Episode 188 – Are You Inspired Yet?

In Episode 188, Ben and Scott discuss some of the latest announcements from Microsoft Inspire, including NFS support of Azure Blob Storage, the GA of Microsoft Lists, and the announcement of Microsoft Dataflex and Microsoft Dataflex Pro. Transcript Email Download New Tab - [Ben] Welcome to episode 188 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro podcast recorded live on July 23rd, 2020. This is a show about Microsoft 365 and Azure, from the perspective of it pros and end users, where we discuss the topic of recent news and how it relates to you. In this episode, Ben and Scott review some of the news coming out of Microsoft Inspire around Microsoft 365 and Azure, including blob storage, Data Flex, and Microsoft lists. Happy Thursday, Thursday. - [Scott] Yeah, Thursday, you made it to another one. Are you feeling inspired yet? - [Ben] I am feeling very inspired, not only by Inspire being inspiring or providing inspiration, is that what Inspire is supposed to do is provide inspiration? - [Scott] Yeah. In fact, it is, it is supposed to inspire Microsoft partners to go out and build awesome things. - [Ben] But I also just had a five-day, six-day, something like that, vacation up in Michigan on the beach, on the lake, paddle boarding and kayaking. And I barely have any cell phone signal up there. So I, frankly just pretty much ignored my phone for five days. It was also an inspiring and relaxing experience. - [Scott] Yeah, that sounds like you're living the dream. You're not missing much back here, like heat, global pandemics, all the fun things. - [Ben] Yeah, I frankly have no idea what's going on in Florida right now. And I don't care, I'll figure it out when we get back home. - [Scott] That's the spirit. - [Ben] Because now I'm back in Michigan recording on my Bose headset. So if my audio is a little off. I am hanging out at my parents for a couple more weeks, have a wedding coming up while we're here and all that. But people probably do not care so much about my inspiring personal life. They probably care more about the inspiration coming from Inspire this week, which I got back from vacation to a flood of news that I've been trying to catch up on. - [Scott] Yeah, quite a bit of news. So as Microsoft has been doing for many of their events lately, they've published their book of news. This time it didn't go out as a book, but it's a website. You get the table of contents, go ahead and browse through it. And you can take a look at all of the announcements around things like Azure, Microsoft 365, certainly business applications, or biz apps like dynamics play a large part in the partner ecosystem. So there's a specific section for that as well as security and compliance, then it wouldn't be a partner conference without partner enablement. And then some, a little bit about sustainability initiatives and things like that that are coming up or in a process now. But if you're interested in what happened at Inspire and you normally go, I shouldn't be interested in Inspire because that's the partner conference and I'm not a partner, or maybe you work for a partner and the relationship side of Microsoft and its partners isn't relevant to you day to day. A lot of these announcements, aren't about how to sell things in the partner ecosystem. They really are functionality within the platform and to a certain degree material changes in functionality. So you'll see some quite a bit of movement on the Teams and Microsoft 365 side, there was a bunch of Azure announcements from Azure stack HCI integrations and improving some of the hybrid flows that exist today. Some networking enhancements, a bunch of stuff around discs. There was a little bit around storage, even developer tooling got some announcements in there with some announcements from Hashi Corp, bringing things forward. So I would encourage you if you deal with Azure, or Microsoft 365 to at least go through, read through those sections and see what functionality A is coming, B is available today and has GA'd or C, is both been announced as coming and is available for you to play with in the form of maybe like a public preview. - [Ben] Yeah, this Inspire was interesting because I feel like, at least in previous years it has been much more partner focused news. And I felt like this year, it was almost like another mini, I don't know if I want to go so far as to say a mini Build or a mini Ignite, but there was a lot more just Microsoft 365 Azure news that really applies to everybody that came out this year, I guess more so than I felt like came out previous years around Inspire. - [Scott] Yeah, I think that's fair. And that certainly feels right. I would have to think that a lot of it has to do with the marketing engine. And if you're spinning up all this marketing for partners, why not use it to market to the broader world as well? Especially if you're lighting up features that apply to the broader world. And I think you'll potentially see more of that just during pandemic times as they don't have those opportunities to get out and about so much. - [Ben] Yeah, so definitely go check out the book of news. 'Cause there's no way we're going to talk about all of it today at the time we have, but we figured we'd go through and pick out some of our favorites. Some of the ones that are maybe most applicable to our audience, or maybe just the ones everybody is talking about after Inspire like another product rename. - [Scott] Another product name. - [Ben] Do you feel overwhelmed by trying to manage your Office 365 environment? Are you facing unexpected issues that disrupt your company's productivity? Intelligink is here to help. Much like you take your car to the mechanic that has specialized knowledge on how to best keep your car running, Intelligink helps you with your Microsoft cloud environment because that's their expertise. Intelligink keeps up with the latest updates in the Microsoft cloud to help keep your business running smoothly and ahead of the curve. Whether you were a small organization with just a few users, up to an organization of several thousand employees, they want to partner with you to implement and administer your Microsoft cloud technology. visit them at Intelligink.com/podcast. That's I-N-T-E-L-L-I-G-I-N-K .com/podcast for more information or to schedule a 30-minute call to get started with them today. Remember Intelligink focuses on the Microsoft cloud. So you can focus on your business. - [Scott] I have a feeling that we're going to spend a good amount of time on Microsoft 365 stuff. So why don't we start with a couple of the Azure announcements, 'cause those are quick hits to get through, and then we can dive into all of that product rename that you mentioned. - [Ben] Perfect, sounds good. So which Azure one would you like to start with? - [Scott] So there wasn't a ton of Azure news, like we said, news comes when news comes. So there's a couple of things that have happened in regard to migration. So specifically tooling, like Azure Migrate has been continuing to have new features added to it over time. So initially Azure Migrate started out and it could assess VMware environments and it was targeted at those and potentially bringing VMware customers over to Azure. And then they added hyper V support over the last couple of months, I believe, probably the last six months or so. They've done things like added support for importing your own inventories. So if you have a physical inventory and maybe you don't want Azure Migrate tooling to actively assess it like go out and interrogate the performance counters on my servers, things like that. You just wanted to give it a CSV file that said I've got this server with this name, it's got this much CPU, this much RAM, tell me what the equivalent or right size thing would be in Azure and how much it's going to cost me or my pricing agreement. They've added functionality like that. At Inspire, they announced the ability where they've added another kind of import mechanism. So now you can import and create assessments using uploaded configuration management database data. And they've also included support for those AVS assessments, those Azure VMware solution assessments. And then they've worked a little bit on the assessment engine itself and some of the recommend or the recommendation engine, I guess, and some of the pieces that come out of there. So you'll see that it's a little bit more holistic and able to give you a better sense of where you should land on the other side. And over time, I think you'll continue to see improvements in there. Another thing that was announced very recently, I believe this one was pre Inspire, but they did mention it at Inspire, again is Microsoft has support for shared discs with virtual machines now. So you can do things like spin up a disc in Azure that now you can attach to or mount multiple virtual machines at the same time, which enables you to do things that you haven't been able to do in the past. Like maybe a traditional fail over cluster because it required that cluster shared volume. Some of those workloads are now ready to go and they would have support natively in the operating system. And you're not doing any weird workarounds on the backend to fake having a shared disc. It's just a native capability and ready to go. - [Ben] Interesting, so I missed this one. This one is not then spinning up like an Azure file share or creating a disc and doing a traditional SMB share of it. But it's having a, say physical virtual disc, you essentially have that virtual disc file. And you can attach that virtual disc straight to two different VMs in Azure. - [Scott] Correct. Yeah, so this was originally talked about like in the way back when, it went into preview, like early in 2020, but I don't know that, like you said,...