Do It Yourself Cloud Accelerator – Part III Scaling Out

22nd of October, 2014 / / 3 Comments

There’s recently been some interest in the space of accelerating Office 365 SharePoint Online traffic for organisations and for good reason. All it takes is a CEO to send out an email to All Staff with a link to a movie hosted in SharePoint Online to create some interest in better ways to serve content internally. There are commercial solutions to this problem, but they are, well… commercial (read expensive). Now that the basic functionality has been proven using existing Windows Server components, what would it take to put into production?… [Keep reading] “Do It Yourself Cloud Accelerator – Part III Scaling Out”

Fix: Azure Cloud Services Error: No deployments were found. Http Status Code: NotFound

21st of October, 2014 / / 1 Comment

If you find yourself having to move existing .Net solutions to Microsoft Azure you may come across an initial deployment issue if you add a Cloud Service Project type to your existing application and then publish it to a new Azure Cloud Service using Visual Studio. It’s not immediately obvious what the source of the issue is so let’s take a look at how we can troubleshoot the source of the problem.

Visual Studio provides you with the vanilla error message “Error: No deployments were found.… [Keep reading] “Fix: Azure Cloud Services Error: No deployments were found. Http Status Code: NotFound”

Fix: unable to delete an Azure Storage Container due to a lease.

20th of October, 2014 / / 8 Comments

A quick tip for anyone who gets stuck when trying to delete an Azure Blob Storage Container that appears to be empty but upon deletion generates the following helpful error message

There is currently a lease on the container and no lease ID was specified in the request…

You’ve looked and there are no VHD or other objects appearing in this Container and you have found that you are unable to change the lease settings on the Container (yes, you can read them but you can’t update or remove them).… [Keep reading] “Fix: unable to delete an Azure Storage Container due to a lease.”

Manage Azure Resources Using Tags

14th of October, 2014 / / 4 Comments

A feature request for quite some time in the Microsoft Azure space has been the ability to group individual resources such as websites and databases so that they can be grouped and managed as part of a single solution or system. In this post we’ll take a look at what has been introduced so far through 2014 to meet these needs.

Say Hello to Azure Resource Manager

The first piece of the solution to these requests was the introduction of the Azure Resource Manager (ARM) way back at Build 2014 along with the new Azure Preview Portal which offers support for Resource Groups.… [Keep reading] “Manage Azure Resources Using Tags”

Deploy Hardened HA-Proxy Azure VM from VM Depot (Microsoft Open Technologies)

10th of October, 2014 / / No Comments

In this post, we will discuss how to deploy various VM image developed by community from VM Depot (Microsoft Open Technologies).

Microsoft Azure Cross Platform Command Line (X-Plat CLI)

I blogged Microsoft Azure Cross Platform Command Line previously. This post will continue to explore Microsoft dedication on Open-Source technologies.

Firstly let’s prepare quickly our tools to run Azure X-Plat CLI:

1. I am using my Windows machine. I run my Azure Command Prompt or You can use node.js… [Keep reading] “Deploy Hardened HA-Proxy Azure VM from VM Depot (Microsoft Open Technologies)”

How to create custom images for use in Microsoft Azure

10th of September, 2014 / / No Comments

In this post I will discuss how we can create custom virtual machine images and deploy them to the Microsoft Azure platform. To complete this process you will need an Azure Subscription, the Azure PowerShell module installed and a pre-prepared VHD which you would like to use (VHDX is not supported at present.)

You can sign up for a free trial of Microsoft Azure here if you don’t currently hold a subscription.

Completing this process will allow you take advantage of platforms which aren’t offered “out of the box” on Microsoft Azure eg, Server 2003 and Server 2008 for testing and development.… [Keep reading] “How to create custom images for use in Microsoft Azure”

How to fix 403 errors when managing Azure SQL Database from Visual Studio

8th of September, 2014 / / No Comments

I was recently trying to manage Azure SQL Databases via Visual Studio in a new Azure subscription and was unable to open the SQL Databases node at all and received the following error message.

Screenshot of Visual Studio error dialog.

The text reads:

Error 0: Failed to retrieve all server data for subscription ‘GUID’ due to error ‘Error code: 403 Message: The server failed to authenticate the request. Verify that the certificate is valid and is associated with this subscription.’.

and my Server Explorer window looked like this:

How Server Explorer Looked

I must admit that I don’t often manage my Azure assets via Visual Studio so it had been a while since I’d used this tooling.… [Keep reading] “How to fix 403 errors when managing Azure SQL Database from Visual Studio”

Highly Available SQL 2012 across Azure VNET (Part 2)

5th of August, 2014 / / 1 Comment

Part 1 can be found here.

In this Part 2 we will discuss:

  • Create DC on Azure and confirm VNET to VNET connectivity
  • SQL VMs
  • Configure WSFC and lastly configure AAG

DC and Connectivity VNET to VNET

First thing first, we need VMs for the Domain Controller (DC) and SQL Server 2012. I will use my script below to create few VMs

I created 2 DC , one on each VNET: AZSEDC001 and AZUSDC001
I registered both as DNS on Azure.… [Keep reading] “Highly Available SQL 2012 across Azure VNET (Part 2)”

Highly Available SQL 2012 across Azure VNET (Part 1: VNET Peering)

1st of August, 2014 / / 1 Comment

Just over a year Microsoft announced the support of SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability Groups (AAG) on Microsoft Azure IaaS. Last month, Microsoft announced the support of SQL AAG between Azure Regions. This is a great news for great technology like SQL Server 2012 for highly available and disaster recovery scenario. SQL AAG released in SQL 2012 and enhanced in SQL 2014. AAG will detect anomaly which will impact SQL availability. When We will discuss how to do this in two blog posts:

  • Part1: Design SQL 2012 AAG across Azure VNET and How to create Microsoft Azure VNET to VNET peering
  • Part2: SQL, WSFC, Configure Quorum and Voting (SQL) and Configure AAG

Part1 SQL 2012 AAG across Azure VNET SQL 2012 AAG is designed to provide high availability for SQL database and Azure IaaS is great place where this technology can live.… [Keep reading] “Highly Available SQL 2012 across Azure VNET (Part 1: VNET Peering)”

Static DIP Request, VIP Reservation on Microsoft Azure

18th of July, 2014 / / No Comments

 

Firstly, what is Azure VIP (Virtual IP address) and DIP (internal IP address assigned by Azure DHCP) on Microsoft Azure?

Microsoft Azure VM has two known IP addresses:

  • VIP: Public IP address pointing to Azure Cloud Service where VM is deployed. Every Cloud Service has a VIP and every Cloud Service can have several VMs. A VIP assigned to Cloud Service won’t be released until last VM on that Cloud Service is Stopped (De-allocated)
    or Deleted
  • DIP: Internal IP address assigned to the VM by Azure DHCP.
… [Keep reading] “Static DIP Request, VIP Reservation on Microsoft Azure”