Category: Microsoft

Jul172019July 17, 2019July 17, 20195 Commentsby Thomas Maurer

How to Install Hyper-V Server 2019

Posted in Hyper-V, Microsoft, PowerShell, Virtualization, Windows, Windows Server, Windows Server 2019

A couple of weeks ago Microsoft released the installation media, and you can download Hyper-V Server 2019 right now. In this blog post, I am going to show you how to install and configure Hyper-V Server 2019 step by step. This should especially help beginners with Hyper-V Server 2019. Hyper-V Server 2019 ships only a core option, so there won’t be desktop experience version of Hyper-V Server like you would have with Windows Server 2019.

Hyper-V Server 2019 Requirements

Hyper-V has specific hardware requirements to run virtualization in a secure and performant way.

64-bit processor with second-level address translation (SLAT)
Minimum of 4GB of RAM. You will need more RAM for virtual machines on the Hyper-V Server.
Virtualization features and support needs to be enabled in BIOS or UEFI
- Hardware-assisted virtualization – Intel Virtualization Technology (Intel VT) or AMD Virtualization (AMD-V) technology.
- Hardware-enforced Data Execution Prevention (DEP) Intel XD bit (execute disable bit) or AMD NX bit (no execute bit).

Specific features, like Discrete device assignment (DDA) or Shielded Virtual Machines, will also have other hardware requirements. You can find more about the Hyper-V Server 2019 requirements on Microsoft Docs.

Download ISO

You can download Hyper-V Server directly from the Microsoft evaluation center. This SKU does not require a license key, and it also doesn’t expire. It is a fully supported version of Hyper-V for free. However, if you run workloads like Windows Server, Windows 10, or other operating systems on top of it, they need to be correctly licensed.

Install Hyper-V Server 2019

After you have download the ISO file, you will need to install this on your machine. There are multiple options to do this:

Burn a DVD drive and boot your server from DVD
Attach the file using an out of bound management solutions like HPE ILO or others
Create a USB drive to install Windows Server 2019
Use Windows Deployment Services
or other solutions

You can also follow this guide to add drivers to a Windows Server Image; this also works for Hyper-V Server.

Now you can boot your server with the Hyper-V installation media. This will start the step by step installation. Select the language and region settings you want to use for your Hyper-V Server.

Install Hyper-V Server 2019

Jul122019July 12, 2019July 12, 20193 Commentsby Thomas Maurer

Migrate Hyper-V VMs to Azure using Azure Migrate

Assess and Migrate Hyper-V VMs with Azure Migrate

Posted in Cloud, Hyper-V, Microsoft, Microsoft Azure, Virtualization, VMware, Windows Server, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2016, Windows Server 2019

Today, the Azure Migrate team launched an update to the Azure Migrate service, which can help you discover, assess, and migrate applications, infrastructure, and data from your on-prem environment to Microsoft Azure. This is excellent timing since we all know that Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 are soon out of support and you get free extended security updates if you migrate your VMs to Azure. With Azure Migrate, you can now centrally track the progress of your migration journey across multiple thrid-party and Microsoft tools. In addition, Azure Migrate can now assess and migrate your Hyper-V virtual machines (VMs).

With the latest release of Azure Migrate you can now:

Extensible approach with choice across Microsoft and popular ISV assessment and migration tools
Integrated experience for discovery, assessment, and migration with end-to-end progress tracking for servers and databases
Server Assessment and Server Migration for large-scale VMware, Hyper-V, and physical server migrations
Database Assessment and Database Migration across various database targets including Azure SQL Database and Managed Instance

You can find more about the Azure Migrate capabilities on Microsoft Docs. For more information on Azure Migration, check out my blog post about Azure Migration on the Nigel Frank International blog. In this post, I am going to show you how you can step-by-step assess and migrate Hyper-V VMs to Azure using Azure Migrate.

Preparation

First, you need to prepare your Azure to set the right permissions and prepare the on-premises Hyper-V hosts and VMs for server assessment and migration. You can find more about the details for permissions and host preparations on Microsoft Docs.

Next, you will need to create a new Migration project for servers. Click on Asses and migrate servers.

Azure Portal Azure Migrate

Now you will need to add the tools you want to use for the assessment as well as for the migration, click on “add tools”.

Getting started

You will need to create a new Azure Migrate project. Enter the details for your subscription, resource group, and a name for the project. You will also need to choose a region where your project is going to be deployed. No worries, this will only store the assessment data, you can still select another region for the migration.

Jul112019July 11, 2019July 18, 20190 Commentby Thomas Maurer

AZ-203 Microsoft Certified Azure Developer Associate

Passed AZ-203 Microsoft Certified Azure Developer

Posted in Certification, Cloud, Microsoft, Microsoft Azure

I am happy to share that I just passed another Microsoft Azure Exam. This time I took exam AZ-203, which gives you the Microsoft Certified Azure Developer Associate. This exam is focused on Azure Developers building solutions using different Azure services. There are several various Azure exams and certifications depending on different job roles like the Microsoft Certified Azure Administrator Associate or the Azure Architect Expert. However, even as an architect, engineer, or administrator, it helps how to understand different Azure services and how you can implement, design, and use them. These exams are not focused on writing the perfect code; they are designed to understand how you can design and build solutions and applications on top of the Azure platform. As you can see on the exam page, the AZ-203 has different focus areas like Azure IaaS, containers, app services, serverless, databases, storage, security, and much more. If you want to prepare for the exam, I highly recommend that you check out Microsoft Learn, but more on that later.

AZ-203 Microsoft Certified Azure Developer Associate
Candidates for this exam are Azure Developers who design and build cloud solutions such as applications and services. They participate in all phases of development, from solution design, to development and deployment, to testing and maintenance. They partner with cloud solution architects, cloud DBAs, cloud administrators, and clients to implement the solution.

You can find more about the exam and more details on the Microsoft Learning platform.

Azure Certifications

As mentioned, Microsoft offers different certifications depending on various job roles. If you are just getting started with Azure, I also highly recommend that you are doing AZ-900, which is the Azure Fundamentals exam.

Microsoft Certified Azure Administrator Associate (AZ-10X)
Microsoft Certified Azure Developer Associate (AZ-203)
Microsoft Certified Azure Solutions Architect Expert (AZ-30X)
Microsoft Certified Azure DevOps Engineer Expert (AZ-400)
Microsoft Certified Azure Security Engineer Associate (AZ-500)
Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900)

How to prepare for the AZ-203 Microsoft Certified Azure Developer Associate exam

Like for every modern Microsoft exam, I recommend that you first carefully read the skills measured on the exam page. Knowing the technologies and topics which are tested in the exam is already half of the work. Next, I recommend that you have a look at Microsoft Learn. Microsoft Learn is a great learning platform with a lot of different modules on different topics and technologies, which you can search but also filter based on your role. These are not just text-based learning modules; in some cases, you have a hands-on experience using a sandbox environment. You need to work with these technologies, try out these services on Azure, read the documentation on Microsoft Docs to the specific topics and go and try out the services with the different quick starting guides and tutorials. This will not only help you learn for the exam but also provide you a lot of knowledge on Azure.

I wish you happy learning and good luck taking the AZ-302 Microsoft Certified Azure Developer Associate exam!

Jul102019July 10, 2019July 10, 20193 Commentsby Thomas Maurer

How to Install and Update PowerShell 7

Posted in Microsoft, PowerShell, Software, Windows, Windows 10, Windows Server, Windows Server 2016, Windows Server 2019, Work

Currently, you can install the cross-platform version PowerShell Core 6 on Linux, macOS, and Windows. Early April the PowerShell team announced the next release called PowerShell 7. PowerShell 7 is built on .NET Core 3 and brings back many APIs required by modules built on .NET Framework so that they work with .NET Core runtime. While PowerShell Core 6 was focusing on bringing cross-platform compatibility, PowerShell 7 will focus on making it a viable replacement for Windows PowerShell 5.1 and bringing near parity with Windows PowerShell. Here is how you can install and update PowerShell 7 (preview) on Windows and Linux using a simple one-liner.

If you want to know more about the roadmap, check out Steves blog post.

One great example of how cross-platform PowerShell can work, check out my blog post: How to set up PowerShell SSH Remoting.

Install PowerShell 7 (Preview)

As mentioned PowerShell 7 is currently in preview. You can download and install it manually from GitHub. However, the easiest way to install it is to use the following one-liners created by Steve Lee (Microsoft Principal Software Engineer Manager in the PowerShell Team). You can also use the same one-liners with different parameters to install the current GA version of PowerShell 6.

If you are installing the PowerShell 7 Preview, this will be a side by side installation with PowerShell 6. You can use the pwsh-preview command to run version 7.

One-liner to install or update PowerShell 7 on Windows 10

You can use this single command in Windows PowerShell to install PowerShell 7. The difference between the installation of version 6 versus version 7 is the -Preview flag.

iex "& { $(irm https://aka.ms/install-powershell.ps1) } -UseMSI -Preview"

There are additional switches to, for example, install daily builds of the latest PowerShell previews.

-Destination
The destination path to install PowerShell Core to.

-Daily
Install PowerShell Core from the daily build.
Note that the ‘PackageManagement’ module is required to install a daily package.

-Preview
Install the latest preview, which is currently version 7. This will

-UseMSI
Use the MSI installer.

-Quiet
The quiet command for the MSI installer.

-DoNotOverwrite
Do not overwrite the destination folder if it already exists.

-AddToPath
On Windows, add the absolute destination path to the ‘User’ scope environment variable ‘Path’;
On Linux, make the symlink ‘/usr/bin/pwsh’ points to “$Destination/pwsh”;
On MacOS, make the symlink ‘/usr/local/bin/pwsh’ points to “$Destination/pwsh”.

One-liner to install or update PowerShell 7 on Linux

You can use this as a single command to install PowerShell 7 on Linux

wget https://aka.ms/install-powershell.sh; sudo bash install-powershell.sh -preview; rm install-powershell.sh

Depending on your distro you are using, this will register Microsoft’s pkg repos and install that package (deb or rpm).

You can also use the following switches:

-includeide
Installs VSCode and VSCode PowerShell extension (only relevant to machines with a desktop environment)

-interactivetesting
Do a quick launch test of VSCode (only applicable when used with -includeide)

-skip-sudo-check
Use sudo without verifying its availability (hard to accurately do on some distros)

-preview
Installs the latest preview release of PowerShell side-by-side with any existing production releases

To currently run the PowerShell Preview, you can run the following command:

pwsh-preview

After Installing

After you have installed PowerShell 7, also make sure to update PowerShellGet and the PackageManagement module.

Remember PowerShell 7 is still currently in preview, if you have any questions, please let me know in the comments.

Jul082019July 8, 2019July 8, 20192 Commentsby Thomas Maurer

PowerShell Get-WindowsImage Windows Server 2019 Editions

Add Drivers to a Windows Server 2019 ISO Image

Posted in Hyper-V, Microsoft, PowerShell, Server Core, Windows, Windows 10, Windows Server, Windows Server 2019

In this blog article, I am going to show you how you can add drivers to a Windows Server 2019 ISO Image or WIM file using PowerShell and the DISM module. This will allow you to already have the latest drivers within the Windows Server installation image when you install Windows Server 2019. We will add drivers to a Windows Server 2019 WIM file (WIM stands for Windows Imaging Format), which then can be used to create a new ISO image or for example in Windows Deployment Services.

Preparation

Folder for adding drivers to Windows Server 2019

First, you will need to create three new folders called Drivers, ISO, and Mount. In my example, I created these in C:\Images.

Drivers – This is the folder where you put all your extracted drivers, which you want to add to your Windows Server 2019 Image.
ISO – This is where you can extract the Windows Server 2019 ISO Image. Basically all the files on the ISO file.
Mount – This is an empty folder, which will be used to mount the WIM files.

You can now mount the ISO using Windows Explorer or the following PowerShell commands and copy the files to the ISO folder.

Mount ISO PowerShell

Mount-DiskImage -ImagePath C:\Temp\17763.379.190312-0539.rs5_release_svc_refresh_SERVER_EVAL_x64FRE_en-us.iso
Copy-Item D:\* C:\Image\ISO\ -Recurse

In your case, the ISO may be mounted on a different drive letter instead of my D: drive.

Add drivers to the Windows Server 2019 Image

First, you can check in which Windows editions you want to add the drivers. To check that you can use the following PowerShell command:

Get-WindowsImage -ImagePath C:\Image\ISO\sources\install.wim

PowerShell Get-WindowsImage Windows Server 2019 Editions

The Get-WindowsImage cmdlet will show you the different editions included in the WIM file.

After we have seen the Index numbers, we can now mount the Windows Image our Mount folder. In my example, I use Image Index 3, which is the Windows Server 2019 Datacenter Core Edition. If you want to check which editions of Windows Server 2019 you should use, check out the Microsoft Docs.

Mount-WindowsImage -Path C:\Image\Mount -ImagePath C:\Image\ISO\sources\install.wim -Index 3

Mount-WindowsImage

After the image is mounted you can now add the drivers to the Windows Server 2019 Image using the following command:

Add-WindowsDriver -Path C:\Image\Mount -Driver C:\Image\Drivers -Recurse

Add Drivers to Windows Server 2019 ISO Image

After you have added all the drivers to the image, you need to dismount the image and save it.

Dismount-WindowsImage -Path C:\Image\Mount -Save

We have now added the drivers to the Install image, and you should also add the drivers to your boot image if it is, for example, a network or storage controller driver you might need to install the server. To do this do the same steps to the C:\Image\ISO\sources\boot.wim.

Now you can use these WIM files with Windows Deployment services or create a USB drive to install Windows Server 2019. If you want to create an ISO file, you can use the oscdimg command-line tool. The oscdimg tool comes with the Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit (Windows ADK), which you can get here.

oscdimg -n -m -bc:\temp\ISO\boot\etfsboot.com C:\temp\ISO C:\temp\mynew.iso

I hope this post helps you to add drivers to your Windows Server image. If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment.

Jul052019July 5, 2019July 5, 20190 Commentby Thomas Maurer

IT Career Energizer Episode Thomas Maurer

Part of the IT Career Energizer podcast

Posted in Award, Certification, Cloud Advocate, Microsoft, Microsoft MVP, Speaking, Windows Insider MVP, Work

I had the chance to be part of Phil Burgess IT Career Energizer podcast. IT Career Energizer podcast helps those who want to start, develop, and grow their IT careers. Guests share their experience and advice, which will help others in their careers. It was great to talk to Phil as discuss some exciting highlights, like becoming a Microsoft MVP in 2012 and being part until 2019 when I joined Microsoft. We also discussed the challenges in my career and where I faced some difficult decisions, as well as some exciting times coming up in the IT industry.

When you listen to the I.T. Career Energizer you’ll hear from individuals from around the world. Each guest gives their own perspectives on career development and their views on the future of technology. My guests include programmers, business analysts, project managers and testers to name but a few.

Phil did almost 200 episodes until today, and I am proud and happy to be part of it. You can listen and subscribe to the podcast on itcareerenergizer.com.

Jul032019July 3, 2019July 3, 20190 Commentby Thomas Maurer

Free Webinar: Azure Security Center: How to Protect Your Datacenter with Next Generation Security

Posted in Cloud, Cloud Advocate, Microsoft, Microsoft Azure, Speaking, Windows Server

I am happy to announce that I will be speaking in a free webinar together with Microsoft MVP Andy Syrewicze about Azure Security Center. The Altaro webinar called Azure Security Center: How to Protect Your Datacenter with Next Generation Security will be focusing on Azure Security Center, and how you can protect your Cloud and Datacenter Infrastructure. The webinar will be free and it will be held twice on Tuesday, July 30th, 2019. You can save your seat by filling out the form here.

Webinar presented live twice:

Session 1: 2pm CEST – 8am EDT – 5am PDT
Session 2: 7pm CEST – 1pm EDT – 10am PDT

Save your seat!

Free Webinar

Azure Security Center: How to Protect Your Datacenter with Next Generation Security

Security has always been a fundamental concern of IT admins and now more than ever, in the age of the cloud datacenter, you need to ensure your workload security is ahead of the curve.
Join Thomas Maurer from the Microsoft Azure Team, alongside Microsoft MVP Andy Syrewicze, for a value-packed webinar that will show you how to batten down the hatches, even when your workloads are hosted in the public cloud! You’ll learn:
Azure Security Center Introductions
Deployment and first steps
Best Practices
Integration with other tools
And more!
With the industry’s transition to the cloud, we’ve seen a number of workloads migrate to service provider datacenters and public clouds like Azure. While many IT Pros are comfortable in dealing with core services in this manner, many find themselves at a loss when it comes to securing these next generation deployments. Pair that with an overly eager bad-actor community, and you have a recipe for disaster. However, new tools are designed to enhance existing security paradigms and help you sleep at night, such as Azure Security Center. Are you concerned about the strength of your Azure workload security? Struggling with where to start? We’ve got the webinar for you!
Taking advantage of the latest in security tools will ensure your organization stays one step ahead of the bad guys, and we’re here to help you get started!
See you there!

As mentioned, we will give you an overview of how Azure Security Center and strengthen your security posture and protect against threats with Azure Security Center. I will also show you features like Azure Just-in-Time VM access and many others.

I hope that you join the webinar and if you have any questions, let me know in the comments.

Category: Microsoft

How to Install Hyper-V Server 2019

Hyper-V Server 2019 Requirements

Download ISO

Install Hyper-V Server 2019

Assess and Migrate Hyper-V VMs with Azure Migrate

Preparation

Passed AZ-203 Microsoft Certified Azure Developer

Azure Certifications

How to prepare for the AZ-203 Microsoft Certified Azure Developer Associate exam

How to Install and Update PowerShell 7

Install PowerShell 7 (Preview)

One-liner to install or update PowerShell 7 on Windows 10

One-liner to install or update PowerShell 7 on Linux

After Installing

Add Drivers to a Windows Server 2019 ISO Image

Preparation

Add drivers to the Windows Server 2019 Image

Part of the IT Career Energizer podcast

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