Azure Preview Features website

31st of July, 2015 / / No Comments

I had stumbled upon this site before, however, on my long journey through the interwebs I must have forgotten or lost it. The site I’m referring to is the Azure Preview Features site which isn’t directly accessible through the main Azure site top or bottom menu’s. So as this is a lucky find, I thought I’d share.

(Note: If you Google Azure preview; the site is the first result that comes up. Face palm?)

The Azure Feature Preview site is a list of current publicly accessible preview features and functionality. Moreover, Microsoft explain that the preview features in Azure are as follows:

Azure currently offers the following preview features, which are made available to you for evaluation purposes and subject to reduced or different service terms, as set forth in your service agreement and the preview supplemental terms. Azure may include preview, beta, or other pre-release features, services, software, or regions to obtain customer feedback (“Previews”). Previews are made available to you on the condition that you agree to these terms of use, which supplement your agreement governing use of Microsoft Azure.

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Azure VNET gateway: basic, standard and high performance

23rd of July, 2015 / / 6 Comments

Originally posted @ Lucian.Blog. Follow Lucian on twitter @Lucianfrango.

I’ve been working a lot with Azure virtual network (VNET) virtual private network (VPN) gateways of late. The project I’m working on at the moment requires two sites to connect to a multi-site dynamic routing VPN gateway in Azure. This is for redundancy when connecting to the Azure cloud as there is a dedicated link between the two branch sites.

Setting up a multi-site VPN is a relatively streamlined process and Matt Davies has written a great article on how to run through that process via the Azure portal on the Kloud blog.

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ADFS sign-in error: “An error occurred. Contact your administrator for more information.”

22nd of July, 2015 / / 4 Comments

Originally posted @ Lucian.Blog. Follow Lucian on twitter @Lucianfrango.

I’ve not had that much luck deploying Azure AD Connect and ADFS 3.0 in Azure for a client in the last few weeks. After some networking woes I’ve moved onto the server provisioning and again got stuck. Now, I know IT is not meant to be easy otherwise there wouldn’t be some of the salaries paid out to the best and brightest, this install though was simple and nothing out of the ordinary. A standard deployment that I and many others have done before.

Let me paint the picture: ADFS is now running, although not working, in Azure compute across a load balanced set of two servers with a further load balanced set of web application proxy (WAP) servers in front. Theres two domain controllers and a AAD Connect server all across a couple of subnets in a VNET.

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AWS Direct Connect in Australia via Equinix Cloud Exchange

21st of July, 2015 / / 5 Comments

I discussed Azure ExpressRoute via Equinix Cloud Exchange (ECX) in my previous blog. In this post I am going to focus on AWS Direct Connect which ECX also provides. This means you can share the same physical link (1GBps or 10GBps) between Azure and AWS!

ECX also provides connectivity service to AWS for connection speed less than 1GBps. AWS Direct Connect provides dedicated, private connectivity between your WAN or datacenter and AWS services such as AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).… [Keep reading] “AWS Direct Connect in Australia via Equinix Cloud Exchange”

Azure AD Connect: Connect Service error “stopped-extension-dll-exception”

21st of July, 2015 / / 8 Comments

Originally posted @ Lucian.Blog. Follow Lucian on twitter @Lucianfrango.

I was rather stuck the other day. Azure AD Connect provisioning has not been the smoothest of installs even following the wizard and successfully completing the mostly automated process. Azure AD Connect has built upon the previous generation sync services and, from what I’ve read, isn’t much of a new app, rather a version upgrade and re-name from the AADSync service still (as of July 2015) the default for Office 365 directory replication from on-premises to Azure AD.

Past versions and previous generation aside, a now generally available app should feature a working and thoroughly tested feature set. Should…

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How to provision Azure Active Directory Connect

20th of July, 2015 / / 33 Comments

Originally posted @ Lucian.Blog. 

Time flies when you’re connecting to Azure AD. Late last month Microsoft announced that Azure AD Connect is now generally available. At the time of writing this, the synchronisation app itself still isn’t the default sync standard for Azure and obtaining the installer requires a quick Google. Since I’m deploying it for a client, I thought I’d run through the install process for future reference.

AADConnect provides allot of new functionality like for example this new fandangled ADDS password sync. In this scenario I’m keeping federation services, so ADFS will be deployed, which is more aligned with the previous or most common enterprise identity design.

This is going to be a long blog post with allot of screen shots (you’re welcome) on how to deploy Azure AD Connect. I’ll be going though the wizard process which will follow the automated process to deploy AADConnect, ADFS and ADFS WAP servers- pretty cool indeed.

At the moment AADConnect still isn’t the standard synchronisation service for Office 365 or Azure AD and requires download from the Microsoft Download Centre. To begin with, I’ve downloaded the AADConnect installer from this location.

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Azure ExpressRoute in Australia via Equinix Cloud Exchange

1st of July, 2015 / / 4 Comments

Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute provides dedicated, private circuits between your WAN or datacentre and private networks you build in the Microsoft Azure public cloud. There are two types of ExpressRoute connections – Network (NSP) based and Exchange (IXP) based with each allowing us to extend our infrastructure by providing connectivity that is:

  • Private: the circuit is isolated using industry-standard VLANs – the traffic never traverses the public Internet when connecting to Azure VNETs and, when using the public peer, even Azure services with public endpoints such as Storage and Azure SQL Database.
… [Keep reading] “Azure ExpressRoute in Australia via Equinix Cloud Exchange”

Azure MFA Server – International Deployment

1st of July, 2015 / / 2 Comments

Hi all – this blog will cover off some information to assist with multilingual/international deployment of Azure MFA server. There are some nuances of the product that make ongoing management of language preferences a little challenging. Also some MFA Methods are preferable to others in international scenarios due to carrier variances.

Language Preferences

Ideally when a user is on-boarded, their language preferences for the various MFA Methods should be configured to their native language. This can easily be achieved using MFA Server, however there are some things to know:

  1. Language settings are defined in in Synchronisation Items.
… [Keep reading] “Azure MFA Server – International Deployment”

Azure Active Directory Connect high-availability using ‘Staging Mode’

25th of June, 2015 / / 11 Comments

With the Azure Active Directory Connect product (AAD Connect) being announced as generally available to the market (more here, download here), there is a new feature available that will provide a greater speed of recovery of the AAD Sync component. This feature was not available with the previous AAD Sync or DirSync tools and there is little information about it available in the community, so hopefully this model can be considered for your synchronisation design.… [Keep reading] “Azure Active Directory Connect high-availability using ‘Staging Mode’”