Disaster Recovery – how to recover your application if a disaster occurs. Disaster Recovery is part of what we call “resilience” today. Resilience is the how to ensure that our applications are reliable or recoverable. This is a different approach and view of the more legacy “disaster recovery” environment where a cold (or warm) standby datacenter was built to recover the primary DC in case of a failure. Partial or full failover is part of this legacy architecture. Resiliency goes a bit further than just DR, as it includes multiple events that have an impact into an application. Events can sc ..read more

As a continuation of my AZGateway migration scripts I entered the scripting world again for the migration of VMs. As anything worth doing is worth doing twice I actually wrote the entire script and then found out the Microsoft Azure SAP team already had something lined up. While their script did migrate VM’s there were a few things I did not like about their script, for example the lack of Public IP support when migrating VM’s and some cosmetic stuff in the backend. So, I present today, 2 ways of migrating your existing VM’s, VMSS’s, Managed Disks and Network Cards (or actually Public IP’s on ..read more

As promised, I would cover Availability Zones a bit more in the next few posts. If your Azure region supports Availability Zones you probably want to use them. Yes the services are a bit more expensive but you gain a higher SLA and the ability to adopt an active-active infrastructure. This active-active infrastructure usually starts with the VPN/ER Gateways. When you deploy an Azure Gateway there are essentially 3 options; regional (meaning it can go in any AZ but you don’t know which); Zonal (you select the zone you want it deployed in) and Zone Redundant (meaning it will be deployed in at le ..read more

Microsoft is working hard to make “Availability Zones” available for most of their primary Azure regions. What is an Availability Zone will be covered later in another blog post, including why you should use it, what advantages it brings and more importantly (as most of the previous is covered by Microsoft documentation) – how do you migrate from your current non-AZ aware deployment into a fully redundant AZ zone deployment. This will be a short post however. See the problem we will solve in this post is “which zone is which zone in another subscription”. Okay, that might need some explanation ..read more

Azure Reservations are a good way to reduce your cloud costs. Reservations are available for SQL, Databricks, storage Virtual Machines, and many other services. But in this topic I will be looking into Virtual Machines only. The reason for that is that these (although amongst others) are a; the most used, b; can be exchanged easily and finally c; might be complex. So, what is a reservation. A reservation allows you to “reserve” some compute to reduce the cost for VM’s in Azure that you are going to use for longer term. Let’s take an example; Calculating the discount level PAYG pivot point: Say ..read more

The URL: Windows Virtual Desktop for the enterprise – Azure Example Scenarios | Microsoft Docs explains a bit on how the integration with Azure Files and Active Directory can be accomplished. However, it does not highlight the creation of the AD object to represent the storage in your Active Directory. So a short post on this topic while (hopefully) Microsoft fixes their documentation. How it works In order to create a connection between the AD and Azure Files, an object representing Azure Files needs to be created in your domain. This object will have a specific password and a specific SPN (S ..read more

It’s been a while between posts, but I promise this will be interesting to Hybrid Infrastructure Admins that also want to have secure VM’s. As almost usual, the supportability of the described solution here is not yet proven, but I hope it will be soon. This post will describe how to deploy shielded VM’s onto Azure Stack HCI – the ability to shield VM’s from the Hyper-V administrators and thus allowing you to run tier-0 workloads on HCI. After playing with my Azure Stack Development Kit – Microsoft released Azure Stack HCI as a new family member in the portfolio. Stack HCI has the advantage t ..read more

MFA for WVD, doesn’t that already exist through Azure AD conditional access? Yes, it does, but its limited to certain scenario’s. With the Azure AD MFA WVD access, you only need to MFA once in order to access any desktop published through WVD. Which got me thinking: what if I want to request an MFA every time I launch a desktop? What if I want an MFA on the Remote Desktop application when opening a desktop in order to avoid users switching username when they left their application open? You see, there are many reasons why you would or would not want to request additional verification from a us ..read more

In our previous post we talked about the scripts that can install applications and set settings automatically without even login-on to the system. In this post we will see how we can use those scripts in a JSON file, together with the Azure Image Builder. Within the JSON file we specify which OS we want, what executables / content we want to download, applications to install and much more. As it would be hard writing this from scratch, we can use the GitHub examples on DanaielSollondon’s page. When you look at the JSON file you will notice the standard parameters, variables and resources hives ..read more

In these last and future posts we will be building an image with the Azure Image Builder. The Image builder takes a standard OS (from the marketplace or your image gallery) and runs a number of scripts against that image fully automated. In this post goes into creating those scripts that the customizer can use to install your applications, set the default profile stuff and essentially making your image complete! What we could do, is run a completely automated PowerShell script to create our base image. Or run individual scripts one by one from the input JSON file that we need for the ImageBui ..read more