Migrating Sitecore 7.0 to Azure IaaS Virtual Machines – Part 1

26th of March, 2015 / / 1 Comment

INTRODUCTION

Recently, I had the opportunity of working on a Sitecore migration project. I was tasked with moving a third-party hosted Sitecore 7.0 instance to Azure IaaS. The task sounds simple enough but if only life was that simple. A new requirement was to improve upon the existing infrastructure by making the new Sitecore environment highly available and the fun begins right there.

To give some context, the CURRENT Sitecore environment is not highly available and has the following server topology:

  • Single Sitecore Content Delivery (CD) Instance
  • Single Sitecore Content Management (CM) Instance
  • Single SQL Server 2008 Instance for Sitecore Content and Configurations
  • Single SQL Server 2008 Instance for Sitecore Analytics

The NEW Sitecore Azure environment is highly available and has the following server topology:

  • Load-balanced Sitecore CD Instances (2 servers)
  • Single Sitecore CM Instance (single server)
  • SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn Availability Group (AAG) for Sitecore Content (2 servers)
  • SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn Availability Group (AAG) for Sitecore Analytics (2 servers)

In this tutorial I will walk you through the processes required to provision a brand new Azure environment and migrate Sitecore.… [Keep reading] “Migrating Sitecore 7.0 to Azure IaaS Virtual Machines – Part 1”

Hands Free VM Management with Azure Automation and Resource Manager – Part 2

17th of March, 2015 / / 3 Comments

In this two part series, I am looking at how we can leverage Azure Automation and Azure Resource Manager to schedule the shutting down of tagged Virtual Machines in Microsoft Azure.

  • In Part 1 we walked through tagging resources using the Azure Resource Manager PowerShell module
  • In Part 2 we will setup Azure Automation to schedule a runbook to execute nightly and shutdown tagged resources.

Azure Automation Runbook

At the time of writing, the tooling support around Azure Automation can be politely described as a hybrid one.… [Keep reading] “Hands Free VM Management with Azure Automation and Resource Manager – Part 2”

Microsoft Azure Pricing Calculator

16th of March, 2015 / / 5 Comments

Originally posted in Lucian’s blog over at lucian.blog.

Whether you’re wanting to deploy a new workload in Microsoft Azure, wanting to extend an existing workload via a hybrid scenario or like me wanting to use Azure outside of work to gain more knowledge and experience, the pay-as-you-go charge model can often times intimidate and even deter many from using a cloud service like Azure. From a lab or dev point of view, it is all well and good to dabble in Azure at the various tiers of engagement, but at the end of the day you could be left with a credit card bill allot larger than expected. Enter the Microsoft Azure Pricing Calculator where you can accurately estimate your potential usage for any given service.

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Azure’s G Series VMs – Prime Compute Only One Click Away!

11th of March, 2015 / / 3 Comments

I’m going to start this blog post by making one thing clear. My intent in writing this post is light-hearted – I had some spare time on my hands over a lunch break and I wondered what I could do with it. The result was this blog post :).

Ever since Microsoft announced their G Series Virtual Machines for Azure I’ve been looking for a good reason to fire one up and kick the tyres. Today while I was skimming through my Twitter feed I came across a tweet showing the time it took to calculate the trillionth prime number on a 16 vCPU Linux instance running on GCP.… [Keep reading] “Azure’s G Series VMs – Prime Compute Only One Click Away!”

Hands Free VM Management with Azure Automation and Resource Manager – Part 1

9th of March, 2015 / / 4 Comments

Over the past six months, Microsoft have launched a number of features in Azure to enable you to better manage your resources hosted there.

In this two part series, I will show how we can leverage two of these new features – Azure Automation and Azure Resource Manager – to schedule the shutting down of tagged Virtual Machines in Microsoft Azure.

  • In Part 1 we will walk through tagging resources using the Azure Resource Manager features and
  • In Part 2 we will setup Azure Automation to schedule a runbook to execute nightly and shutdown tagged VM resources.
… [Keep reading] “Hands Free VM Management with Azure Automation and Resource Manager – Part 1”

Mule ESB DEV/TEST environments in Microsoft Azure

16th of February, 2015 / / No Comments

Agility in delivery of IT services is what cloud computing is all about. Week in, week out, projects on-board and wind-up, developers come and go. This places enormous stress on IT teams with limited resourcing and infrastructure capacity to provision developer and test environments. Leveraging public cloud for integration DEV/TEST environments is not without its challenges though. How do we develop our interfaces in the cloud yet retain connectivity to our on-premises line-of-business systems?

In this post I will demonstrate how we can use Microsoft Azure to run Mule ESB DEV/TEST environments using point-to-site VPNs for connectivity between on-premises DEV resources and our servers in the cloud.… [Keep reading] “Mule ESB DEV/TEST environments in Microsoft Azure”

Kloud develops online learning portal for leading education organisation

8th of January, 2015 / / No Comments

Customer Overview

Catholic Education South Australia (CESA) is made up of the South Australian Commission for Catholic Schools (SACCS), Catholic Education Office of South Australia (CEO) and 103 Catholic schools across South Australia. The organisation comprises 6,000 staff who care for more than 48,000 students.

Business Situation

Catholic Education South Australia recently made the decision to offer the capabilities of Office 365 to its 103 schools across the state (including Exchange email, Lync, SharePoint and Office on Demand).… [Keep reading] “Kloud develops online learning portal for leading education organisation”

Using a Proxy with Azure AD Sync Services

19th of December, 2014 / / 3 Comments

In this blog I am going to cover some tips and tricks for using Azure AD Sync Services with a proxy… including the specific URLs required for whitelisting, the proxy settings used during the installation, configuration and running of the tool, and a workaround for apps that do not support authenticating proxies.

URL Whitelisting

It is generally recommended to whitelist all the Office 365 URLs to bypass proxy infrastructure as this provides the best performance and avoids issues with applications that are not compatible with an authenticating proxies (OneDrive for Business client installations, Exchange Hybrid services, Azure AD Sync Services and so on…).… [Keep reading] “Using a Proxy with Azure AD Sync Services”

Installing WordPress in a Sub-Folder on Azure Websites

27th of November, 2014 / / 7 Comments

This blog post shows you how to install a wordpress website in a sub-folder on your Azure website. Now somebody would ask why would I need to do that, and that is a good question, so let me start with the reasons:

Why do it this way?

Assume that you have a website and you want to create a blog section. This is a very common practice and most companies nowadays have a blog section of the website (which replaces the old “news” page).… [Keep reading] “Installing WordPress in a Sub-Folder on Azure Websites”