For a while I have been deploying infrastructure using Azure DevOps, and in particular deploying demo environments which need to be spun up and torn down again, but also to demonstrate the power of Infrastructure as Code. One issue I’ve faced with a pure ARM/Bicep or Terraform deployment is the promotion of a Domain Controller… it is straightforward to deploy […]
Continue Reading →
Recently I have been working more and more with Terraform – and seeing the benefits to what I can do in a short space of time within Azure, using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) methodologies. I’m now using Terraform for all my Azure lab needs – it’s so fast and easy to deploy just what I need, and tweak from there […]
Continue Reading →
One area that always need focus is around security and managing credentials. Using Terraform, and the method in this blog post, you can help build Azure Key Vault and create a secure secret to use when creating VMs, automatically. To keep things secure, my method uses a combination of randomised password values, and Azure Key Vault. This post explains how […]
Continue Reading →
For some time, I have been using Terraform to create environments – and it’s something I rely on heavily for my own Azure lab environment. My lab is an ever changing picture – and thus I regularly create and destroy resources and environments, to test new things. I usually just run Terraform locally and have it spin up specific lab […]
Continue Reading →
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 […]
Continue Reading →
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 […]
Continue Reading →
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 […]
Continue Reading →
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 […]
Continue Reading →
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 […]
Continue Reading →
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 […]
Continue Reading →
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 […]
Continue Reading →
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 – 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 […]
Continue Reading →