Finally, Microsoft has released their Threats and Countermeasures guide for Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2. It is a very lengthy document going into gory details on hundreds of security settings, mostly covered by GPOs. It's a great resource for understanding WHY Microsoft recommends a certain setting, and understanding implications...
During the testing process of Citrix XenDesktop 5, we were using the built-in SQL express database so we can do a quick lab setup. Of course a production deployment would use a full blown SQL 2008 R2 enterprise edition instance with database mirroring. During the XenDesktop 5 SP1 upgrade process,...
So here's an official video from Microsoft showcasing a preview of their new Windows 8 GUI. All I can say is wow...is it different! Built from the ground up for touch..looks pretty darn cool.You can watch the HD video here. It will be exciting to see more information about Windows...
Yippee..a free tool from VMware! This nice little tool runs compliance scans against vSphere hosts and compares the results to the VMware Hardening Guidelines. Almost a year ago I wrote a short blog announcing their hardening guide here. Since then, VMware released a hardening guide for vSphere 4.1, which you...
A couple of weeks ago Citrix released XenDesktop 5.0 SP1, which fixes a number of bugs. Last week I attended Citrix Synergy 2011, and talked to an employee about SP1. He said that the service pack fixes many more bugs than the short list included in the release notes. In...
This session was presented by two non-Microsoft speakers: Benny Tritsch from AppSense and Shawn Bass from Syn-Net. After seeing their extensive testing methodology and the presentation of the results, I feel confident that the results are accurate and as neutral as one could get. The whole session was presenting the...
One of the objectives for SM 2012 is to deliver IT as a Service (ITaaS). ITaaS objectives are to reduce costs, increase service levels, faster time to delivery, provide more data, more transparency, and increased compliance. Implementation components include automation, standardization, self-service, and compliance. The deployment of these components are...
This session went into great gory depth on how RemoteFX works, and the hardware requirements. What is RemoteFX? RemoteFX is a new technology in Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 and Windows 7 SP1 that when combined with a VDI environment allows efficient host-side rendering of graphics and multimedia. It requires...
This session focused on the brand new services template module in VMM 2012. Service templates are a method to rapidly, consistently deploy, and maintain applications regardless of what hypervisor (Hyper-V, ESX or XenServer) that you use. So this entire session applies to customers even if you are a VMware shop,...
This session covered how System Center Service Manager 2010 really integrates many of the System Center components to allow an organization to follow industry best practices, such as ITIL and MOF. Without an integrated solution, it's really hard automate these processes to reduce operational expenses and meet defined SLAs or customer...
This session covered a number of free Microsoft tools that can be used to secure the Windows operating system, and to a lesser extent, applications. For the most part they presented tools that I was familiar with, and even have written a blog about (such as EMET). However, I did...
This session focused on the new (and pretty robust IMHO) networking monitoring enhancements in OpsMgr 2012. Previously network monitoring in OpsMgr was very, very basic. So basic, that I suspect not many people really used OpsMgr to monitor network devices. That all changes in OpsMgr 2012, where the OpsMgr team developed their own SNMP...