially when there are children in school.

Did someone say free?

Plans for organizations

What Office 365 provides

The Office Offerings Today

Office 2016 desktop programs

Office Online

Office Online compared to Office 2016

Office mobile apps

1TB (1024 GB) OneDrive storage

Email

60 Skype minutes (consumer)

Skype for Business

Skype For Business UI

Enterprise collaboration

Advanced management tools

Is Office 365 a good fit for you?

Probably yes. When you consider the Office programs, OneDrive storage, Skype minutes, and best-in-class management tools, Microsoft Office 365 is a good deal for nearly everyone. There are a few special cases where people can get by using free alternatives, but not most people. Microsoft is very responsive to their users and continues to invest heavily into all of their Office products. As a subscriber, you will constantly be kept up to date and worry free. If you have more questions about Office 365, comment below and I’ll do my best to find the answers.

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