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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. An Automation account allows you so separate automation resources from other Automation accounts. Automation resources are runbooks and assets (credentials, certificates, connection strings, variables, scheudles etc.). So each Automation account has its own set of runbooks and assets. This is perfect to separate production from development. An Automation account is associated with an Azure region, but the Automation account can manage Azure services in all regions.

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. You can retrieve the credentials using the Get-AzureAutomationCredential cmdlet. This cmdlet returns a System.Management.Automation.PSCredential object, which can be used with Add-AzureAccount to connect to a subscription. If you want to use a certificate, you need four assets in the Automation account: A certificate and variables with the certificate name, the subscription ID and the subscription name. The values of these assets can be retrieved with Get-AutomationVariable and Get-AutomationCertificate.

With the general availability of PernixData FVP 3.1, PernixData released the first version of PernixData Architect.

One of the biggest problems today is, that management tools are often focused on deployment and monitoring of applications or infrastructure. This doesn’t lead to a holistic view over applications and related data center infrastructure. You have to monitor at several points within the application stack and even then, you won’t get a holistic view. Without proper information, you can’t make proper decisions. At this point, PernixData Architect comes into play.

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. There are two types of CALs:

Since september 2015, the latest version of HP StoreOnce backup system software is available. The latest release 3.13.0 is available for HP StoreOnce VSA, 6500, B6200 multi-node and all single node systems running software version 3.x. This also applies to some D2D 2500, 4100 and 4300 single-node backup systems running software versions 2.x. Make sure that you take a look into customer notice c03729283 for details on performing the conversion.

This release comes with some nice enhancements, e.g.

While upgrading a rather old (but very stable) Veeam Backup & Replication 6.1 installation to 8.0 Update 3 (with intermediate step to 6.5), I ran into a curious error. Right after the welcome screen, this error message

appeared. A closer look into the BackupSetup.log (you can find this log in the %temp% dir. Just enter %temp% into the Explorer address bar) resulted in this very interesting log entry:

Last week, my colleague Claudia and I have ported a HP ProVision configuration to HP Comware. Unexpectedly, it wasn’t routing or VLANs or OSPF that caused headaches, it was a Wake-on-LAN (WoL). Depending on the used tool, the magic packet (which wakes up the computer) is a broadcast (255.255.255.255) or a subnet-directed broadcast (e.g. 192.168.200.255). So it was important to know what tool the customer used.

This is how HP ProVision implements subnet-directed broadcasts:

Important note: It seems that vCenter Server Appliance updates revert the changes. Please check the settings after each update!

The VMware vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) can act as a remote syslog destition for ESXi hosts. This is very handy for troubleshooting and I really recommend to use this feature.  But VMware ESXi hosts can be really chatty and therefore it’s a good idea to keep an eye on the free disk space of the VCSA.

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…). Very simple, nothing fancy. Feel free to use and modify the script according to your needs.

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. All VMs that use the same Cloud Service get their IPs via DHCP and share the same private IP address range. The VMs can communicate directly to each other. To access these VMs over the internet, a Cloud Service Endpoint is used. Each Cloud Service has a internet addressable virtual IP address assigned. And that’s the Cloud Service Endpoint. With PAT, ports for RDP or PowerShell are forwarded to the VMs by default. If you deploy a webserver and an application server, both can be provisioned to the same Cloud Service and therefore, they share the same Cloud Service Endpoint. But you can only forward http traffic to the webserver. Therefore only the webserver is available over the internet, not the application server.