It’s July, which means the annual Microsoft MVP renewal notifications have landed. This marks my 8th renewal, putting me in the program for 9 years now across the Hyper-V and Azure Hybrid tracks. Looking back, it’s wild how much the landscape has shifted. When I first got awarded, I was spending my time deep in the weeds of a brand-new technology called Storage Spaces Direct, back when “hybrid cloud” wasn’t even standard terminology. Fast forward to today, and the daily reality has completely evolved into things like Azure Local and Azure Arc. But even as the names and scale change, the part I still enjoy the most remains exactly the same: getting under the hood of the tech to figure out how it actually works, and trading notes with the crew over in the Azure Local Slack community. That’s where the real-world troubleshooting, architecture debates, and shared headaches happen every single day. A massive thank you to the Microsoft product groups for keeping the lines of communication wide open, and to everyone who keeps the daily technical chats sharp. Here’s to kicking off year 10.

Did you know that if you press the “CTRL” key while right clicking on a Scale-out Backup Repository, you get additional menu options to proactively run a Tiering Job or kick off an extent rebalance?