RunAs Radio

It's the Questions and Answers from SQL Intersection in Orlando! Richard moderates a panel of the usual suspects: Kim Tripp, Paul Randal, Brent Ozar and occasional contributions from some of the SQL Team, Kendra Little, Jeremiah Pesha and more! Lots of discussion around virtualization, different recovery and fail over strategies, the infamous heap-vs-clustering debate, using SSDs with SQL Server.....

Richard talks to Damian Flynn about Windows Azure Pack for Windows Server and Service Management Automation. Big confusing names for a really simple concept - how do we bring self-service to the users of our infrastructure? The discussion starts out around the idea of service management automation, using tools to make your IT systems more service-centric, allowing people to provision and utilize i...

Richard chats with Microsoft PFE Mike O'Neill about his work with customers using large scale Exchange sites. Mike is one of the contributors to You had Me at EHLO, the Exchange team blog site. The conversation digs into how Exchange 2013 is the most Powershell-centric version of Exchange yet... you really need to know it! Mike talks about the efficiency and scriptability of Exchange and Powershel...

Recorded in front of a live audience at SQL Intersection in Orlando, Florida, this panel discussion focuses on the new features in SQL 2014. The panelists are all Microsoft engineering folks, deeply involved in creating SQL 2014. The discussion does NOT focus on Hekaton, but rather all the other cool performance and reliability enhancements coming in SQL 2014. Okay, there's a little Hekaton.

Hot off of last week's news about Heartbleed, Richard talks to Troy Hunt about the size and scope of the problem. Heartbleed is the cool name (and logo) given to a weakness in the OpenSSL library. The news has been hyped, but the exploit is real and there's really no way to know what data has been compromised. And if you don't run OpenSSL on your servers, do you know what your networking gear runs...

Richard chats with Aidan Finn about the Scale-Out File Server features of Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012 R2. Aidan digs into a bunch of the improvements that have come with Windows Server 2012 R2, including SMB 3.0., which opens the door to dramatic network speed advantages for such things as live VM migration. But it also impacts how we do file sharing, and Aidan digs deep into the new features i...

Richard chats with Michael Nygard about the concept of resilience in the IT world. Michael starts out the conversation talking about what resilience really is - do your systems keep working even when things aren't working perfectly? Or are they brittle, where one problem takes the whole system down. The conversation broadens to more of a DevOps conversation, since ultimately resiliency involves ev...

Steve Evans makes a return visit to the show to talk a little DevOps. The conversation starts out with the work he's currently doing with a bio-tech company, and how the little changes their making to their processes are affected overall productivity to the better. You don't have to call it DevOps, you can just call it 'doing your work more effectively.' The conversation digs into the automation s...

Richard chats with fellow Canadian Aaron Bertrand about his work with SQL Server. Aaron starts out the conversation with a mention around SQL Server 2008 and 2008 R2 coming out of primary tech support and the push to get one last service pack out for both versions. You can contribute to that discussion at the Microsoft Connect site. Aaron also discusses some of the nasty bad practices he's found i...

Richard catches up with Tony Redmond on all things Exchange. The conversation starts out talking about the fact that Exchange 2013 has a service pack, even though there have been quarterly cumulative updates - in reality, Exchange 2013 SP1 is really cumulative update 4 (CU4). Tony digs into what it takes to install these updates, the fact that testing continues to be not optional - it's your mail...

Richard chats with Microsoft PFE Kurt Falde about the Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET). It might be a weak name, but it's an amazing set of tools - a whole different way of defending a workstation from malware exploits. Kurt dives into how EMET can lock down PCs in a standardized way, including controlling specific SSL certificates for key web sites. But the bulk of the focus of EMET...

Richard talks to Jeremy Thake about the move of Sharepoint into the Cloud. The conversation starts off with a bit of a history lesson and how Sharepoint has taken a few twists and turns along the way offering different programming models, and really struggling with what it is actually good at. Jeremy discusses how moving Sharepoint to the Cloud is really about shaking off some of the baggage of th...

Richard talks to Gene Kim about his experiences in DevOps - the research he's done on high performing IT teams, and how that knowledge has evolved into what we now know as DevOps. Gene mention's John Willis' blog post on The Convergence of DevOps as a great explanation of why DevOps is happening now. Beyond The Phoenix Project, Gene and a team of luminaries are working on the DevOps CookBook, to c...

Back with Minasi! Richard chats with Mark Minasi about the end of XP... coming in April of 2014! The discussion rapidly turns to a history lesson about the evolution of Windows, the bumps that led to Vista, the fix that was Windows 7, and the concern around Windows 8... and what about Windows 9? As with any conversation with Mark, the discussion ranges all over the topic space!

Richard chats with Matt Wrock about the power of boxstarter.org for building and configuring PCs quickly. The conversation starts out talking about what Boxstarter can do for you - automate the installation of software and patches. Boxstarter depends on Chocolatey and PowerShell 2. Everything is public, if you'd like a private version, you should check out MyGet for a private configuration. Check...

So how do you learn? Richard talks to Kim Tripp about technology learning. The conversation starts out with responsibility for learning - what is the role of the learner (typically an employee), and the company? Who pays for what? What is the commitment to provide value for everyone involved? And how do you learn? How does instructor-led training compare to a video course, or a conference? Kim and...

Richard talks to Boris Hristov about Distributed Transaction Replay in SQL Server 2012. New to SQL Server 2012, Distributed Replay uses a SQL Profiler template to collect transactions that can be replayed on your server. The tool is largely command line, and can be distributed across as many as sixteen clients. Boris talks about the different types of replays that can be done to simulate a workloa...

Richard chats with Ed Horley about his new book, Practical IPv6 for Windows Administrators. The conversation starts out with the evolution of IPv6 from a Windows perspective, starting back in 2006 with Vista and Windows Server 2008. Ed digs into the fundamental things that all administrators need to know about IPv6, how it works in your internal network, the advantages it gives, and how to get awa...

What happens when a podcast host talks to another podcast host? You get confused about who is interviewing who. Hal Rottenberg from the PowerScripting podcast chats with Richard about DevOps - and the conversation travels all over the spectrum on the topic. Where is the DevOps movement really at? Is this something we all should be doing? Is it developer-centric or operations-centric? How do you ac...

Richard chats with PFE Chris Evans about using Surface devices in the enterprise. After a quick recap of the various Surface models, the hard conversation starts - how do we use tablets in the enterprise in general? What does it take to get your own custom apps on a Surface device? Do the ARM devices make sense? Can Bring Your Own Device really work? Chris takes them all on and outlines some inter...

Happy New Year! Richard chats with Stephen Rose about the crazy things that went on at Microsoft in 2013 and some thoughts about the potential of 2014. A little Windows 8, tablets, Windows Phone and new development tools... and what about the whole CEO thing? Fun conversation to help you start thinking about your goals in 2014!

Richard talks to Martin Booth from Microsoft about their vision of the People-Centric IT. A cornerstone of this vision is unified device management, covering desktops, laptops, tablets and phones across all platforms. Martin digs into how tools like Intune, Configuration Manager and Window Server 2012 R2 work together to be able to deal with Bring Your Own Device, effective Information Security an...

Richard chats with Steven Murawski about implementing Microsoft's Desired State Configuration (DSC) in the Stack Exchange infrastructure. DSC is part of the Windows Management Framework 4.0 that comes with Windows Server 2012 R2 but is also backward compatible for Server 2012 and 2008 R2. Steven talks about being able to create detailed configuration documentation as part of DSC that then actually...

Richard talks to Scott Lowe about VMWare's NSX product, which provides network virtualization to the vSphere world. NSX came from VMWare's acquisition of Nicira in July 2012 and their own development efforts to bring Software Defined Networking to life. Scott talks about being able to provision and configure networking the same way that you do with virtual machines, and what that means to networki...

Richard chat with Dana Epp about the latest on Microsoft Intune. Dana digs into the latest in Intune, which is it's second version, both for small organizations and large. The basic version is a pure cloud offering for smaller organizations that allows you to push software, manage policy and track inventory with no on-premise infrastructure. And it works across platforms - Windows, Windows RT, Win...