Archive
Microsoft Azure IaaS Operations Guidance – #AAD, #RBAC, #ARM, #Microsoft, #Azure
Here you can find a ton of great guidance material for Azure operations by mzbowe! Really good summary!
This is a collection of Azure Infrastructure installation and operational guidance resources I provide to my customers. By keeping these links up to date with each engagement, all of my customers may benefit. Hopefully you can too! The latest Azure updates will always be at Azure service updates. Make it part of your operational procedure to review that monthly, if not weekly! In 2015, there were over 500 updates. Wow!
The goal of this guide to highlight core installation and operational procedures for an Azure IaaS deployment which predominantly will consist of Compute, Network and Storage resources. This article Azure Infrastructure Services Implementation Guidelines, gives a pretty good run down of what needs to be created and in what order. The resources I will keep updated below pretty much follow most of those resources in the last link. But for now, there is a very important piece of that puzzle missing. For the newer Azure Resource Manager (ARM) model of deployment, we need to plan, design and create Azure Resource Groups. Once we have Resource Groups, we can delegate administration with Role Based Access Control (RBAC).
Besides all this, if you just need to ramp up and learn more on Azure, go to the Azure Learning Paths page. Check it out and learn something new! I also have my Azure Certification resources (Slides and Videos) from MS Ignite 2015, to get you certified and ready to go!
- aka.ma/Certification/70-533 | Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Certification Prep
- aka.ma/Certification/70-534 | Microsoft Azure Architecture Certification Prep
Azure Active Directory
- How Azure subscriptions are associated with Azure Active Directory
- This is an important link to read and understand. Microsoft Azure does not equal Azure Active Directory. If you create a brand new Azure subscription, you will have an Azure Active Directory tenant by default. But, sometimes companies have Office 365 first, without an Azure Subscription. With Office 365, you get an Azure Active Directory tenant for free. That is your cloud directory. It can be standalone. Or many companies will synchronize or federate with their on-premises identities. But, an Azure AD tenant for Office 265 is not necessarily tied to an Azure Subscription. An Azure subscription is just another service like Office 365. If your company is going to have both, then the KEY goal is that both of those connect to the same Azure Active Directory tenant. So if you started Office 365 and made the primary domain name contoso.com, then when you login to create an Azure subscription, make sure to do so with a Global Admin account in the contoso.com Azure AD tenant that you use to administer Office 365. See Manage the directory for your Office 365 subscription in Azure.
- Azure Active Directory editions
- Before you get too excited about everything you discover on the azure website, make sure you know what version you have. There are many flavors and enterprise agreements. Depending on the version you have, you may have more or less services available to you. Azure Active Directory Premium will get you the whole kitchen sink. But there are different ways to get that as well e.g. an Enterprise Mobility Suite license.
- Hybrid Identity Design Considerations
- The Four Pillars of Identity – Identity Management in the Age of Hybrid IT
- Azure Active Directory Authentication Protocols
- Authentication Scenarios for Azure AD
- Azure Active Directory federation compatibility list: third-party identity providers that can be used to implement single sign-on
- Azure AD terminology
- Getting started with Azure Multi-Factor Authentication in the cloud
- Azure AD Privileged Identity Management
Azure AD Operational Guidance
- Administer your Azure AD directory
- Assigning administrator roles in Azure Active Directory (Azure AD)
- Create or edit users in Azure Active Directory
- Azure AD Password Reset for Users and Admins
- Managing access to resources with Azure Active Directory groups
- View your access and usage reports which is part of
Microsoft announcing SQL Server on Linux – #SQL, #Microsoft, #DB, #PaaS
This is sooo cool and further shows how Microsoft has changed over the past years!
It’s been an incredible year for the data business at Microsoft and an incredible year for data across the industry. This Thursday at our Data Driven event in New York, we will kick off a wave of launch activities for SQL Server 2016 with general availability later this year. This is the most significant release of SQL Server that we have ever done, and brings with it some fantastic new capabilities. SQL Server 2016 delivers:
- Groundbreaking security encryption capabilities that enable data to always be encrypted at rest, in motion and in-memory to deliver maximum security protection
- In-memory database support for every workload with performance increases up to 30-100x
- Incredible Data Warehousing performance with the #1, #2 and #3 TPC-H 10 Terabyte benchmarks for non-clustered performance, and as of March 7, the #1 SAP SD Two-Tier performance benchmark on Windows1
- Business Intelligence for every employee on every device – including new mobile BI support for iOS, Android and Windows Phone devices
- Advanced analytics using our new R support that enables customers to do real-time predictive analytics on both operational and analytic data
- Unique cloud capabilities that enable customers to deploy hybrid architectures that partition data workloads across on-premises and cloud based systems to save costs and increase agility
These improvements, and many more, are all built into SQL Server and bring you not just a new database but a complete platform for data management, business analytics and intelligent apps – one that can be used in a consistent way across both on-premises and the cloud. In fact, over the last year we’ve been using the SQL Server 2016 code-base to run in production more than 1.4 million SQL Databases in the cloud using our Azure SQL Database as a Service offering, and this real-world experience has made SQL Server 2016 an incredibly robust and battle-hardened data platform.
Gartner recently named Microsoft as leading the industry in their Magic Quadrant for Operational Database Management Systems in both execution and vision. We’re also a leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Data Warehouse and Data Management Solutions for Analytics, and Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms, as well as leading in vision in the Magic Quadrant for Advanced Analytics Platforms.
Extending SQL Server to Also Now Run on Linux
Today I’m excited to announce our plans to bring SQL Server to Linux as well. This will enable SQL Server to deliver a consistent data platform across Windows Server and Linux, as well as on-premises and cloud. We are bringing the core relational database capabilities to preview today, and are targeting availability in mid-2017. Read more…
Microsoft and AzureCon delivers! Love it! – #Azure, #AzureCon, #EnvokeIT, #IoT, #SaaS, #PaaS
I really love the way that Microsoft and Azure delivers! It’s so amazing with all the PaaS and SaaS offerings they now have on top of the traditional IaaS delivery. There is no other cloud provider out there that delivers anything near it! I’m amazed and so happy to be a part of this journey!
If you didn’t have the time to look at AzureCon you have a lot of great videos and topics to go through!!
Here is a short overview of the many great things released and presented:
- General Availability of 3 new Azure regions in India
- Announcing new N-series of Virtual Machines with GPU capabilities
- Announcing Azure IoT Suite available to purchase
- Announcing Azure Container Service
- Announcing Azure Security Center
Watching the Videos
All of the talks presented at AzureCon (including the 60 breakout talks) are now available to watch online. You can browse and watch all of the sessions here.
Announcing General Availability of 3 new Azure regions in India
Yesterday we announced the general availability of our new India regions: Mumbai (West), Chennai (South) and Pune (Central). They are now available for you to deploy solutions into.
This brings our worldwide presence of Azure regions up to 24 regions, more than AWS and Google combined. Over 125 customers and partners have been participating in the private preview of our new India regions. We are seeing tremendous interest from industry sectors like Public Sector, Banking Financial Services, Insurance and Healthcare whose cloud adoption has been restricted by data residency requirements. You can all now deploy your solutions too.
Announcing N-series of Virtual Machines with GPU Support
This week we announced our new N-series family of Azure Virtual Machines that enable GPU capabilities. Featuring NVidia’s best of breed Tesla GPUs, these Virtual Machines will help you run a variety of workloads ranging from remote visualization to machine learning to analytics.
The N-series VMs feature NVidia’s flagship GPU, the K80 which is well supported by NVidia’s CUDA development community. N-series will also have VM configurations featuring the latest M60 which was recently announced by NVidia. With support for M60, Azure becomes the first hyperscale cloud provider to bring the capabilities of NVidia’s Quadro High End Graphics Support to the cloud. In addition, N-series combines GPU capabilities with the superfast RDMA interconnect so you can run multi-machine, multi-GPU workloads such as Deep Learning and Skype Translator Training.
Announcing Azure Security Center
This week we announced the new Azure Security Center—a new Azure service that gives you visibility and control of the security of your Azure resources, and helps you stay ahead of threats and attacks. Azure is the first cloud platform to provide unified security management with capabilities that help you prevent, detect, and respond to threats.
The Azure Security Center provides a unified view of your security state, so your team and/or your organization’s security specialists can get the information they need to evaluate risk across the workloads they run in the cloud. Based on customizable policy, the service can provide recommendations. For example, the policy might be that all web applications should be protected by a web application firewall. If so, the Azure Security Center will automatically detect when web apps you host in Azure don’t have a web application firewall configured, and provide a quick and direct workflow to get a firewall from one of our partners deployed and configured: Read more…
Microsoft Specialist – Architecting Microsoft Azure Cloud Solutions – #Azure, #LoveAzure, #EnvokeIT
Yes, I found a really interesting exam and must say that this is a great one! Makes you show that you understand all the great services that Azure has to offer and on such a good level as well!
I’m happy I made it and that EnvokeIT continues its journey within the Microsoft Cloud and Mobility area! 🙂
The things that I love is the way that Microsoft puts a lot of really good material out there for free for all us techies to consume, like the Microsoft Virtual Academy, Channel 9, Azure Friday, etc.
Also what is really good if you’re preparing for this exam (70-534) is to go through this great prep guide:
So go and explore everything that Azure has to offer and if you have any thoughts or questions around Azure don’t hesitate to contact me at richard at envokeit.com or through our official contact details for the UK and Swedish businesses here.
Have a great weekend!
//Richard
Microsoft Ignite 2015 summary – #MSIgnite, #EnvokeIT, #Azure, #Office365, #OneDrive, #EMM, #PaaS, #IaaS
Hi all,
We at EnvokeIT participated and collaborated at Microsoft Ignite 2015 in Chicago. And it was one of the most intense events I’ve visited in years with a lot of happening in the business and Microsoft really showed that they are the leading innovator in many areas!
I hope that you enjoy my report and that it gives you a condensed overview of what happened and please contact us at EnvokeIT if you want assistance within any area below! And thank you Microsoft for such a great event and also all you bloggers out there that I’ve linked to in this material.
I must say that this event was positive and a bit scary at the same time. Microsoft is for sure pushing as visionairies and innovators in a lot of areas, and I think that competitors will have a hard time competing in the coming years.
These are the areas where A LOT have been released already and where Microsoft according to my oppinion will increase its market share significantly:
- Cloud and Mobile services, and with this I don’t mean IaaS service for just running a VM in their public Azure cloud or building a hybrid cloud with connectivity to on-premise datacenters. They are delivering so many capabilities now as PaaS and SaaS services. Just look at the sections below, it’s everything from Enterprise Mobillity Management (EMM), Business Intelligence, Database, Storage, Web Apps/services, Service Availability services (DR, Monitoring/Reporting, Backup etc.), Development, Source Control, Visual Studio Online etc. It’s amazing!!
- Open Source/Linux support – It’s so cool how much Microsoft have shifted to become an adopter to support more open source technologies and way of thinking than just a couple of years ago! Just have a look at all the Linux support they have in Azure, the Linux support they now have in System Center, Docker support to deliver more DevOps capabilities and all the other services in Azure. It’s amazing and so fun! So now both Microsoft have opened their eyes and realized that they can’t ignore this anymore just like Citrix has with their addition of XenDesktop for Linux with SuSE and RedHat support!
The first day kicked off and was a bombarding of product announcements aimed at helping IT pros secure and manage the new Universal Windows Platform.
CEO Satya Nadella presided over a three-hour keynote, which focused on how Microsoft’s new wave of software and cloud services will enable IT and business transformations that are in line with the ways people now work. Nadella talked up Microsoft’s focus on “productivity and platforms” and how it’s tied with the shift to cloud and mobility. He also highlighted the need for better automation of systems and processes, and better management of the vast amounts of data originating from new sources such as sensors and other Internet-of-Things-type nodes.
As mentioned there where a lot of updates and below I’ve tried to gather these and I hope it gives you a good insight on the infromation we received and also guidance on how you can get more information about the topics.
Included below are links to detailed overviews of each of the demos (from Microsoft blog post) – including information about how to use them, where to learn more, and what you’ll need to get started.
- The New Outlook App: A Modern Standard for Secure E-mail
- Enhanced Data Protection with Windows 10
- Windows 10 Device Guard
- Azure RemoteApp
- Document Tracking & Secure Collaboration with Azure RMS
- SaaS Management with Cloud App Discovery
- Detecting Anomalous Sign-Ins with EMS
- Microsoft Advanced Threat Analytics
- Deploying Azure in Your Datacenter
- The Microsoft Operations Management Suite (OMS)
- Power BI in SCCM
The following picture is a sketch of the keynote and is also quite good at summarizing the message of Mobile and Cloud first!
vNiklas also created a great powershell script that automates the downloading of all MS Ignite content with PowerShell and Bits from Channel 9 that you can find here!
Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) – MDM, MAM, MCSM/MIM etc…
Microsoft’s next chapter in Enterprise Mobility, great blog post on where Microsoft is going etc. http://blogs.technet.com/b/enterprisemobility/archive/2015/05/04/ignite-microsofts-next-chapter- in-enterprise-mobility.aspx …
Windows 10 Continuum – this is cool, think about docking your smartphone to your external screen, keyboard and mouse! That’s try mobility of youre device, this looks really cool and something that I’d like to try out once released!
Have a look at the feature demo at Ignite in the video below.
What’s New and Upcoming with Microsoft Intune and System Center Configuration Manager | Microsoft Ignite 2015
This session outlines the latest enhancements in enterprise mobility management using Microsoft Intune and System Center Configuration Manager. See the newest Microsoft Intune improvements for managing mobile productivity without compromising compliance, and learn about the futures of Microsoft Intune and Configuration Manager, including new Windows 10 management scenarios.
Microsoft Intune and Configuration Manager, including new Windows 10 management scenarios.
In the Cloud – Enterprise Mobility Management table of content:
- Enterprise Mobility Vision
- The Evolution of Enterprise Mobility
- Moving Forward in a Mobile-first, Cloud-first World
- Mastering Mobility: A How-to Guide
- Today: Integration into Broader Systems
- Tomorrow: Mobile Productivity
- Empowering SCCM Admins
- Our Plan to be Your Long Term Vendor of Choice
- Extra: The “Master of Mobility” Video Series
Office 2016 public preview available!
Over the last 12 months, we’ve transformed Office from a suite of desktop applications to a complete, cross-platform, cross-device solution for getting work done. We’ve expanded the Office footprint to iPad and Android tablets. We’ve upgraded Office experiences on the Mac, the iPhone and on the web. We’ve even added new apps to the Office family with Sway and Office Lens. All designed to keep your work moving, everywhere. But that doesn’t mean we’ve forgotten where we came from. While you’ve seen us focus on tuning Office for different platforms over the last year, make no mistake, Office on Windows desktop is central to our strategy.
In March we introduced an IT Pro and Developer Preview for the 2016 release of our Office desktop apps on Windows, and now—as a next step—we’re ready to take feedback from a broader audience. Today we’re expanding the Office 2016 Preview, making it available to Office users everywhere in preparation for general availability in Fall 2015.
Office 2016 previewers will get an early look at the next release of Office on Windows desktop, but more importantly they’ll help to shape and improve the future of Office. Visit the Office 2016 Preview site to learn more about the Preview program and if it’s right for you.
New in Office 2016
Since March, we’ve shared some glimpses of what’s to come in Office 2016. Today, we’d like to give a more holistic view of what customers at home and work can expect in the next release. In Office 2016, we’re updating the Office suite for the modern workplace, with smart tools for individuals, teams, and businesses.
Official GA of Dell with Nutanix!! – #Dell, #Nutanix, #IaaS, #Web-Scale
It’s official! Finally! 😀
WEB-SCALE CONVERGED APPLIANCE
This disruptive solution integrates Dell PowerEdge servers, storage, and Nutanix software to create a scalable, simple, and easy-to-deploy, Web-scale appliance.
WHAT IS WEB-SCALE?
Web-scale is a transformative approach to buying, deploying and managing infrastructure. Pioneered by Internet companies, now available to enterprises. Benefits include:
- Predictable scale: Scale with the needs of your business, one node at a time
- Business agility: Deploy within an hour, update latest software within minutes, and shorten business processes
- Low total cost of ownership: Reduce upfront and ongoing costs by automating processes and spending less time trouble shooting
DELL XC SERIES
Meet the Dell XC Web-scale Converged Appliance – With Software by Nutanix.
FORRESTER REPORT
Forrester Research Evaluates the Web-scale Converged Appliance from Dell and Nutanix.
Read more here!
GARTNER REPORT
Why Your Legacy Storage Vendor Doesn’t Want You to Adopt Web-scale IT Infrastructure.
//Richard
Azure ExpressRoute is a really cool and important feature – #Microsoft, #Azure, #ExpressRoute
Everyone talks about the “cloud” and how you can leverage all the benefits or a public, private or hybrid cloud model. And one challenge and huge risks that enterprises see with moving into a public cloud like Azure is the dependency to the public Internet.
Is the connection secure, stable, available and how can you determine that I have the connectivity between my on-premise stuff and Azure..?
It’s here where I think that Microsoft really has made a HUGE step towards getting more traction with the larger enterprises with the new ExpressRoute feature! Now you can get your own dedicated connection to Azure through it’s partner network of service providers like AT&T and Verizon etc.!
Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute lets you create private connections between Azure datacenters and infrastructure that’s on your premises or in a co-location environment. With ExpressRoute, you can establish connections to Azure at an ExpressRoute partner co-location facility or directly connect to Azure from your existing WAN network (such as a MPLS VPN provided by a Network Service Provider). Read more…
#Nutanix is the Visionary leader in #Gartner magic quadrant! – #IaaS, #PaaS, #DaaS, #Storage, #Converged
I’m not surprised at all and think that this is a good report by Gartner!
Nutanix is absolutely the visionary leader and once more and more units are shipped they will also climb higher into the leaders section and totally rule! I must say that this is a really impressive product that truly is web-scale ready for SMB to large enterprise workloads!! Contact us at EnvokeIT if you need more details! We know the product and how it can deliver value to you!
The integrated system market is growing at 50% or more per year, creating an unusual mix of major vendors and startups to consider. This new Magic Quadrant will aid vendor selection in this dynamic sector.
Nutanix has close working relationships with multiple top software vendors, and workloads like VDI, Hadoop and DBMS servers are well-represented among the installed base. Maximum neutrality is a major focus for Nutanix, as it works to build trust across a wide variety of vendors. The vendor frequently targets specific workload needs to penetrate new accounts, and then expands the workload reach to compete with incumbent vendors as client confidence is built. Nutanix claims that 50% of first-time clients expand their configurations within six months (and 70% do so within 12 months).
Market Definition/Description
Integrated systems are combinations of server, storage and network infrastructure, sold with management software that facilitates the provisioning and management of the combined unit. The market for integrated systems can be subdivided into broad categories, some of which overlap. Gartner categorizes these classes of integrated systems (among others):
- Integrated stack systems (ISS) — Server, storage and network hardware integrated with application software to provide appliance or appliancelike functionality. Examples include Oracle Exadata Database Machine, IBM PureApplication System and Teradata.
- Integrated infrastructure systems (IIS) — Server, storage and network hardware integrated to provide shared compute infrastructure. Examples include VCE Vblock, HP ConvergedSystem and IBM PureFlex System.
- Integrated reference architectures — Products in which a predefined, presized set of components are designated as options for an integrated system whereby the user and/or channel can make configuration choices between the predefined options. These may be based on an IIS or ISS (with additional software, or services to facilitate easier deployment). Other forms of reference architecture, such as EMC VSPEX, allow vendors to group separate server, storage and network elements from a menu of eligible options to create an integrated system experience. Most reference architectures are, therefore, based on a partnership between hardware and software vendors, or between multiple hardware vendors. However, reference architectures that support a variety of hardware ingredients are more difficult to assess versus packaged integrated systems, which is why they are not evaluated by this research.
- Fabric-based computing (FBC) — A form of integrated system in which the overall platform is aggregated from separate (or disaggregated) building-block modules connected over a fabric or switched backplane. Unlike the majority of IIS and ISS solutions, which group and package existing technology elements in a fabric-enabled environment, the technology ingredients of an FBC solution will be designed solely around the fabric implementation model. So all FBCs are an example of either an IIS or an ISS; but most IIS and ISS solutions available today would not yet be eligible to be counted as an FBC. Examples include SimpliVity, Nutanix and HP Moonshot System.
Read the whole Gartner Magic Quadrant for Integrated Systems here!
//Richard
Why huge IaaS/PaaS/DaaS providers don’t use Dell and HP, and why they can do VDI cheaper than you! – via @brianmadden
Yes, why do people and organisations still think that they can build IaaS/PaaS/DaaS services within their enterprise’s and believe that they will be able to do so with the “same old architecture” and components used before? It’s not going to be comparable to the bigger players that are using newer and more scalable architectures with cheaper components.
Enterprises just don’t have that innovation power that companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon has! And if they do then most of the time they are stuck in their old way of doing things from a service delivery point of view, stopping them from thinking outside of the box though the service delivery organisation isn’t ready for it..
This is a great blog post on this from Brian, great work!!
Last month I wrote that it’s not possible for you to build VDI cheaper than a huge DaaS provider like Amazon can sell it to you. Amazon can literally sell you DaaS and make a profit all for less than it costs you to actually build and operate an equivalent VDI system on your own. (“Equivalent” is the key word there. Some have claimed they can do it cheaper, but they’re achieving that by building in-house systems with lower capabilities than what the DaaS providers offer.)
One of the reasons huge providers can build VDI cheaper than you is because they’re doing it at scale. While we all understand the economics of buying servers by the container instead of by the rack, there’s more to it than that when it comes to huge cloud provider. Their datacenters are not crammed full of HP or Dell’s latest rack mount, blade, or Moonshot servers; rather, they’re stacked floor-to-ceiling with heaps of circuit boards you’d hardly recognize as “servers” at all.
Building Amazon’s, Google’s, and Facebook’s “servers”
For most corporate datacenters, rack-mounted servers from vendors like Dell and HP make sense. They’re efficient in that they’re modular, manageable, and interchangeable. If you take the top cover off a 1U server, it looks like everything is packed in there. On the scale of a few dozen racks managed by IT pros who have a million other things on their mind, these servers work wonderfully!
Making #OpenStack Grizzly Deployments Less Hairy – #Puppet, #PuppetLabs
Today, I’m excited to announce a new module from Puppet Labs for OpenStack Grizzly. I’ve been working on this module with the goal of demonstrating how to simplify OpenStack deployments by identifying their independent components and customizing them for your environment.
The puppetlabs-grizzly module is a multi-node deployment of OpenStack built on the puppetlabs-openstack modules. There are two core differences in how it handles deploying OpenStack resources. First, it uses a “roles and profiles” model. Roles allow you to identify a node’s function, and profiles are the components that describe that role. For example, a typical controller node is composed of messaging, database and API profiles. Roles and profiles allow you to clearly define what a node does with a role, while being flexible enough to mix profiles to compose new roles.
The second difference is that the module leverages Hiera, a database that allows you to store configuration settings in a hierarchy of text files. Hiera can use Facter facts about a given node to set values for module parameters, rather than storing those values in the module itself. If you have to change a network setting or password, Hiera allows you to change it in your Hiera text file hierarchy, rather than changing it in the module.
Check out parts 1 and 2 of the demo, which walks you through how to deploy OpenStack with the puppetlabs-grizzly module.
Multi-node OpenStack Grizzly with Puppet Enterprise: Deployment (Part 1 of 2)
The IT Melting Pot! 