 Good morning people what I just literally timed it perfectly that I hit enter on a tweet as soon as the music started to be able to go and we're here and we're here that's time and we are here and I friend hey. What's wrong with this picture. Where's the green hat it's right here I left it in frame just so people wouldn't be concerned. Rick's till he had a still alive and well, but it's you know, it's the it's the last show of the year according to the schedule from what you told me so I figured. Last name of claws. On the holiday edition yes a Christmas hats and this is a holiday edition happy holidays, Merry Christmas. Happy Hanukkah all the different festivals that are going on right now I hope that you're having a good one so far and you're getting ready for what I used to think of as the calmest and. Best time of year working as an IT professional in the operation space. The days between Christmas and New Year's when you got all the work done for the year because no one was around no one is around that's right. That's normally when somebody decides though oh let's use a use the downtime for a maintenance window. I don't know I never allowed those back in the day and stuff done we could definitely tell that's the. It's Christmas time or it's holiday time at Microsoft because the list of updates this week was pretty thin. I guess engineering is all gone on vacation. Well they're saving all the news for the new year I guess or something like that but possibly yeah it's definitely a good time hello to the folks in the room that are watching live you know I see Andrew McCallum's hanging out there. Jared apparently is still rolling out of bed at something like that Paul Jensen was one of the first folks to say hello to see and of course Andrew is is suggesting that maybe I should have like an automation script. I'm assuming StreamYard has some kind of capability to like auto tweet something or something like that. I have not seen that yet but I haven't even looked. Oh I forgot something look at this my fresh because it's like 7am here for me right. It's early on the West Coast is it's like midday for you your cup of coffee. I even went so far as to get the holiday treat that goes on top of the coffee cup is like that. A gingerbread man gingerbread man nothing better than able to. Well I know that this hat you're wearing right now is not photoshopped on that is true. You did a good job with the picture this week my friend. I was I was procrastinating yesterday afternoon in between meetings so I figured let's go let's go nuts on photoshop. I thought you were late and some other deliverables. Interesting and I do have to compliment you on your sweater. These have been making the rounds of the Internet so I don't know how you managed to snag one because they were available for limited time only but the mind sweeper sweater. Yeah did you notice 1990 to 2021. Nice even better you know what I like the best about that shirt though. What the fact that Pierre Ramon now has a minimize maximize and close application button and his top left shoulder. Well do you want do you want me to close it now. Minimize. Always good. Minimize. See that working. I'm gonna have to reboot myself. Yeah that can help sometimes for sure. Good stuff. I haven't looked at the details of the actual mine sweep playing field to see how the person is doing but. I haven't I haven't gone through it either. I have to admit I am happily surprised that it's actually soft and comfortable. Sometimes you get those ugly Christmas sweaters and they're like it's almost like they're they're made out of steel wool on the inside. But no this one is actually nice and kind of nice and the proceeds go to a good cause. Nice girl for girls who code. They sold out actually quite quickly this year if I if I remember. I got one my friend. So am I so am I. We're gonna have the formats going to be a little different today because there's a couple of things that we want to do. And for now let's get right into the news and you are up first. As you mentioned that the news is pretty light this week. I mean like I saw some stuff even just as we were getting online here talking about like an updated search experience for teams and stuff like that. So that's like late breaking news that just came out but one of our main sources that we use for news is an update service that Microsoft Azure folks use to be able to publish when there's something new. I remember this from when I was a PM in the Azure team. There literally was like the small form you had to go fill out to create the blurb and then submit it and then it would go into the RSS feed of the updates services and then they would render that and show inside the portal stuff like that. So lots of people go off and write those. Yeah and it was so it was so like this week that I had to go into the regular products team blogs to find other stories. Oh yeah for sure. Now this one is about simply something as the bread and butter of life and operations world which is restore points or snapshots equivalent. And so you and I were chatting about this before we got started but the whole concept of taking a snapshot of a disk existed before but it was only available during command line capabilities and also through PowerShell against your VMs when you're going off and managing your VMs. The disaster recovery and business continuity group or sorry business continuity disaster recovery group. They basically went off and they created another level of automation and simplicity for this. It's now called VM restore points and preview that allows you to go through and to simply enable and create a machine consistent backup with a machine consistent snapshot. Don't rely on this as a backup. This is a snapshot. This is a machine consistent snapshot that includes all the disks if you want them to be included which they are by default by creating basically like a service container that contains all the snapshots for that particular subscription that you're working with. And then on a per machine per VM basis that you initiate this on will have your own area for that one VM and then all the disks associated with it at the same time their application consistent. Now it's important to note that this is done for the entire disk and all data disks associated with that VM. But it's also a point in time and it's also a full one the very first time you do it. After that it becomes incrementals and therefore you have to have incrementals that happen after it. They're not the differentials which grow in size. The incrementals should basically be kind of you know if you had a regular interval based on how much change you got going on your VM consistently around the same kind of size. And when you run these things there by default attempted to be stored in zone redundant storage automatically if there is no zone redundant storage capable it then stores it on locally redundant locally redundant storage. So basically in three different areas and three different storage clusters inside of the VM I'm forgetting my terms man it's been a while. That's okay. The one thing I do I like about this is that in the past because I've written on itopstox.com shameless plug I wrote about creating restore points or snapshots for my VMs when I'm doing demos. And now using like PowerShell or CLI to get those done but also you had to do every disks separately. It wasn't something that would do the entire VM and this from what I understand also configure the stores the VM configuration not only the disk but the VM configuration. So if something was to up it basically it's an add on to your business disaster recovery plan. So it's a good thing to note that there is I was just looking check and double check the article for some consistencies and restrictions. The first restriction is ultra disks ephemeral operating system disks and shared disks are not supported in this particular snapshot so obviously they have to be part of the managed disk environment. You've got a limit of 200 VM restore points that can be created for a particular VM. That's an awful lot of restore points and then also concurrent creation of restore point is not supported so basically you're a great one and then you wait for it to finish to go for the next one. The good things to know about the good thing is documentation is updated. It was the article came out on the 6th earlier this week documentation was simultaneously updated as well and you can obviously call these with an API to so if you needed to for your own application you're working with you can make an API call to be able to kick this kind of stuff up very very good. The nice thing with that is and we were talking about this earlier in earlier this week when we did our Azure updates management learn live is you could programming programmatically. Programmatically your emphasis was on the wrong syllable. Have another coffee buddy. There you go. There we go. Programmatically create a script so that before you run your your update for example you could snapshot a whole machine. Run your update something goes wrong you restore the snapshot if it doesn't roll back properly so there's all kinds of different possibilities here for IT pros and for operations folks in in a hybrid world. You got it so not terribly earth shattering something that's now available inside the cloud environment makes your job a little bit easier from the old way of doing stuff you don't have to wait for a big long time. You can do massive restore and massive backup to be able to do stuff and some you know easy key features of this is as we mentioned in the chat. Thanks a lot Jared and others and I think Paul brought this up as well is simply a matter of hey before you go off and if you're doing demos nice and simple easy but then also before as you mentioned you do an update to the machine you could also snap it as well so. Yeah or any any maintenance to a machine really. Yeah true yeah very true and I have I do use snapshots for my demo environments but now I might change the way I do them. There you go man. What's your news today my friend. This is part of a. Of course it's something I love log analytics Azure monitor logs as it's formally known now. Is something that I I'm a really big fan of because there are so many other services that are built on top of it and there's so much power in it. Where you get all your performance and your log data whether they're allowing a business application because you can teach it out to ingest the logs or all of your VM logs whether they're windows or Linux all of that into one location and then the insights packages or other services like Sentinel and others go through those logs and actually can surface up. Real information and real status of your environment regardless where those machines may be they can be physical machines they could be VMs on-prem they could be VMs in other clouds or they can be VMs in Azure or they could be also past services in Azure that report their status as well. So what's cool about this announcement is. You know when you go to the portal and there's that little feedback button. Yep. Well the log analytics team really. Like almost on a monthly basis goes through this and if there's anything that can be improved in the experience because like writing queries it's not glamorous like writing a crystal course. The story is something that you have to do because it's your job and it unlocks so many capabilities but it's it's not the it's not the shiny thing that most people want to do except maybe me. As I was about to say I don't really think of logs or log analytics as being like the sexy service of Azure so. No, no, but it is. Is there listening to feedback. Yes, they're listening to feedback and they've created a couple of things that makes it a lot easier to or the experience a lot better within the portal. One of the things that they have done is now when you go into the sidebar and you start creating your in the sidebar you can do filter by subscription resource group machine type machine groups and so on. And then you go to the right side pain and you can start writing your stuff. Often what happened and if you came back you'd have to reset all of your filters. Number one your sidebar filters will remain if you go back and forth within your queries. So really cool. Saving lots of time. Other thing is in your sidebar you may have a list of like pre pre created tables pre created queries. And now you can there's a new way that you can configure what you do when you double click on one. But if you double click on the table, does it actually run a specific query or does it add the table to your to your query editor. If you double click a query, does it actually just load it in the editor or does it actually run it. Well these are all things that are configurable now so giving you more control over your own experience. But I find that the best thing about this is the fact that when you're looking at that feedback button. You know what actually goes somewhere. You know that actually goes somewhere. Nice. I remember somebody. That's awesome. I remember at one point we had sent some newsletters years ago and at the bottom there was like a click here for some feedback and then somebody clicked the button and gave me a rant as to what was it about. Oh yeah we were talking about the role that back in the days when we were called evangelist remember that. Oh yeah yeah yeah yeah. This was like the newsletter that went off across North America or something like that right. Exactly and the guy just like tore me a new one telling me that there was no there was no way we should be bringing faith into business settings because he thought evangelist that we were going to like convert him or something. And then so I he didn't know he didn't realize that he had put his signature block in the in the rant that he sent back and his phone number was there so I called him at home. And he went. What. Who are you. I said oh this is Pierre Roman. I sent the last newsletter all across North America and you replied to it to respond to you and I thought I thought we should have a discussion instead of sending emails back and forth and then he went. I never thought that these emails went anywhere. Well that's the same with this feedback button. Got it. Amen. We're listening. We're here to help. Exactly. Awesome. Cool. What's your next. News. Next news as far as I know that's what we're going to do. But except for you know there was this little thing that was announced today. So not today this week that the team itself has been talking an awful lot about and again people are excited about this as well which is awesome. The finally we announced during Windows Server Summit that there was a new certification for Windows hybrid administrators that's made up of two exams. And we said stay tuned for more details and he gave as much details as we could. But now on Tuesday I think it was the beta became open for people to subscribe to. So the exams are a real thing now. You know probably a pool of like 100 to 150 different types of questions like the normally would do and then you say give me an exam. And they compile a list of like 30 questions and give you the exam. Well anyway the beta exam for the AZ 800 and the AZ 801 is available for people to sign up for. And it's also available in the sense that it's more accessible for people because the first 300 people that sign up on the public interface that you see on this blog post from Liberty Manson. She has set it up so that there are 300 spots for each exam so technically 600. Reduced cost spots it's not free. It's 80% off but it's reduced cost spots and you can see the discount code AZ 800. Is that say Wooster or something. Wooster. That's hilarious. Wooster and Hilsdale. And then AZ 801 Hilsdale. I don't know where those came from from a code name. I think they spelled Woolsey wrong. Either that or they're trying to do Worcestershire. Worcestershire? Anyway the AZ 800 and AZ 801 exam is at an 80% discount currently in beta form for the first 300 people that sign up. And in that blog post she lists off a bunch of different resources including the one that's probably the most helpful for doing your exam studies which is what's known as the objective domains. And also a good friend of ours Oren Thomas has gone ahead and created a study guide on our IT ops talk blog. That should be linked in there somewhere but you probably don't have it freshed up so don't worry about it. That basically talks about you know here are some useful articles that you can look at. The study guides right there. Right there. On there basically will give you some local first of all a chat about that particular exam with Jeff Woolsey but then also it has a link to the documents storage repository of the content inside the exam objective that's being discussed. So very helpful links that are there and rumor has it that even our other good friend on the team Mr. Thomas Maurer is going to do his own spin on something similar because he's got a tradition of doing these on his blog too. To have a traditional spin on that coming up in the near future that's late breaking news. I don't even know if Oren knows about that. Well the question is at this point is did Oren already write the exam. He played a very active role in the development so I think because of the amount of active role that he played he's actually I'm not going to say exempt but maybe he's banned from being able to write it because he would have been involved in the questions or something like that. So yeah. No that's really cool and I am planning to take those at some point. Did you want me to put that into your performance review. I'm not quite just yet. Okay because if you like I could amend the performance review for the for the half. No no no that's fine. Yeah I'll deal with it on my own time. Okay. No problem. But you know I am interested to hear from the folks watching recorded or live. You know you can always do the hashtag AZ Ops tweets that we use from a hashtag perspective for the whole team or this show has at sign AZ update as well if you want to individual show. But I would love to know are you planning on taking it. Are you are you doing some kind of a study group to be able to help you out with it. You interested in some kind of study group to help out for it or whatever. But the current beta is only going to be open until January 10th. So basically it's like holiday time plus the week of recovery afterwards that it's available to be able to take in the beta form in the reduced price form. After that it basically kind of shuts down for a while. They evaluate all the people decide where the passing mark is and then set you up to be able to go through. So beta exams in case you don't know I've been doing certification for a long time. They work regardless of well they work if you pass or not you don't know till the end as opposed to instantaneous and absolutely if you pass above the mark that they determine by the end of it. You at the end of the period you'll get a valid exam that works like anybody else. Yep. Yep. And one thing is I'm thinking is maybe we'll talk to Oren and see if there's a possibility of opening up a couple of channels on our Discord server for AZ 800 and AZ 801 prep questions and support. Yeah. Good idea. See if you are interested. Exactly. All right. We are going to move on with the show because there's at the end I want to have a little chat. Oh sure. Community events this week are every year the festive tech calendar is still ongoing. Yep. I have caught a few of the sessions this week and it was great. So. Techie lass and Lisa at the edge I think didn't ask us anything just earlier on in the week. I was hoping to catch that one but I ended up getting dragged into a meeting that kind of kept me from being able to watch it live. That one there is available on demand. Yeah. It kicked off on December the 1st with a great traditional poem that is a Dora went ahead and created and delivered which is awesome. And they've got a whole list of all the different content that comes out every single day that goes there. And likewise as well folks are lined up and to be able to go in and to make donations towards the I believe it's also Girls Who Code as well. But they're always here around. So keep an eye on that every day something new. Yeah. I've been I've been dipping in and out of the festive tech calendar. I did watch Sarah and Lisa on the edge for their AMA actually asked a couple of questions. Oh cool. Yep. I figured why not. It was a good discussion. It was good. And the other of course is we do have it's another episode of testing and production today at noon eastern time nine Pacific. So Jared hopefully you'll be out of bed and dressed by then. Nice. Do you want to give us a hint about what the topic is this time. Today we are going because we do have an actual show plan unlike the other show that that runs on Fridays. Nice. We're going to talk about demos doing demos with some help from Stream Deck and some automation tools. Very cool. And I am I think she's going to show my office in a video because I had a lot of questions about how did I order all these monitors mounted on my desk and so it's kind of like a video tour of my office of my cave if you will. Nice. And of course the shenanigans. Nice. Very, very cool. I might stick around to be able to watch that one there might spend so much my coffee goes. And I do want to do a shout out the other show patch and switch is doing our last show of the year next week on the 17th. That's going to be fun. Nice little holiday themed one that we're going to be doing a kick shouting out to a whole bunch of our regular viewers and listeners and stuff like that was going to be cool. And also next week. Well, you and I did a session this week on updates on a series we're doing for learn live going through different sessions from Microsoft learn and the last one is happening next week. It's going to be Thomas Maurer and myself talking about backup and restore and disaster recovery options. And that sort of stuff too. I think the link is inside of the blog post. If not, then it's not to make it into the notes, but that's the one we said we're going to talk about is the update. One that took place this week and the one next week on disaster recovery backup and restore stuff. I got the link here. I got the link here. You're slacking. You forgot to put it in the show notes. Well, it's the it's that. Replication is it didn't synchronize. There we go. It's the unexpected reboots three minutes before showtime. Nice. Yeah. Yeah. So this is the learn live hybrid infrastructure study hall. So it was a great series of fun connections with folks on the team. The high December the 16th is the final one 12 Pacific time talking about as your backup and restore is coming. That's all I got, man. Cool. So and to complete this show as we always do the module, the learning module of the week this week. It's not a module. It's not even the learning path. No, no, it isn't. It's a whole freaking collection. Oh, nice. Because in the honor of the beta exam, there is a collection of learn modules and learning paths. To help you kind of prepare for 800 and 800 and one AZ 800 AZ 100 and one exams. That's cool. So I figured I would put up the level up Windows server hybrid administrator collection as our learning path or their module of the week. Nice. So you get deploy manage identity infrastructure are very important in an hybrid environments. Windows server workloads in a hybrid environment, virtualization and containers in the hybrid environment. Basically everything you need to know about hybrid environments. Well, everything you need to know to start with hybrid environments. You can brush up on it here. So are you logged in on this? No, you're not logged in. Are you know why I was about to give you a grief about the fact that you you found this particular one, but I can see that you only have like 10% complete. Of the modules, but it's only because you're not logged in on this web page. I'm not logged in. So I don't know. I don't know who this phantom person who was 27% completed. It's just your leftover cookies or something like that. Yeah, no. Reminds of the week good stuff, but you do want to ask one thing. Do you not about people that follow and listen before we get cut off? Yes, before we get cut off because we got three minutes. This is the last show of the year. We've been doing this for now three seasons. We are at the point where now we're starting to revisit because the world is slowly opening up again reinvent had their in person event last week. We are looking at potentially make changes to the format and the structure of the show and we want the input of our audience because you guys are there every week and we love you so much for supporting us like this. So go on to our discords at aka.ms slash it up stock dashboard or the our feedback email, which I forgot to make a banner for it, which is basically it up stock dash feedback at Microsoft.com. And let us know what you think what you want to see in this show. I mean, is the format nice, half an hour good chunk of time. Do you like the blog posts? Do you like a different style format? Do you want to have like one topic you want to bring guests in like anything under the sun, right? That's right. That's right because we are at the point now after three season and this started out as a way to connect with you when the pandemic hit when the age of the human malware began. And we're just keeping it keeping it fresh, keeping it fresh, keeping it fresh. So between now and in January, we're going to be as a team because this is a team sport, reviewing this. Well, good. I'm glad you're doing this. And I hope that everyone is listening takes the opportunity to give us some feedback to let us know what they like what they don't like. And if they have any ideas how to make it better. That's right. Thank you for inviting me for the last one. I appreciate it. Yeah, and maybe you can you can go back to bed if you want because I'm sure you're still wearing your pajamas. Christmas pajamas down bottom. But yeah, not after that much coffee. I'm going to be up for a while now. All right. Well, thank you everyone. Thank you, Mr. Claus. And we will see you back in January. Have a good one. Cheers.