If you’re getting started with Microsoft Azure, you may feel confused about where things are located. One of the reasons for this confusion is the current use of multiple portals. It’s hard enough to learn how subscriptions work, how to access the resources through PowerShell and all of those new concepts without having to navigate different sites. This post should shed some light on what the portals are and how they’re used. ...
Azure provides a Platform-as-a-Service offering called a “Cloud Service.” Instead of managing every part of a virtual machine (the middle-wear and the application) it might be desirable to only worry about the application that is being deployed. An Azure cloud service allows you to just focus on the app, but does give you access to the underlying virtual machine if you need to use it. So what makes up an Azure Cloud Service? There are two main types of virtual machines that are deployed through a cloud service; web roles and worker roles. Web roles are Windows servers with IIS installed and ready to use on them. Worker roles are Windows servers without IIS installed. In addition to the Windows instances that will be deployed, a cloud service also includes a load balancer that will automatically load balance the web roles, and an IP Address will be assigned to the load balancer. One thing to note is that the web server roles have an agent installed on them as well so that the load balancer can determine if the server is working correctly and if it needs to remove a server from the load balancer. ...
Azure allows you to manage network interfaces as an object that can be decoupled from the virtual machine. This is important to note, because when you delete your virtual machine, the Network Interface will still be in the Azure Portal. This NIC and all of it’s settings will still exist for reuse if you wish. This would include keeping the Public IP Address that is associated with it, subnets, and Network Security Groups. ...
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. ...