You can see the Azure automation version of sequentially starting & stopping Azure VMs on my other post. Have you ever wanted to sequentially start and stop your Azure Virtual Machines all in one hit? Not just Azure VMs, you can use this same method for any sequential job you want to run in Azure. The following script will start and stop your Azure VMs in parallel by using background jobs in PowerShell. Please note, this script is based on Azure Resource Manager, however with easy change to the code, this same structure will still work with Azure Service Management….
Azure News 2016 – Week 30
Previous News | Next News This weeks Azure updates & news. This time around the big news I would say is the news about Azure virtual machines wiping out the upgrade domain nearly 100% to massively improve reliability. Don’t forget, Azure news can also be heard on the ‘Need to Know‘ podcast with Robert Crane and myself. Azure email announments can be found here. Azure Usage and Billing Portal July 14 saw the release of Azure Usage and Billing Portal, this is an open source project started from the developer experience team at Microsoft. It leverages the Azure Resource Usage &…
PowerShell Bug – New-ScheduledTaskTrigger
This used to work with a new Windows 10 device which came pre-installed with Windows 10….. But then I saw a 1511 update that had come through in Windows Updates, so I upgraded Windows to Windows 10 version 1511, this was classed as an upgrade, not just a normal update. I then started to get a bug when trying to run the following PowerShell to add in a scheduled task: The error was….. I looked online and researched, then cam accross this fix – run this below in PowerShell as administrator. Problem solved…. I will report this through to the…
Azure News 2016 – Week 28
Previous News | Next News This weeks Azure updates & news. This time around the big news is WPC (Worldwide Partner Conference) in Toronto Canada where most announcements occurred. WPC Day 1 Announcements WPC Day 2 Announcements WPC Day 3 Announcements Next year WPC will be in Washington DC. Don’t forget, Azure news can also be heard on the ‘Need to Know‘ podcast with Robert Crane and myself. New Azure Regions Just in case you didn’t think there was already enough Azure regions in the US, there’s now two new regions that have just opened for business, US West 2 &…
Azure Stack Vs Azure Public | Event
Last night myself and Steve Hosking at Vigilant IT did a presentation of Azure Stack Vs Azure Public in Sydney. All based around Azure Stack TP1 (Technical Preview 1) from what we know now….. This was all based around the announcement that came out the same day about the release of Azure Stack https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-the-first-technical-preview-of-microsoft-azure-stack/ Had a great turnout to the user group meetup, 50 people registered with 30 people turning up, the magic 60% show rate rang true even on State Of Origin night and a night with freezing conditions smack bang in the middle of Winter – or was it the free beer…
Azure Stack Overview
Why Azure Stack? I can tell you some very good reasons, apart from more control at the provider side by the possibilities of offering an SLA on a single virtual machine ironing out the Upgrade Domain, there’s also the real use case of ease of setup by letting a glorified PowerShell script written by Microsoft do all the work in setting up the entire environment. Azure Stack offers a perfect platform to any large company to allow delegated usage for internal business divisions, allowing stock standard users to install whatever whenever. For example, a university with various faculties can all…
Surface Pro 4 external display
I am writing this blog post because I like many others have had massive problems with the high DPI / high resolution of the Surface Pro 4. The issues were with various external monitors which didn’t have as high as resolution as the Surface. The problems being: Scaling (where it scales programs to various sizes) i.e. automatic scaling as you drag programs from one display to another, some programs ‘jump’ in size and most of the time the end result is the programs being blurry. Also some programs like PowerPoint and Skype for Business didn’t auto-scale correctly so would…
Azure News 2016 – Week 26
Previous News | Next News This weeks Azure updates & news. This time around the big news is more competition in the IT market for end customers with more CSP. Don’t forget, Azure news can also be heard on the ‘Need to Know‘ podcast with Robert Crane and myself. Here is the audio only version of this news: Events coming up, we have: Microsoft Worldwide Partner conference, July 10 – 14 in Toronto, Canada Microsoft Ignite, September 26–30, 2016, Atlanta, GA Microsoft Ignite NZ, 25 – 28 October, 2016 SKYCITY, Auckland CSP Licensing On June 17, Microsoft appointed 5 new indirect 2-tier partners…
Microsoft Azure Information Protection
On June 22 Microsoft announced the new Azure Information Protection, which is basically an upgrade of the existing Azure Rights Management (Azure RMS) by adding the functionality of Secure Islands which Microsoft aquired late last year. Companies and business historically have a logical perimeter, that perimeter contained the majority of business activity and IT services were accessed internally. This is in comparison to now where people access IT business services from anywhere. As employees become more and more mobile, IT admins start to punch stacks of holes in corporate firewalls. These days, all user activity is happening outside the perimeter of the…
Azure Billing – PowerShell
Billing in Azure can be a beast to get your head around. But the new billing API that was announced last year by Scott Guthrie makes it easy to export the billing information to a .CSV file, where you can massage it in Excel and make it look pretty. There’s two parts to it, the Azure Usage API and the Azure RateCard API, we will focus on the forma. The PowerShell script below pieced together runs through exporting Azure usage from the Billing API. The problem is the fact that there’s a limit to the number of lines of data…
Marc Kean 
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