Category: PowerShell

Jun112019June 11, 2019June 10, 20192 Commentsby Thomas Maurer

Generation 2 VM support on Azure – and why should I care?

Posted in Cloud, Hyper-V, Microsoft, Microsoft Azure, PowerShell, Windows, Windows Server, Windows Server 2012 R2

A couple of days ago Microsoft announced the public preview of Generation 2 virtual machines on Azure. Generation 2 virtual machines support a bunch of new technologies like increased memory, Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX), and virtual persistent memory (vPMEM), which are not supported on generation 1 VMs. But more on that later.

What are Hyper-V Virtual Machine Generations

Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V introduced the concept of virtual machine generations. Not to be confused with Hyper-V configuration versions. The generation of a virtual machine defines the virtual hardware of a virtual machine and adds some additional and modern functionality. In Hyper-V, there are two virtual machine generations, generation 1 and generation 2. Generation 2 virtual machines support Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) firmware instead of BIOS-based firmware. The Hyper-V team also removed a lot of the legacy devices and replaced them with a simplified virtual machine model.

On Windows Server Hyper-V Generation 2 VMs support features and improvements like

PXE boot by using a standard network adapter
Boot from a SCSI virtual hard disk
Boot from a SCSI virtual DVD
Secure Boot (enabled by default)
UEFI firmware support
OS disk > 2 TB
improved boot and installation times

However, an important note here, not all of these features are currently available on Azure Generation 2 virtual machines, and not all operating systems are supported in Generation 2 VMs. For example, in Windows7, Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 and 32-bit Windows systems are not supported. You can find more information about Hyper-V Generation 2 VMs here.

Azure Generation 2 Virtual Machines Overview

Azure Generation 2 Virtual Machines are currently in public preview. To be honest, Generation 2 VMs in Azure aren’t that new, with the public preview of Azure Confidential Computing, we already used Generation 2 VMs. However, now we can start using it for other workloads as well. This means that you can now upload and use your local VHD (not VHDX) files based on Hyper-V Generation 2 virtual machines. Before you had to use Azure Site Recovery to replicate and convert your Hyper-V Generation 2 VMs to Azure Generation 1 VMs.

Azure Generation 1 vs. Generation 2 capabilities

Currently, Generation 2 VMs are in public preview, and that means next to not having a service level agreement (SLA), the features which are available can and are limited. If you look at features like ASR or Azure Backup, which are currently not supporting Generation 2 VMs.

Capability	Generation 1	Generation 2
OS disk > 2 TB	❌	✔
Custom Disk/Image/Swap OS	✔	✔
Virtual machine scale set support	✔	✔
ASR/Backup	✔	❌
Shared Image Gallery	✔	❌
Azure Disk Encryption	✔	❌

You can find more information about Azure Generation 2 virtual machines with an updated list of capabilities on Microsoft Docs.

Hyper-V vs. Azure Generation 2 VMs

There are also differences between Hyper-V Generation 2 VMs and Azure Generation 2 VMs. Not all of the features provided in Hyper-V are currently present in the public preview version on Azure.

Feature	On-prem Hyper-V	Azure
Secure Boot	✔	❌
Shielded VM	✔	❌
vTPM	✔	❌
Virtualization-Based Security (VBS)	✔	❌
VHDX format	✔	❌

Again, you can find an up-to-date list on Microsoft Docs.

Getting started

You can get started using the Generation 2 VMs on the following VM Sizes on Azure Premium Storage and Ultra SSD:

In public preview, you can now also use the following Azure Marketplace images from the “windowsserver-gen2preview” offer.

Windows Server 2019 Datacenter (2019-datacenter-gen2)
Windows Server 2016 Datacenter (2016-datacenter-gen2)
Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter (2012-r2-datacenter-gen2)
Windows Server 2012 Datacenter (2012-datacenter-gen2)

Create a virtual machine

You can use the Azure Portal to create a new VM or the Azure CLI using the following commands:

 
az group create --name myGen2ResourceGroupVM --location eastus
az vm create \
--resource-group myGen2ResourceGroupVM \
--name myVM \
--image MicrosoftWindowsServer:windowsserver-gen2preview:2019-datacenter-gen2:latest \
--admin-username thomas \
--admin-password myPassword12

Conclusion

I hope this gives you an overview of the benefits and how you can run Generation 2 VMs on Azure. If you have any questions please let me know in the comments.

May282019May 28, 2019May 30, 20190 Commentby Thomas Maurer

How to Install AzCopy for Azure Storage

Posted in Cloud, Microsoft, Microsoft Azure, PowerShell, Windows, Windows 10, Work

AzCopy is a command-line tool to manage and copy blobs or files to or from a storage account. It also allows you to sync storage accounts and move files from Amazon S3 to Azure storage. In this blog post, I will cover how to install AzCopy on Windows, Linux, macOS, or in update the version in the Azure Cloud Shell.

AzCopy v10 is now generally available to all of our customers and provides higher throughput and more efficient data movement compared to the earlier version of AzCopy (v8). Version 10 also adds additional functionality like sync of blob storage accounts and much more.

Install AzCopy

You can get the latest version of AzCopy from here: Get started with AzCopy

Windows (zip)
Linux (tar)
MacOS (zip)

Install AzCopy on Windows

To install AzCopy on Windows, you can run the following PowerShell script, or you can download the zip file and run it from where ever you want. This script will add the AzCopy folder location to your system path so that you can run the AzCopy command from anywhere.

 
#Download AzCopy
Invoke-WebRequest -Uri "https://aka.ms/downloadazcopy-v10-windows" -OutFile AzCopy.zip -UseBasicParsing
 
#Curl.exe option (Windows 10 Spring 2018 Update (or later))
curl.exe -L -o AzCopy.zip https://aka.ms/downloadazcopy-v10-windows
 
#Expand Archive
Expand-Archive ./AzCopy.zip ./AzCopy -Force
 
#Move AzCopy to the destination you want to store it
Get-ChildItem ./AzCopy/*/azcopy.exe | Move-Item -Destination "C:\Users\thmaure\AzCopy\AzCopy.exe"
 
#Add your AzCopy path to the Windows environment PATH (C:\Users\thmaure\AzCopy in this example), e.g., using PowerShell:
$userenv = [System.Environment]::GetEnvironmentVariable("Path", "User")
[System.Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable("PATH", $userenv + ";C:\Users\thmaure\AzCopy", "User")

Install AzCopy on Linux

To install AzCopy on Linux, you can run the following shell script, or you can download the tar file and run it from where ever you want. This script will put the AzCopy executable into the /usr/bin folder so that you can run it from anywhere.

 
#Download AzCopy
wget https://aka.ms/downloadazcopy-v10-linux
 
#Expand Archive
tar -xvf downloadazcopy-v10-linux
 
#(Optional) Remove existing AzCopy version
sudo rm /usr/bin/azcopy
 
#Move AzCopy to the destination you want to store it
sudo cp ./azcopy_linux_amd64_*/azcopy /usr/bin/

Authorize with Azure Storage

When you start working with Azure Storage, you have two options to authorize against the Azure Storage. You can provide authorization credentials by using Azure Active Directory (AD), or by using a Shared Access Signature (SAS) token.

It also depends on which services you want to use.

Storage type	Supported method
Blob storage	Azure AD and SAS
Blob storage (hierarchical namespace)	Azure AD
File storage	SAS only

Authenticate using Azure AD

To authenticate with AzCopy using Azure AD, you can use the following command

 
azcopy login

Authenticate using SAS token

To authenticate with AzCopy using a SAS token you can use this command as an example

 
azcopy cp "C:\local\path" "https://account.blob.core.windows.net/mycontainer1/?sv=2018-03-28&amp;ss=bjqt&amp;srt=sco&amp;sp=rwddgcup&amp;se=2019-05-01T05:01:17Z&amp;st=2019-04-30T21:01:17Z&amp;spr=https&amp;sig=MGCXiyEzbtttkr3ewJIh2AR8KrghSy1DGM9ovN734bQF4%3D" --recursive=true

To make things easier you can use Azure PowerShell to generate the SAS token for you. I wrote a blog post on ITOPSTALK.com about how you can do that. You can get the SAS token using the following Azure PowerShell command. If you are running Linux or macOS, you can find on this blog post, how to install PowerShell 6.

 
Connect-AzAccount
Get-AzSubscription
 
$subscriptionId = "yourSubscriptionId"
$storageAccountRG = "demo-azcopy-rg"
$storageAccountName = "tomsaccount"
$storageContainerName = "images"
$localPath = "C:\temp\images"
 
Select-AzSubscription -SubscriptionId $SubscriptionId
 
$storageAccountKey = (Get-AzStorageAccountKey -ResourceGroupName $storageAccountRG -AccountName $storageAccountName).Value[0]
 
$destinationContext = New-AzStorageContext -StorageAccountName $storageAccountName -StorageAccountKey $storageAccountKey
 
$containerSASURI = New-AzStorageContainerSASToken -Context $destinationContext -ExpiryTime(get-date).AddSeconds(3600) -FullUri -Name $storageContainerName -Permission rw
 
azcopy copy $localPath $containerSASURI --recursive

To learn more about SAS tokens, check out Using shared access signatures (SAS).

I hope this helps you to install AzCopy and configure it. If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment.

May092019May 9, 2019May 17, 201921 Commentsby Thomas Maurer

How to configure Windows Sandbox

Posted in Containers, Hyper-V, Microsoft, PowerShell, Virtualization, Windows, Windows 10, Work

With the latest release of Windows 10 (1903), Microsoft introduced a new feature called Windows Sandbox. Windows Sandbox is based on Hyper-V technology and allows you to spin up an isolated, temporary, desktop environment where you can run untrusted software. In this blog post, I will show you how you can set up and configure Windows Sandbox in Windows 10. I will also cover who you can do an advanced configuration of your Windows Sandbox using Windows Sandbox config files.

The sandbox is great for demos, troubleshooting or if you are dealing with malware. If you close the sandbox, all the software with all its files and state are permanently deleted. It is a Windows 10 virtual machines, with the advantage that it is built into Windows 10, so it leverages the existing OS, which gives you faster startup, less footprint, better efficiency, and easier handling, without losing security.

Source: Microsoft

Windows Sandbox is a lightweight virtual machine with an operating system. The significant advantage which makes it so small is the usage of existing files from the host, for data which cannot change. For the files which can change, it uses a dynamically generated image, which is only ~100MB in size.

There are much more exciting things happening with the Windows Sandbox like smart memory management, Integrated kernel scheduler, Snapshot and clone, Graphics virtualization and Battery pass-through. If you want to find out more about the Windows Sandbox, check out the official blog post.

Prerequisites

Windows Sandbox comes with a couple of requirements. How more powerful your machine is, the better the experience will be.

Windows 10 (1903) Pro or Enterprise build 18362 or later
64-bit architecture
Virtualization capabilities enabled in BIOS
At least 4GB of RAM (8GB recommended)
1GB of free disk space (SSD recommended)
2 CPU cores (4 cores with hyperthreading recommended)

May082019May 8, 2019May 8, 20190 Commentby Thomas Maurer

Speaking at the Azure Saturday 2019 in Munich

Posted in Cloud, Cloud Advocate, Events, Microsoft, Microsoft Azure, PowerShell, Speaking

Azure Saturday Munich is a free community-focused Azure event dedicated to educating and engaging members of the local technical community. Azure Saturday draws upon the expertise of local Azure IT professionals, developers and solutions architects who come together to share their real-world experiences, lessons learned, best practices, and general knowledge with other like-minded individuals. With 30 speakers delivering 25 sessions in front of 500 attendees. I am happy that this year I will be speaking about the Azure Cloud Shell on the Azure Saturday 2019 on May 18 in Munich.

Azure Saturday 2019

Mastering Azure using Cloud Shell, PowerShell and Bash!

Azure can be managed in many different ways. Learn your command line options like Azure PowerShell, Azure CLI and Cloud Shell to be more efficient in managing your Azure infrastructure. Become a hero on the shell to manage the cloud!

If you want to use your Saturday to learn about Azure, come by and I hope to see you there!

May022019May 2, 2019May 2, 20190 Commentby Thomas Maurer

Preview Web Apps with Azure Cloud Shell Web Preview

Posted in Microsoft, Microsoft Azure, PowerShell

If you have worked with the Azure Cloud Shell in the last couple of days, you might have seen a new button called Web Preview. The Azure Cloud Shell Web preview feature allows you to run web applications on the Cloud Shell container instance and preview them before you deploy them. You can run web applications that listen to HTTP requests on the Cloud Shell from port 1025-8079 and 8091-49151.

If you are running for example a .NET Core application in Cloud Shell, you can preview this to the Cloud Shell gateway.

I have created a short video tutorial to show you the Azure Cloud Shell Web preview feature.

How to use the Cloud Shell Web Preview

First you need to run your application, in my case I run a simple .NET Core web application. This also works with other applications which can run in Cloud Shell and can map a local port.

 
dotnet run

By default, this will use port 5000. Now you can create a simple port mapping by clicking on the Web Preview button in Cloud Shell.

This will open up the configuration menu to create the port mapping, where you can select port to use from 1025-8079 and 8091-49151.

Now you can access the application running inside your Cloud Shell container through the gateway, to preview your application.

I hope this was helpful and gave you a quick overview about the Web Preview feature in Cloud Shell. If you have any questions, please let me know in the comments.

You can run Azure Cloud Shell from in the Azure Portal or directly from shell.azure.com.

If you want to learn more about Cloud Shell, check out my video about Mastering Azure using Cloud Shell.

Apr302019April 30, 2019May 1, 20190 Commentby Thomas Maurer

Mastering Azure using Cloud Shell Session

Video: Mastering Azure using Cloud Shell, PowerShell and Bash!

Posted in Cloud, Cloud Advocate, Exchange Online, Microsoft, Microsoft Azure, Office365, PowerShell, Web, Work

At the NetWork 9 Conference in Neum and at the Global Azure Bootcamp in Switzerland, I presented my session about Mastering Azure using Cloud Shell. Since I got a lot of requests for the session to be online, I recorded my presentation and made it available for everyone. The presentation is a live demo and summary of my blog post “Mastering Azure with Cloud Shell“, which gives you an overview about the Cloud Shell and some of the advanced stuff you can do.

In the session you learn:

Overview about Cloud Shell
Azure PowerShell and Bash experience
Persistent Storage using Azure Files
Azure Drive
Third party tools
Editors
Visual Studio Code integration
Using Git as Source Control
Remote manage Azure virtual machines
Integration of Cloud Shell in Microsoft Docs, Microsoft Learn and more
Cloud Shell in the Azure Mobile App
and more.

I hope you enjoy watching it and let me know what you think in the comments.

Apr292019April 29, 2019April 29, 20190 Commentby Thomas Maurer

Speaking at the Cloud and Datacenter Conference Germany 2019

Posted in Azure Stack HCI, Cloud, Cloud Advocate, Containers, Events, Hyper-V, Microsoft, Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Azure Stack, PowerShell, Speaking, Virtualization, Windows Admin Center, Windows Server, Windows Server 2019, Work

One of the best conferences when it comes to cloud and datacenter topics of IT Pros, is the Cloud and Datacenter Conference Germany 2019 organized by Microsoft MVP Carsten Rachfahl. I had the opportunity to speak at CDC-Germany 2016, 2017 and also in 2018. I am happy that I again was invited to speak at CDC-Germany 2019. The two day, Cloud & Datacenter Conference Germany will be held in Hanau, Germany on May 21-22. The CDC Germany will be focusing on Microsoft Technology and will have 6 tracks full of great Microsoft Cloud and Datacenter content with speakers from all over the world.

My Sessions at the Cloud and Datacenter Conference Germany 2019

I happy to speak in 1 of the main sessions and 2 breakout session about Hybird Cloud topics, like Azure Cloud Shell, Azure Stack, Windows Server 2019, Windows Admin Center, Azure Stack HCI and much much more.

CDC-Germany

Hybrid is the New Black!

Hybrid Cloud is not just a state during your cloud migration, it is here to stay! Hybrid Cloud goes far beyond Microsoft Azure Stack, and in this session you will see an overview about the different solutions you can use to extend your on-premises environment with Microsoft cloud services.

CDC-Germany

Windows Server 2019 – The Next Generation of Software-Defined Datacenter

Join this session for the best of Windows Server 2019, about the new innovation and improvements of Windows Server. Learn how Microsoft enhances the SDDC feature like Hyper-V, Storage and Networking and get the most out of the new Azure Hybrid Integration and Container features. You’ll get an overview about the new, exciting improvements that are in Windows Server and how they’ll improve your day-to-day job. In this presentation Thomas Maurer (Microsoft MVP) will guide you through the highly anticipated innovations in Windows Server 2019 and the Semi-Annual Channel including: Windows Server Containers Azure Integration Hyper-V features Storage Networking Security Windows Server Containers And more!

CDC-Germany

Mastering Azure using Cloud Shell, PowerShell and Bash!

Azure can be managed in many different way. Learn your command line options like Azure PowerShell, Azure CLI and Cloud Shell to be more efficient in managing your Azure infrastructure. Become a hero on the shell to manage the cloud!

My Session at the Hyper-V Community + Hybrid Cloud Community Pre-Day

I will also be speaking at the Hyper-V Community + Hybrid Cloud Community Pre-Day at May 20, 2019.

Hyper-V Community + Hybrid Cloud Community Pre-Day

Extend the Intelligent Cloud to the Edge with Azure Stack and Azure Stack HCI

Azure Stack allows you to extend Azure to your datacenter and run Azure Services under your terms. With Azure Stack HCI, the latest member in the Azure Stack family, we also offer a great hyper-converged infrastructure solution, with optional Azure connected services. Find out more about Azure Stack and Azure Stack HCI, how these solutions can help you to in your Hybrid Cloud strategy. Learn about the features and services you will get by offering Azure Stack to your customers and how you can build a true Hybrid Cloud experience.

I am really looking forward to the Cloud and Datacenter Conference Germany 2019, and I hope to see you there!

Category: PowerShell

Generation 2 VM support on Azure – and why should I care?

What are Hyper-V Virtual Machine Generations

Azure Generation 2 Virtual Machines Overview

Azure Generation 1 vs. Generation 2 capabilities

Hyper-V vs. Azure Generation 2 VMs

Getting started

Create a virtual machine

Conclusion

How to configure Windows Sandbox

Prerequisites

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