This post is part 2 of a small series and stems from this post https://marckean.com/2016/05/17/azure-resource-groups-networks/ This post discussed Azure Resource Groups and splitting all IaaS Azure resources across multiple Azure Resource Groups for an easy way to delete targeted resources and easy of delegating admin. This post focuses on NSGs (Network Security Groups). A quick re-cap, with ARM based NSGs… …you can apply a NSG to both a subnet or a NIC The order of the NSG rules that are applied are NSG rules attached to a virtual network subnet and then a NIC. Once there’s a match, it takes that Each…
Azure Resource Groups – Networks
I recently finished delivering a technical presentation all about Azure in both Sydney and Melbourne at the Microsoft offices. It was a good turnout and something learnt that there is still segregation in IT teams even in today’s world of the cloud – there is still a large number of people that are IT network people!! Although I am, I fell into it by accident with network virtualisation on Hyper-V with converged networks and more recently Azure. Now I have posted lots around ARM (Azure Resource Manager) before, but I think I tended to focus on putting all resources into…
Azure VPN with Windows Server 2012 R2 – Routing & Remote Access
My other blog post talked about setting up an Azure Virtual Network along with a Local network gateway, Public IP address and Virtual Network Gateway in the same Resource Group. The other end to this is setting up the on-prem side of the VPN tunnel. As I am a Microsoft person, here is a PowerShell script below to setup the Azure site-to-site VPN tunnel on a Microsoft firewall – Windows Server 2012 R2 (Routing & Remote Access). Now all the network admins of this world will be cursing at me for using a Micosoft product as a firewall, but you know…
Azure ARM Virtual Networks and VPN tunnels / gateways
This post is part 1 of a small series and stems from this post https://marckean.com/2016/05/17/azure-resource-groups-networks/ The following is some PowerShell I put together that ends up setting up a full Virtual Network along with a Local network gateway, Public IP address and Virtual Network Gateway in the same Resource Group. This will set all this up into a separate Azure Resource Group on its own, which I recommend to keep the network part of your Azure environment separate, then you can easily deploy other resources in other Resource Groups, e.g. Virtual Machines which all can be attached to this Virtual…
Automatically Create Users in AD
Here’s a PowerShell script I put together to import users into AD (Active Directory). You just need to edit the .CSV file to add your users into it, then simply run the script pointing to the .CSV file. This is good for testing purposes. Prior to running the script, ensure that you have added your email domains to AD as UPNs to the domain and also that you have extended the schema for Exchange, to add in the all the Exchange attributes. It also supports multiple email domains, if you don’t have multiple email domain, hash out the third line…
IaaS limitations of the ‘new’ Azure Portal
There is some limitation of setting up VMs (virtual machines) using the new Azure portal http://portal.azure.com Let me explain some of these limitations now. Oh and I better mention that CSP licensing is all ARM ONLY! In other words, with CSP licensing there is no link to ASM at all, it doesn’t even give you the option of selecting (classic) in brackets. ARM Load Balancer: Creating virtual machines in the new Azure portal only allows you to create a new VM with an NSG (Network Security Group). If you want to create a VM with an ARM based load…
Azure VM (ASM 2 ARM) migration tool
During my travels in my in-depth work with Microsoft Azure and dealings with the fabulous rhipe partners, I have seen a much needed gap in the Azure market and developed a tool completely based on PowerShell over 700 lines long to help Azure customers move / migrate virtual machines effortlessly, seamlessly and painlessly from Azure’s old ASM based Azure Service Management environment to Azure’s new ARM based Azure Resource Manager environment. The tool takes into account every possible combination in which you can have an ASM based virtual machine setup. In case you don’t know, ASM is the classic (IaaS v1)…
Azure Sydney outage between February 17 and 29, 2016
…. From Microsoft: The root cause of this issue was excessive load on one of our storage scale units in the region. Due to unprecedented demand in this region, this storage scale unit was operating under higher than expected load and capacity pressure. This caused intermittent high latencies for storage transactions on this scale unit, which may have resulted in failures for some customers. The Azure Storage team rebalanced workloads across the entire region, which mitigated some of the failures while the team deployed a new scale unit. This allowed us to direct new customers to the new unit and…
Office 365 (Office 2016) not updating
If your Office 365 software (Office 2016 SKU) is stuck on a certain version number and are experiencing an issue where Office 365 doesn’t update or won’t update – like mine was (on two machines), I managed to find a fix. Bearing in mind, this even happened on a brand new machine, an install of Office 365 (Office 2016), the wrong URL was set in the registry to grab updates. Go to the registry (only if you have the Office 2016 version of Office 365) and change the value of HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\ClickToRun\Configuration\CDNBaseUrl to http://officecdn.microsoft.com/pr/492350f6-3a01-4f97-b9c0-c7c6ddf67d60 Just in case, back this value up first….
AD Connect – password sync notifications
For a customer I setup AD Connect (AD Sync) along with password sync. However the customer needed more visibility and an easy way to be notified when passwords were actually changed in Azure AD (Office 365). Passwords can be changed with on-prem Active Directory (AD), however it’s a slight delay when the password sync actually makes the actual password change in Azure AD – the slight delay being up-to 2 minutes. The scenario being if a user needed their password changed by IT, IT can change the password and simply say to the user “when you get an SMS, you’ll…
Marc Kean 
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