Full of I.T.

Do you want to test SharePoint 2013 without dedicating your own hardware?

Kevin Remde — Fri, 17 May 2013 14:42:12 GMT

Well, do you?

“Yes! And I bet you’re going to tell me to use Windows Azure.”

You’re catching on! In today’s article in our “20 Key Scenarios with Windows Azure Infrastructure Services”, my friend Keith Mayer shares some excellent tips, resources, and a step-by-step for building a SharePoint 2013 lab housed completely in Windows Azure. All you need is a Windows Azure Free Trial subscription.

READ HIS EXCELLENT ARTICLE HERE

Put your ADFS in the Cloud - 20 Key Scenarios with Windows Azure Infrastructure Services

Kevin Remde — Thu, 16 May 2013 11:59:00 GMT

Welcome to another installment of our May series of articles – “20 Key Scenarios with Windows Azure Infrastructure Services”.

Today I’m going to describe a scenario, a problem, and then propose a solution.

The Scenario: Single Sign-On support using Active Directory, Windows Azure Active Directory, ADFS (Active Directory Federation Services), and Office 365 and/or Windows InTune.

For those of you who may not be familiar with it, you have the ability to set up a federated identity relationship between your local Active Directory and your Office 365 authentication. In this way, your people, simply logging in with their local domain accounts, are able to be automatically authenticated against Office 365, because Office 365’s use of Windows Azure Active Directory, and you have the ability to set up an ADFS relationship between the authentication in Office 365 and your company’s Active Directory domain. So, you manage one set of user accounts locally, just like you always have, and Office 365 can grant access based on the “claim” that the user account is known and valid. Your client (laptop, tablet, or other mobile device) gets the claim from your Active Directory (preferably by accessing an ADFS Proxy in your company’s perimeter network), and then passes that acquired claim up to Office 365.

In short – Your users are either already authenticated, or just have to set up the authentication parameters one time for their use of the cloud-based services such as Office 365, Windows InTune, or other such services.

For details on setting up Single Sign-On for Office 365, see “Plan for and deploy AD FS for use with single sign-on”

So this is great. No matter where I am, or where my people are in the world, they can use their domain account and local profile and just open up Outlook or access the cloud-based SharePoint or their SkyDrive Pro storage, and they’re authenticated. And even if they’re using a non-domain machine or a mobile device, they’ll use the same company credentials they’re already familiar with to connect to their company e-mail or other resources.

The Problem: I’m outside the office, and the connection to my ADFS Proxy is unavailable. What happens then?

“Yeah.. what happens then?!”

I’ll tell you what happens then. It’s a problem, because, your device needs to get to the ADFS (STS) proxy to verify that you are who you say you are, and to give you the claim token that is passed up to Office 365. If it is unavailable, then your users can’t be trusted by their cloud-based resources. Outlook won’t be able to connect to the Office 365 Exchange server. Yeah.. a big problem. That’s why so much documentation (and even the promise of Microsoft support) is devoted to the configuration of a load-balanced farm of servers to keep that proxy service high-performing and highly available.

Granted, it’s an even bigger problem for the people who are sitting in that office. Presumably they can’t access the Internet at all. So assuming that your company, like most others, is becoming more and more dependent upon that Internet connection being live in order to get their work done, you’ve probably already addressed alternatives. And many people nowadays have multiple personal paths to the Internet that would restore some amount of personal access. But that doesn’t fix their problem of not being able to get Outlook to connect.

The Solution: Put a copy of your domain in “the cloud”!

Think about it: If I have a replicated copy of my domain up on a virtual machine running in Windows Azure, then that domain controller can also serve as the trusted location where Office 365 and the ADFS trust can be connected!

“Sounds like an interesting idea. But what if I don’t want a copy of my domain up in the cloud?”

Then another option would be to Windows Azure virtual machines as your ADFS Proxies. Basically think of Windows Azure as an alternative to (or an extension of) your Perimeter network (DMZ). Of course in this case if the availability of your home datacenter goes down, you’re still going to have authentication issues.

Here’s a thought: Do both! Have an AD site up in Windows Azure, with a secured/authenticated/encrypted connection back to the corporate network. And then build an externally available, load-balanced set of machines in a separate “perimeter” network in Windows Azure as well. In this way, even if your connection back to your main office and the local AD DCs goes down, you still have AD authentication available “locally” within your Windows Azure subscription.

Here’s a document that describes the process in great detail:

Office 365 Adapter: Deploying Office 365 Single Sign-On using Windows Azure

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What do you think? Do you have any other ideas or suggestions? Any concerns? I’d love to hear about them in the comments. Let’s discuss!

And if you’ve missed any of our ““20 Key Scenarios with Windows Azure Infrastructure Services” series, please click on this link to find all of the other great articles.

Deploy Web Server Solutions in the Cloud – 20 Key Scenarios with Windows Azure Infrastructure Services

Kevin Remde — Wed, 15 May 2013 11:47:00 GMT

Windows Azure Infrastructure Services allows you to build complex solutions, hosted in Microsoft datacenters, as readily a you would have them running in your own lab or datacenter.

For today’s article in our “20 Key Scenarios with Windows Azure Infrastructure Services”, my friend Matt Hester gives us a detailed lab assignment which, in the end, will result in you having a load-balanced web application supported by a SQL Server database; all without having to use any of your local computer’s resources. Yep, we’re doing it all in “the cloud”.

READ HIS ARTICLE and DO THE LAB, HERE

Deploy a WebDAV File Server in the Cloud – 20 Key Scenarios with Windows Azure Infrastructure Services

Kevin Remde — Tue, 14 May 2013 20:18:17 GMT

If you can extend your datacenter into the cloud using a secured network path and Windows Azure, it sure should follow that you can take advantage of cloud-based virtual machines to perform some of your more common infrastructure tasks. For example: File Servers.

“Yeah, I get it, Kevin. You have a secured network connection, and you can just treat it like any other server.”

Ah.. but what if you want to use something like WebDAV for storage on a server instead? (WebDAV = Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning.) Perhaps you want to map a drive to a WebDAV connection to a cloud-based server? That doesn’t require anything other than HTTP to access Windows Server-based storage.

“I’m listening…”

In today’s article in our “20 Key Scenarios with Windows Azure Infrastructure Services” series, my friend Brian Lewis describes the scenario, and then provides a detailed step-by-step on how to install and configure WebDAV on a Windows Server 2012 running in Windows Azure, how to configure the proper endpoint and firewall rules, and then how to map a drive letter on a local machine and make the connection.

CHECK OUT HIS EXCELLENT ARTICLE HERE

NEW! Hands-On Datacenter Scenarios and Windows Azure Events

Kevin Remde — Tue, 14 May 2013 16:09:16 GMT

This just in…

The demand has been so great for more information about using Windows Azure Infrastructure Services as an extension of your datacenter and IT Operations, that we’ve decided to schedule a few more FREE events to close out the end of our fiscal year here in Central Region Microsoft US DPE. The four of us (Brian Lewis, Keith Mayer, Matt Hester and I) are holding events at four locations at the end of this month (and one in mid-June):

Southfield, MI (Detroit), May 21, 2013, and
Irving, TX (Dallas), May 30, 2013
Edina, MN (Minneapolis), May 31, 2013, and
Downers Grove, IL (Chicago), June 13, 2013

Each of these days will be made up of two half-day events on two different topics, giving you three different registration options.

“Huh?”

You can register for the morning session. You can register for the afternoon session. OR you can register for the full-day.

“Cool. What are the topics?”

I’m glad you asked…

Morning Topic: Using Windows Azure as a server and datacenter backup solution – Windows Azure Backup. We’ll talk briefly about, and then walk through a hands-on example (you will follow along and do this on your own computers) of enabling, configuring, and leveraging Windows Azure Backup.

Afternoon Topic: Building a Microsoft SharePoint 2013 lab entirely in Windows Azure. Again, at the end of this you will have a Microsoft SharePoint 2013 lab configured in your own cloud based lab in Windows Azure.

As I said, you can register for either one, or register for the full day. PLEASE just register one time, so that we can get an accurate estimate of attendance.

Okay, here are the registration links:

May 21 – Southfield, MI

OR

May 30 – Irving, TX

OR

May 31 – Edina, MN

OR

Downers Grove, IL

OR

Space is limited, so register early. And make sure you heed the requirements prior to coming. You’ll need at least some Internet and Remote-Desktop capable hardware, and a Windows Azure subscription. (Get a free 90-Day Trial here)

See you there!

SQL Database Mirroring to the Cloud - 20 Key Scenarios with Windows Azure Infrastructure Services

Kevin Remde — Mon, 13 May 2013 12:00:00 GMT

“Hey Kevin… I would like to use Windows Azure as a location where I set up a SQL Server database mirror. Is this something I can do?”

Absolutely, yes! In fact, it doesn’t even require anything fancy as far as setting up special connectors or site-to-site VPN in order to try this out (though in production you should consider a more secured connection).

As a really great tutorial and example, I point you to this TechNet resource: Tutorial: Database Mirroring for Disaster Recovery in Hybrid IT

This tutorial shows you how to implement SQL Server database mirroring for disaster recovery end-to-end in a hybrid IT environment. In this configuration, the principal database server runs on-premise and the mirror database server runs in Windows Azure. You can implement this scenario without a VPN connection between Windows Azure and your on-premise network if you use server certificates. Furthermore, it is possible for your principal database server to run behind a NAT device on-premise if you forward the appropriate ports on your NAT device to the server.

To try this out, I created a new Windows Server 2012 (using the free evaluation) server as a Hyper-V virtual machine named SQLOnPrem, and had a downloaded .ISO of the SQL Server 2012 evaluation installation connected to it (in the virtual DVD drive). I didn’t even have to manually install SQL on that box, since the tutorial actually gives you the scripts to do all the heavy lifting. And as long as you can redirect port 5022 through your NAT/firewall to your local VM, it’s really easy to set up.

I also used my Windows Azure subscription.
HINT: If you need one of those, you should get the 90 Day FREE Trial.

The tutorial provides PowerShell code to build the Windows Azure based virtual machine, which is an evaluation SQL Server 2012 running on Windows Server 2008 R2. Note however that, like the SQL Server AlwaysOn High Availability tutorial I discussed and used last week, the PowerShell code in the tutorial is a little out-of-date and won’t work as provided. In particular the PowerShell command for the creation of the Azure-based “SQLinCloud” server should be:

New-AzureVMConfig `
    -Name $sqlServerName `
    -InstanceSize Large `
    -ImageName $sqlImageName.ImageName `
    -MediaLocation "$storageAccountContainer$sqlServerName.vhd" `
    -DiskLabel "OS" |
    Add-AzureProvisioningConfig `
        -Windows `
        -AdminUserName $vmAdminUser `
        -Password $vmAdminPassword `
        -DisableAutomaticUpdates ` |
        Set-AzureSubnet `
            -SubnetNames $subnetName |
            Add-AzureEndpoint `
                -Name "SQL" `
                -Protocol "tcp" `
                -PublicPort 1433 `
                -LocalPort 1433 |
                Add-AzureEndpoint `
                    -Name "SQLMirroring" `
                    -Protocol "tcp" `
                    -PublicPort 5022 `
                    -LocalPort 5022 |
                    New-AzureVM `
                        -ServiceName $serviceName `
                        –AffinityGroup $affinityGroupName `
                        -VNetName $virtualNetworkName

Notice how this is essentially one-line of PowerShell that creates a VM in a specific Affinity Group, creates the Azure Service, connects the Machine to your Azure Network and subnet, sets up two TCP endpoints! Amazing!

Another fix needed to be made in the script to configure the firewall on the SQLonPrem machine (your local SQL Server). It should read:

[reflection.assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.SqlServer.Smo")
[reflection.assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.SqlServer.SqlWmiManagement")
$wmi = new-object ("Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Smo.Wmi.ManagedComputer") $env:COMPUTERNAME
$wmi.ServerInstances['MSSQLSERVER'].ServerProtocols['Tcp'].IsEnabled = "True"
$wmi.ServerInstances['MSSQLSERVER'].ServerProtocols['Tcp'].Alter()
$svc = Get-Service -Name 'MSSQLSERVER'
$timeout = New-Object System.TimeSpan -ArgumentList 0, 0, 30
$svc.Stop();
$svc.WaitForStatus([System.ServiceProcess.ServiceControllerStatus]::Stopped,$timeout)
$svc.Start();
$svc.WaitForStatus([System.ServiceProcess.ServiceControllerStatus]::Running,$timeout)

(The highlight is what I had to correct.)

I’ve put my copy of the corrected PowerShell that I used to create the Windows Azure VM up on SkyDrive for you. GET IT HERE.

Other than that, it works great, and is a very useful tutorial. In the end you’ll have a database installed locally, and a mirror up in your server running under Windows Azure.

"Oh yeah? Prove it?”

(sigh) Okay… here’s my local SQL Server…

…and here’s my SQL Server in the cloud.

For those of you not familiar with SQL Server Database Mirroring, I recommend you look at this page: Database Mirroring (SQL Server).
Important note: Database Mirroring is a feature that is being phased out in favor of the newer SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn Availability Groups for the purpose of High Availability (See my blog post HERE). But.. if you want to mirror, you can. And now you can mirror to the cloud.

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What do you think? Are you considering using the cloud and Windows Azure as part of your storage and disaster recovery solutions? Give us your comments or questions!

Extend Your Private Cloud with Windows Azure Virtual Networks and Windows Server 2012 - 20 Key Scenarios with Windows Azure Infrastructure Services

Kevin Remde — Fri, 10 May 2013 19:38:10 GMT

So now that we’ve been talking about building virtual machines in Windows Azure, and extending your datacenter into “the cloud”, we need to actually make the connection. But how does one actually build the Windows Azure Network, and then that subnet our local subnets?

Keith Mayer gives us the answer today in our latest “20 Key Scenarios with Windows Azure Infrastructure Services” article. He delivers an excellent step-by-step, showing you exactly how it’s configured. For his sample scenario, basically all you need is a Windows Server 2012 server connected to the external network, and a Windows Azure subscription. So…

Get your Windows Server 2012 evaluation,
Start a free 90-day Windows Azure trial, and
CHECK OUT HIS ARTICLE HERE

20 Key Scenarios with Windows Azure Infrastructure Services – The Complete Series

Kevin Remde — Thu, 09 May 2013 18:30:00 GMT

As many of you may already know, this month my Microsoft US DPE Central Region teammates (Matt Hester, Brian Lewis, and Keith Mayer) and I are blogging about “20 Key Scenarios with Windows Azure Infrastructure Services”. Throughout this month I’ll be adding links, making any updates or changes. So keep checking back for more, or keep watching my blog. As before, I plan on adding my own blog post every day, either introducing the day’s topic, or providing the article myself.

HINTS:

You might want to get your 90 Day FREE TRIAL of Windows Azure, if you haven’t already,
You should get your System Center 2012 SP1 trial (to start fully managing all of your clouds), and
You should also LIKE my “Kevin Remde is Full of I.T.” page on Facebook, and FOLLOW me on Twitter; whatever is your preferred method of keeping in touch with what I and my teammates are doing, or on general Microsoft news as it pertains to all things I.T.

That said, here are the articles!

Date	Title / Topic	Author
1-May	Getting Started!	Matt Hester – @matthewhester
2-May	Leveraging the Cloud for Backing Up Your Data	Matt Hester – @matthewhester
3-May	Step-by-Step: Tired of Tapes? Backup your SQL Databases to the Cloud!	Keith Mayer – @KeithMayer
6-May	Step-by-Step: Accelerating the Cloud with “BranchCache” in Windows Server 2012	Keith Mayer – @KeithMayer
7-May	DR–Extend Active Directory to the Cloud with Windows Azure	Brian Lewis – @BrianLewis_
8-May	Replicate File Server Content to the Cloud with DFS-R	Matt Hester – @matthewhester
9-May	SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn in the Cloud	Kevin Remde – @KevinRemde
10-May	Extend Your Private Cloud with Windows Azure Virtual Networks and Windows Server 2012	Keith Mayer – @KeithMayer
13-May	SQL Database Mirroring to the Cloud	Kevin Remde – @KevinRemde
14-May	Deploy a WebDAV File Server in the Cloud	Brian Lewis – @BrianLewis_
15-May	Deploy Web Server Solutions in the Cloud	Matt Hester – @matthewhester
16-May	Put Your ADFS in the Cloud	Kevin Remde – @KevinRemde
17-May		Keith Mayer – @KeithMayer
20-May		Brian Lewis – @BrianLewis_
21-May		Brian Lewis – @BrianLewis_
22-May	Build a System Center 2012 SP1 Configuration Manager Cloud Distribution Point	Kevin Remde – @KevinRemde
23-May		Brian Lewis – @BrianLewis_
24-May
27-May
28-May		Matt Hester – @matthewhester
29-May	Migrating VMs from Hyper-V to Windows Azure	Kevin Remde – @KevinRemde
30-May		Keith Mayer – @KeithMayer
31-May		Keith Mayer – @KeithMayer

Useful? I hope so! Drop a line in the comments if you have a question or comment, please!

More Free Online Training on May 16 - Windows Azure for IT Professionals Jump Start

Kevin Remde — Thu, 09 May 2013 17:11:00 GMT

This is going to be good! The folks at the Microsoft Virtual Academy are once again hosting a full-day online training event on May 16, 2013 from 9am to 5pm Pacific Time.

The title: Windows Azure for IT Professionals.

Make Windows Azure Your Datacenter! This Jump Start will help you understand how you can use Windows Azure Infrastructure Services, such as Virtual Machines and Virtual Networks, to migrate, extend, run, manage and monitor common workloads in the cloud. The jumpstart will be led by Microsoft Lead Azure Technical Evangelist David Tesar and Azure Group Technical Product Manager David Aiken. Get ready for a live online interactive experience highlighting the latest and greatest via numerous scenarios and demos all while answering questions from the audience.

The event will be delivered by David Tesar and David Aiken, so you know it’s going to be a good one. Check out the event main page, or skip it and just click here to register.

20 Key Scenarios with Windows Azure Infrastructure Services (IaaS): SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn in the Cloud

Kevin Remde — Thu, 09 May 2013 12:00:00 GMT

“Hey Kevin.. How do I get high availability out of my SQL Server?”

Cluster. Shared Storage. Windows Failover Clustering supports that.

“But… I want my SQL Servers running in Windows Azure. And I don’t have shared storage in “the cloud”. But I still need the benefits of clustered high availability.”

Wow.. you sure want a lot. Thankfully, I have a great solution. SQL Server 2012 has a new high availability feature called SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn. With AlwaysOn configured, you can have two or more (up to 5) complete copies of a database that are maintained by each of the participating SQL Servers. Each SQL Server could be hosting the database on it’s local storage, or at some other location (SMB 3.0 file share? You bet!), but from the perspective of SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn, it’s a copy of the database served up by each of the SQL Servers. The SQL Servers in turn are nodes in a Windows Server Failover Clustering cluster.

“And, because it’s not a cluster using shared storage, I can run these SQL Servers up in Windows Azure Infrastructure Services as Virtual Machines?”

Yes! Windows Azure is a great place to run these! As long as you have an Active Directory domain controller available, your servers can be cluster nodes in a Windows Failover Cluster, and SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn can be configured.

“Sounds terrific, Kevin! How do I get started?”

You’re in luck! There’s are two very detailed step-by-step walkthroughs on how to build an example up in Windows Azure. One describes how to build the machines manually, and the other actually uses PowerShell and other command line scripting to configure everything. In the end you have 4 servers:

ContosoDC (Domain Controller)
ContosoQuorum (Cluster Quorum Server)
ContosoSQL1 (SQL Server), and
ContosoSQL2 (SQL Server)

The examples also walk you through how to create the required Azure networks, the Availability Group for your machines, the configuration of the cluster, and the creating and configuration of a database that is highly available.

Here are the links:

Test Lab: Create an AlwaysOn Availability Group in Windows Azure End-to-End (Manually create and configure machines)
Tutorial: AlwaysOn Availability Groups in Windows Azure (PowerShell and Scripted)

For my own learning, I used the scripted option. Unfortunately, some of the commands listed needed to be tweaked a little bit to work with the most recent version of the Windows Azure Powershell module, and there were several typos in the text. But once I worked out the kinks, I was able to consistently create the machines and configure the cluster and the SQL Servers.

“Prove it!”

Okay…

Here are my servers in Windows Azure…

And here’s looking at my Availability Group “AG1” on one of the SQL Servers…

And looking in the Failover Cluster Manager I can see the clustered “AG1” service, currently being served by “CONTOSOSQL1”.

And I can manually move that clustered service…

…so that it’s failed-over and now being served by “contososql2”.

TRY IT: I’ve created and uploaded a .txt file containing my modified snippets of PowerShell used to configure my Windows Azure subscription and to create the storage, the networking and the four Virtual Machines.
YOU CAN FIND IT HERE.
I strongly suggest that you change the file extension to .PS1, and open it with the PowerShell Integrated Scripting Environment. Read the notes at the top, and only run the specific segments at the time they’re asked for in the tutorial.

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For the official details about AlwaysOn Availability Groups in SQL Server, check out the main documentation page on TechNet.

John Joyner did a very good write-up on SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn for TechRepublic. Read his article: SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn: High Availability database for cloud data centers

Don't forget to sign up for your free 90-day trial of Windows Azure, to start working with SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn!

And you can find all of the articles in the complete "20 Key Scenarios with Windows Azure Infrastructure Services" series HERE.