Viewing AWS CloudFormation and bootstrap logs in CloudWatch

30th of August, 2016 / / No Comments

Mature cloud platforms such as AWS and Azure have simplified infrastructure provisioning with toolsets such as CloudFormation and Azure Resource Manager (ARM) to provide an easy way to create and manage a collection of related infrastructure resources. Both tool sets allow developers and system administrators to use JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) to specify resources to provision, as well as provide the means to bootstrap systems, effectively allowing for single click fully configured environment deployments.

While these toolsets are an excellent means to prevent RSI from performing repetitive monotonous tasks, the initial writing and testing of templates and scripts can be incredibly time consuming.… [Keep reading] “Viewing AWS CloudFormation and bootstrap logs in CloudWatch”

How to quickly recover from a FAILED AzureRM Virtual Machine using Powershell

25th of August, 2016 / / 3 Comments

Problem

I have a development sandpit in Azure which I use quite a lot to test and mess with different ideas and concepts. This week when shutting it down things didn’t go that smoothly. All but one virtual machine finally stopped and de-allocated, but one virtual machine just didn’t make it. I tried resizing the VM. I tried changing the configuration of it and obviously tried starting it up many times via the portal and Powershell all without any success.… [Keep reading] “How to quickly recover from a FAILED AzureRM Virtual Machine using Powershell”

Migrating resources from AWS to Microsoft Azure

22nd of August, 2016 / / 1 Comment

Kloud receives a lot of communications in relation to the work we do and the content we publish on our blog. My colleague Hugh Badini recently published a blog about Azure deployment models from which we received the following legitimate follow up question…

So, Murali, thanks for letting us know you’d like to know more about this… consider this blog a starting point :).… [Keep reading] “Migrating resources from AWS to Microsoft Azure”

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”

AWS CloudFormation AWS::RDS::OptionGroup Unknown option: Mirroring

17th of August, 2016 / / No Comments

Amazon recently announced Multi-AZ support for SQL Server in Sydney, which provides high availability for SQL RDS instances using SQL Server mirroring technology. In an effort to make life simpler for myself, I figured I’d write a CloudFormation template for future provisioning requests, however it wasn’t as straight forward as I’d expected.

I began by trying to guess my way through the JSON resources, based on what I’d already knew for MySQL deployments. I figured the MultiAZ property was still relevant, so I hacked together a template and attempted to provision the stack, which failed, indicating the following error:

CREATE_FAILED        |  Invalid Parameter Combination: MultiAZ property cannot be used with SQL Server DB instances, use the Mirroring option in an option group associated with the DB instance instead.… [Keep reading] “AWS CloudFormation AWS::RDS::OptionGroup Unknown option: Mirroring”

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”

Create a Cloud Strategy For Your Business

15th of August, 2016 / / 1 Comment

Let’s be clear, today’s cloud as a vehicle for robust and flexible enterprise grade IT is here and it’s here to stay. Figures published by IDG Research’s 2015 Enterprise Cloud Computing Survey predict that in 2016 25% of total enterprise IT budgets will be allocated to cloud computing.

They also reported that the average cloud spend for all the enterprises surveyed would reach 2.87M in the following year and that 72% of enterprises have at least one application running in the cloud already, compared to 57% in 2012.… [Keep reading] “Create a Cloud Strategy For Your Business”

Performance Tuning Ubuntu Server For Use in Azure cloud

8th of August, 2016 / / 3 Comments

The following describes how to performance tune Ubuntu Server virtual machines for use in Azure. Although this article focuses on Ubuntu Server because it’s better established in Azure at this time. It’s worth mentioning that Debian offers better performance and stability overall, albeit at the cost of some of the more recent functionality support available in Ubuntu. Regardless many of the optimizations discussed below apply equally to both although commands and settings may vary occasionally.

Best practice recommendations from Microsoft.… [Keep reading] “Performance Tuning Ubuntu Server For Use in Azure cloud”

Azure Deployment Models And How To Migrate From ASM to ARM

4th of August, 2016 / / 9 Comments

This is a post about the two deployment models currently available in Azure, Service Management (ASM) and Resource Manager (ARM). And how to migrate from one to the other if necessary.

About the Azure Service Management deployment model

The ASM model, also known as version 1 and Classic mode, started out as a web interface and a backend API for the PaaS services Azure opened with at launch.

Features

  1. ASM deployments are based on an XML schema.
… [Keep reading] “Azure Deployment Models And How To Migrate From ASM to ARM”