Tag Archives: Windows Server

Azure Site Recovery – An overview

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Azure Site RecoveryAzure Site Recovery (ASR) is a powerful disaster recovery and business continuity solution provided by Microsoft Azure. It enables businesses to keep their critical applications and services up and running in the event of unexpected downtime, disasters, or disruptions. With ASR, you can replicate your on-premises virtual machines, physical servers, and even entire data centers to Azure, and quickly restore them when needed.

In this blog post, we will dive deep into the capabilities, benefits, and use cases of Azure Site Recovery. We will also explore the key features, architecture, and pricing model of ASR.

Capabilities of Azure Site Recovery

Azure Site Recovery provides a range of capabilities that can help businesses ensure high availability, data protection, and disaster recovery. Here are some of the key capabilities of ASR:

  1. Replication: ASR can replicate virtual machines, physical servers, and even entire data centers to Azure. This enables businesses to keep their critical applications and services up and running in the event of unexpected downtime, disasters, or disruptions.
  2. Orchestration: ASR can orchestrate the failover and failback of replicated virtual machines and servers. This ensures that the entire failover process is automated, orchestrated, and monitored.
  3. Testing: ASR provides a non-disruptive way to test disaster recovery scenarios without impacting the production environment. This enables businesses to validate their disaster recovery plans and ensure that they are working as expected.
  4. Integration: ASR integrates with a range of Azure services, including Azure Backup, Azure Monitor, Azure Automation, and Azure Security Center. This enables businesses to have a holistic view of their disaster recovery and business continuity operations.

Benefits of Azure Site Recovery

Azure Site Recovery provides a range of benefits to businesses of all sizes and industries. Here are some of the key benefits of ASR:

  1. High availability: ASR enables businesses to achieve high availability of their critical applications and services. This ensures that their customers and employees have access to the applications and services they need, even in the event of unexpected downtime, disasters, or disruptions.
  2. Data protection: ASR ensures that data is protected and can be recovered in the event of data loss or corruption. This is essential for businesses that handle sensitive data or have compliance requirements.
  3. Reduced downtime: ASR can help businesses reduce downtime by providing a fast and efficient way to recover from disasters or disruptions. This can save businesses a significant amount of time, money, and resources.
  4. Simplified disaster recovery: ASR simplifies the disaster recovery process by automating failover and failback operations. This reduces the risk of human error and ensures that the entire process is orchestrated and monitored.
  5. Lower costs: ASR can help businesses reduce their disaster recovery costs by eliminating the need for expensive hardware and infrastructure. This is because businesses can replicate their virtual machines and servers to Azure, which provides a cost-effective disaster recovery solution.

Use cases for Azure Site Recovery

  • Business Continuity: ASR can help businesses ensure business continuity by providing a way to keep their critical applications and services up and running in the event of unexpected downtime, disasters, or disruptions. With ASR, businesses can replicate their on-premises virtual machines and servers to Azure and failover to them in the event of a disaster.
  • Data Protection: ASR can help businesses protect their data by replicating it to Azure and providing a way to recover it in the event of data loss or corruption. With ASR, businesses can set up a replication policy to replicate data to Azure and configure recovery points to restore data to a specific point in time.
  • Migration: ASR can be used to migrate virtual machines and servers from on-premises to Azure. With ASR, businesses can replicate their on-premises workloads to Azure and then failover to the replicated virtual machines in Azure. This can help businesses move their workloads to Azure in a seamless and efficient manner.
  • Testing: ASR provides a non-disruptive way to test disaster recovery scenarios without impacting the production environment. With ASR, businesses can test their disaster recovery plans and ensure that they are working as expected without interrupting their production environment.
  • DevOps: ASR can be used in DevOps scenarios to replicate development and test environments to Azure. This can help businesses reduce the time and cost of setting up and managing these environments. With ASR, businesses can replicate their development and test environments to Azure and then failover to them when needed.
  • Compliance: ASR can help businesses meet compliance requirements by ensuring that their data is protected and can be recovered in the event of data loss or corruption. With ASR, businesses can replicate their data to Azure and then configure recovery points to ensure that their data can be restored to a specific point in time.
  • Hybrid Cloud: ASR can be used in hybrid cloud scenarios to ensure high availability and disaster recovery across on-premises and Azure environments. With ASR, businesses can replicate their on-premises workloads to Azure and then failover to them in the event of a disaster.
  • Multi-Site Disaster Recovery: ASR can be used to provide disaster recovery across multiple sites. With ASR, businesses can replicate their virtual machines and servers to multiple Azure regions and then failover to the replicated virtual machines in the event of a disaster.

In summary, Azure Site Recovery provides a range of capabilities that can help businesses ensure high availability, data protection, and disaster recovery. It can be used in a wide range of use cases across different industries to provide a cost-effective and efficient disaster recovery solution.

Until next time,

Rob

Azure Batch: A Comprehensive Guide

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Azure Batch Example

Azure Batch is a cloud-based platform offered by Microsoft Azure that enables users to run large-scale parallel and batch computing workloads. With Azure Batch, users can manage, schedule, and run their applications and tasks on a pool of virtual machines. This provides a flexible and scalable solution for businesses and organizations looking to run complex computing tasks in the cloud.

Key Features of Azure Batch

Scalability: Azure Batch allows users to scale their computing resources on demand, enabling them to handle even the largest computing workloads. The platform can automatically allocate and manage the virtual machines needed to run your tasks, ensuring that your applications have the resources they need to run smoothly.

Flexibility: Azure Batch supports a wide range of applications and languages, including .NET, Python, and Linux. This makes it easy for organizations to integrate their existing applications and tools with Azure Batch.

Monitoring and Management: Azure Batch provides real-time monitoring and management capabilities, making it easy to track your batch jobs’ progress and quickly identify and resolve any issues.

Cost-Effective: Azure Batch offers a pay-per-use pricing model, so you only pay for the resources you consume. This helps to keep costs down, making it an attractive solution for organizations looking to reduce their IT expenses.

How to Use Azure Batch

To get started with Azure Batch, you’ll need to create a Batch account in the Azure portal. Once your account is set up, you can create a pool of virtual machines to run your tasks on. These virtual machines can be managed and scaled using the Azure Batch API or the Azure portal.

Next, you’ll need to create a batch job to run your tasks on the virtual machines in your pool. A batch job is a collection of tasks executed on your pool’s virtual machines. You can submit your tasks to the job, and Azure Batch will automatically manage the distribution of the tasks across the virtual machines in your pool.

Once your batch job runs, you can monitor its progress in real-time using the Azure portal or the Azure Batch API. You can also retrieve detailed information about each task, such as its status and any errors that may have occurred during its execution.

Examples of Effective Usage

  • Use auto-scaling to save cost: Azure Batch provides an auto-scaling feature that automatically adds or removes compute nodes based on the demand for your applications. This helps you save cost by only paying for what you use and avoiding over-provisioning of compute resources. To enable auto-scaling, you can use the auto-pool and auto-scale features in the Azure portal or through the Azure Batch API.
  • Utilize the cloud-init script: You can use the cloud-init script to customize the behavior of your compute nodes. For example, you can use the script to install necessary software, configure firewall rules, or download data. The cloud-init script is executed every time a new compute node is created, ensuring that all nodes are consistently configured.
  • Make use of custom images: Azure Batch allows you to use custom images to deploy your applications, which can greatly reduce the time required to set up your
    environment. By creating a custom image with all the necessary software pre-installed, you can quickly create new compute nodes and start processing your data.
  • Take advantage of the task dependencies: Azure Batch provides the capability to specify task dependencies, which can help you ensure that tasks are executed in the correct order. You can use task dependencies to specify the order in which tasks are executed, or to make sure that a task is not executed until its dependencies have been completed.
  • Utilize the Job Preparation task: The Job Preparation task is a special task that runs on each compute node before the other tasks are executed. You can use the Job Preparation task to perform any necessary setup or configuration, such as installing software, copying data, or configuring firewall rules.
  • Monitor your jobs: Azure Batch provides robust monitoring capabilities that allow you to monitor the status of your jobs, tasks, and compute nodes. You can use the Azure portal, Azure Monitor, or the Azure Batch API to monitor your resources and get insights into the performance of your applications.

Conclusion

Azure Batch is a powerful and flexible platform for running large-scale batch computing workloads in the cloud. With its ability to scale resources on demand, support for a wide range of applications and languages, and real-time monitoring and management capabilities, it’s an attractive solution for organizations looking to take their computing to the next level. Whether you’re running scientific simulations, data processing, or any other type of batch computing workload, Azure Batch can help you get the job done quickly and efficiently.

Until next time, Rob

Windows Virtual Desktop now in the Wild – Public Preview Now Available

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The Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) product and strategy announced last September is finally here in public preview.  Something near and dear to my heart for the last 6 months.  I’ve been in private preview and had to keep a lid on it 🙂 Yea!!

What is it?

Simply put, it’s multi-session Windows 10 experience with optimizations for Office 365 ProPlus, and support for Windows Server Remote Desktop Services (RDS) desktops. It means users can deploy and scale Windows desktops on Azure and on-premise quickly.

The service brings together single-user Windows 7 VDI and multi-user Windows 10 and Windows Server RDS and is hosted on any of Azure’s virtual machine tiers or what you could call DaaS (Desktop as a Service) in a way.

Licensing

Microsoft is pricing WVD aggressively by charging only for the virtual machine costs; the license requirements for the Windows 7 and Windows 10 based services will be fulfilled by Microsoft 365 F1/E3/E, Windows 10 Enterprise E3/E5, and Windows VDA subscriptions. The Windows Server-based services are similarly fulfilled by existing RDS client access licenses. This means that for many Microsoft customers, there will be no additional licensing cost for provisioning desktop computing in the cloud.

The virtual machine costs can be further reduced by using Reserved Instances that commit to purchasing certain amounts of VM time in return for lower pricing.  All of this just means simpler licensing for Office and Windows as opposed to the crazy license models of the past.  I am not saying that crazy licensing models are gone but have gotten much simpler.

What’s the deal with Windows 7 and Support?

The new service will be available to the production environments in the by June before Windows 7 support ends in January 2020.

But, there is a big incentive, Windows 7 users will receive all three years of Extended Security Updates (ESU) at no extra cost. This should ease the cost of migration to the service; this is in contrast to on-premises deployments that will cost either $25/$50/$100 for the three years of ESU availability or $50/$100/$200, depending on the precise Windows license being used.

WVD and O365

WVD will also provide particular benefits for Office 365 users. In November last year, Microsoft bought a company called FSLogix that develops software to streamline application provisioning in virtualized environments.

Outlook (with its offline data store) and OneDrive (with its synchronized file system) represent particular challenges for virtual desktops, as both applications store large amounts of data on the client machine.  This data is expected to persist across VM reboots and redeployments. FSLogix’s software allows these things to be stored on separate disk images that are seamlessly grafted onto the deployed virtual machine. WVD will use this software for clients running Office 365, but this can be optional.

Liquidware and WVD

The technology of ProfileUnity and FlexApp only complement what Microsoft includes with FSLogix.  But do understand, if you need a simple soution for Profile Disk, then FSlogix is the way to go and save yourself some money. Over my next few blog posts, I plan to show how to set up WVD and a full walk-through of FSLogix running with WVD.

Sizing WVD?

Liquidware has a product called Stratusphere UX. It’s an EUC monitoring tool that allows you to properly size your Azure environment for WVD. This helps make smart decisions on migrations to WVD.  It doesn’t stop there, Stratusphere provides ongoing metrics and alerting that help IT Pro’s to continue to maintain a high performing WVD environment into the future.

How do I get it?

Azure Market Place 🙂 The preview is available in the US East 2 and US Central Azure regions; When GA is announced, it will be available in all regions.

In Microsoft’s eyes, its time to kickass and take names 😉

Check out my next post on WVD and FSLogix.

Until next time, Rob

MVPITPro Podcast – Ep5 – A Talk with Mike Bender from the Azure Cloud Ops Advocate Team

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Join us for episode 3 of the new MVPIT Pro Podcast, featuring your hosts Andy Syrewicze from Altaro Software and myself    Jeffrey Snover @jsnover 

In this episode Andy and Rob Talk about:

  • Windows Server 2019 TP Build 17666
  • GDPR
  • Microsoft Loves Linux!
  • Steps that IT Pros can take today to become Microsoft MVPs
  • and much, much more!

Our special guest interview this episode features The one and only Jeffrey Snover, Microsoft Technical Fellow and Creator of PowerShell!

Enjoy 🙂 !!!

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Microsoft Hyper-V vs. VMware: How far is VMware Still Ahead?

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Probably four of the best virtual platform developers are VMware (vSphere), Microsoft (Hyper-V), Red Hat (KVM), and Citrix (XenServer).

While they are all comparable, each with its own set of advantages, the two who seem to cause the most ruckus are VMware and Hyper-V.

There’s a lot of talk about which is better and in what way, so let’s dive into the two a little deeper.

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The Microsoft Cloud: A Complete Picture

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If you’re looking to learn more about Microsoft cloud, including how your organization could benefit from it, you’re in the right place. This comprehensive guide covers the basics and beyond, from “What is Microsoft cloud?”, to services and security.

Feel free to skip to the parts you’re most interested in by using the table of contents below. If you have any questions after reading, don’t hesitate to get in touch—I’m happy to provide clarification and answer any of your questions.

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Azure Stack 101: The Definitive Introduction

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Azure Stack

Microsoft’s Azure Stack is an excellent toolset that allows enterprises to run a hybrid cloud right in their own datacenters, giving them additional cloud options.

But to really use it to its best advantage, IT pros should know the ins and outs of Azure Stack so they can use it within their business IT infrastructures to better manage, speed up and control their Azure cloud deployments and workloads.

A good place to start is with a primer on Azure Stack itself to give business users a broad look at what’s under the hood of their IT infrastructure.

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