As per this blog post, you can now backup Azure Files with a retention of 10 years! Microsoft have enabled on-demand backups that can retain your snapshots for 10 years using PowerShell Backup for Azure file shares offers the ability to configure policies with retention up to 180 days. However, using the “On-demand backup” option in PowerShell, you can retain a recovery point even for 10 years! You can have up to 200 Snapshots for a file share at any point in time A couple of points to consider at the time of writing. Currently there isn’t a way to…
Azure VM network best practices
There are serveral links on the internet that discuss tuning Azure VM network performance across both Windows & Linux VMs, most of all come from Microsoft – so this is is a summary of all the links and all the information available for ways to improve & tweak network performance across Azure VMs. Receive Side Scaling (RSS) – is a network driver technology that enables the efficient distribution of network receive processing across multiple CPUs in multiprocessor systems. RSS can reach higher maximal throughput than a VM without RSS. RSS may be disabled by default in a Windows VM. RSS…
Azure… or no Azure
Like all public/private clouds, Azure does have its ups and downs and can maybe effect all of us at some point. However due to this, Microsoft publish a public article Designing resilient applications for Azure to help to protect you against any outages. However, when there are any outages, you would want to know about them and be fully kept in the loop. To be totally covered as much as possible for both your stuff and general stuff with a wider scope with the least noise – two steps below: More targeted notifications – Make use of Azure Service Health, you…
Log Analytics Advanced Queries
Advanced Queries from Azure Log Analytics can be a bit daunting at first, however below are some example Log Analytics Queries to help get you started: Here are some links to more details: Log Analytics Demo site – https://portal.loganalytics.io/demo#/discover/query/main Kusto Course – https://www.pluralsight.com/courses/kusto-query-language-kql-from-scratch Log Analytics new log search FAQ and known issues – https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/log-analytics/log-analytics-log-search-faq Cheat Sheet – https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/log-analytics/log-analytics-log-search-transition Language Reference – https://docs.loganalytics.io/docs/Language-Reference Getting started guide (20 mins) – https://docs.loganalytics.io/docs/Learn/Getting-Started/Getting-started-with-queries //—————- 80% of what you’ll ever do, 10 commands ——————-// // search, where, take, count, summarize, bin, top, extend, project, distinct // //—————————————————————————-// Top 5 running processes in the last 3 days // Find…
Latency between Azure & AWS within region
Testing latency between Azure & AWS in the same region. Imagine you had a customer with workloads in AWS and workloads in Azure. This test was assuming the front-end workloads in Azure would connect to back-end workloads in AWS. The big question what would be the latency. To start with, let’s start with the general web speed tests from each public cloud provider to level set. Web Browser Speed Tests Tests results from both Azure & AWS using the browser and the popular speed test websites. Speedtest.net Comparing apples with apples, using the Telstra Sydney speed test server for both….
Programmably connect to a WiFi network using a password
Connecting to a wireless network using a password is harder than what you might think, as you need to create a WiFi ‘profile’. The below PowerShell code can do exactly what you need, it creates the WiFi profile, and connects you to the WiFi network automatically. # Fill in mandatory details for the WiFi network $WirelessNetworkSSID = '<WiFi_SSID>' $WirelessNetworkPassword = '<WiFi_password>' $Authentication = 'WPA2PSK' # Could be WPA2 $Encryption = 'AES' # Create the WiFi profile, set the profile to auto connect $WirelessProfile = @' <WLANProfile xmlns="http://www.microsoft.com/networking/WLAN/profile/v1"> <name>{0}</name> <SSIDConfig> <SSID> <name>{0}</name> </SSID> </SSIDConfig> <connectionType>ESS</connectionType> <connectionMode>auto</connectionMode> <MSM> <security> <authEncryption> <authentication>{2}</authentication> <encryption>{3}</encryption>…
Easy tagging of resources in Azure for billing and charge back
Tagging of resources in Azure can be a pain, especially if you have heaps of resources deployed. Tagging is used primarily for billing purposes and tags applied to the resource group are not inherited by the resources in that resource group. What’s more, if you want to chargeback Azure consumption to the business across various business units, tagging is the best way to do it. There’s a few of ways you can chargeback to business units by using tags: Download or view your Azure billing invoice and daily usage data Connect to Microsoft Azure Enterprise with Power BI Cloudyn which has…
Windows 10 Adaptive Contrast
Have you ever experienced the contrast/brightness of the screen in Windows 10 change dynamically between applications? Especially switching from high white contrast apps like a web browser to a dark contrast application like VS Code for example? It’s pretty annoying. I have a Surface Pro 6 and its fairly off putting. It’s different to this setting where it changes the brightness/contrast across the board to the OS level regardless of specific apps: The setting I am talking about where it changes contrast as you change and flick between apps. Solution: From here https://www.windowscentral.com/how-disable-adapative-contrast-surface Adaptive contrast is very different than auto-brightness (or…
Microsoft Azure has the best global WAN
This blog post was recognised on this podcast and here’s the audio snippet (below) where they specifically talked about it. Thanks guys! Microsoft has the second biggest network in the world behind the internet Microsoft Cloud Show Podcast – Episode 281 Want to understand more about Azure’s global WAN and Microsoft’s network backbone? A recent 2018 Public Cloud Performance Benchmark Report from ThousandEyes says Azure has the best global WAN, out of the three major public cloud providers. – all of it is our own private network. Some of the highlights in this report are: AWS’ network design forces traffic from the end…
Save Money with Azure, intelligent shutdown of VMs
This blog post is based on 3 separate asks from 3 separate customers about adding value for their Azure subscriptions. They came to be and said “Marc, I would like to devise a scheme where at 7pm every night, all Dev/Test VMs can be shut down to save money and the business owners have the final say.” There’s one problem though, the business owners don’t have access to the Azure portal – it has to be done over email. What’s more, an option to force the shutdown of the VMs if the business owners don’t respond in a time frame…
