Schedule Office 365 PowerShell Tasks Using Azure Automation

24th of August, 2016 / / 6 Comments

Anyone who has used Office 365 knows that just creating your users or syncing them via Azure AD Connect really isn’t enough; instead we almost always have to run scheduled PowerShell scripts to manage tasks such as adding licenses or enabling features, like litigation hold.

Usually I would run these scripts on a management server, or an Azure AD Connect server, but what do you do if you have no on-premises environment? Or no Windows VM’s in Azure?… [Keep reading] “Schedule Office 365 PowerShell Tasks Using Azure Automation”

Exchange in Azure: NIC disabled/in error state

22nd of August, 2016 / / No Comments

I recently had the need to build my own Exchange server within Azure and connect it to my Office 365 tenant.
I loosely followed the steps in this Microsoft article: https://technet.microsoft.com/library/mt733070(v=exchg.160).aspx to get my Azure (ARM) VMs and infrastructure deployed.

I initially decided to utilise an A1 Azure VM for my Exchange server to reduce my costs, however upon successfully installing Exchange it was extremely slow and basic things like EAC and creating mailboxes would not function correctly due to the lack of resources.… [Keep reading] “Exchange in Azure: NIC disabled/in error state”

Gracefully managing Gulp process hierarchy on Windows

17th of August, 2016 / / No Comments

Process Tree

When developing client side JavaScript, one thing that really comes in handy is the ability to create fully functional stubs that can mimic real server APIs. This decouples project development dependencies and allows different team members to work in parallel against an agreed API contract.

To allow people to have an isolated environment to work on and get immediate feedback on their changes, I leverage the Gulp.js + Node.js duo.

“Gulp.js is a task runner that runs on Node.js … [Keep reading] “Gracefully managing Gulp process hierarchy on Windows”

Image a Windows Virtual Machine In Azure, then Deploy And Join It To A Domain

17th of August, 2016 / / 4 Comments

The following Azure Resource Manager mode PowerShell will allow you to create an image of an existing Windows virtual machine in Azure, deploy it at will and join it to a domain if necessary.

Login to PowerShell

[code language=”powershell”]
Get-AzureSubscription
$SubID = "your-subscription-ID"
Login-AzureRMAccount
Select-AzureRmSubscription -SubscriptionId $SubID
[/code]

Create the virtual machine image

Run sysprep on the desired virtual machine in Azure.

[code language=”dos”]%windir%\system32\sysprep[/code]

When prompted for System Cleanup Action choose ‘Enter System Out of The Box Experience (OOBE)‘, Generalize and Shutdown from Shutdown Options.… [Keep reading] “Image a Windows Virtual Machine In Azure, then Deploy And Join It To A Domain”

Replicate Client OS to Azure with Azure Site Recovery

17th of August, 2016 / / 1 Comment

In this blog, I will discuss how you can replicate and eventually protect a client OS, e.g. Windows 7, Windows 8, or Windows 10 to Azure with the Azure Site Recovery (ASR), even if you don’t have an MSDN subscription.

Before we do so however, this blog will not go into detail on how to set up ASR. The steps are outlined on Microsoft’s Azure ASR website.

It may sound simple, and it really is, but there’s a catch into getting this done.… [Keep reading] “Replicate Client OS to Azure with Azure Site Recovery”

Connecting to and Using the Azure MFA Web Service SDK Server SOAP API with Powershell

16th of August, 2016 / / 10 Comments

Background

A colleague and I are validating a number of scenarios for a customer who is looking to deploy Azure MFA Server. One of the requirements from an Identity Management perspective is the ability to interact with the MFA Server for user information. That led us on the exploration of what was possible and how best to approach it.

The title of this post has pretty much given it away as to how. But why ?… [Keep reading] “Connecting to and Using the Azure MFA Web Service SDK Server SOAP API with Powershell”

Monitoring Azure WebJobs Health with Application Insights

11th of August, 2016 / / 11 Comments

Introduction

Azure WebJobs have been available for quite some time and have become very popular for running background tasks with programs or scripts. WebJobs are deployed as part of Azure App Services (Web Apps), which include their companion site Kudu. Kudu provides a lot of features, including a REST API, which provides operations for source code management (SCM), virtual file system, deployments, accessing logs, and for WebJob management as well. The Kudu WebJobs API provides different operations including listing WebJobs, uploading a WebJob, or triggering it.… [Keep reading] “Monitoring Azure WebJobs Health with Application Insights”

Setting up Always On Availability Groups for SQL Server in Azure

11th of August, 2016 / / 5 Comments

Almost all organisations rely on data, be it in the form of files or databases (SQL, Oracle…). The most challenging aspect of managing data for any organisation is high-availability and disaster recovery. Starting with the release of SQL Server 2012 (Enterprise Edition) Microsoft introduced “Always On Availability Groups”.

This powerful capability ensures your databases are synchronised through one or more replicas (SQL Servers).

While Azure offers an Infrastructure as a Service capability, the mechanisms used to setup many of the requirements for an Always On Availability Group are different to those in a traditional environment.… [Keep reading] “Setting up Always On Availability Groups for SQL Server in Azure”

Getting Users, Groups & Contacts via the Azure Graph API using Differential Query & PowerShell

11th of August, 2016 / / 1 Comment

This is the final post in a series detailing using PowerShell to leverage the Azure AD Graph API. For those catching up it started here introducing using PowerShell to access the Azure AD via the Graph API, licensing users in Azure AD via Powershell and the Graph API, and returning all objects using paging via Powershell and the Graph API.

In this post I show how to;

  • enumerate objects from Azure AD via Powershell and the Graph API, and set a delta change cookie
  • enumerate changes in Azure AD since the last query
  • return objects that have changed since the last query
  • return just the changed attributes on objects that have changed since the last query
  • get a differential sync from now delta change link

Searching through MSDN and other resources working this out I somehow stumbled upon a reference to changes in the API that detail the search filters.… [Keep reading] “Getting Users, Groups & Contacts via the Azure Graph API using Differential Query & PowerShell”

Enumerating all Users/Groups/Contacts in an Azure tenant using PowerShell and the Azure Graph API ‘odata.nextLink’ paging function

10th of August, 2016 / / 7 Comments

Recently I posted about using PowerShell and the Azure Active Directory Authentication Library to connect to Azure AD here. Whilst that post detailed performing simple tasks like updating an attribute on a user, in this post I’ll use the same method to connect to Azure AD via PowerShell but cover;

  • enumerate users, contacts or groups
  • where the number of objects is greater than the maximum results per page, get all remaining pages of results
  • limit results based on filters

The premise of my script was one that could just be executed without prompts.… [Keep reading] “Enumerating all Users/Groups/Contacts in an Azure tenant using PowerShell and the Azure Graph API ‘odata.nextLink’ paging function”