Category Archives: Azure

Cloud & Datacenter Conference Germany

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It’s with great joy that I can share that the Cloud & Datacenter Conference Germany website is live and you can now register to attend. My fellow MVP and friend Carsten Rachfahl has realized one of his ambitions to organize a large community driven conference by and for the IT community in the DACH region. But please free to attend if you’re from outside that region, it is open to all and welcomes anyone who wishes to attend. Just note not all sessions will be in English, but in German.

Organizing such an event is not an easy undertaking and I want to applaud Carsten for making this happen. He’s one of Germany’s for most experts and via his company, Rachfahl IT-Solutions, he’s always contributed heavily into the community. Thank you Carsten, you contribute a lot and we appreciate those efforts.

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I invite you all to attend and join us on May 12 for the first edition of the Cloud & Datacenter Conference Germany in Dusseldorf. It offers more than 25 presentations by top community speakers in five parallel tracks. These tracks cover the entire spectrum of Microsoft technologies available to help you design, build and maintain a state of the art modern IT infrastructure. The conference covers Windows Server 2016, Hyper-V, Microsoft software defined storage, networking, azure stack, System Center, OMS, failover cluster, IaaS, azure, Nano server, PowerShell, containers, and much more.

I’m happy and honored to speak at this conference with so many true real life experts that are part the global community around Microsoft technologies. My presentation will aim to get you briefed on the new and improved functionality in Windows Server 2016 Failover Clustering. In that respect it’s a nice addition to my session What’s new in Failover Clustering in Windows Server 2012 R2. I can only suggest to get up to speed on those as these are still very much valid and I’’ be focusing on the delta between Windows Server 212 R2 and 2016.

The breadth and depth of the technologies available to us cannot be overstated and is still growing. It takes a team effort with both complementary and overlapping expertise to stay on top of things. Education is a huge and important part of daily life for anyone working in IT.

Nowadays when any meeting can be held on-line an in person a conference is still very valuable. It enables you to focus on absorbing the content without being distracted by the realities and interrupts of daily work life. That’s why I still invest in attending conference and I hope you do so as well. When you attend one, be there! That might sound silly but it’s painful to see attendees working remotely and being on the phone all the time. Bart true emergencies that’s a waste of money and effort. Allow yourself or your employees to optimize the ROI of that conference by having them do why they came. Learn, get inspired and network with peers.

Register soon to secure your spot. The price is set a level to make sure it will not be an issue. Sponsoring by companies who have real investment in cloud and datacenter management and benefit from a flourishing well informed ecosystem make this possible.

Azure AD Connect 1.1.105.0 is GA

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On February 18th  2016 Microsoft released a significant update to Azure AD Connect, version 1.1.105.0. It adds some capabilities and improves on others. For me this is a core piece of the puzzle today and in the future for many of my plans to optimize the future IT Infrastructure & DevOps. Even when politics seem hell bound on slowing you down and cause a serious delay and missed opportunities this piece of technology is key in breaking through those barriers and keep moving ahead.

So what’s in the box with version  1.1.105.0

  • Automatic upgrade feature for Express settings customers.
    Support for the global admin using MFA and PIM in the installation wizard.
  • We can change the user’s sign-in method after initial install.
  • We can now set Domain and OU filtering in the installation wizard. As a secondary benefit this means we can now connect to forests where not all domains are available.
  • We get a Scheduler is built-in to the sync engine.

Some preview features are now GA:

We get one new preview features which is going to be a hit in world where patience disappeared from the equation:

  • The default sync interval is now 30 minutes instead of 3 hours before. this is configurable now in the scheduler.

It also fixes the following issues:

  • The verify DNS domains page didn’t always recognize the domains.
  • Prompts for domain admin credentials when configuring ADFS.
  • On-premises AD accounts are not recognized by the installation wizard when they are in a domain with a different DNS tree than the root domain.

Grab the latest version of Azure AD Connect here.

Using VEEAM FastSCP for Microsoft Azure to help protect my blog

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My buddies in IT know about some of my mantras. The fact that I like “* in depth”. Backup in depth for example. Which is just my variant on the 3-2-1 rule in backups. Things go wrong and relying on one way to recover is risky. “One is none, two is one” is just one of the mantras I live by in IT. Or at least try to, I’m not perfect.

So besides backups in Azure I also copy the backup files I make for my blog outside of the VM, out of Azure. That means the BackWPup files and the MySQL dumps I create regularly via a scheduled job.

That copy is not made manually but is automated with VEEAM FastSCP for Microsoft Azure. It’s easy, free and it works.  I’ve blogged about it before but that blog might have been lost in the huge onslaught of Microsoft Ignite 2015 announcements.

It’s all quite simple. First of all you need to create a data dump location for the backups we do on our blog server. That’s copied out by but VEEAM FastSCP for Microsoft Azure ensures I have an extra copy do those which doesn’t rely on Azure

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Add your VM in Azure to VEEAM FastSCP for Microsoft Azure

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It’s easy, specify the information you can find about your VM on the Azure management portal. Optionally you can skip the SSL requirement and certificate verifications. Do note you need to use the correct PowerShell port (end point) for that particular VM in your Azure subscription.

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When successful you can browse the file system of your Azure VM.

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Create one or more jobs (depending on what & how you’re organizing your backups)

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Give the job a descriptive name

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Select what folders on the Azure VM you want to backup by simply browsing to it.

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Select the target folder on the system where VEEAM FastSCP for Microsoft Azure is running by, again, simply browsing to it.

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Set a schedule according to your needs

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If you need to run some PowerShell before or after a download here’s the place to do so.

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Click finish and hit Start Job to lick it of and test it. Here’s the WordPress Blog backup download job running.

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By using VEEAM FastSCP for You can download folders and files to your system at home, to a virtual machine, whether this is on premise or also in the cloud. Perhaps even in AWS (IAAS) if you’re really paranoid. By doing a simple restore of your blog and changing your DNS entry you can even get it up and running if Azure would ever be the target of a major outage causing attack. You could even keep blogging about it Smile.

So do yourself a favor. Check it out!

WorkingHardInIT Blog Maintenance Window & Tools Used

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As you might have noticed my blog was down last night for about 1 hour and 45 minutes between 22:20 and 00:10. A bit longer than I wanted but I needed more time do deal with the upgrade of MySQL as part of the routine maintenance I do on my WordPress blog server.

In the environments under my care I take care to take the time to do routine maintenance to avoid falling behind to much in firmware, drivers, patches, etc. This takes some effort but as it helps prevent bigger issues in the long run it’s worth while to do so. I take the same approach with my blog as much as possible. Most of this maintenance goes by without you ever noticing. The windows updates reboots being the exception. WordPress upgrades, plugin upgrades, PHP upgrades, etc. … all go swiftly usually which means I’m pretty well covered there, frequently.

Upgrading MySQL however is always a bit of a time consuming effort and depending on what version you’re upgrading from and to witch one it can actually mean multiple sequential upgrades (5.1 to 5.5.44 to 5.6.25).image

I practiced this upgrade on a copy of the VM in azure to make sure I could handle whatever came up and still I had to deal with some challenges I did not encounter in the test environment. That show that I’m not a full time hard core MySQL guru I guess.

Anyway after getting to MySQL 5.6.25 from 5.5.44 and fixing some issues with TIMESTAMP with implicit DEFAULT value is deprecated (easy fix) and dealing with the error in MySQL Workbench:

An unhandled exception occurred (Error executing ‘SELECT t.PROCESSLIST_ID,
IF (NAME = ‘thread/sql/event_scheduler’,’event_scheduler’,t.PROCESSLIST_USER) PROCESSLIST_USER,t.PROCESSLIST_HOST,t.PROCESSLIST_DB,t.PROCESSLIST_COMMAND,
t.PROCESSLIST_TIME,t.PROCESSLIST_STATE,t.THREAD_ID,t.TYPE,t.NAME,t.PARENT_THREAD_ID,
t.INSTRUMENTED,t.PROCESSLIST_INFO,a.ATTR_VALUE FROM performance_schema.threads t 
LEFT OUTER JOIN performance_schema.session_connect_attrs a ON t.processlist_id = a.processlist_id AND (
a.attr_name IS NULL OR a.attr_name = ‘program_name’) WHERE t.TYPE <> ‘BACKGROUND”
Native table ‘performance_schema’.’threads’ has the wrong structure.
SQL Error: 1682). Please refer to the log files for details.

which I fixed by running run mysqld –performance_schema I’m rocking everything up to date once more.

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Always have good backups, make exports of your database schema, data and structures in MySQL and have multiple ways out when things go south. In Azure I’m relying on Backup Vault where I protect my virtual machine with schedules backup jobs. I also backup my WordPress with the data via a plug in and export the database via MySQL Workbench.

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Those dumps are copied out of the VM to where ever I want (Azure, One Drive, home PC, a VM running in AWS …) to make sure I have multiple options to recover.

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VEEAM FastSCP for Microsoft Azure comes in very handy for this by the way. You might want to check it out if you’re in need of an automated and secure way to get data out of a VM running in Microsoft Azure!