Resize Azure Virtual Machines in Parallel

Imagine you had to resize a whole bunch of VMs in Azure, rather than doing a resize one after the other in serial, you can do this in parallel with the new ForEach-Object Parallel feature in PowerShell v7. More details on this feature here – https://devblogs.microsoft.com/powershell/powershell-foreach-object-parallel-feature/ Doing this in parallel will greatly speed up the process by resizing any number of VMs all at once. To start with, you will need a CSV file with two columns, vmname,targetsize. Enter all the VM names of the VMs that you want to resize, also the correct VM size.  Sample CSV file: To get a list of Azure VM…

Azure Private Link DNS

Azure Private Link is a private connection to Azure PaaS services. However to really understand private link, you need to understand what is happening under the covers – with DNS. Before you enable Private Link for a PaaS service e.g. Azure SQL, if you had an Azure PaaS service URL e.g. Sql321.database.windows.net (a global zone), the following would be the DNS resolution that would occur: You had a virtual machine that made a request to Sql321.database.windows.net This DNS request resolved to a DNS CNAME record and was forwarded by using a redirect (CNAME) to another regional DNS zone of westeurope1-a.control.database.windows.net…

Azure Networking Sessions | Ignite 2019

Microsoft Ignite just completed in the US beginning of November 2019. As a result, it’s left us with a whole bunch of free and awesome content to keep us busy. Put Netflix aside for the next month or so and watch all the Ignite videos instead. To help, I managed to collate the Azure Networking topics all into the one single YouTube playlist. Also too if you want to find the rest of the Ignite videos, here’s the raw JSON payload with all the sessions: This file has been truncated, but you can view the full file. This file contains…

SAP on Azure demystified whiteboarding video

In case you missed the others in the series: Azure Virtual WAN demystified | whiteboarding session Azure ExpressRoute demystified | whiteboarding session Azure ExpressRoute demystified (part 2) | whiteboarding session This next one focuses on the large ticket item, SAP on Azure. I’m joined by Etienne Dittrich from Microsoft who takes us through in a clean and concise way. We cover off the following: Why should I care about SAP HANA SAP on Azure SAP on Azure IaaS SAP Large Instances (Physical) SAP Infrastructure on Azure SAP Resiliency Linux Clustering – Pacemaker clusters SAP DR/HA Azure NetApp Files & SAP…

Azure Files 10 years retention

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…