Posts

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. ...

It’s about time to head to the US VMworld conference again and this year its in Las Vegas Nevada. VMworld is always a time that is full of excitement for virtualization junkies. Will there be new product announcements that will disrupt the established virtual design principles? Will a new product vendor make a big splash at the event? Can I learn brand new ways to enable my company? All of these questions spread the anticipation for the event. ...

I was asked to provide the PowerPoint deck used in the 2016 Indianapolis VMUG Conference Keynote. If you are interested in this presentation, it can be found here. Indy-Keynote v6

Following the posts in order, this guide should help you to understand and get familiar with Microsoft Azure. This is a guide to getting started with Azure that you can build upon to deploy your own public cloud environment. Azure Accounts and Subscriptions Azure Active Directory Integration Azure Resource Groups Setup Azure Networks Azure Network Security Groups Create Azure VPN Connection Azure Storage Accounts Setup Azure PowerShell Azure Virtual Machine Deployment Azure Network Interfaces Azure Cloud Services Azure Scale Sets Understanding the Multiple Azure Portals Using Azure Automation Microsoft Azure Official Links Azure Resource Manager Portal - https://portal.azure.com Azure Classic Portal - http://manage.windowsazure.com Microsoft Azure Documentation and Resources - https://azure.microsoft.com ...

An Azure resource group is a way for you to, you guessed it, group a set of resources together. This is a useful capability in a public cloud so that you can manage permissions, set alerts, built deployment templates and audit logs on a subset of resources. Resource groups can contain, virtual machines, gateways, VNets, VPNs and about any other resource Azure can deploy. Most items that you create will need to belong to a resource group but an item can only belong to a single resource group at a time. Resources can be moved from one resource group to another. ...

Azure is a great reservoir of resources that your organization can use to deploy applications upon and the cloud is focused around pooling resources together. However, organizations need to be able to split resources up based on cost centers. The development team will be using resources for building new apps, as well as maybe an e-commerce team for production uses. Subscriptions allow for a single Azure instance to separate these costs, and bill to different teams. ...

Join me on July 20th in Indianapolis Indiana for a day of fun and learning at the annual Indianapolis VMware Users Group Conference! For those of you not familiar with VMUG, its an independent customer-led organization created to maximize members’ use of VMware and partner solutions through knowledge sharing, training, collaboration and events. VMUG is the largest organization worldwide focused on virtualization users. Don’t worry if you just want the day off from work, that’s just one of the benefits, but BE SURE TO REGISTER FOR FREE HERE: https://www.vmug.com/p/cm/ld/fid=13570 ...

vRealize Automation lets us publish vRealize Orchestrator workflows to the service catalog, but to get more functionality out of these XaaS blueprints, we can add the provisioned resources to the items list. This allows us to manage the lifecycle of these items and even perform secondary “Day 2 Operations” on these items later. For the example in this post, we’ll be provisioning an AWS Security group in an existing VPC. For now, just remember that AWS Security groups are not managed by vRA, but with some custom work, this is all about to change. ...