Azure VM troubleshooting – part 1

It’s very easy to spin up new servers in Azure but what if one of those machines starts playing up? Gone are the days of F8’s, booting into safe mode or console access. Over the last couple of weeks I lost the ability to RDP into several virtual machines. Some of these machines were still pingable but no RDP, others didn’t respond at all. From within the portal the VM would still show a status of “Running”.… [Keep reading] “Azure VM troubleshooting – part 1”

Add workdays and public holidays to your Azure Automation runbooks

Azure Automation runbooks are a great way to automate various aspects of your Azure environment. Probably the task it is used for the most (at least at the moment) is starting and stopping a virtual machine or a bunch of vms on a schedule. The runbook scripts take care of the “powering on” or “shutting down”. Adding a schedule to these scripts is a great way to save cost by only running virtual machines when they are required.… [Keep reading] “Add workdays and public holidays to your Azure Automation runbooks”

IoT – Solar & Azure

Ever since we got our solar system installed about two years ago, I’ve been keeping track of the total power generated by the system. Every month I would write down the totals and add it to my Excel spreadsheet. Although it’s not much work, it’s still manual work… yes all 2 minutes every month.

So when the whole “Internet of Things” discussion started at our office (see Matt’s blog “Azure Mobile Services and the Internet of Things“) I thought it would be a good opportunity to look at doing this using Azure – even if it was only to prove the IoT concept.… [Keep reading] “IoT – Solar & Azure”

Exchange 365 – Transport Rules & Distribution Groups

One of our customers is transitioning from on premise Exchange 2010 to a hybrid Exchange 365 (wave 15) environment and user management for Office 365 done through on premise Active Directory. Customer had quite a few transport rules setup up which needed to be migrated. This worked fine except for the rules using a “redirect the message to” action using a distribution group.

The error displayed in Exchange 365 generated is: The transport rule can’t be created because TR-Marketing@Company.com,[Keep reading] “Exchange 365 – Transport Rules & Distribution Groups”