TechNet Event Questions and Answers from Cincinnati, OH on 3-2-2010

Thank you so much for everyone coming to the event we had at the MS office in Mason.  I had a lot of fun, and I hope everyone had fun and learned something as well.  Remember I will be talking about Windows Server 2008 R2 at the CINPA meeting on April 7.  To learn more about the event click here to register:

Windows Server IT Pro Community Tour, Cincinnati April 7th.  

You had several questions from the event, and without further ado here they are:

Q: Can you automatically provision servers to meet demand in Azure
A: No, and I do not know if there will be this feature in the future. Personally I look at this from another perspective. Would you rather control your compute bill or have an automated tool control your compute bill. If you automatically provision servers, you are letting the Internet traffic determine when servers get turned out. While, now with you provisioning the servers by hand you can control when servers are turned on.

Q: Is there a “Utility meter” for billing in Azure?
A: Not as of yet, although I know they are looking at tools to do so, currently the only I know that is planned is the app fabric. If you want to be able to predict the costs take a look at the TCO calculator here: https://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/tco/

Q: How is storage in the cloud provisioned?
A: While I could not locate information on the exact storage, but here is a good tidbit on how SQL is provisioned. https://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/faq/#sql

Q: If you add a processor to a hyper-v guest after you have already created the server what happens to performance?
A: Other than you are taking a resource away from your physical host, you may notice host performance reduce while that hyper-v guest is running. Here is a good article on multi-proc’s and hyper-V: https://blogs.technet.com/winserverperformance/archive/2008/02/29/hyper-v-and-multiprocessor-vms.aspx

Q: How do you take a .vhd file and deploy it to a physical server?
A: One way is to use the deployment technologies we discussed during the event. The .wim files we created can be taken out of the virtual world and deployed to physical machines. A third party tool you may also want to look into is winimage: https://www.winimage.com/winimage.htm

Q: In the deployment of your custom OS where do you put .exe deployed programs?
A: You will put youy .exe programs in the applications section of the MDT toolkit. That is also the same location you add your .msi files as well.