Automation is essential to reduce friction and to streamline operational processes. It’s indispensable when it comes to the automation of manual, error-prone and frequently repeated tasks in a cloud or enterprise environment. Automation is the key to IT industrialization. Azure Automation is used to automate operational processes withing Microsoft Azure.
Automation account The very first thing you have to create is an Automation account. You can have multiple Automation accounts per subscription.
Before you can manage Azure services with Azure Automation, you need to authenticate the Automation account against a subscription. This authentication process is part of each runbook. There are two different ways to authenticate against an Azure subscription:
Active Directory user Certificate If you want to use an Active Directory account, you have to create a credential asset in the Automation account and provide username and password for that Active Directory account.
Microsoft Exchange Server licensing is rather simple. You can choose between two Exchange licenses:
Standard (up to 5 mailbox databases) Enterprise (up to 100 mailbox databases) Standard and Enterprise only differ in the number of supported databases! Feedl free to use Exchange DAG with Exchange Standard and Windows Server Standard! To license your clients, you have to purchase a Client Access License (CAL) for each user or device that accesses your Exchange server environment.
To be honest: I’m lazy and I have a wife and two kids. Therefore I have to minimize the costs of my lab. I have a physical lab at the office and some VMs running on Microsoft Azure. Azure is nice, because I only have to pay what I really use. And because I’m only paying the actual use, I start the VMs only when I need them. Inspired by this very handy Azure VM wakeup & shutdown script, I decided to write my own script (yes, I invented a wheel again…).
Building networks in the cloud is sometimes hard to understand. A common mistake is to believe that all VMs can talk to another, regardless of the owner, and that all VMs are available over the internet.
Some basics about Cloud Service Endpoints and Virtual Networks When we talk about Microsoft Azure, a Cloud Service Endpoint is the easiest way to access one or multiple VMs. A Cloud Service contains resources, like VMs, and it’s acting as a communication and security boundary.
This issue is described in KB2971270 and is fixed in CU6.
I ran a couple of times in this error. After applying changes to SSL certificates (add, replace or delete a SSL certificate) and rebooting the server, the event log is flooded with events from source “HttpEvent” and event id 15021. The message says:
An error occurred while using SSL configuration for endpoint 0.0.0.0:444. The error status code is contained within the returned data.
A customer of mine is currently refreshing his branch office server infrastructure. A part of this project is to demote the Active Directory Domain Controllers, that are currently running in each branch office. The customer has multiple branch offices and each branch office has an Active Directory Domain Controller which is acting as file-/ print- and DHCP server. Each branch office has its own Active Directory site. The Domain Controller and the used IP subnets are assigned to the corresponding AD site.
Microsoft has introduced the Web Application Proxy (WAP) with Windows Server 2012 R2 and has it positioned as a replacement for Microsoft User Access Gateway (UAG), Thread Management Gateway (TMG) and IIS Application Request Routung (ARR). WAP ist tightly bound to the Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) role. WAP can be used
pre-authenticate access to published web applications, and it can function as an AD FS proxy The AD FS proxy role was removed in Windows Server 2012 R2 and it’s replaced by the WAP role.
Since Exchange 2007 client connections are handled by the Client Access Server role. With Exchange 2010, Microsoft has introduced the concept of the Client Access Server Array (CAS Array). A CAS Array is required, when internal and external client connections should be load balanced over multiple client access servers. Many client access protocols in Exchange 2010 require session affinity. This means, that the connection between the client and a particular client access server must persist.
Some days ago I wrote two blog posts (part I and part II) about VMware vSphere Metro Storage Cluster (vMSC) with HP 3PAR Peer Persistence. Because I wrote about it in the first of the two blog posts, allow me to take a short description, what Peer Persistence is and what it does, from that blog post:
HP 3PAR Peer Persistence adds functionalities to HP 3PAR Remote Copy software and HP 3PAR OS, that two 3PAR storage systems form a nearly continuous storage system.
