Tag: Cloud

Mark Twain’s Advice on Microsoft Azure

I’ve been doing Azure events since August and I’ve come to the conclusion that there are 3 types of people in the audience:

  • Want to learn now – a small percentage of the audience
  • Have a small measure of interest but never try anything out – maybe over half of the room
  • Are only attending to learn how to compete with Azure or their boss forced them – everyone else in the room

I’m guessing the breakdown is similar at most cloud IaaS events. And I’ve not forgotten the those who are hoping that the US government kills off the cloud and wouldn’t attend a cloud event if it was the only place to be inoculated against the zombie apocalypse. And let’s not forget those clock punchers who make up the sad majority of IT pros and haven’t tried to learn anything since 2004.

O365 gives us a great track record that we can use to predict the future of Azure. We are in early days of Azure and uptake looks slow. But it was like this with BPOS/Office 365 before O365 became the norm for email here in Ireland. A few disruptors decided to skill up on Office 365 and those Microsoft partners shook up the market. They became the industry experts and they took business from their competitors:

  • By being the only resellers around that implemented a solution that customers wanted
  • By having developed skills over time that allowed them to take customers away from competitors that were doing a bad job

The time to learn Azure is now. Don’t procrastinate. Don’t be the moron that thinks “the cloud will never work for my customers” or “my customers are too small for Azure”. Take some advice from Mark Twain:

The secret of getting ahead is getting started.

So you’re serious about Azure but the scale of it scares you? That’s fair. That’s why Microsoft has taken a very targeted approach with Azure-based solutions via Open Licensing. And it’s why I’ve been delivering Azure technical training on a monthly chunk-by-chunk basis. The Mark Twain quote actually covers this too:

The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and starting on the first one.

If you’re starting with Azure, find an on-ramp solution like online backup or DR, and use this to supplement your existing skills. Learn the basics of storage and virtual networking.

Microsoft News – 19 December 2014

We’re getting close to Christmas and Microsoft is starting to wind down for the year. Here’s a mostly-Azure report for the last few days.

Hyper-V

Azure

Miscellaneous

Microsoft News – 17 December 2014

Things have settled down a little after last week’s surprise Azure announcements.

Hyper-V

Azure

Office 365

Microsoft Partners

Licensing

  • Price increases in 2015!! SPLA/hosting licensing costs are going up. Hosters will have no choice but to pass that on to their customers.

Miscellaneous

Microsoft News – 12 December 2014

It’s December, the month when Microsoft employees normally head away for a long vacation and nothing much happens. Or so we thought. Azure went wild last night, releasing loads of new features either into preview or GA. Oh yeah, loads of December updates from Microsoft have problems.

Windows Client

System Center Virtual Machine Manager

Azure

Miscellaneous

You Do Not Need To Run SCVMM To Replicate Hyper-V To Azure

If you follow Microsoft then you are used to December being a dead month. So I checked my Twitter feed last night and was stunned by some big Azure announcements.

The most important of the announcements to me was the change that is being made to Azure Site Recovery (ASR), AKA DR in the cloud. Previous to last night, you need to run SCVMM on premises to replicate Hyper-V to Azure. This baffled me:

  • You had to install the protection agent on each host/cluster node anyway
  • SMBs, the companies that are most likely to use ASR, cannot afford System Center
  • There is a low adoption rate of SCVMM with System Center/Hyper-V customers

The feedback on this was given – and Microsoft made a change. Last night they announced the general availability of Disaster Recovery (DR) to Azure for Branch offices and SMB feature in our Azure Site Recovery (ASR) service … AKA ASR without SCVMM. This will allow you to replicate Hyper-V VMs into Azure without using System Center on premises.

The hosts must be running WS2012 R2 Hyper-V. Replication is done using Hyper-V Replica. You get centralized replication monitoring and orchestration as a part of the service. And you get the one-click test, planned and unplanned failover types.

THIS IS FRAKKING GREAT NEWS!

Why am I so excited? The original releases of ASR were targeted at customers with System Center licensing. Those are mid-large customers and are likely the ones that already have DR sites. Adoption rates were going to be low. The customer base that needs ASR are the SMBs that run Hyper-V hosts on-premises. That is a huge breadth market. Microsoft partners can enable those customers via Azure in Open licensing – buy some credits ($100 value each), try out ASR with no long term CAPEX or contractual commitments, and see what it can do for your business. And then give your insurance company a call to see what having a remote DR site will do for the company’s insurance premium.

Azure Backup & SCDPM Public Feedback Opportunity

Microsoft is giving you the chance to provide feedback and vote on existing ideas for Azure Online Backup and System Center Data Protection Manager. This is a great idea. Personally speaking, it’s validating a number of things that I have fed back to Microsoft already, and a number of things that customers have fed back to me.

I’ve been working with Azure IaaS since January of this year. Before that, Azure was meaningless to me; it was a direct sell by Microsoft to developers – yes, even with IaaS there. But then I found out that Azure was coming to Open licensing so partners could resell it, and I started learning. And we at MicroWarehouse started to promote Azure to our customers (the Microsoft partners that resell licensing and implement solutions for their customers) and that’s when I started to get a better feel for what worked in the real world.

Azure Online Backup was the thing that grabbed people’s attention. Who can argue with €0.15/GB/month? That’s less than half of the cheapest discount rate that we found for online backup that is typically sold in Ireland by resellers. However, there were issues.

The biggest one is that there is no centralized portal. Partners use this to manage backups and get reports. That all has to be done on-premises with Azure Online Backup and that increases the cost of operations significantly.

The other hot issue for me is the lack of a backup mechanism for VMs running in Azure. The only offered solution is to install an agent in the guest OS and then we’re back to the bad old days of backup. VM backup should be “select a VM and backup magically happens”, grabbing the files and state that make up the VM. We don’t have that in any way in Azure.

So that’s why I went onto the site to provide feedback and to vote this morning. You should do the same if you have any interest in Azure. Here’s the top vote getters as they are right now:

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Microsoft News – 3 December 2014

It’s been a slow period but there’s some interesting stuff in Azure networking and websites.

Hyper-V

Windows Server

Azure

Office 365

Miscellaneous

Microsoft News – 20 November 2014

There are a lot of upset people because of (1) the Azure outage and (2) how Microsoft communicated during the outage. We had a couple of affected customers. The only advice I can give to Microsoft is:

  1. Don’t deploy your updates to everything at the same time.
  2. Now you know how customers feel when bad updates are issued. Bring back complete testing.
  3. Communicate clearly during an issue – that includes sending emails to affected customers. You’ve got monitoring systems & automation – use them. Heck, you even blogged about how (Azure) Automation could be used by customers to trigger actions.

Hyper-V

Azure

Miscellaneous

Microsoft News – 19 November 2014

Pay attention to the security update for Windows that was released out of band last night. It’s an important one that prevents people from crafting custom Kerberos tickets.

Hyper-V

Windows Server

Azure

Security

Office 365

Microsoft News – 17 November 2014

I’ve had a crazy few weeks with TechEd Europe 2014, followed by the MVP Summit, followed by a week of events and catchup at work. Today, I’ve finally gotten to go through my news feeds. There is a LOT of Azure stuff from TEE14.

Hyper-V

Windows Server

System Center

Windows Client

  • Windows 10 – Making Deployment Easier: Using an in-place upgrade instead of the traditional wipe-and-load approach that organizations have historically used to deploy new Windows versions. This upgrade process is designed to preserve the apps, data, and configuration from the existing Windows installation, taking care to put things back the way they need to be after Windows 10 has been installed on the system. And support for traditional deployment tools.
  • Windows 10 – Manageability Choices: Ensuring that Windows works better when using Active Directory and Azure Active Directory together. When connecting the two, users can automatically be signed-in to cloud-based services like Office 365, Microsoft Intune, and the Windows Store, even when logging in to their machine using Active Directory accounts. For users, this will mean no longer needing to remember additional user IDs or passwords.

Azure

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ASR SAN replication topology

Office 365

Intune

Operational Insights

Licensing