Author: rlevchenko

Microsoft MVP 2016

Microsoft MVP Award Logo 2016

I’m happy and proud to announce that I’ve just received my 3rd Microsoft MVP award

Dear Roman Levchenko,

Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2016 Microsoft® MVP Award! This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others. We appreciate your outstanding contributions in Cloud and Datacenter Management technical communities during the past year.

This year becomes special to me.  VMware vExpert 2016 award 1 month ago and now I’ve got a confirmed Microsoft MVP for the next 12 months as well. I’m very honored to be a part of this and will do my best every single day.

Microsoft MVP provides a list of great opportunities for me such as MVP Global Summit (event organized by Microsoft specially for MVPs) , technical subscriptions (Office365, MSDN) and online/offline meetings with Microsoft staff where you can have a talk with internal Product Groups. These benefits are helping me to acquire advanced knowledge about both upcoming and GA products (…a big round of applause goes to MS)

I’d like to thank my readers, fellow MVPs and other followers that support me over years.

Ignite 2016 Key Announcements

Windows Server 2016 and System Center 2016 are GA

Windows Server 2016 is available for evaluation and will be on the October price list. Volume licensing customers will be able to download fully licensed software at General Availability in mid-October.

Windows Server 2016 also comes with the built-in support of containers and commercial version of Docker engine without additional charge!

System Center 2016 Evaluation is here . What’s new in System Center 2016?

UPDATE (10/12): WS2016 and SC2016   became available @MSDN and @Azure + UR1 for System Center 2016 and CU for WS2016 + https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3192366

Windows Server 2016 and System Center 2016 Ignite Announcement+ today MS has published pre-configured VHDs to help you quickly evaluate new SC 2016 features

See my previous posts to get what’s new in Windows Server 2016 (Hyper-V, RDS, MultiPoint)  and also check the updated technet articles : WS 2016 and SC 2016

TIP: I’d not recommend to use evaluation version in production. Wait while fully licensed media becomes available.

Azure Stack Technical Preview 2

In fact, Azure Stack TP2 announcement was described earlier in this blog post (TP2 rolled out for some “vip” customers). At Ignite MS confirmed GA for Azure Stack TP2.

And now you can try this new preview here + read what’s new in Azure Stack TP2 and review Azure Stack Architecture

More info about this announcement: New ideas, new solutions, new technical preview of Azure Stack

SQL Server supports Storage Spaces Direct

SQL Server 2016 will support deploying databases on Storage Spaces Direct (S2D).To build up S2D you need from 2 to 16 servers with local-attached SATA, SAS, or NVMe drives and dedicated network between hosts (10+GbE with RDMA is recommended)

storage-spaces-direct-with-sql-server

Continue reading “Ignite 2016 Key Announcements”