As many of my friends and colleagues will know, I am a big fan of Smart Home/IOT technology – plugs, lights, sensors, cameras… I like automating things around the house – partly for security reasons, partly for reasons of making my life easier, but mostly because I enjoy working with technology! 🙂 However, I am well aware of the security […]
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As you may know, Smart Scale has been discontinued as of 31/05/2019. But – fear not, a community project now provides the same functionality. This project is the brainchild of Leee Jeffries (twitter/blog – well worth a follow/read for anyone working in the EUC space by the way!), and provides a simple to use solution, that provides a great replacement […]
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Recently, I have been playing around more and more with Microsoft Flow – which is a tool designed to Automate processes and tasks. In a previous post I used a tool called Stringify to automate a number of Smart Home actions. Microsoft Flow provides a similar environment and allows integration between processes and tasks. I was impressed from the first […]
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Azure Storage Sync provides the means to synchronise files from various locations into an Azure Storage account and to endpoints running the Azure Storage Sync agent. In this post I will give a quick overview of how it can be setup to service branch office requirements whereby VPN connectivity does not exist. For further information see here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/files/storage-sync-files-planning. Here’s my environment which I […]
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Azure Lab Services (formerly DevTest Labs) is designed to allow for the rapid creation of Virtual Machines for testing environments. A variety of purposes and use cases can be serviced using DevTest Labs, for example, Development Teams, Classrooms, and various Testing environments. The basic idea is that the owner of the Lab creates VMs or provides a means to create VMs, which are […]
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It’s probably no secret that half of the IT blogs out there are running on WordPress or a similar Platform. WordPress is easy to use, simple, and requires little maintenance to run – what’s not to love?! As with any Website – it doesn’t matter how good the back-end code or server hosting the site is, if your user is […]
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Azure Firewall was released for preview this week, so I thought I would give it a quick try and look at some of the features available. The firewall provides the following features at the current time: Built-in high availability – built into the Azure Platform, so no requirement to create load balanced configurations Unrestricted cloud scalability – the firewall can […]
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When using any environment that provides virtual desktops at scale, it makes sense to have only the required number of resources running at the right time – rather than all of the resources all of the time. The usual approach to this is to use power management – so unused virtual machines are shut down when not in use. With […]
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Azure Traffic Manager is designed to provide traffic routing to various locations based on a ruleset that you specify. It can be used for priority (failover), weighted distribution, performance, and geographic traffic distribution. The failover option is similar to GSLB – and works in a similar way, so I am going to demonstrate that in this post. I’ve started with […]
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Sometimes there is a requirement to Load Balance StoreFront using a method other than NetScaler. Although rare (in my experience!) this does occasionally happen when NetScaler is perhaps not being used for Remote Access – Â in an internal only environment for example. In this post I will explain how to Load Balance StoreFront using the native Azure Load Balancers. We […]
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In this post I’ll be going through how I have configured GSLB for NetScaler Gateway in Azure, and the various elements required for this type of configuration. Firstly – I began by setting up the background infrastructure to demonstrate this test. Namely, 2x Active Directory DCs within two Azure Locations (Eastern US (EUS), and South Central US (SCUS)). These were […]
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NetScaler, as I am sure you are aware, is a superbly powerful Application Delivery Controller. One of the most useful features is the use of Responder Policies/Actions, and Backup vServers to indicate that a service is down or to provide access to an alternative service for end users. Let’s say – you have a load balancer configured that balances two […]
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