Tag: VM

Jun092020June 9, 2020June 8, 20200Commentby Thomas Maurer
HCSDiag.exe - Hyper-V Host Compute Service Diagnostics Tool

HCSDiag.exe – Hyper-V Host Compute Service Diagnostics Tool

Posted in Containers, Docker, Hyper-V, Microsoft, PowerShell, Virtualization, Windows, Windows 10, Windows Server, Windows Server 2019

As you know, Hyper-V is not just a server virtualization software anymore. Today, you can find Hyper-V technology across different operating systems, products, and services, like Windows Defender Application Guard, Windows Sandbox, Hyper-V Containers, or many more. Thanks to Ben Armstrong from the Hyper-V team, I found out that there is a tool in Windows to troubleshoot these Hyper-V containers called hcsdiag.exe or Hyper-V Host Compute Service Diagnostics Tool. The Hyper-V Host Compute Service Diagnostics Tool (HCSDiag.exe) is available in Windows 10 and Windows Server 2019 if you have the Hyper-V roles or virtualization features enabled, and can be helpful to troubleshoot Hyper-V containers, virtual machines (VMs), Windows Sandbox, Windows Defender Application Guard, Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 and more.

HCSDiag.exe - Hyper-V Host Compute Service Diagnostics Tool

HCSDiag.exe – Hyper-V Host Compute Service Diagnostics Tool

Let’s have a look at the HCSDiag.exe, which you can find in C:\Windows\System32. It provides you with a couple of different commands and options. However, keep in mind that not all features work with every type of container. Some features are limited to scenarios where the VM is being used under the same user context as the host, where it is all about protecting the host from the guest and not the guest from the host like in the server version of Hyper-V.

To install Hyper-V, check out the following posts:

HCSDiag.exe

hcsdiag <command> [options…]

  • list
    Lists running containers and VMs.
  • exec [-uvm] <id> <command line>
    Executes a process inside the container.
  • console [-uvm] <id> [command line]
    Launches an interactive console inside the container.
  • read [-uvm] <id> <container file> [host file]
    Reads a file from the container and outputs it to standard output or a file.
  • write [-uvm] <id> [host file] <container file>
    Writes from standard input or a host file to a file in the container.
  • kill <id>
    Terminates a running container.
  • share [-uvm] [-readonly] [-asuser] [-port <portnumber>] <id> <host folder> <container folder>
    Shares a host folder into the container.
  • vhd [-uvm] <id> <host vhdx file> <container folder>
    Shares a virtual hard disk file into the container.
  • crash <id>
    Forces a crash of the virtual machine hosting the container (only works for containers hosted in a virtual machine).

I will give you some examples of how you can use hcsdiag.exe to interact with some of the Hyper-V containers. Now again, this focuses mostly on technologies like Windows Sandbox, Docker Hyper-V Containers, WSL 2, and similar features.

You can find more documentation on Hyper-V on Windows Server or Hyper-V on Windows 10 on Microsoft Docs.

List all containers and Hyper-V VMs

With the hcsdiag list command, you can create a list of containers and Hyper-V virtual machines running on the host. Including Windows Sandbox, Windows Subsystem for Linux 2, and Application Guard.

hcsdiag.exe list

hcsdiag.exe list

Connect Console to Hyper-V containers and Windows Sandbox

You can also directly connect to the console of containers or the Windows Sandbox. Remember that it only works for Hyper-V containers where the guest is not protected from the host. Not for containers like Hyper-V VMs, where the guest is also protected from the host. If you need to remote into want console access or run commands against a Hyper-V VM from the host, check out PowerShell Direct for Windows VMs and hvc.exe for Linux VMs.

hcsdiag console connect

hcsdiag console connect

Here is an example where I am connected to a Windows Sandbox container using hcsdiag.exe.

hcsdiag Windows Sandbox

hcsdiag Windows Sandbox

But that also works with Dockers container (Hyper-V containers) running Windows and Linux.

hcsdiag Linux Container

hcsdiag Linux Container

HCSDiag console provides you with an interactive connection to interact with the container.

Additional HCSDiag.exe features and commands

The HCSDiag.exe also provides you with a couple of additional commands you can use. For example, the read command to read a file from the container and output it to the host or as a file to the host.

hcsdiag read

hcsdiag read

You can use the “share” command to share a host folder into the container or use “vhd” to mount a virtual disk file (VHD) file to a container. The hcsdiag kill command terminates a running container.

Conclusion

HCSDiag.exe – Hyper-V Host Compute Service Diagnostics Tool is excellent if you need to troubleshoot these Hyper-V containers, virtual machines (VMs), Windows Sandbox, Windows Defender Application Guard, Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 and more. If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment.


Mar102020March 10, 2020March 10, 20205Commentsby Thomas Maurer
Visual Studio Code Azure Virtual Machines Extension

Create and Manage Azure VMs from VS Code

Posted in Cloud, Microsoft, Microsoft Azure, Virtualization, Visual Studio Code

With the new Azure Virtual Machines (VMs) extension for Visual Studio Code (VS Code), you can now create and manage Azure VMs directly from VS Code. This is a great new extension if you are working with VS Code and Microsoft Azure. The extension is currently in preview and lets you view, create, delete, start and stop Azure Virtual machines, as well as adding SSH keys to existing Azure VMs.

Get started

To get started with the Azure Virtual Machine extension in Visual Studio Code, simply follow these steps:

  1. Download and install the Azure Virtual Machines extension for Visual Studio Code
  2. Once complete, you’ll see an Azure icon in the Activity Bar
  3. Sign in to your Azure account by clicking Sign in to Azure. If you don’t have an Azure account yet, you can create a free Azure account here.
Free Azure Account

Free Azure Account

If you don’t have an Azure account yet, you can sign up today for your free Azure account and receive 12 months of free popular services, $200 free credit, and 25+ always free services.

Create an Azure VM in VS Code

You can now create Azure VMs directly from Visual Studio Code. The wizard will ask you for a VM name, username, Azure region, and passphrase.

VS Code creating Azure Virtual Machines

VS Code creating Azure Virtual Machines

This will create an Azure VM Standard D2s V3 (2 CPU Cores & 8 GB of ram) with the image Ubuntu 18.04-LTS. An SSH key will be created, and your SSH Config file (~/.ssh/config) will be updated so you can immediately connect via SSH ($ ssh vm-name) or using the Remote-SSH extension. You can find more information about how you can connect to Azure VM using Visual Studio Code in my blog post.

Azure VM management in VS Code

Azure VM management in VS Code

Having the possibility to manage Azure VMs and connect with them directly within Visual Studio makes working with these tools and Azure much more convenient.

I hope you can go and try out the Azure VM extension for VS Code. If you have any questions, please feel free to leave a comment.


Jan232020January 23, 2020March 15, 20200Commentby Thomas Maurer
How to Reduce the Costs of your Azure IaaS VMs

How to Reduce the Costs of your Azure IaaS VMs

Posted in Cloud, Microsoft, Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Azure Stack, Windows Server

Azure Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offers significant benefits over traditional virtualization. With benefits like the possibility to quickly spin up a couple of virtual machine in any Azure region around the world whenever you need it, is pretty powerful. There are a lot more benefits to Azure IaaS virtual machines. However, that’s not part of this blog. This blog post is focused on helping you saving money by reducing the costs when you are using Azure IaaS virtual machines (VM). Some of the tips here will help everyone out there, some of the tips

Pick the right Azure VM series and the right Azure VM size

Reduce cost by picking the right Azure VM size

Reduce cost by picking the right Azure VM size

First of all, obviously, you pay more for larger virtual machines. Something I realized by working with a lot of customers is that they take the on-premises VM size and use the equivalent size in Azure. Not realizing that the VM size they had was way to oversized. But since they had the static capacity on-prem, they didn’t’ care. Now when you pay for more capacity in the cloud, the story is different. So make sure you realize that the Azure VM sizes are not oversized. You can still change the size later to a larger virtual machine if needed. And if you are looking at tools like Azure Migrate to migrate your existing VMs to Azure IaaS, you will have some additional advantages. Azure Migrate asses your environment and helps you pick the right Azure VM size depending on performance data history. Azure Migrate works with Hyper-V and VMware virtual machines, if you want to know more about Azure Migrate, check out my blog post. If you are already running the virtual machine in Azure, Azure Advisor can be helpful to figure out that your virtual machine is underutilized. Picking the right size will help you to save money and reduce the cost of Azure IaaS VMs.

Read More

Dec052019December 5, 2019December 5, 20191Commentby Thomas Maurer
Reset RDP and Admin Password Azure VM

How to Reset RDP and Admin Password of an Azure VM

Posted in Cloud, Microsoft, Microsoft Azure, Virtualization, Windows, Windows Server, Work

I think we all had that experience where we suddenly couldn’t use Remote Desktop Services (RDP) to access our Windows Server anymore. Luckily, if this happens to an Azure virtual machine (VM), we can use the VMAccess extension to reset the RDP configuration as well as the password of the Azure VM. You can reset the RDP configuration or the Azure virtual machine password using the Azure portal or Azure PowerShell.

Reset the administrator password of an Azure VM 🔓

To reset the password of an Azure VM, you can use the Azure portal or Azure PowerShell. If you take the portal path, log in to the Azure portal, go to the Azure VM, you want to reset the password. Under Support + Troubleshooting, click on Reset Password, and follow to the Reset Password wizard to update the credentials. Note that this is not supported for Active Directory Domain Controllers.

Reset Administrator Password of an Azure VM

Reset Administrator Password of an Azure VM

If you want to use Azure PowerShell, you can run the following commands:

$SubID = "SUBID" 
$RgName = "RESOURCE GROUP NAME" 
$VmName = "VM NAME" 
$Location = "LOCATION"
 
Connect-AzAccount 
Select-AzSubscription -SubscriptionId $SubID 
Set-AzVMAccessExtension -ResourceGroupName $RgName -Location $Location -VMName $VmName -Credential (get-credential) -typeHandlerVersion "2.0" -Name VMAccessAgent

This should help you to reset the password of an Azure Virtual Machine (VM) if you lost access to it. If you want to know more, read the following troubleshooting article on Microsoft Docs.

Reset RDP configuration 👩‍💻

If you can access your Azure Virtual Machine using RDP, you can reset the configuration, and this will enable Remote Desktop service in the VM and create a firewall rule for the default RDP port 3389. To reset the Remote Desktop Service (RDP) configuration, you again login to the Azure portal, select the virtual machine you want to reset the RDP configuration. Under Support + Troubleshooting, click on Reset Password, on the new blade select Reset configuration only, and click on update.

Reset Remote Desktop Services RDP of an Azure VM

Reset Remote Desktop Services RDP of an Azure VM

There is also an Azure PowerShell command available to do this:

$SubID = "SUBSCRIPTION ID" 
$RgName = "RESOURCE GROUP NAME" 
$VmName = "VM NAME" 
$Location = "LOCATION"
 
Connect-AzAccount 
Select-AzSubscription -SubscriptionId $SubID 
Set-AzVMAccessExtension -ResourceGroupName $RgName" -VMName $VmName" -Name "myVMAccess" -Location $Location -typeHandlerVersion "2.0" -ForceRerun

I hope this gives you an overview of how you can Reset your Remote Desktop Service of an Azure Virtual Machine (VM) if you lost access to it. If you want to know more, read the following troubleshooting article on Microsoft Docs. You can also use Azure PowerShell in Cloud Shell.

If you want to know more about how you migrate your virtual machines to Azure, check out my blog post about Azure Migrate.

 


Oct082019October 8, 2019October 7, 20198Commentsby Thomas Maurer
Azure IaaS VM enable Update Management

How to Manage Updates for Azure IaaS VMs

Posted in Cloud, Microsoft, Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Azure Stack, System Center, Virtualization, Windows, Windows Server

As a lot of customers are moving their workloads to Azure and specifically moving virtual machines to Azure Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), the question is how do I manage my Azure virtual machines (VMs) efficiently. The great thing about Azure IaaS, it is not just another virtualization platform. Azure IaaS also offers a lot of other benefits versus classic virtualization. Azure IaaS and Azure Management provide a lot of functionality to it make it more efficient to run and manage virtual machines. One of them is Azure Update Management. In this blog post, I am going to show you how you can efficiently manage updates for your Azure IaaS VMs.

Overview and benefits Azure Update Management ☁

The Azure Update Management solution is part of Azure Automation. And with Azure Update Management you can manage operating system updates for your Windows and Linux computers in Azure, in on-premises environments, or in other cloud providers. That is right, it is not only for your Azure VMs, it also works with all your environment and provides you with a single pane of glass for your Update Management. It allows you to quickly assess the status of available updates on all virtual machines and servers, and manage the process of installing required updates for servers.

  • Azure Update Management works with Azure IaaS VMs, on-premise servers and even servers running at other cloud service providers.
  • Update Management supports Linux and Windows servers
  • It is directly integrated into the Azure portal and onboarding of Azure VMs is very simple.
  • It works with existing update sources like Microsoft Update, WSUS or on Linux with private and public update repositories.
  • Azure Update Management can be integrated into System Center Configuration Manager. You can learn more about Azure Update Management and System Center Configuration Manager integration on Microsoft Docs.
  • You can onboard new Azure VMs automatically to Update Management in multiple subscriptions in the same tenant.
Architecture

Architecture

How to onboard Azure IaaS VMs ✈

Onboarding Azure VMs to Azure Update Management is fairly simple and there are many different ways you can enable Update Management for an Azure VM.

One thing I want to highlight is, that you can set up automatic enablement for future virtual machines. With that Azure virtual machines, you create in the future, will automatically be added to the Update Mangement solution.

Onboarding

Onboarding

Since this blog post is all about managing updates for Azure VMs, I will keep it short, but if you want to add servers running on-premises or at other service providers, you can have a look how you can configure Azure Update management from Windows Admin Center. If you are running Azure Stack, you can also easily add your Azure Stack VMs to the Update Management solution.

Update Assesment 📃

Azure Update Management Compliant Assessment

Azure Update Management Compliant Assessment

After you have enabled and connected your virtual machines, Azure Log Analytics and Update Management start to collect data and analyze it and creates a continuous assessment of your Azure VM infrastructure and the additional servers you added. It will let you know which servers are compliant and which updates are missing. In the Azure documentation for Azure Update Management, you can find the schedules and time new updates will be added to the assessment.

Manage and deploy updates to Azure VMs 🔧

After you know which servers are compliant or not, you can schedule an update deployment, to update your servers.

Update Azure VMs using Update Deployment

Update Azure VMs using Update Deployment

An update deployment configuration is done very easily.

  1. Enter a name for the update deployment
  2. Select which operating system you want to target with the deployment (Linux or Windows)
  3. Choose the machines you want to update. You can select specific Azure virtual machines, non-Azure machines, groups, AD, WSUS, SCCM groups and filters.
  4. Select the Update Classifications you want to deploy
  5. Include or exclude updates
  6. Schedule the deployment. You can also create recurring update deployments for example for monthly patching.
  7. Configure pre- and post-scripts
  8. Configure the maintenance window size
  9. Configure the reboot update after the updates are installed

View update deployments ✔

Update Azure VMs Status

Update Azure VMs Status

During and after the duration of the update deployment, you can see an overview of the deployment, which updates on which machine were installed and if they were successful.

Pricing – What does it cost? 💵

Now I know what you are thinking now, this is great, but I am sure Microsoft is making me pay for this. No! there are no charges for the service, you only pay for log data stored in the Azure Log Analytics service. You can find more pricing information here.

Conclusion and Learn more 🎓

Update Management is a great solution to keep your environment up to date. If you want to know more, check out Microsoft Docs or follow this tutorial to onboard Azure VMs. There is also a very good blog series by Microsoft MVP Samuel Erskine. If you don’t have Azure today, create an Azure Free account.

Free Azure Account

Create free Azure Account ☁

Create your Azure free account today and get started with 12 months of free services!

If you have any questions, let me know in the comments.


Oct012019October 1, 2019October 1, 20191Commentby Thomas Maurer
Azure Mv2 Virtual Machines VMs

New Azure Mv2 Virtual Machines with 12TB Memory

Posted in Cloud, Microsoft, Microsoft Azure, Virtualization

Girish Bablani Corporate Vice President Microsoft Azure, just announced that the new huge Azure Mv2 virtual machines (VMs) with up to 12TB of memory and 415 vCPUs, which are optimized for SAP HANA. The new Mv2 size will become generally available and production certified in the coming weeks. You will get these new VM sizes in the US West 2, US East, US East 2, Europe North, Europe West, and Southeast Asia regions. And in addition, you also more M-series availability in other Azure regions up to 4TB in Brazil, France, Germany, South Africa, and Switzerland.

He also announces a couple of other improvements to SAP applications running in Microsoft Azure, like the private preview of Azure Monitor for SAP Solutions. These announcements make Microsoft Azure even a better place for SAP workloads.

A few months back, at SAP’s SAPPHIRE NOW event, we announced the availability of Azure Mv2 Virtual Machines (VMs) with up to 6 TB of memory for SAP HANA. We also reiterated our commitment to making Microsoft Azure the best cloud for SAP HANA. I’m glad to share that Azure Mv2 VMs with 12 TB of memory will become generally available and production certified in the coming weeks, in US West 2, US East, US East 2, Europe North, Europe West and Southeast Asia regions. In addition, over the last few months, we have expanded regional availability for M-series VMs, offering up to 4 TB, in Brazil, France, Germany, South Africa and Switzerland. Today, SAP HANA certified VMs are available in 34 Azure regions, enabling customers to seamlessly address global growth, run SAP applications closer to their customers and meet local regulatory needs.

– Girish Bablani Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Azure

You can read the full announcement blog post here.

If you want to learn more about Azure Mv2 VMs, check out the following Microsoft Docs. And if you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment.


Sep172019September 17, 2019September 17, 20195Commentsby Thomas Maurer
Ping Azure VM Public IP address

How to enable Ping (ICMP echo) on an Azure VM

Posted in Cloud, Microsoft, Microsoft Azure, PowerShell, Virtualization, Windows, Windows Server, Work

This is just a very quick blog post because I got the question from a couple of people. In this blog post want to show you how you can enable ping (ICMP) on a public IP address of an Azure virtual machine (VM). First, just let me say that assigning a public IP address to a virtual machine can be a security risk. So if you do that, make sure you know what you are doing. If you need admin access to virtual machines only for a specific time, there are services like Azure Just-in-Time VM Access (JIT) and Azure Bastion you should have a look at. Now back to the topic, Azure by default denies and blocks all public inbound traffic to an Azure virtual machine, and also includes ICMP traffic. This is a good thing since it improves security by reducing the attack surface.

Azure Network Security Group Port Rules Deny All Inbound Traffic to Azure VM

Azure Network Security Group Port Rules Deny All Inbound Traffic to Azure VM

This also applies to pings or ICMP echo requests sent to Azure VMs.

Ping Azure VM failed

Ping Azure VM failed

However, if you need to access your application from a public IP address, you will need to allow the specific ports and protocols. The same applies to the ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol) protocol. The ICMP protocol is typically used for diagnostic and is often used to troubleshoot networking issues. One of the diagnostic tools using ICMP is ping, which we all know and love.

What do I need to do to be able to ping my Azure virtual machines (VMs)

Overall we need to do two main steps:

Configure Network Security Group (NSG) to allow ICMP traffic

So here is how you enable or allow ping (ICMP) to an Azure VM. Click on add a new inbound port rule for the Azure network security group (NSG).

Enable Ping ICMP in a NSG on an Azure VM

Enable Ping ICMP in an NSG on an Azure VM

Change the protocol to ICMP. As you can see, you can also limit the sources which can make use of that rule, as well as change the name and description. You can also use the following Azure PowerShell commands to add the inbound security rule to your NSG.

Get-AzNetworkSecurityGroup -Name "AzureVM-WIN01-nsg" | Add-AzNetworkSecurityRuleConfig -Name ICMP-Ping -Description "Allow Ping" -Access Allow -Protocol ICMP -Direction Inbound -Priority 100 -SourceAddressPrefix * -SourcePortRange * -DestinationAddressPrefix * -DestinationPortRange * | Set-AzNetworkSecurityGroup
Configure Network Security Group PowerShell

Configure Network Security Group PowerShell

Set up the operating system to answer to Ping/ICMP echo request

If you haven’t already configured the operating system that way, you will need to allow ICMP traffic, so the operating system response to a ping. On Windows Server, this is disabled by default, and you need to configure the Windows Firewall. You can run the following command to allow ICMP traffic in the Windows Server operating system. In the Windows Firewall with Advanced Security, you can enable the Echo Request – ICMPv4-In or Echo Request ICMPv6-In rules, depending on if you need IPv4 or IPv6.

Windows Firewall Enable Ping

Windows Firewall Enable Ping

You can also run the following command to do that:

# For IPv4
netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name="ICMP Allow incoming V4 echo request" protocol="icmpv4:8,any" dir=in action=allow
 
#For IPv6
netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name="ICMP Allow incoming V6 echo request" protocol="icmpv6:8,any" dir=in action=allow

After doing both steps, you should be able to ping your Azure Virtual Machine (VM) using a public IP address.

Ping Azure VM Public IP address

Ping Azure VM Public IP address

I hope this helps you be able to ping your Azure VMs. If you have any questions, please let me know in the comments.



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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 (Cloud + AI) 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. Opinions are my own.

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