How to make a copy of a virtual machine running Windows in Azure

How to make a copy of a virtual machine running Windows in Azure

6th of October, 2016 / / No Comments

I was called upon recently to help a customer create copies of some of their Windows virtual machines. The idea was to quickly deploy copies of these hosts at any time as opposed to using a system image or point in time copy.
The following PowerShell will therefore allow you to make a copy or clone of a Windows virtual machine using a copy of it’s disks in Azure Resource Manager mode.

Create a new virtual machine from a copy of the disks of another

Having finalized the configuration of the source virtual machine the steps required are as follows.… [Keep reading] “How to make a copy of a virtual machine running Windows in Azure”

Automate ADFS Farm Installation and Configuration

27th of September, 2016 / / No Comments

Originally posted on Nivlesh’s blog @ nivleshc.wordpress.com

Introduction

In this multi-part blog, I will be showing how to automatically install and configure a new ADFS Farm. We will accomplish this using Azure Resource Manager templates, Desired State Configuration scripts and Custom Script Extensions.

Overview

We will use Azure Resource Manager to create a virtual machine that will become our first ADFS Server. We will then use a desired state configuration script to join the virtual machine to our Active Directory domain and to install the ADFS role.… [Keep reading] “Automate ADFS Farm Installation and Configuration”

Creating Organizational Units, and Groups in AD with GUID

27th of September, 2016 / / No Comments

A recent client of Kloud, wanted to have the chance to create new organizational units, and groups, automatically, with a unique ID (GUID) for each organizational unit. The groups created needed to share the GUID of the OU.

In this blog, I will demonstrate how you could achieve the aforementioned, through a simple PowerShell script, naturally.

Before you start however, you may have to run PowerShell (run as Administrator), and execute the following cmdlet:
Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned
This is to allow PowerShell scripts to run on the computer.… [Keep reading] “Creating Organizational Units, and Groups in AD with GUID”

Leveraging the Microsoft Graph API with PowerShell and OAuth 2.0

13th of September, 2016 / / 4 Comments 
Update Oct 2019: See this post for simplifying oAuth Authentication to Microsoft Graph using PowerShell and the MSAL (Microsoft Authentication Libraries)

Background

Microsoft Graph is the evolvement of API’s into Microsoft Cloud Services. For me not being a developer, a key difference is interacting with with Graph API using OAuth 2.0 via PowerShell. Through a number of my previous posts I’ve interacted with the Graph API using client libraries such as the Microsoft.IdentityModel.Clients.ActiveDirectory library. This post details using PowerShell to talk directly to Graph API and managing Authentication and Authorization using OAuth 2.0 and Azure WebApp.… [Keep reading] “Leveraging the Microsoft Graph API with PowerShell and OAuth 2.0”

Leveraging the PowerBI Beta API for creating PowerBI Tables with Relationships via PowerShell

31st of August, 2016 / / No Comments

If anyone actually reads my posts you will have noticed that I’ve been on a bit of a deep dive into PowerBI and how I can use it to provide visualisation of data from Microsoft Identity Manager (here via CSV, and here via API). One point I noticed going direct to PowerBI via the API (v1.0) though was how it is not possible to provide relationships (joins) between tables within datasets (you can via PowerBI Desktop).… [Keep reading] “Leveraging the PowerBI Beta API for creating PowerBI Tables with Relationships via PowerShell”

Office365 Licensing Management Agent for Microsoft Identity Manager

26th of August, 2016 / / 5 Comments

Licensing for Office365 has always been a moving target for enterprise customers. Over the years I’ve implemented a plethora of solutions to keep licensing consistent with entitlement logic. For some customers this is as simple as everyone gets say, an E3 license. For other institutions there are often a mix of ‘E’ and ‘K’ licenses depending on EmployeeType.

Using the Granfeldt PowerShell Management Agent to import Office365 Licensing info

In this blog post I detail how I’m using Søren Granfeldt’s extremely versatile PowerShell Management Agent yet again.… [Keep reading] “Office365 Licensing Management Agent for Microsoft Identity Manager”

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”

Understanding Outlook Auto-Mapping

23rd of August, 2016 / / 10 Comments

Auto-mapping is an Exchange & Exchange Online feature, which automatically opens mailboxes with Full Access permissions in a delegate’s Outlook client. The setting is configurable by an Administrator when Full Access permissions are assigned for a user. Once enabled, the periodic Autodiscover requests from the Outlook client will determine which mailboxes should be mapped for a user. Any auto-mapped mailboxes with be opened by the Outlook client in a persistent state and cannot be closed by the user.… [Keep reading] “Understanding Outlook Auto-Mapping”

Enumerating all Users/Groups/Contacts in an Azure tenant using PowerShell and the Azure Graph API ‘odata.nextLink’ paging function

10th of August, 2016 / / 7 Comments

Recently I posted about using PowerShell and the Azure Active Directory Authentication Library to connect to Azure AD here. Whilst that post detailed performing simple tasks like updating an attribute on a user, in this post I’ll use the same method to connect to Azure AD via PowerShell but cover;

  • enumerate users, contacts or groups
  • where the number of objects is greater than the maximum results per page, get all remaining pages of results
  • limit results based on filters

The premise of my script was one that could just be executed without prompts.… [Keep reading] “Enumerating all Users/Groups/Contacts in an Azure tenant using PowerShell and the Azure Graph API ‘odata.nextLink’ paging function”

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”