Users craft Windows images to run on Microsoft’s Azure cloud

Azure now offers users the ability to craft their own Windows images and run them on Microsoft’s cloud. These VM Roles are built by you (sysprep recommended) and uploaded to your blob storage. When you create a service around your custom VMs and start the instances, Fabric Controller takes pains to redundantly ensure redundancy. It makes a shadow copy of your file, caches that shadow copy (in the VHD cacher, of course) and then creates the three VHDs seen above for each VM needed. From there, you’re on your own; Microsoft does not consider having to perform your own patches an asset in Azure.

VM Role: User-created, unsupported Windows Server 2008 virtual machine images that are uploaded by the user and controlled through the user portal. Unlike Web and Worker Roles, these are not updated and maintained automatically by Azure.

Worker Role: An instance configured not to run IIS but instead to run applications developed and/or uploaded to the VM by the end user.

How-azure-actually-works-courtesy-of-mark-russinovich

Microsoft Lync Server 2010 Active Directory Guide

Microsoft Lync Server 2010 Active Directory Guide - This document guides you through the process of preparing Active Directory for Microsoft Lync Server 2010 and includes the Active Directory schema reference.

Building Microsoft Messaging and Collaboration Cloud Services

Building Microsoft Messaging and Collaboration Cloud Services - The documents in this file are intended to provide system integrators and service providers with guidance for migrating from Microsoft Solution for Hosted and Messaging Collaboration (HMC) to Microsoft® Exchange 2010 SP1 in Hosting mode.

Microsoft Lync Server 2010 Deployment Guides

Microsoft Lync Server 2010 - Microsoft Lync Server 2010 communications software offers instant messaging (IM), presence, conferencing, and telephony solutions that can support enterprise-level collaboration requirements.

Microsoft Lync Server 2010 Capacity Planning - The topics in this section help you understand how to plan and deploy Microsoft Lync Server 2010 communications software so that you can adequately plan for the number of users in your organization and plan for the server load that their activities generate.

Microsoft Lync Server 2010 Group Chat Deployment Guide - This document guides you through the process of migrating and deploying Lync Server 2010 Group Chat Server and the related components that are required to let organizations set up searchable, topic-based chat rooms that persist over time, allowing geographically distributed teams to better collaborate with one another while preserving organizational knowledge.

• Lync Documentation Overview
• Lync Capacity Planning
• Lync Capacity Calculator
• Lync Stress and Performance Tool

Microsoft & The BroadWorks VoIP & UC Platforms

BroadWorks, integrated with the Microsoft Solution for Hosted Messaging and Collaboration (HMC) version 4.5, provides businesses with a unified communications offering to help improve the efficiency of how employees communicate, increasing productivity across all functional areas.


The BroadWorks Platform

• Network Elements
• Geographic Redundancy and High Availability
• Capacity and Scalability
• Network Management
• Xtensibility

Related Threads and Posts of Interest:

- Microsoft & Broadsoft

- Hosted Versus Premises - It's not Black and White