RunAs Radio

Richard and Greg talk to Mark Minasi about the state of Windows today. There's a bit of discussion about Vista (Mark seems to be its only fan), then over to Windows 7 (it's Vista with love!), but most of the discussion focuses on the chocolatety goodness of Windows 2008 R2. Mark digs into Active Directory Undelete, Managed Service Accounts and more.

Richard and Greg talk to David Lowe about the Microsoft Web Platform. The web platform spans from development and designer tools, through the web server (IIS) and the databases. David starts out digging into running PHP and mySQL on Windows before moving on into the IIS extensions, including: Application Resource Routing, Dynamic IP Restrictions, Live Smooth Streaming, Windows Media Services and S...

Richard and Greg talk to Phil Peery of Microsoft's Premier Field Engineering team about 64 bit operating systems. Phil also talks extensively about the /3GB switch for 32 bit operating systems - a tricky switch that has to be handled carefully. The discussion also digs into running 32 bit apps on 64 bit operating systems.

Richard and Greg talk to Mitch Garvis about System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM). SCVMM handles Physical-to-Virtual (P2V) migration of computers into virtual machines. It also does Virtual-to-Virtual (V2V) migration from VMWare VMDK to VHD. Besides migration, SCVMM allows operators to understand the load across different VM host machines and move VMs from one machine to another, to handle...

Richard and Greg talk to Stephen Rose about Windows 7 RC. The show focuses on what the enterprise customer is going to care about around Windows 7, including reducing maintenance costs, managing compatibility and better remote access options.

Richard and Greg tak to Brian Gregor from Microsoft Premier Field Engineering about BizTalk. BizTalk has a variety of roles for IT Pros in the infrastructure: orchestration, integration, workflow.

Richard and Greg talk to Ken Brumfield from Microsoft Premier Field Engineering on the challenges of working in really large infrastructures. What's large? Try 250,000 workstations and 40,000 servers large! Ken talks about how tactical solutions create strategic problems in IT management at this scale, and how to balance "getting things done" with "not making the mess worse." C...

Richard and Greg welcome Clint Huffman back to the show to talk about analyzing performance monitor logs. Clint is the author of Performance Analysis of Logs (PAL) at pal.codeplex.com. Clint has another collection of favorite tools, including Process Monitor (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645.aspx), xPerf (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/hh162920.as...

Richard and Greg talk to Buck Woody... they had planned on talking about sqlcms.codeplex.com but ended up instead digging into what it takes to be in an IT career in today's economy. The discussion ranges from the advantages of generalists vs. specialists, consulting vs. employment and how technology is evolving to support these different styles.

Richard and Greg welcome Susan Bradley back on the show. The SBS Diva (www.sbsdiva.com) talks about Windows Server 2008 Foundation, the smaller cousin of Small Business Server. Foundation is aimed at businesses of 15 users or less. Think Microsoft Home Server for small business!

Richard and Greg talk to Jeff Atwood of Stack Overflow (www.stackoverflow.com) fame about being a developer who also maintains infrastructure. Jeff also talks about his new site, Server Fault (www.serverfault.com), which is a Question and Answer site for the IT Professional. Great discussions about adventures in RAID controllers and NIC drivers and how FireBug can diagnose your network problems.

Richard and Greg talk to Pedro Manfredi from Microsoft about High Performance Computing. HPC is the next generation of supercomputing - using off-the-shelf hardware rather than custom built supercomputers. Pedro digs into the new style of applications that are best served with HPC and how development is done. Check out http://www.microsoft.com/hpc for more information.

Richard and Greg talk to Robert Smith from Microsoft Premier Field Engineering about understanding storage performance. The discussion digs into SAN, iSCSI, direct-attached storage, also looking at tools like PerfMon and the Windows Performance Toolkit. Check out WPT at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc305187.aspx and the disk performance issues talked about in the show at http://support....

Richard and Greg talk to Allan Hirt about failover clustering in SQL Server 2008. SQL Server got a major update in the clustering side of things for 2008, Allan talks about the changes, improvements and why you'd want to do this in the first place. Check out an alpha version of Allan's book at http://www.apress.com/book/view/1430219661.

Richard and Greg talk to Rhonda Layfield about what's coming in the Microsoft deployment tools for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. They talk about Windows PE - the Windows Preinstallation environment that presents a minimum install environment (fits on a CD or USB key) which is part of Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK). Improvements in the new Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT 2010)...

Richard and Greg talk to Kim Tripp about how developers and DBAs inter-relate around SQL Server. Kim tells a story of how she encountered developers who saw SQL Server as a "set it and forget it" technology. What should the relationship between developers, DBAs and database be? We tackle the topic!

Richard and Greg talk to Bill Graziano about performance tuning in SQL Server. Bill digs into using SQL Profiler to focus on where the problems lie. The discussion digs into the procedure cache and how you can optimize your queries for caching. He also talks about ClearTrace, a free tool he distributes to help understand trace data. Check it out at http://www.cleardata.biz.

Richard and Greg talk to Randy Williams about how Sharepoint fits into an organization. Is it a developer's product or an IT product? Who brings Sharepoint to the table? Why use it over other document management solutions or good old ASP.NET? Randy digs into the answers to these questions and more.

Richard and Greg talk to Alan Sugano of ADS Consulting about everything storage. The conversation ranges over the different types of RAID, direct attached storage, iSCSI, Fibre Channel, Fibre Channel Over Ethernet, SANs... you name it!

Hey, its our 100th show! Just for fun, Richard decides to interview Greg, and ends up in a serious discussion about security. Who knew? Anyway, thanks for sticking with us for 100 shows! Here's to the next 100!

Richard and Greg talk to David Sengupta from Quest about all things cloud computing. The discussion ranges from outsourced email to building cloud-based applications. Azure gets a mention, but so does Google and Amazon... and all the concerns in between!

Richard and Greg talk to Bob Beauchemin about the new spatial data features in SQL Server 2008. Don't think you have spatial data in your database? Bob explains how every address can be spatial data. Check out Bob's blog at http://www.sqlskills.com/blogs/bobb/

Richard and Greg talk to Dana Epp about the challenges around Virtual Machine security. Not just stopping someone from taking your virtual machine away on a USB key, but also the controlling of creation, duplication, distribution and configuration of virtual machines. Oh, and Dana goes off on a couple of serious security rants. Check out his blog at http://silverstr.ufies.org/blog/

Richard and Greg talk to Richard Hicks about ISA Server, including 2000, 2004, 2006 and the upcoming Threat Management Gateway product. The discussion also explores dedicated ISA hardware.

Richard and Greg talk to John Bocharov from Microsoft's IIS Media team. John talks about Microsoft Media Services in general and the upcoming Smooth Streaming technologies utilizing IIS7 and Silverlight. Check out John's blog at http://blogs.iis.net/jboch/