Azure Storage – Create a Storage Account
Let’s take a look at how to create a storage account in Azure that you can use for storing your […]
Azure Readiness – Fundamentals Skills
Why would a manager or supervisor, or even the CFO need to understand Azure Fundamentals? Isn’t that type of knowledge handled by the technical people and why would our managers need this knowledge? These are questions that I come across regularly; and my answer is always the same. As a business moves towards cloud adoption, it’s important that all stakeholders understand the basics, terminologies, and have a foundational understanding of the platforms. Now, I’m not suggesting that a CFO is going to be setting up your Azure subscriptions; but wouldn’t it be great if they understood all the concepts and could help you communicate technical changes to other non-technical leaders? When ideas are understood…
See the full article for more discussion on Azure Fundamental concepts.
Create an RDP file for your Azure Virtual Machine in PowerShell
Ever need to quickly connect to one of your virtual machines in Azure? You can use CLI or Azure PowerShell module and the Get-AzRemoteDesktopFile cmdlet to create an RDP file to use for your connection! This is not a widely known method, but it can save you loads of time!
See how to use RDP files from Azure CLI by reading on…
How to Use VS Code for Azure CLI
To keep as much flexibility in my connection and administration work as possible, I like to take advantage of all the hard work of the teams that have given us (the general public) tools like PowerShell, VS Code, and Azure CLI. My clients know that my love of PowerShell is almost equal to that of my mountain biking, but let’s stay focused today! We will walk through getting you setup to use Azure CLI from inside VS Code. This will only take about 15 minutes for you to get up and running, so let’s get started!
Read on to get VSCode setup…
Azure Naming Conventions
Most Admins are aware why we should use a standardized naming convention across all your resources, but sometimes we have to explain it to business members or new admins that have not considered this before. It can be a contentious topic sometimes, but Microsoft Docs guides us through this process….
For examples and explanations of naming conventions read on…
Azure Readiness – Let’s Talk Network Latency
Understanding your network latency between you and your favourite Azure Region is important. It can be the difference between responsive services hosted inside Azure, and a negative user experience. Especially if you are using Azure VPN and not Express Route services.
To understand what region is likely better for you to be working out of, host your primary resources in (because I know you would want to use geographically balanced services for redundancy — right?) and has the ‘best’ overall speed between that Azure datacenter and your network; let’s take a closer look at how to easily test this out.
Keep reading to find out more about your own speeds between you and your Azure datacenters…
Log Analytics Alerting
Why is alerting from Azure Log Analytics important? We need to be able to create alerts so that administrators can be made aware of potential problems so that they can be investigated and corrected quickly. Sounds simple right? Well, thanks to Azure Log Analytics and Monitoring Alerts in Azure, it is.
Keep reading to learn more about alerting driven through log analytics conditional triggers in Azure…
Azure Storage Diagnostics
What is a diagnostic log? A diagnostic log provides information about the operations of a resource – in this case a storage account inside Azure.
Azure Migrate – Part 2
In my last article, you were introduced to Azure Site Recovery and Azure Migrate. These services allow you to discover, assess, and migrate workloads into Azure quickly using a framework built using the foundations of Azure Site Recovery. We talked a lot about disaster recovery foundations, technical requirements, and some key differences between ASR and Azure Migrate. Today, we’ll be working in Azure Migrate and we want to get you ready to do a test fail-over of a workload from your VMWare environment into Azure. There are lots of steps to follow, so give yourself about 3 hours to work through all the reading and steps. You may need to step out of this article to perform changes in your VMWare environment as part of your readiness. I want you to be comfortable using Azure Migrate so let’s get started!
Azure Migrate – Intro
Azure Migrate allows you to discover, assess, and migrate workloads into Azure quickly using a framework built using the foundations of Azure Site Recovery. Starting out with ASR is a solid and well-built foundation that allows you to replicate a source environment into Azure. Azure Migrate service is built on top of the foundation elements of Azure Site Recovery and provides a highly reliable and rapid method to sync your current data from VMWware, Hyper-V, physical servers on-premise, and AWS into Azure. This can be part of your disaster recovery plan, migration strategy, and migration testing. Azure Site Recovery has often been deployed as a major part of disaster recovery strategies for on-premise or existing Azure virtual machines.
A bit of basic information first. Azure Site Recovery will help you with:
• Console to manage discovery and connectivity to Azure
• Replication from source to Azure
• Testing your migration to ensure that you get your VMs in Azure as expected
• Cut-over migration into Azure