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An issue serious enough to require servers in your data center to be failed over to a secondary site will probably keep you busy enough all on it’s own. You don’t want to have to think about how complicated your disaster recovery tool is. I’ve been impressed with Zerto since the first time that I worked with it. The tool requires a piece of software called the Zerto Virtual Manager, to be installed at each of your sites and connected to your vCenters. This manager will then deploy replication appliances on each of your ESXi hosts to manage the replication. From there on, all the replication settings, orchestration options, and fail over tasks are completed through this manager. ...

Congratulations! If you’ve made it this far in the Microsoft Azure Series, you’re finally ready to start deploying virtual machines in Microsoft Azure. Let’s face it, the whole series has led up to this post because most of you are probably looking at getting started in Azure with the virtual machine. It’s familiar and can house applications, databases, data or whatever you’ve been housing in in your on premises data center. If you’re trying to benchmark Azure with you’re own data center apps, virtual machines are probably where you’ll spend your time. As you learn more about the the platform, Azure’s PaaS offerings might be more heavily used to prevent you from having to manage those pesky operating systems but for now we’re focusing on the VM. ...

It’s a weird thing to say, but we can install PowerShell on Mac after the announcement from Microsoft that PowerShell will be available for both Macintosh and Linux. It’s pretty easy to accomplish but having a great scripting language like PowerShell available for Mac is really cool and deserves a blog post. I mean, now I don’t even need to fire up my Windows virtual machine just to run PowerShell! To get started, download the OSX .pkg file from the github page: https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/releases/ ...

Today Rubrik announced the release of their latest version of the Rubrik Cloud Data Management (RCDM) operating system and this one has some really neat enhancements. If you’re not familiar with Rubrik, and hate managing backups, then you really should take a closer look at them. Their Cloud Data Management Platform makes managing backups a very simple task. Think Apple’s Time Machine, only for your data center. The latest version of their operating system is named “Firefly”, instead of having a boring old number distinction like 2.0. I’m told that future versions will also be named in a similar fashion around a bio-luminescence naming scheme. So if you’re not into fireflies, just hang tight for the Angler fish version which I’m speculating will be next. ...

Microsoft Azure has its own command line that can be used to script installs, export and import configurations and query your portal for information. Being a Microsoft solution, this command line is accessed through PowerShell. Install Azure PowerShell Using PowerShell with Microsoft Azure is pretty simple to get up and going. The first step to getting started is to install the Azure PowerShell modules. Open up your PowerShell console and run both “Install-Module AzureRM” and then “Install-Module Azure”. ...

Azure storage accounts provide a namespace in which to store data objects. These objects could be blobs, file, tables, queues and virtual machine disks. This post focuses on the pieces necessary to create a new storage account for use within Azure Resource Manager portal. Setup To setup a storage account go to the Azure Resource Manager Portal, select storage accounts and then click the “Add” button. From there you’ll have some familiar settings that will need to be filled out such as a unique name for the account, a subscription to use for billing, a resource group for management, and a location for the region to be used. The rest of this article explains the additional settings shown in the screenshot below. ...

Unless you’re starting up a company from scratch, you probably won’t host all of your workloads in a public cloud like Microsoft Azure. If you’re building a hybrid cloud, you probably want to have network connectivity between the two clouds and that means a VPN. Microsoft Azure uses a Virtual Network Gateway to provide this connectivity. NOTE: As of the writing of this blog post, Microsoft has two portals that can be used to provide cloud resources. The Classic portal and the Azure Resource Manager portal. This post focuses on setting up a VPN tunnel using the new Azure Resource Manager portal. ...

An Azure network security group is your one stop shop for access control lists. Azure NSGs are how you will block or allow traffic from entering or exiting your subnets or individual virtual machines. In the new Azure Resource Manager Portal NSGs are applied to either a subnet or a virtual NIC of a virtual machine, and not the entire machine itself. NOTE: At the time of this post, Azure has a pair of Azure portals, including the classic portal where NSGs are applied to a virtual machine, or the Resource Manager Portal where NSGs are applied to a VNic of a virtual machine. ...

Setting up networks in Microsoft Azure is pretty simple task, but care should be taken when deciding how the address space will be carved out. To get started lets cover a couple of concepts about how Azure handles networking. To start we have the idea of a “VNet” which is the IP space that will be assigned to smaller subnets. These VNets are isolated from each other and the outside world. If you want your VNet to communicate with another VNet or your on-premises networks, you’ll need to setup a VPN tunnel. You might be wondering, how do you do any segmentation between servers without having to setup a VPN then? The answer there is using subnets. Multiple subnets can be created inside of a VNet and security groups can be added to them so that they only allow certain traffic, sort of like a firewall does. ...

The use cases here are open for debate, but you can setup a serverless call to vRealize Orchestrator to execute your custom orchestration tasks. Maybe you’re integrating this with an Amazon IoT button, or you want voice deployments with Amazon Echo, or maybe you’re just trying to provide access to your workflows based on a CloudWatch event in Amazon. In any case, it is possible to setup an Amazon Lambda call to execute a vRO workflow. In this post, we’ll actually build a Lambda function that executes a vRO workflow that deploys a CentOS virtual machine in vRealize Automation, but the workflow could really be anything you want. ...