virtual machine – Kloud Blog

Migrating VirtualBox VDI Virtual Machines to Azure

5th of April, 2017 / Darren Robinson / 4 Comments

Overview

Over the years I’ve transitioned through a number of laptops and for whatever reason they never fully get put out to pasture. Two specific laptops are used semi-regularly for functions associated with a few virtual machines they hold. Over the last 10 years or so, I’ve been a big proponent of VirtualBox. It’s footprint and functionality aligned with my needs. The downside these days is needing to sometimes carry two laptops just to use an application or two contained inside a Virtual Machine on VirtualBox.… [Keep reading] “Migrating VirtualBox VDI Virtual Machines to Azure”

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

6th of October, 2016 / hughbadini / 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”

Exchange in Azure: NIC disabled/in error state

22nd of August, 2016 / AJ Bajada / 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”

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

17th of March, 2015 / Scott Scovell / 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 / Lucian Franghiu / 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.

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

9th of March, 2015 / Scott Scovell / 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]

Migrating Azure Virtual Machines to another Region

16th of November, 2014 / Scott Scovell / 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

Shutdown the VM in the source Region
Copy the underlying VHDs to storage accounts in the new Region
Create OS and Data disks in the new Region
Re-create the VM in the new Region.

… [Keep reading]

How to create custom images for use in Microsoft Azure

10th of September, 2014 / Josh McIntosh / No Comments

In this post I will discuss how we can create custom virtual machine images and deploy them to the Microsoft Azure platform. To complete this process you will need an Azure Subscription, the Azure PowerShell module installed and a pre-prepared VHD which you would like to use (VHDX is not supported at present.)

You can sign up for a free trial of Microsoft Azure here if you don’t currently hold a subscription.

Completing this process will allow you take advantage of platforms which aren’t offered “out of the box” on Microsoft Azure eg, Server 2003 and Server 2008 for testing and development.… [Keep reading] “How to create custom images for use in Microsoft Azure”