Archive - Sep 2013

One of the essential characteristics of a cloud computing infrastructure is resource pooling. A hypervisor is installed on individual systems to provide abstraction of the underlying hardware in order to provide resource pooling for compute resources. In the Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 operating system, the hypervisor is Hyper-V. Hyper-V is maturing at remarkable speeds, due in no small part to the fact that Microsoft leverages Hyper-V as the hypervisor for its public Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering, Windows Azure.

When DirectAccess was first introduced as a feature of Windows Server 2008 R2, many considered the concept of always-on, secure remote access a natural evolution of traditional Virtual Private Networking (VPN) technologies. VPN had gone from being something that only IT administrators needed to provide remote support for their systems to an essential productivity tool for the modern, mobile workforce. Unfortunately, DirectAccess in Windows Server 2008 R2 was a bit ahead of its time. The idea was an excellent one, but in practice it was difficult to implement and carried steep infrastructure requirements, the most challenging of those being the requirement to deploy IPv6 on the internal network.