SQL Server Canonical and Microsoft have teamed up to support Ubuntu with Microsoft SQL Server both for on-premises systems and images available through the Azure Marketplace.

Brien walks through the steps necessary for authenticating users on-premises and in the cloud with Microsoft's Windows Azure Active Directory.

Instead of using SQL Server Management Studio to bridge the gap, as used in Azure SQL Database, Microsoft's free SQL Server Data Tools (which can be downloaded here) will be used instead. The improved ...

In addition, AD RMS requires IIS, a database such as Microsoft SQL Server and it must be run on a member of an Active Directory Domain Services forest.

Microsoft has released a new public preview of Azure Active Directory Connect, a tool for connecting Windows Server AD to Azure AD. It will replace DirSync and the standalone Azure AD Sync tools.

One thing that is a must for most organizations is to join the vCenter Server to Active Directory. A few words of advice to do this smoothly.

From there, you can configure Active Directory domain controllers with the PDC emulator role in a domain to use this list of servers explicitly for their time.

If you want to backup and restore Active Directory in Windows Server, you can follow the detailed instructions mentioned in this post.

A step-by-step guide to deploying, configuring, and testing a multi-AZ, multi-region SQL Server FCI in the Azure cloud, complete with a PowerShell script that handles the networking configuration.

In 2010, Microsoft plans to deliver BizTalk Server 2009 R2, which will be a "minor" update that adds support for Visual Studio 2010, SQL Server 2008 R2 and Windows Server 2008 R2.