Tag: Cloud

Jan022019January 2, 2019January 15, 20190Commentby Thomas Maurer
Top 20 Microsoft Azure Blogs

Listed in the Feedspot Top 20 Microsoft Azure Blogs To Follow in 2019

Posted in Blog, Cloud, Microsoft, Microsoft Azure, Microsoft MVP, Work

Another great thing I found out about today. My blog, ThomasMaurer.ch is listed in the Feedspot Top 20 Microsoft Azure Blogs and Websites To Follow in 2019. I am super excited to be on this list, next to other top blogs and websites. As you can imagine you will find even more about Microsoft Azure on my blog in 2019. You can follow my blog on Feedspot or just check out my Subscribe page, to get my latest blogs.

The Best Microsoft Azure Blogs from thousands of Microsoft Azure blogs in our index using search and social metrics. We’ve carefully selected these websites because they are actively working to educate, inspire, and empower their readers with frequent updates and high-quality information.

Thanks for reading, commenting and sharing my blog! If you have some topics or ideas I should cover in 2019, please let me know!


Dec112018December 11, 2018December 11, 20181Commentby Thomas Maurer
Technado Podcast

Interview about Azure and Microsoft on Technado ITPro.TV

Posted in Cloud, Microsoft, Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Azure Stack, Microsoft MVP, Speaking, Webinar, Work

I was a proud interview guest at the Technado Podcast by ITPro.TV this week! Together with Cherokee and Don, we were talking about Microsoft Azure, Azure Stack and the Cloud as well as Microsoft in general and my favorite foods.

The Technado, Episode 77: Microsoft MVP Thomas Maurer

 

If you’re plugged into the Microsoft community, you’ve heard of Thomas Maurer. In this episode, Thomas will give Don and Cherokee his take on all things Azure. This week also sees a return of the latest tech news from the week.

ITProTV is the industry leader for online, on-demand IT training for tech professionals, students, and organizations worldwide. Home of binge-worthy learning, ITProTV empowers the world through engaging training.

By blending entertainment and cutting-edge technology with IT education, ITProTV creates high-quality training shows taught by experienced educators and industry professionals. Toss the boring PowerPoint classroom training aside, ITProTV is streaming the latest training for the most current tech trends and certification exams daily. Start FREE today: https://www.itpro.tv/plans/

Enjoy watching!


Oct292018October 29, 2018October 29, 20180Commentby Thomas Maurer
HPE Azure Stack Innovation Center

Let’s talk about the HPE Azure Stack Innovation Center

Posted in Cloud, Hardware, HP, Microsoft, Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Azure Stack, ProLiant Server, Speaking, Webinar, Work

Together with HPE, I did some short videos about HPE Azure Stack and the HPE Azure Stack Innovation Center in Geneva. The videos are very short to just give you a quick idea about the different scenarios and the benefits of the Innovation Center as well as the HPE solutions. If you want to know more about it, you can check out my blog and look for my articles on Azure Stack and Azure.

About the Azure Stack Innovation Centers

To help you get started on your journey with Microsoft Azure Stack, HPE and Microsoft have built Azure Stack Innovation Centers. Staffed by HPE and Microsoft experts, and leveraging the latest industry-leading Azure Stack hardware and software solutions, the Azure Stack Innovation Centers are designed to help simplify and accelerate your hybrid cloud journey.

In simple words, the Innovation Centers are a place to try out Azure Stack multi-node systems, do proof of concepts and test your real-world workloads. We used the Azure Stack Innovations Centers to work with customers, to try out their workloads directly on a full multi-node system. This helps to better understand the benefits and challenges for the specific customer workloads and get some hands-on experience. It is also a great possibility to test out the Azure Stack Operator capabilities and tasks.

Thomas Maurer about the HPE Azure Stack Innovation Center

Thomas Maurer talks about how the HPE Microsoft Azure Innovation Center helps partners and customers on Azure Stack Implementation projects!

Read More

Oct042018October 4, 2018October 5, 20182Commentsby Thomas Maurer
Microsoft Certified Azure Administrator Associate

Passed Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator

Posted in Certification, Cloud, Microsoft, Microsoft Azure, PowerShell, Work

After the announcement of the new Microsoft Azure certifications at Microsoft Inspire in Las Vegas, I decided to take the beta exam which was available to upgrade my current Azure certifications. Since I had already passed Exam 70-533 Implementing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions, I needed exam AZ-102 to do the transition. Today I got confirmation that I passed the Microsoft exam AZ-102 and earned the Microsoft Certified Azure Administrator Associate certification.

I already took the new available beta Exam for the Microsoft Certified Azure Architect at Microsoft Ignite, however for the results I still need to wait a bit.

What is Exam AZ-102 Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate

The new certifications are based on different job roles, like Azure Administrator, Azure Developer and Azure Architect. You can read more about the new Azure Certifications here on my blog.

Earning Azure Administrator Associate certification demonstrates understanding of services across the IT lifecycle, and ability to take requests for infrastructure services, applications, and environments. Candidates for this certification are typically Azure Administrators who manage cloud services spanning storage, security, networking, and compute cloud capabilities. They recommend services to use for optimal performance and scale, as well as provision, size, monitor, and adjust resources.

This is great news to start in the day while I am flying to a customer in Paris today for some more Azure work.

Exam Preparation

The skills measured in AZ-102 are a mix from AZ-100 and AZ-101 and will focus on Azure Infrastructure and deployment, Azure Integration and Azure Security.

I often get asked how I prepared for exams such as this. Obviously it makes sense to certify the knowledge you already have. I usually use Microsoft free online courses on Channel 9, Virtual Academy and now the new Microsoft Learn. However, I realized that also the Azure Documentation is a great resource to learn. I recommend you check the skills needed for the exam, in this case AZ-102 and read the specific Azure Documentation for these topics, and also try it out.


Sep042018September 4, 2018September 4, 20181Commentby Thomas Maurer
Azure Stack Backup with Azure Backup Server

Protect Azure Stack Tenant Workloads with Azure Backup Server

Posted in Cloud, Hardware, Microsoft, Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Azure Stack, Virtualization, Work

If you are running Azure Stack in your datacenter, you also want to backup workloads running on Azure Stack. This blog post covers how you can backup Azure Stack tenant workloads with Azure Backup Server. Azure Backup allows you to protect on-premise workloads running on different platforms as well as on Azure Stack and store long-term data in Azure.

Why protecting Azure Stack workloads with Azure Backup Server

Microsoft Azure Backup Server is included as a free download with Azure Backup that enables cloud backups and disk backups for workloads like SQL, SharePoint and Exchange regardless if these workloads are running on Hyper-V, VMware, Physical servers or Azure Stack. It also provides a central console to protect these workloads. If you compare this to the Azure Backup Agent, where you have to configure the agent on every single server. The Azure Backup Server also allows you to not only do file backup, but also backup of applications like SharePoint, SQL Server, Exchange and more. This gives you flexibility and centralized management to back up your infrastructure as a service (IaaS) workloads on Azure Stack.

Read More

Aug212018August 21, 2018August 21, 20180Commentby Thomas Maurer
HPE Azure Stack

HPE OneView for Microsoft Azure Log Analytics

Posted in Cloud, Hardware, HP, Microsoft, Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Azure Stack, Operations Management Suite, Work

Today, I got some great news, which I missed in the last couple of weeks. HPE announced that their HPE OneView for Microsoft Azure Log Analytics 1.0 Preview, or short OV4ALA, is now available. OV4ALA is a integration that provides a bridge between HPE hardware infrastructure and Azure Log Analytics. This basically allows you to extend your HPE hardware monitoring to the Microsoft Cloud.

The OV4ALA is an Azure Resource Manager solutions which provides you with dashboards for your on-premises HPE hardware infrastructure. This includes systems like:

  • HPE OneView Appliances
  • Server Hardware
  • Server Profiles
  • Logical Interconnects
  • Physical Interconnects
  • Storage Systems
  • Storage Pools
  • Storage Volumes
  • SAS Interconnects
  • Drive Enclosures
  • Alerts

HPE OneView for Microsoft Azure Log Analytics Description

Every item in the dashboard provides a link to the underlying Log Analytics search query, which allows you to create powerful and detailed custom searches for long term event correlation and trend analysis.  Searches can also be combined with data from non-HPE sources, such as OS, VM, and application information. A set of pre-defined saved searches is included to help navigate the HPE log records generated by the solution.

It also includes Azure Automation runbooks that drive the automatic generation of log records from information collected from on-premise instances of HPE OneView and HPE Synergy, leveraging the Azure Hybrid Runbook Worker.

This solution requires an on-premises component (HPE PowerShell Module for Log Analytics) that must be properly installed and configured where HPE OneView and HPE Synergy are located. This module acts as a proxy between the on-premises instances of HPE OneView and HPE Synergy and Azure Log Analytics running in the Azure public cloud.

This solution is being released as a Technical Preview, and HPE does not provide any formal customer support for HPE OneView for Microsoft Azure Log Analytics at this time. This preview is provided “as-is” and is excluded from service level agreements and limited warranty. The customer assumes all risks in using this preview version. Features available in the preview are subject to change, including removal, prior to the general availability release. The fully supported generally available version is planned for later this year.

This is great news, especially when you run an HPE Azure Stack solution, which also comes with OneView. With the Azure Stack OMS Solutions you can send alerts and warnings from the Azure Stack software to Azure Log Analytics. Now with the HPE OneView for Microsoft Azure Log Analytics solution, you can also forward the HPE hardware monitoring of Azure Stack to Azure Log Analytics, which will make it a central place for your Azure Stack monitoring.

Check out more information about OV4ALA on the HPE blog. Thanks for Roland Frehner from HPE for the link.


Aug092018August 9, 2018August 13, 20181Commentby Thomas Maurer

You can now watch Microsoft’s underwater Datacenter and fish on Live Webcams

Posted in Cloud, Hardware, Microsoft, Microsoft Azure, Pictures, Web, Work

A couple of months back Microsoft provided a look at Project Natick, which is basically Microsoft’s project to host datacenter in underwater. This brings obviously some challenges but also some advantages like cooling etc. Today Microsoft also added some public webcam streams to Project Natick, which allows you to watch the Underwater Datacenter and some fish.

Microsoft Project Natick Webcam

About Microsoft Project Natick

Project Natick seeks to understand the benefits and difficulties in deploying subsea datacenters worldwide. Phase two extends the research we accomplished in phase one by deploying a full-scale datacenter module in the North Sea, powered by renewable energy.

 

  • Project Natick is a research project to build an underwater datacenter. Microsoft is investigating the numerous potential benefits that a standard, manufacturable, deployable undersea datacenter could provide to cloud users all over the world.
  • The Natick Phase 1 vessel was operated on the seafloor approximately one kilometer off the Pacific coast of the United States from August to November of 2015.
  • Phase 2 of Natick aims to demonstrate that we can economically manufacture full scale undersea datacenter modules and deploy them in under 90 days from decision to power on. The Phase 2 vessel was deployed at the European Marine Energy Centre located in the Orkney Islands, UK in June of 2018.
  • Project Natick reflects Microsoft’s ongoing quest for cloud datacenter solutions that offer less resource intensive options, rapid provisioning, lower costs, and high agility in meeting customer needs.

If you want to know more about Microsoft Project Natick, check out the website:

Microsoft Project Natick Website

 



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    Thomas Maurer

    My name is Thomas Maurer. I am a Senior Cloud Advocate at Microsoft. I am part of the Azure engineering team and engage with the community and customers around the world. I am located in Switzerland. I am focusing on Microsoft technologies, especially cloud and datacenter solutions based on Microsoft Azure, Azure Stack and Windows Server.
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