Entries tagged with msit - TechNet Edge

How Microsoft IT Used OSD as Part of the Windows 7 Deployment

Microsoft IT Showcase — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 06:37:00 GMT

Microsoft IT will talk about how they leveraged the Operating System Deployment feature within System Center Configuration Manager to deploy Windows 7 within the Enterprise. Learn how Microsoft IT customized the solution that has been engineered for extensibility and how you can do the same.

How Microsoft IT Simplified the Windows 7 Installation Experience with OSD

Microsoft IT Showcase — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 03:05:00 GMT

Microsoft IT will talk about how they simplified the Windows 7 installation experience by developing a self-service wizard. The wizard can be launched from network boot or run advertised programs in control panel. It uses preflight checks and gives the user the ability to select applications to install. Find out how Microsoft IT will enhance this offering in the future.

TechNet Radio: How Microsoft IT Uses Visual Studio Team Foundation Server to Improve IT Processes

Eric Ostrowski — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 15:18:00 GMT

Join this TechNet Radio session to hear about the tools and benefits of using Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 Foundation Server for the IT engineering process. We describe the Microsoft IT long-term vision to adopt Team Foundation Server, a suite of engineering tools to facilitate planning, development, and project management activities.

TechNet Radio: How Microsoft IT upgraded a multi-terabyte database from Yukon to Katmai

Eric Ostrowski — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 18:07:00 GMT

Learn how Microsoft IT upgraded ICE 3.0, which is a 30-terabyte database, from SQL Server 2005 to a pre-release version of SQL Server 2008, code named Katmai. ICE, which stands for Information Security Consolidated Event Management System, is used by the Microsoft Information Security team to analyze network utilization events captured by various sources including over 100 proxy servers, Mail servers, Net logon servers, etc. The ICE database processes approximately 1TB of log data each day and has become a key component in the incident response process as well as forensics investigations.

The upgrade was part of Microsoft's internal Technology Adoption Program (TAP) for Katmai. The upgrade helped Microsoft become its first and best customer by using the product internally before releasing it to the outside world. Upgrading the database to Katmai enabled the Katmai product team to flush more bugs out of the product and ensure that the product will perform as intended. Hear how the multi-terabyte database upgrade was planned, tested and implemented without a database backup by following a structured, organized and methodical approach.

How MSIT does server Virtualization and Hyper-V Part 2

David Tesar — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 00:14:00 GMT

In this interview we met up with Devin Murray (Group Manager) and David Lef (Technology Architect) who are in charge of implementing virtualization within Microsoft. They've been running Hyper-V since it was in Beta in 2007 and have been running Hyper-V in production since January 2008. Watch Part 1 first.

In Part 2 of this interview, we cover the following topics:

Challenges they've faced in deploying and recommendations

[2:23] - What their thinking is around a future datacenter to address those challenges

[4:43] - Technical details on the future datacenter

[9:29] - What workloads would this infrastructure support

[13:15] - Branch office efforts around virtualization

[16:05] - How long we've been running Hyper-V, will we be able to have 100% of our servers virtualized in the future, and what is the net impact of running virtual server 2005 R2 vs Hyper-V.

How Microsoft IT does server Virtualization and Hyper-V

David Tesar — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 15:00:00 GMT

History behind why and when we started implementing virtualization in the environment and what challenges we had.
[6:22] - Number of servers virtualized in Microsoft's environment and goals of what percentage desired to be virtualized
[8:07] - Net business impact and how the team manages this area of the business
[9:54] - Current high availability stats (how many 9's) and how to make this higher
[12:45] - Configuration of virtualization environment
- High availability with Hyper-V
- Why they determined the sweet spot was an 8 node cluster
- [18:18] - Decision points between using VHDs versus Pass-through disks
- [19:45] - What workloads he wouldn't recommend using one disk type versus another in regards to performance
- Downtime they're seeing with quick migration

Watch Part 2 here.
Read more information about MSIT's virtualization strategy.

TechNet Radio: How Microsoft IT Approached the Deployment of Microsoft Application Virtualization v4

Eric Ostrowski — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 15:16:00 GMT

Learn how Microsoft IT implemented Microsoft Application Virtualization version 4.5, formerly known as SoftGrid Application Virtualization. Hear the benefits of application virtualization within our environment, as well as some of the technical limitations of the product, from a software deployment perspective.

MSCOM OPS with Microsoft.com, WS08, IIS7, and the Lone Server

David Tesar — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 17:14:00 GMT

I sat down with Jeff Toews, a member of the Microsoft.com Operations (MSCOM OPS) Engineering Team which is responsible for managing, maintaining, and deploying all of the servers which host Microsoft.com and thousands of other MS websites.

In this interview, you get to learn a little bit about Microsoft's hosting environment and configuration, some good tips on migrating from WS03 / IIS 6, knowledge into some of the new IIS 7 features, and we learn the truth behind the Lone Server!

Because this one is a little bit long, I'm providing the breakdown for what is where in the video:
00:00 - Who Jeff is and what he and his team does
04:29 - What the environment & hardware config is like
06:20 - Steps they took to migrate from the start

Get it to install (worked with it in alpha)
Feedback / work with IIS7 product team
Configuration to test server
Performance testing & tuning (i.e. with WCAT, etc)
Move to single production box

12:32 - Challenges they had in the migration
14:37 - Specific tips on how to migrate from IIS6 to IIS7
18:18 - Migration from classic to integrated mode difficult?
19:30 - Benefits of Integrated Mode
28:58 - Performance Tips: Caching/compression/tuning dynamic content
33:15 - Does the Lone Server really exist?
35:40 - A final summary and information about failure request event buffering (FREB).
37:56 - Over the Edge

For "Over the Edge", learn about special edition Jimi Hendrix vodka, KEXP, see liquid which is "the size of a small infant" and the Beatles, and get Jeff's IIS7 book recommendations.

MSN Ops - how we manage 1000's of servers 24/7

Adam Bomb — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 17:37:00 GMT

In this interview, I sat down with Jon Wong, a lead systems engineer in the msn.com group. Jon’s team looks after over 700 websites, running on over a 1000 servers. He has to manage over 50 updates to the site content every week. Oh, and just like you, he has to deal with patch Tuesdays.
Jon takes some time in this interview to tell us how they do it. He mentions some of the usual suspects, like MOM.
He gives us a tour of his office, where we learn a couple of interesting things, like how his office setup has improved his kite surfing, and how air drumming in the car doesn’t translate to video game skills.
Jon also somehow manages to use the phrase “less metal, more rock” without referring to music.

Microsoft IT Active Directory Interview with Brian Puhl

David Tesar — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMT

We sat down with Brian Puhl who has been working for Microsoft IT (MSIT) on the deployment, maintenance, planning of their active directory infrastructure since around Windows Server 2000. Learn about how Microsoft does AD from the source and also the projects they're working on. A seamless experience for your corporate users inside the corporate network and out on the internet, without using a VPN? Smartcard login/authentication for all MS employees? Average of 1 Schema change every 4 months?