The content below is taken from the original (What’s New in Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 5: Hyper-V Features), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

This article will discuss new Hyper-V features and their impact in the Windows Server 2016 (WS2016) Technical Preview 5 (TP5), which is available to download now.

Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 5 New Features

Microsoft recently released the latest public preview of Windows Server 2016 and Hyper-V Server 2016 (the free version). There are lots of new Hyper-V features to evaluate, learn, and use.

If I had to give you a theme to this release, it would be cloud. Much of what is in the 2016 release is geared toward building private, hosted, or public cloud, with a lot of the management being offered either by Azure or Microsoft Azure Stack. When evaluating WS2016, you’ll need to consider:

• Nano Server, with administration via Remote Server Management Tools
• Hyper-V
• Failover Clustering
• Storage
• Networking, particularly the Network Controller
• Microsoft Azure Stack
• Containers

In this post, I’m going to focus on the improvements to Hyper-V.

Connected Standby

This is a feature for Windows 10 users and the few presenters that run Windows Server Hyper-V on their laptop or hybrid device. You might even say that this new feature was dedicated to Paul Thurrott when the feature was announced at TechEd Europe 2014, mainly because Paul was one of the more vocal sufferers of the lack of compatibility between Hyper-V and the heralded Windows 8/hardware feature. Hyper-V had issues with Connected Standby, and these issues have been solved in Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016.

Discrete Device Assignment (DDA)

Discrete Device Assignment is a relatively new feature in the list of improvements. DDA allows you to give a virtual machine direct and exclusive access to some PCI devices in the host. The concept is that a virtual machine can talk directly to a graphics card. My suspicion is that the primary customer for this feature are those who are using Microsoft Azure with an N-Series virtual machine. But anyone looking for something better than RemoteFX or compute intensive workloads should be interested in this feature, too.

Host Resource Protection

This is a security feature to protect a host and other virtual machines from resource abuse by another virtual machine. Imagine that a virtual machine goes awry or is compromised; in the latter case, the attacker will want to attack the hypervisor, either looking for a vulnerability or to launch a DOS attack. Hyper-V can be configured to starve the virtual machine of resources when unusual behaviour starts, thus limiting the damage and giving you a chance to intervene.

Add-Add/Remove of Virtual Memory and Network Adapters

Is that applause and cheering that I hear? This heavily demanded feature is coming to Hyper-V; you can add and remove memory and virtual NICs to and from running virtual machines running Windows 10 or WS2016.

Hyper-V Manager

The old tool is looking long in the tooth, but improvements are coming. You can launch Hyper-V manager with alternate credentials, supporting the secure dual-identity approach that some companies enforce. You can also manage older versions of Hyper-V from WS2016 (WS2012, WS2012 R2, Windows 8.1, and Windows 8). The management protocol has been updated to use WS-MAN (TCP 80) with remote hosts. A benefit is that you can connect to a remote host with CredSSP and perform a live migration without enabled messy Active Directory constrained delegation.

Integration Services via Windows Update

Another cheering moment here; the Hyper-V integration components in the guest OS will be updated via Windows Update; Linux uses different methods. Note that the VMGUEST.ISO is no longer required, so it is not included in the installation.

Linux Secure Boot

You can protect Linux guests from root kits by enabling secure boot on Generation 2 virtual machines. You must use a compliant version of Linux and enable the use of the Microsoft UEFI Certificate Authority.

Nested Virtualization

Here’s a very big cheering moment because we finally get a feature we’ve been asking for since Windows Server 2008. Those with constrained hardware can finally run Hyper-V virtual machines inside of Hyper-V virtual machines — there are blog posts on how to get vSphere running inside of Hyper-V!

You can even run Hyper-V virtual machines inside of Hyper-V virtual machines, insider of Hyper-V virtual machines, inside of Hyper-V virtual machines, and on and on. This is great for training classes and presenters (failover clustering and Live Migration on a single physical machine), but the real winner here is Windows Server Containers, which gets the more secure Hyper-V Container.

The architecture of nested Hyper-V (Image Credit: Microsoft)

I can’t wait until the day that I can run Hyper-V inside of an Azure virtual machine! The performance of nested Hyper-V should be pretty good, thanks to Microsoft’s micro-kernalized architecture, as opposed to the alternative monolithic approach.

Networking

This is a huge area that deserves its own article, so watch out for a post that’s coming soon.

Production Checkpoints

Checkpoints, what some of you still call Hyper-V snapshots, were improved to the point where Microsoft can say “yes, use them with production workloads.” A production checkpoint uses the backup infrastructure of Hyper-V to create a checkpoint of a running virtual machine. When you restore the checkpoint, it’s as if the virtual machine is being restored from a backup. You can use legacy standard checkpoints, but production checkpoints are on by default. This improvement is a recognition that:

• People were using checkpoints in production, even though it wasn’t recommended.
• The nature of systems management has changed, and self-service administrators are going to use checkpoints.

Shielded Virtual Machines

This is actually a huge topic; Microsoft’s core hypervisor team did a lot of work to:

• Harden the hypervisor.
• Create a new model and architecture (Host Guardian Server) for creating trusted virtual machines with limited or no access for hypervisor administrators.
• Enabling tenant-managed BitLocker with a virtual TPM chip.

Yes, you can replicate these virtual machines to hosts that are similarly secured in the secondary location using Hyper-V Replica.

Virtual Machine Configuration

The old XML files of the past that were used to describe virtual machine metadata are gone. WS2016 will use binary files that you cannot edit:

• .VMCX: The virtual machine configuration file.
• .VMRS: The virtual machine runtime state data file.

The benefits of this change are:

• Improved performance on larger and denser hosts.
• Reduced risk of data corruption caused by storage failure.

This change has proven to be controversial. I don’t get why; it was completely unsupported and unsafe to directly edit the XML files in the past.

Virtual Machine Configuration Version

Most of us did not know that virtual machines have always had versions, based on the Hyper-V version that they were created and running on. You will be able to update the version of a virtual machine in WS2016, which will be useful thanks to some of the improvements in failover clustering.

PowerShell Direct

I’m not a day-to-day administrator, but I use PowerShell a lot when doing presentations and demos of Hyper-V. I’ve done lots of PowerShell remoting, which can get quite complicated. The same scenario exists for a virtualization admin; they have lots of machines they want to work with, but they want PowerShell admin inside of the machines to be easier.

PowerShell Direct allows you to do work inside of a virtual machine, from the host, without any network or firewall access to the guest OS. For example, if a virtual machine loses an IP configuration, you can reconfigure the network stack using PowerShell Direct to get the machine back to an operational status.

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The content below is taken from the original (ICANN knifes Africa’s internet: New top-level domains terminated), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

The content below is taken from the original (Disney scanner identifies gadgets by their electromagnetic field), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

If someone placed your naked smartphone on a table alongside two identical models, how would you determine which one is yours? If you’re an engineer at Disney Research, you would pull out a little scanner and immediately pinpoint the handset based on the noise it emits. It definitely sounds a little futuristic, but a team of researchers at Disney’s innovation labs found that every single piece of technology has its own unique electromagnetic signal, even if they’re exactly the same make and model, and built a radio scanner to read them.

Disney technicians tested a total of 40 devices, including five fluorescent tube light bulbs, five Lightsaber toys, five iPhone 6 handsets, five Retina MacBook Pro and 20 24-inch Dell LCD displays. Using a custom-built $10 scanner, the team fed the electromagnetic signals into a specialized software that pinpoints 1,000 unique frequency responses to create an EM-ID — a digital fingerprint of each device.

The results were varied but encouraging. For the Lightsaber, the algorithm "perfectly identified" the device 30 times. The Dell displays scored an average identification accuracy of 94.7 percent, followed closely by the five MacBook Pros with 94.6 percent. The lightbulbs came in at 86 percent but the iPhone 6 tests only averaged 71.2 percent, a result that Disney researchers believe occurred because the smartphone has a frequency distribution that can easily overlap with other identical models.

So, what does this mean? Right now, Disney is presenting the technology as a new way to "improve asset management and inventory tracking." Instead of using RFID tags, which are considered too expensive when compared with a standard printed barcode, organizations could use a device’s own electromagnetic footprint to determine exactly what stock it has without even having to touch it.

Via: Gizmodo

Source: Disney Research

The content below is taken from the original (WHEA Errors on Hyper-V Hosts), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

Hyper-V is a very resilient hypervisor, designed to protect your workloads from corruption. Corruption can come in many forms. Maybe Hyper-V pauses your virtual machines because a Cluster Shared Volume is full and it’s protecting your business or customer from dynamic virtual hard disks trying to consume space that is no longer there. Or maybe your host has failing memory DIMMS and Hyper-V is aware of this and is ensuring that your virtual machines will not consume that RAM. The latter is where Hyper-V is using hardware error detection to protect you from your hardware. I recently encountered the latter in person, and here’s what I found.

What is WHEA?

WHEA stands for Windows Hardware Error Architecture. MSDN describes WHEA as a mechanism where Windows and the firmware of the underlying hardware work together to detect hardware issues and deal with them.

The architecture of WHEA (Image Credit: Microsoft)

Since Windows Vista, Windows maintains a list of discoverable hardware error sources. For each source that is discovered on a physical machine, Windows maintains a low-level hardware error handler (LLHEH). When a hardware error is reported to Windows, the LLHEH is the first piece of code to run in response. Microsoft places each LLHEH in the appropriate part of the operating system to deal with the issues of the related error source.

When an LLHEH runs, it will:

• Acknowledge the error
• Capture information related to the error
• Report the error condition to the operating system

I recently saw the following WHEA error in the System Log of a Hyper-V host:

A system log error from WHEA (Image Credit: Aidan Finn)

WHEA and Hyper-V

Traditionally, the most precious resource on a virtualization host has been RAM. Virtualization has given us tools to optimize how we use RAM to squeeze more virtual machines onto our host hardware. And over time, hosts have grown. Gone are the days of hosts with 64 GB of RAM being a sweet spot. These days, the smallest host my company sells has 128 GB RAM, and we’re more likely to see 256 GB or 512 GB RAM hosts, thanks to the ever falling price of DIMMs. But as we add more memory chips into hosts, we are creating conditions where there is a higher probability of chip degradation.

Let me be clear about that language; I said degradation, not failure. An outright failure of a DIMM is easily handled — it’s dead and unusable. But what happens if part of a DIMM becomes faulty and untrustworthy without triggering an alarm?

Hyper-V is made aware of the fault thanks to WHEA. And Hyper-V is intelligent enough to protect you from this failure by isolating the affected memory and ensuring that virtual machines don’t use it anymore.

What happened with the host that created the above alert? I knew to look for errors because there was a report of an alert on the front console of the server. I logged into the remote management of the physical server and the current status was healthy; there were no apparent hardware failures. But I had a WHEA error indicating that there was a memory degradation. I browsed into the logs of the server’s remote management and found a hardware error report to prove that there was a dodgy DIMM.

A log entry to prove DIMM degradation (Image Credit: Aidan Finn)

Armed with that information, I’ve been able to request a memory swap out to prevent any further issues with this host … and it was great to know that Windows and Hyper-V had my back.

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The content below is taken from the original (Rethinking security for the Internet of Things), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

The content below is taken from the original (VNYL’s wireless turntable lets your pals follow along on Spotify), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

Perhaps you’ve heard of VNYL: the $39 record subscription service that sends you three new albums a month based on your musical tastes. After offering the vinyl aspect of the audio equation, the company is looking to provide the gear you’ll need to spin those records, too. TRNTBL (we should’ve seen this coming), is a belt-driven wireless turntable that connects to your speakers, headphones and other devices via Bluetooth and AirPlay. Despite its claims, the gadget isn’t the first wireless turntable as both ION and Audio Technica have Bluetooth-equipped models of their own.

So what’s the hook here? Well, TRNTBL identifies what’s playing on the device while its spinning, so you can share it via your collection of social channels. It also shares what you’re playing to Spotify, where a couple of things happen. First, it builds a playlist of what’s spinning on the gadget based on that identification process — similar to the collection that’s automatically built when you Shazam songs. There’s also a "Tune-In" feature that lets your pals follow along on the streaming service in real time or access the playlist from the beginning you’ve started. VNYL says the feature is kind of like Periscope, but for music.

What’s more, the turntable works with Sonos’ audio gear, streaming uncompressed audio to the speakers just like you were pulling it from Apple Music, Pandora and others. Finer details are a bit scarce for now, but if that’s enough to temp you, TRNTBL is up for pre-order now for $351. It’s set to ship this summer, and when it does, the price jumps to $420. You’ll have the option of two colors, and both the black and white models feature gold accents and hardware.

Source: VNYL

The content below is taken from the original (Google connects BigQuery to Google Drive and Sheets), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

The content below is taken from the original (Microsoft Now Allows Businesses To Buy (and Sell) Apps in Bulk), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

With the release of Windows 10, Microsoft built in several features targeted directly at its enterprise users. Under the umbrella of Windows Update for Business, this suite of services allows you to have greater control of your environment with granular features like the ability to designate when a specific machine will receive updates.

To make the app buying process easier, Microsoft has enabled the ability to bulk purchase apps through the Windows Store for Business which will make it significantly easier to deploy store-based apps to your users. At this time, you can only use a credit card to buy the apps but Microsoft will be introducing additional payment methods in the near future.

Apps acquired via the Windows Store for Business will show in your Dev Center reports as volume acquisitions by organizations.

This update is one more way that Microsoft is trying to make its store a desirable place for developers to offer their applications. Because bulk purchasing is essential to enterprise style software, this feature will now let any type of developer easily sell, at volume, apps to corporate clients.

This feature is now available and you can learn more here.

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The content below is taken from the original (As drones get smarter, so must their owners), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

On Sunday, April 17th, British Airways flight BA727 from Geneva to London was coming in to land, when the pilot saw something — reportedly a drone — strike the front of the aircraft. The collision was said to have happened above Richmond Park, an area where drone flying is prohibited (but not because of its proximity to the airport). Perhaps, more worrying, was that the impact happened at 1,700 feet — well above the 400 feet height limit for all drone flights in the UK, even in permissible areas. Fortunately, BA727 landed safely and without incident. It was also probably a false alarm. But, with more and more amateur drone pilots taking to the skies, how long until it happens for real?

If the BA incident had involved a drone, I might have had mixed feelings. Last summer, I was testing a drone. To evaluate the device and its camera, I wanted to find a safe, yet picturesque place to fly. I chose a quiet stretch of beach, a short bus ride south of where I live in Spain. I say quiet: That was until two police officers rolled over the sand dunes on quad bikes and told me to stop. It turns out that I, too, was in a national park. How can I roll my eyes when I’ve done the same thing? (I never have, nor will ever fly at 1,700 feet, though). In my (weak) defense, I knew it was near a national park, but thought I was outside the boundary.

Almost a year later, I’m testing another drone: the FlyPro XEagle Sport. This time I want zero chance of encountering the police (or airliners full of people). But it’s no simple task. In fact, for a car-less city dweller, finding somewhere scenic and legal without plenty of planning is hard. But, tough noogies, right? As more drones fly themselves, filming us autonomously, we need to be more careful. A smart drone still needs a smart human.

The XEagle is one such drone — a "follow me" quadcopter for capturing sporting moments, similar to AirDog. The "Sport" edition has no ground station (controller). Instead, the XEagle follows a wearable that looks like an ’80s-era Casio for kids. You can buy a ground station for it, but all I have is the wrist-watch thing. All the more reason to find somewhere open and away from people.

With no "sticks," you have less immediate control over a drone. The XEagle lands at the press of a button, and there are dials on the watch to move it up/down and left/right, but this is still hardly what I’d call "control." Even then there are problems. If there’s a barking dog or an object below it, or it’s now unsafe to land where you took off, you don’t have many options. The main photo for this article is the XEagle landing in a pothole it obviously couldn’t see. In fairness, it righted itself, and returned to the spot where it took off; it just did a little gardening along the way.

When searching for a good place to fly, Google Maps is an obvious place to start. I used its measurement tool to draw a five-mile line from the nearest point of the airport (the distance Spain’s aviation authority requires). I then drew a circle with that radius in Photoshop. This gave me an easy view of the most important no-fly zone where I am (Valencia). Local laws also require you fly in unpopulated areas. That means nowhere residential, obviously.

This effectively means I must leave the city, as there are no parks big enough to comfortably avoid people. Valencia’s airport is to the west, meaning I must focus my search on the east — which is hemmed off by the sea. Beaches are off-limits if there are people, so it’s either gamble on an early-morning flight or look elsewhere. Given my experience last time, I decide to look elsewhere.

You might be thinking, aren’t there apps that make it easy to see no fly zones? There are. There’s the FAA’s B4UFLY and Air Map, among others. The problem is, knowing where you can’t fly isn’t the same as knowing where you can.

There are tools for this, too. But none seem to have nailed it. Drone Zones lets users add spots, but lacks a large community. DJI’s +Discover has the potential user base, but is relatively new, and flying hot spots are only a minor feature within the app. DJI compiles data from users’ flights to map these "hot spots" automatically. At least it does in China. The version for Europe and the US did offer this feature, but privacy concerns led the company to put the feature on hold. When I asked DJI why it removed hot spots, a spokesperson said: "While we initially launched the hotspot feature outside China, we weren’t satisfied with the experience it created and temporarily removed that functionality."

For the brief moment it was there, though, I found two hot spots near me. One within my "airport circle" (it’s since disappeared), so that’s out. The second was near a town called Alboraia just outside the city. Google Earth shows the spot to be wasteland surrounded by fields. It’s not going to be scenic, but for testing the XEagle, it could be ideal.

The patch of land is a short metro ride from where I live, tucked away behind the town. It’s the sort of place where people dump old furniture and fridges (I determine this from the old furniture and fridges lying around). It’s otherwise barren — perfect for testing a drone that may or may not follow me around, as advertised.

The reason DJI doesn’t want to include flight hot spots in the new edition of app is that there’s not enough data to safely anonymize things. If I saw a DJI pilot at this piece of wasteland, for example, there’s a statistically high chance it’d be the person from the app. That said, the feature’s success in China shows what can happen when the location data is used wisely. If there were an app that offered the same thing for all drones, it’d be the perfect discovery tool. As you can see from the screenshot above (Shenzhen left; Valencia right) good use of data is the key to finding safe, scenic places to fly.

Of course, there’s a broader, more serious point to be made here. I’m just flying for fun and photos. But many of the same problems I face apply to more serious applications. As Drone Advocate, Peter Sachs, reminds us. "Unlike traditional model aircraft, drones are useful. To be useful, drones will (and should) be used in urban areas." Sachs points to journalists, or first responders that are using drones in the city for good. "If populated areas were to be considered off limits, it pretty much defeats the whole purpose of them using drones."

In that context, I’m suddenly more happy with my little patch of dirt. And I’m pleased that technology helped me find it. It’s perfect for testing the XEagle. I’ve learned that the drone follows you well, but it’s prone to random adjustments. It offers decent battery life (about 20 minutes flying time) and while it comes with a camera, you’ll probably want to upgrade it to a GoPro (the included one is a cheap clone). When it goes on sale for $489, it will make for a decent introduction to autonomous flying, though it lacks the polish of its pricier rival, AirDog.

More importantly, I enjoy the peace of mind knowing I can legally fly it. That’s especially true as I continue to master the drone’s quirky controls. For example, rotating the dial on the watch-thingy’s face moves it around you in a fixed circle. But, in practice, that only works if you’re moving (I guess so it knows which way is "front"). Occasionally the drone realizes it’s behind me, when it should be in front. Dutifully it flies over me to correct that. This kind of behavior would be perilous if there were trees or power lines around.

And that’s the thing. With autonomous flying comes an uneasy feeling. Perhaps it’s healthy nerves. Perhaps it’s a reaction to relinquishing control. Perhaps it’s unreasonable fear that a "BA727 incident" could happen to even the most well-intended drone pilot. As apps like Drone Zones and DJI +Discover show, the smarts to solve these problems are already there; it’s up to the drone community to apply them. They don’t just apply to urban flyers, either. Everyone wants to find that literal sweet spot. Don’t just tell us where we can’t fly: Help us find the places we should fly.

Source: Kickstarter, FlyPro