January 24, 2013 News Thursday: Microsoft Virtualization Jump Start and more Server and Tools News…

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by STB Blogger

 

Join Microsoft and get a Jump Start on Virtualization

The IT Pro Evangelism team, Microsoft Learning and the Microsoft Virtual Academy are pleased to announce the next Jump Start courses!  Join us for Introduction to Hyper-V on Thursday, January 24th and Microsoft Virtualization for VMware Professionals on Wednesday, January 30th.

These live online events are designed for IT Pros that are new to virtualization, or experienced in other hypervisors (such as VMware or Citrix), and want to learn about Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V.  

Join Microsoft and VMware virtualization experts Symon Perriman, Jeff Woolsey and Matt McSpirit in a demo-rich learning experience and a live Q&A session. Additionally, you can join us again in late February for our Microsoft Tools for VMware Migration & Integration Jump Start.

SQL Server 2012 SP1 Cumulative Update (CU) 2 now available

Today, we released SQL Server 2012 SP1 Cumulative Update (CU) 2, available for download here. SQL Server 2012 SP1 CU2 includes two new features:

  • You can now directly create a backup to Windows Azure Storage using SQL Server Native Backup functionality. This will allow users to back up a SQL Server database on an on-premises instance or on an instance of SQL Server that is running in a hosted environment, such as the Windows Azure Virtual Machine.
  • SQL Server SysPrep now supports all features of SQL Server with the exception of Reporting Services – SharePoint, Reporting Services Add-in for SharePoint Products, and Distributed Replay Client. Read more about SysPrep in this blog post.

Check out this blog for more information about SQL Server 2012 SP1 CU2. 

New ODBC drivers available for download

Today, Microsoft released two new Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) drivers, now available for download. These drivers are an evolution of existing Microsoft drivers, renamed and realigned to the industry standard of ODBC. Both ODBC drivers include new features such as AlwaysOn support for Linux as well as all the previous ODBC functionality.

Microsoft is aligning and renaming the previous ODBC drivers as follows:

  • SQL Server Native Client (SNAC) will now be called Microsoft ODBC Driver 11 for SQL Server on Windows, available for download here.
  • Microsoft SQL Server ODBC Driver 1.0 for Linux will now be called Microsoft ODBC Driver 11 for SQL Server on Red Hat Linux, available for download here.

Also available for download are the Command Line Utilities for Microsoft ODBC Driver 11 for SQL Server here.

For more information on the new ODBC drivers, check out this blog post.

Are you betting your datacenter on a wooden racquet?

In technology, as in sports, to keep a competitive edge, you have to continuously adapt to the ever-changing game. Looking at VMware’s recent announcements compared to Microsoft’s recent advances. I’m wondering if VMware is giving their customers the state-of-the-art equipment they need to win in the datacenter.

In the second installment of his blog posts, Varun Chhabra, a member of the Server and Tools Marketing team discusses his observations that each company has a unique cloud roadmap, and that IT leaders are looking for infrastructure investments that are future proof.  Read through the ways in which Microsoft is addressing these key issues head-on with Windows Server 2012, System Center 2012 SP1 and Windows Azure.  And get a bit of tennis history to boot.