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 →
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 […]
Continue Reading →