A WORLD OF BITS AND BYTES…
When we create a new virtual machine within the Azure environment, we can use the Azure Marketplace. Services and software are available in the Azure Marketplace, which you can deploy within an environment. For virtual machines, Windows operating systems, Open source variants and also 3rd party appliances are available.
From the Azure portal, we can view the Azure Marketplace.
Continue reading “Deploy a VM from the Azure Azure Marketplace”Azure Spot VM is an Azure feature that allows you to take advantage of the unused capacity of the underlaying platform. If an host has some capacity compute left, these ‘spots’ will be filled with you Spot enabled virtual machines. When enabling this feature, you receive a discount up to 90 percent of the normal pricing in some cases.
Only pricing and eviction are the differences between Spot enabled virtual machines and the regular virtual machines. The compute, networking, storage, etc are exactly the same. The virtual machine can be attached to a virtual network or a load balancing solution, such as a internal/external load balancer. Also, the management capabilities are exactly the same and are done though the Azure Portal or with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) like Bicep, ARM, Powershell or Terraform.
Continue reading “Reduce costs with Azure Spot virtual machines”PIM for Groups is part of the Azure Active Directory Privileged Identity Management. With PIM for Groups users can activate membership or ownership of an Azure AD security group or Microsoft 365 group. These groups can be used to assign access to for example Azure AD roles or Azure roles.
When using Azure PIM with PIM for Groups, you’re following the Microsoft best practices of ‘least privileged’ strategy.
Today, I’m going to show you how to install and configure Active Directory Domain Services on Windows Server 2022 Core edition on Azure.
I’ve used some ARM templates to deploy my two domain controllers in Azure, based on Windows Server 2022 Core edition. These servers are in a separate subnet within my Azure environment. In this example, Í’ve two domain controllers, mss-dc-core001 and mss-dc-core002.
Continue reading “Install and configure ADDS on Windows Server 2022 Core in Azure (Part 1)”
If you have experience with the Windows Admin Center, you might already have deduced it is a powerhouse of functionality making light of important server management tasks. If you’re just adding it to your system administrator toolbox, welcome to the wonder of Windows Admin Center!
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In Azure, you have the option to bring in your own licenses (Azure Hybrid Benefit). If you deploy a virtual machine using Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates, this option is not enabled by default. Certainly for test environments, demos, but in many cases also production environments, you want to enable this option.
By adding the line below to your ARM template, the Azure Hybrid Benefit is enabled.
When you deploy a new virtual machine, for example Windows Server 2016/2019 or 2022, you’ll get the C: drive with the operating system, the D: drive for the TEMP storage (most of the VM types) and a DVD drive.
The DVD drive is not needed in some situations, for example on domain controllers. This type of servers you want to harden the security as much as possible. So, for domain controllers we’re deploying in our customer environments, we want to disable the DVD drive.
We run the following command when deploying new domain controllers in Azure.
## Disable DVD drive
Set-ItemProperty -Path HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\cdrom -Name Start -Value 4 -Type DWord
After this step, reboot the server and your DVD drive is gone!
Today I’ve deployed a new virtual machine within Azure using the Windows Server 2022 Azure Edition Preview Marketplace image. After running my Powershell script, I received an error:
’User failed validation to purchase resources. Error message: ‘You have not accepted the legal terms on this subscription: …..’
So, let’s take a look at the legal terms, also using Powershell. I’ve used a couple of variables.
$azureVmPublisherName = "MicrosoftWindowsServer"
$azureVmOffer = "microsoftserveroperatingsystems-previews"
$azureVmSkus = "windows-server-2022-azure-edition-preview"
$Version = "latest"
Get-AzMarketplaceTerms -Publisher $azureVmPublisherName -Product $azureVmOffer -Name $azureVmSkus
As you can see, the legal terms are not accepted yet!! With a small Powershell command, we can accept the legal terms.
Get-AzMarketplaceTerms -Publisher $azureVmPublisherName -Product $azureVmOffer -Name $azureVmSkus | Set-AzMarketplaceTerms -Accept
Now you’re good to go!!