Getting Started with Office 365 Video

21st of November, 2014 / / 1 Comment

Starting Tuesday November 18 Microsoft started rolling out Office 365 Video to customers who have opted in to the First Release programme (if you haven’t you will need to wait a little longer!)

Kloud has built video solutions on Office 365 in the past so it’s great to see Microsoft deliver this as a native feature of SharePoint Online – and one that leverages the underlying power of Azure Media Services capabilities for video cross-encoding and dynamic packaging.… [Keep reading] “Getting Started with Office 365 Video”

IoT – Solar & Azure

18th of November, 2014 / / 6 Comments

Ever since we got our solar system installed about two years ago, I’ve been keeping track of the total power generated by the system. Every month I would write down the totals and add it to my Excel spreadsheet. Although it’s not much work, it’s still manual work… yes all 2 minutes every month.

So when the whole “Internet of Things” discussion started at our office (see Matt’s blog “Azure Mobile Services and the Internet of Things“) I thought it would be a good opportunity to look at doing this using Azure – even if it was only to prove the IoT concept.… [Keep reading] “IoT – Solar & Azure”

Migrating Azure Virtual Machines to another Region

16th of November, 2014 / / 11 Comments

I have a number of DEV/TEST Virtual Machines (VMs) deployed to Azure Regions in Southeast Asia (Singapore) and West US as these were the closet to those of us living in Australia. Now that the new Azure Regions in Australia have been launched, it’s time to start migrating those VMs closer to home. Manually moving VMs between Regions is pretty straight forward and a number of articles already exist outlining the manual steps.

To migrate an Azure VM to another Region

  1. Shutdown the VM in the source Region
  2. Copy the underlying VHDs to storage accounts in the new Region
  3. Create OS and Data disks in the new Region
  4. Re-create the VM in the new Region.
… [Keep reading] “Migrating Azure Virtual Machines to another Region”

Australia’s leading wholesale distribution company transforms IT with Office 365

13th of November, 2014 / / No Comments

Customer Overview

Metcash is one of Australia’s leading wholesale distribution and marketing companies, specialising in grocery, fresh produce, liquor, hardware and automotive parts and accessories.

Business Situation

Metcash required the transition of a number of on-premises workloads to a cloud based service to alleviate infrastructure, support and performance issues experienced by the organisation.

Metcash evaluated several alternative SaaS options and requested to roll-out the Microsoft Office 365 suite of products in the form of a technology pilot.… [Keep reading] “Australia’s leading wholesale distribution company transforms IT with Office 365”

Get Azure Virtual Networks with PowerShell

11th of November, 2014 / / 6 Comments

I needed to make my life easier the other day as a colleague and I worked through setting up a Azure IaaS network topology to connect to an enterprise production network. One of our clients requirements meant that whilst we created the network sites, subnets and segments we needed to report on what we had created to verify it was correct. This simple task of viewing network names and associated subnets is currently missing from the Azure cmdlets, so we have pieced together this quick bit of re-usable code.… [Keep reading] “Get Azure Virtual Networks with PowerShell”

Secure Azure Virtual Network and create DMZ on Azure VNET using Network Security Groups (NSG)

7th of November, 2014 / / 20 Comments

At TechEd Europe 2014, Microsoft announced the General Availability of Network Security Groups (NSGs) which add security feature to Azure’s Virtual Networking capability. Network Security Groups provides Access Control on Azure Virtual Network and the feature that is very compelling from security point of view. NSG is one of the feature Enterprise customers have been waiting for.

What are Network Security Groups and how to use them?

Network Security Groups allow us to control traffic (ingress and egress) on our Azure VNET using rules we define and provide segmentation within VNET by applying Network Security Groups to our subnet as well as Access Control to VMs.… [Keep reading] “Secure Azure Virtual Network and create DMZ on Azure VNET using Network Security Groups (NSG)”

Deploy an Ultra High Availability MVC Web App on Microsoft Azure – Part 2

4th of November, 2014 / / 2 Comments

In the first post in this series we setup our scenario and looked at how we can build out an ultra highly available Azure SQL Database layer for our applications. In this second post we’ll go through setting up the MVC Web Application we want to deploy so that it can leverage the capabilities of the Azure platform.

MVC project changes

This is actually pretty straight forward – you can take the sample MVC project from Codeplex and apply these changes easily.… [Keep reading] “Deploy an Ultra High Availability MVC Web App on Microsoft Azure – Part 2”

Deploy an Ultra High Availability MVC Web App on Microsoft Azure – Part 1

3rd of November, 2014 / / 2 Comments

As public cloud platforms such as Microsoft Azure mature it is becoming easier to build deployment architectures that are substantially resilient to faults in cloud platforms that are increasingly unlikely to ever eventuate due to the previously mentioned maturity!

We’ll take a look at how we can deploy an ultra highly available database-backed ASP.Net MVC Website using Microsoft Azure across this post and my next one.

Desired State

The diagram below shows what we will be aiming to achieve with our setup.… [Keep reading] “Deploy an Ultra High Availability MVC Web App on Microsoft Azure – Part 1”

Azure VM Security using Azure VM Security Extensions, ConfigMgr and SCM Part 2

31st of October, 2014 / / 1 Comment

This post is part of the series. Part 1 can be found here. As I mentioned on previous post, this post to wrap up my session at TechEd Sydney 2014 DCI315 Azure VM Security ad Compliance Management with Configuration Manager and SCM.

Let’s jump to our next focus:

Patch Azure VM

ConfigMgr  is long famous for its capability for patch management. Three points on how the patch management lifecycle is running with ConfigMgr 2012 R2 for our Azure VMs:

  • Scan and Measure
    Scan&Measure
  • Remediate Non-Compliant – Patch the non-compliant
  • Reporting
    reportdefinition

Patch is straight forward and utilize ADR (Automatic Deployment Rules) to set schedule update/patch.… [Keep reading] “Azure VM Security using Azure VM Security Extensions, ConfigMgr and SCM Part 2”

Azure VM Security using Azure VM Security Extensions, ConfigMgr and SCM Part 1

30th of October, 2014 / / 1 Comment

This post to wrap up my session at TechEd Sydney 2014 : DCI315 Azure VM Security and Compliance Management with Configuration Manager and SCM.

In this blog post series we will dispell some of the myths and dive into Azure VM Security.

With Azure AU Geo launched on TechEd Sydney 2014, Azure now has 19 Regions. More and more enterprises start migrating their workloads into Azure. Most of our clients have the same question – How do we manage security and compliance on Azure VM?… [Keep reading] “Azure VM Security using Azure VM Security Extensions, ConfigMgr and SCM Part 1”