Cloud

For some time I write a whitepaper about how to implement a highly available private cloud to host virtual machines. On this day of Christmas, I have finished and published it. You can download it from this link. This whitepaper explains how to implement a Private Cloud with Windows Azure Pack in high availability from scratch. So I talk about ...

Microsoft Azure Operational Insights (OpInsights) is a set of tools based on Azure technologies that enables to collect, combine, correlate and visualize all your machine data. OpInsights works with intelligence packs which are collection of logic, visualization and data acquisition rules. These intelligence packs can be added the the OpInsights easily from a gallery. These intelligence packs enable for example ...

Thanks to Windows Azure Pack, we can deploy standalone Virtual Machines or Virtual Machine Roles from the management portal. The Virtual Machine Role (VM Role) enables to deploy virtual machines with pre-configured Windows Server roles as File Server, Domain Controller, Web Server and so on. Moreover when deploying VM roles, it is easy to increase the number of instances that ...

The VM Role enables to deploy Virtual Machines with a predefined role as Domain Controller, Web Server, Exchange and so on. When deploying VM role from the gallery, the configuration of the related role is made automatically. Usually two packages are needed to deploy a VM role (resource extension package is optional): A resource definition package (*.resdefpkg). This is a ...

In Windows Azure Pack – Manage VM Networks topic, I have talked about network virtualization implemented with NVGRE and I have implemented it without NVGRE gateway. That means that Virtual Machines weren’t able to be contacted from the outside of its VM network boundary. In this topic, I’m going to implement a NVGRE gateway in order to these VM can ...

Microsoft has just released Update Rollup 4 for System Center 2012 R2 and Windows Azure Pack. This update fix a lot of issues (mainly on VMM) and add new features as DPM which is now able to backup SQL Server 2012SP2/2014. Below, you can find links to download updates: Virtual Machine Manager: KB2992024 Service Provider Foundation: KB2992021 Operations Manager: KB2992020 Service ...

The RDS Gateway is useful for VM Clouds in the Windows Azure Pack to connect to Virtual Machine that have no connection to the network. Thanks to RDS gateway, VMs can be managed from console mode and tenants can always have access to VMs even if a network issue occurs. N.B : The above schema comes from this TechNet article. The ...

When the Windows Azure Pack is installed for production, the access to the cloud services should be accessible 99,9% of the time. To implement this service level, the Windows Azure Pack has to be deployed with high availability mechanisms as Load-Balancing, SQL AlwaysOn and so on. The below schema shows the Windows Azure Pack deployment in high availability that I ...

SMA (Service Management Automation) is a feature that enables to automate tasks in your private cloud from the Windows Azure Pack. SMA is included in the Orchestrator ISO. Three components are needed to run SMA for Windows Azure Pack: SMA Web Services – This is a REST Endpoint used by the Windows Azure Pack to connect to the SMA service. ...

In the previous topic, I have configured the Website clouds service in the Windows Azure Pack. However websites usually need a database to store configuration and user data. For example Tech-Coffee is powered by WordPress which needs a MySQL database. So in this topic we will see how to implement the MySQL Servers service on the Windows Azure Pack. MySQL ...