Tag: Azure

Event: TechCamp 2014 On June 19/20 In Dublin

Another community event is coming on June 19th and 20th in Citywest in Dublin. This time, with TechCamp 2014, we’re switching to a more “here’s how to do it” style of presentation. Based on feedback, we’ll have 1 track per day, over 2 days. Day 1 (June 19th) will focus on Hybrid Cloud, mixing Windows Server, System Center, and Microsoft Azure content into one track. On day 2 (June 20th) the focus switches over to the public cloud, and products like Office 365 and Windows Intune.

Most of the speakers are MVPs sharing their knowledge and experience with these technologies, with keynotes by local Microsoft product-line managers.

You can choose to register for either or both days.

Please retweet, post on Facebook, LinkedIn, share with workmates, customers, etc.

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Microsoft News Summary – 9 May 2014

Another quiet 24 hours ahead of TechEd:

Microsoft News Summary – 7 May 2014

Between a bank holiday and some travel, I’ve been unable to post, but I’ve saved up the headlines from those days:

Presentation – Microsoft Azure And Hybrid Cloud

I recently presented in the MicroWarehouse and Microsoft Ireland road show to Irish Microsoft partners on the topic of the Cloud OS, comprised of Azure, Windows Server 2012 R2, Hyper-V, and System Center 2012 R2. You can find the slide deck below.

 

Microsoft News Summary-1 May 2014

Happy May Day, comrades! I was tied up with events the last couple of mornings so here is two days worth of news. Note the new beta for System Center Advisor. The security functionality looks very interesting!

Microsoft News Summary-29 April 2014

There is a lot of reading material this morning.

Microsoft News Summary–24 April 2014

Here’s some interesting bits from the last few days that I have not blogged:

Build 2014 Keynote 2 – Azure

The first presenter is Scott Guthrie, executive VP of cloud and enterprise, in a red t-shirt as usual. He wants to talk about a strategy that uses IaaS and PaaS together to give customers the best of breed service. 44 new features and services will be announced in this keynote. 2 new regions in Shanghai and Beijing:

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Huge growth:

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Titanfall was a huge multiplayer game, powered by Azure. The game cannot be played without the cloud. >100,000 Azure VMs powered this thing on launch day. That’s incredible; I’d love to see the virtual network design for that. We get some stuff about NBC using Azure. Tuning out for a while – most people do that with NBC.

New enhancements in Iaas:

Virtual machines:

  • This week Visual Studio will allow devs to create/destroy/debug VMs in Azure
  • New support to capture images with any number of drives. You then can deploy easily from that image.
  • Can configure VM images using DSC, Puppet (?), and PowerShell.

Mark Russinovich comes out. He demos Visual Studio to create VMs. Very easy wizard. He then runs PowerShell to create an image from a VM.

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He then shows Puppet puppet master from the gallery. Luke Kanies of Puppet Labs. He gives a demo. Looks like it’s doing a lot of the service template concept that you get from SCVMM in the private cloud. Getty Images (huge pro stock library) dude comes out. They’re moving to Azure. They use Puppet for automation & configuration management. Now they can burst from their own data centre into Azure. Azure gives them Puppet labs and support for Windows & Linux VMs.

Guthrie is back out. Also announcing:

  • GA of auto-scaling: Great for creating automated elasticity for services based on demand.
  • Dynamic routing: I wonder if this is the “iBGP dynamic routing with best path selection” that was talked about at TechEd in 2013?
  • Point-site VPN GA
  • Subnet migration
  • Static internal IP address: This is a big simplification requirement for deploying hybrid cloud.

Moving on to PaaS. Azure Web Site service is one of the most popular services in Azure. And other PaaS stuff. I tune out.

Looks like the IT pro stuff is done, as am I.

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How My New Azure VM Web Server Is Configured

Following yesterday’s “I’ve moved to Azure” post, I decided to write a bit more about what I’ve done. For obvious reasons, I will not get into deep specifics.

The first step was to create a cloud service. Each cloud service in Azure should be seen as an external point of contact … a public IP address if you want to think of it that way.

I then created a single subnet virtual network.

A storage blob was created in Azure to store the VHD files of the new virtual machine.

A small spec VM (single core, 1.7 GB RAM) was created. An endpoint was created for HTTP in the Azure portal to allow incoming web traffic. I don’t need HTTPS and I don’t use the FTP functionality of WordPress.

I then created a WS2012 R2 Datacenter virtual machine. I configured patching using GPEDIT.MSC, and a few other things. I added IIS and ran the Web Platform Installer to install MySQL, PHP and a few other WordPress prerequisites. I also installed MySQL Workbench … I can’t be bothered googling for MySQL commands.

Two websites were created in IIS and two databases/service accounts were created in MySQL. I have this blog and my photography website to host. I downloaded and extracted 2 copies of the WordPress files, and configured each blog.

I’ve only migrated this site so far – the photography site will be next (more complex because of galleries). I decided against exporting the database from the old server; this was an opportunity to go with whole new versions of everything. So I did WordPress export/import. The export file was bigger than the 2 MB max so I split the export file using a free tool called WXR File Splitter. 2 MB files were too large and caused the import to timeout, so I went with 512 KB. Apparently a hack of PHP would have been an alternative, but I want to avoid hacks.

I added all my WordPress plug-ins and configured them, making sure that my advertisers were OK. And then I tested a bit. And then came the next step: switching the A records for my domain to switch to the new server. That’s the REAL test – will this server work for you.

The last steps were to configure backup. I configured a MySQLDump job to export all databases using Task Scheduler and a batch file. That backs up to a folder called Backup. I then configured an Azure Recovery Services backup Vault for Azure Online Backup. I created a 3 year 2048 bit certificate using the CA in the lab, uploaded the public key to Azure Backup, and imported the private key into the My Computer – Personal Store in the guest OS of the VM. I downloaded the Azure backup agent and configured a daily backup job to backup the Inetpub and the Backup folders. That’s the data of the two WordPress sites saved.

And that’s the lot!

There’s a new Basic VM configuration coming this week. I’ll consider migrating again to a higher spec one of those.

The one question I’ve gotten over and over is “how much does this cost?”. The answer: nothing. I’m using the benefits of my personal MSDN subscription (€75/month). The other one (which I answered in the previous post) was “Why not use an Azure web site?”. Simple: it does not offer enough disk capacity.

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My AidanFinn.Com Blog Has Moved To Microsoft Azure

Tonight I completed the migration of this WordPress blog to Windows Azure.

PoweredByAzure

 

I was having performance and health issues with the VM that I was renting from a local hosting company. The admin portal was proving to be a nightmare. I had upgrade the VM but the VM wasn’t upgraded. The hard disk was filling frequently and killing MySQL, and therefore killing the WordPress blog.

Why was I on a VM? Because I needed more processor & bandwidth capacity.

A failure last week led me to look at my options. I’ve grown comfortable with Microsoft Azure so this was the place that I decided to move to. My free €75 credit per month thanks to my MSDN account doesn’t hurt either!

I looked at the website hosting options but they provide too little disk space. The VMs, even the smaller ones, give you loads of disk space. I decided to fire up a cloud service, blob, virtual network and a small VM instance just for my new web server VM. I installed IIS, added the sites, installed PHP, WordPress, MySQL, and a few other bits and bobs and started the laborious process of migrating from the old VM.

I could have cheated but I decided to do a fresh install. It was more time consuming, especially when I had to split the WordPress export file into 40 smaller export files (the import of 2MB files was timing out). I added and configured all the plugins. And then the final steps:

  • After some tests I configured the website to bind to aidanfinn.com and http://www.aidanfinn.com.
  • I changed the DNS A records for those two URLs to switch to the public IP of the Azure cloud service.

My next steps will be:

  • Configure MySQL automated export
  • Deploy Windows Azure Online Backup to backup the IIS Inetpub folder and the MySQL export

And maybe I’ll configure the endpoint monitoring option in the Azure portal Smile