Tag: VMware

Dec172020December 17, 2020December 20, 20200 Commentby Thomas Maurer

Get started with the Azure Arc Jumpstart Project

Yesterday the team announced the new Azure Arc Jumpstart project. We all have been there, and you want to try out some new Azure services for a proof of concept (PoC) or a quick demo. Thanks to the automation using Azure Resource Manager templates, it is pretty easy and fast to deploy and tries most of the new Azure services. However, when it comes to services for hybrid cloud environments, where you can try services like Azure Arc, things can be more difficult because you have some prerequisites. The Azure Arc Jumpstart project is there to help with that!

The Azure Arc Jumpstart project is designed to provide a “zero to hero” experience so you can start working with Azure Arc right away. It provides step-by-step scenarios, which allow you to go through independent scenarios that incorporate as much automation as possible, detailed screenshots and code samples, and an overall rich and comprehensive experience while getting started with the Azure Arc platform. The goal is for you to have a working Azure Arc environment spun-up in no time so you can focus on the core values of the platform, regardless of where your infrastructure may be, either on-premises or in the cloud.

Azure Arc Jumpstart Scenarios

The Azure Arc Jumpstart project currently supports the following scenarios.

Azure Arc enabled servers

The deployment scenarios in this section will guide you through onboarding various Windows and Linux server distributions as Azure Arc enabled servers.

Azure Arc enabled SQL Server

The deployment scenarios in this section will guide you through onboarding Microsoft SQL Server as an Azure Arc enabled SQL server.

Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes

The deployment scenarios in this section will guide you through onboarding various Kubernetes distributions as an Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes clusters.

Azure Arc enabled data services

The deployment scenarios in this section will guide you through deploying and working with Azure Arc enabled data services on multiple infrastructure platforms.

These scenarios will help you to super easily set up an environment.

Conclusion

The Azure Arc Jumpstart project is a great way of trying different hybrid cloud scenarios with Azure Arc. I used it to build a couple of different demo environments in a very fast and automated way. I hope this blog post provides you an overview of the Azure Arc Jumpstart project. If you have any question feel free to leave a comment below.

Jul122019July 12, 2019July 12, 20195 Commentsby Thomas Maurer

Migrate Hyper-V VMs to Azure using Azure Migrate

Assess and Migrate Hyper-V VMs with Azure Migrate

Posted in Microsoft, Microsoft Azure, Virtualization, Windows Server

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.

Apr292019April 29, 2019May 16, 20199 Commentsby Thomas Maurer

VMware on Azure - Azure VMware Solutions

Run your VMware natively on Azure with Azure VMware Solutions

Posted in Microsoft, Microsoft Azure, Virtualization

Today the Microsoft Azure team announced the Azure VMware Solutions, which allow you to run VMware natively on Azure. VMware Solution on Azure by CloudSimple is a fully managed service that lets you run the VMware platform in Azure. This solution includes vSphere, vCenter, vSAN, NSX-T, and similar tools. VMware environment runs natively on Azure Bare Metal infrastructure, on Azure cloud locations. The service includes all the features required to consume the VMware platforms efficiently and securely. The solution is delivered by Microsoft, verified by VMware, and run on Azure infrastructure.

This allows you to move or extend your on-premises VMware environment to Microsoft Azure. You can seamlessly move VMware workloads to Azure and integrate with your VMware management environment, using the same and existing management tools. This gives you time to modernize your workloads with native Azure services. This extends the Microsoft hybrid cloud offerings for products like Azure Stack, Azure Stack HCI, and more.

VMware Solution on Azure by CloudSimple

Features

On-demand self-service provisioning of VMware cloud environments. Ability to add and remove capacity on demand
VMware platform deployment, upgrade, management plane backup, health/capacity monitoring, alerting, troubleshooting, and remediation.
Underlay networking services required to enable VMware, including L2/L3 services and firewall rule management.
Edge-type networking services, including VPN, Public IP, and Internet Gateways. These edge services run on Azure and carry the corresponding security and DDoS protection of Azure.
Capacity reservation to lower costs.
High-speed, low-latency connectivity to Azure and on-premises.
Solution architectures for customers to consume Azure services in an integrated fashion, take advantage of this unique “VMware cloud in a public cloud” architecture. These Azure services include Azure AD, storage,
application gateways, and others.
Infrastructure is fully dedicated to you and is physically isolated from the infrastructure of other customers.
Management features such as activity management, usage, billing/metering, and user management.
24×7 customer support.

(Source Microsoft Docs)

This will open a couple of crucial scenarios for our customers.

Data Center retirement or migration – If you need to retire your datacenter and you need a fast and straightforward way to move your existing VMware workloads, Azure is a great place to host these workloads without rearchitecting them. This will give you time to modernize your applications in the mid and long term
Expansion on demand – If you are running your VMware environment and you need more capacity on demand, you can extend it to Azure.
Disaster Recovery – You can use Azure as your recovery site for your on-premises VMware workloads
Virtual Desktops – If you are running a VDI solution on top of VMware, you are also able to host the infrastructure in Azure.
Hosting High-Performance Applications – The CloudSimple solution provides a hyper-converged architecture designed to run high-performance workloads
Hybrid Cloud – It opens up scenarios for companies to run hybrid cloud scenarios, without the need to switch all your tools and to rearchitect your workloads

If you want to know more about VMware Solution on Azure by CloudSimple, you can check out the Microsoft docs.

Integration into Azure

The VMware solutions on Azure, are not just isolated from the rest of your Azure environment. VMware on Azure by CloudSimple is integrated into Azure, which means it allows you to leverage Azure Express Route and even the Azure Resource Manager to deploy virtual machines on your VMware host running in Azure. This will enable you to create new virtual machines from your VMware administration tools like vCenter, but also within the Azure Portal or using Azure Resource Manager templates.

Pricing

In terms of pricing, you will be paying per VMware node in Azure, and you will get charged by Microsoft for it. You can use your existing Azure Enterprise Agreement precommitments for it.

We have two different instances available depending on the size you need, the CS28 and the larger CS36 nodes. These include CPU cores, RAM, NVME Cache, and useable all-flash storage. The minimum of nodes you will need is three instances per cluster. You can also make use of the Reserved options for 1 or 3 years to save up to 50%. You can also use the Azure Hybrid Benefit to use your existing Windows Server licenses, and you can also make use of the Extended Security Update options for Windows Server 2008 / 2008 R2 and SQL Server 2008 / 2008 R2.

Azure CloudSimple Pricing

The storage pricing is the useable storage in vSAN. If you want to know more about pricing, check out the Azure pricing page for Azure VMware Solution by CloudSimple.

What are your thoughts about these announcements? Let me know in the comments!

Aug252016August 25, 2016June 26, 20190 Commentby Thomas Maurer

Microsoft’s new VMware migration offer for Windows Server 2016

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

Microsoft just announced a new VMware migration offer for Windows Server 2016. In a nutshell: If you switch from VMware to Hyper-V from during September 1, 2016, through June 30, 2017, you can get free Windows Server Datacenter licenses when buying Windows Server Datacenter + Software Assurance. That ultimately means customers only pay for Software Assurance.

Microsoft also released a new TCO calculator to compare VMware and Hyper-V, which you can find here: VMware Shift

There are also a lot of great technical reasons to switch from VMware to Hyper-V. Check out my blog post about What’s new in Windows Server 2016 Hyper-V to get an overview about new features.

To get started just follow these steps:

To be eligible for the VMware migration offer, customers must follow these steps:

Step 1: Engage your account executive or sales rep to begin the process.
Step 2: Identify virtualized workloads to migrate and specify the Windows Server Datacenter cores required.
Step 3: Provide your account executive proof of eligibility. (Offer applicable to customers migrating from VMware to Microsoft).
Step 4: Engage your partner to start the migration process.
Step 5: Receive free Windows Server Datacenter licenses with Software Assurance and pay only the cost of Software Assurance to kick start your migration.

Feel free to contact us to help you switch!

May312016May 31, 2016January 28, 20197 Commentsby Thomas Maurer

Windows Sysprep for Virtual Machines

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

For using the same system image for different virtual machines or physical computer, Microsoft created a tool called sysprep.exe. This blog post covers Most people should be already familiar with that tool. If not here is the description:

Sysprep prepares a Windows installation (Windows client and Windows Server) for imaging, allowing you to capture a customized installation. Sysprep removes PC-specific information from a Windows installation, “generalizing” the installation so it can be reused on different PCs. With Sysprep you can configre the PC to boot to audit mode, where you can make additional changes or updates to your image. Or, you can configure Windows to boot to the Out-of-Box Experience (OOBE).

This is great so you can sysprep a virtual machine copy the VHD or VHDX file and use it for the first boot of different VMs. In Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8, Microsoft added an addition to sysprep called the mode switch “/mode:vm”. The mode:vm switch allows you to identify the Windows as a Virtual Machine and sysprep.exe will generalize a Virtual Hard Disk (VHD or VHDX) so that you can deploy the VHD as a VHD on the same Virtual Machine (VM) or hypervisor. You must deploy the VHD on a Virtual Machine (VM) or hypervisor with the same hardware profile. For example, if you created VHD in Microsoft Hyper-V, you can only deploy your VHD to Microsoft Hyper-V VMs with a matching hardware profile, and you can only run VM mode from inside a VM.

This will boost the performance and time for the virtual machine for the first startup and installation. This also work of course with virtual machines running on other hypervisors such as VMware or Xen.

Run the following command inside the Virtual Machine (You find sysprep.exe in the C:\Windows\System32\Sysprep folder):

 
sysprep.exe /oobe /generalize /shutdown /mode:vm

Now you can copy the VHD or VHDX file from that virtual machine and use it for other VMs. Also check out my post about automating VM creation using an unattend.xml file.

Apr042016April 4, 2016November 1, 20180 Commentby Thomas Maurer

Veeam Vanguard 2016

Posted in Microsoft, Microsoft Azure, Virtualization, Windows Server

Today I had some great news in my inbox. I got awarded with my second Veeam Vanguard award in a row. I was one of the first Veeam Vanguards in 2015 and now I am proud to receive the Veeam Vanguard Award for 2016.

A Veeam Vanguard represents the Veeam brand to the highest level in many of the different technology communities in which Veeam engages. These individuals are chosen for their acumen, engagement and style in their activities on and offline.

Apr102015April 10, 2015January 12, 20190 Commentby Thomas Maurer

Enable SSH on VMware ESXi 6.0 via vSphere Client

Posted in Virtualization

In another blog post I wrote how you can enable SSH on a VMware ESXi 6.0 host directly on the host it self. In this blog post I show you how you can enable SSH on your VMware ESXi 6.0 host via the VMware vSphere Client.

Open the VMware vSphere client and connected to your ESXi server and open the Configurations tab.

On the Configurations tab choose Security Profile.

Open the Properties tab so you cen see the Security Profile properties and the Remote Access services. Here you can enable the SSH Server on the VMware ESXi host.

If you have some issues check the firewall settings on your VMware ESXi host.

If you want to enable SSH on directly on your VMware ESXi host check out the following post: Enable SSH on VMware ESXi 6.0

If you are running Windows, you should also check out my blog post about how to install SSH on Windows 10 or SSH on Windows Server. I also blogged about how you can use SSH with PowerShell.

Apr092015April 9, 2015January 12, 20190 Commentby Thomas Maurer

Enable SSH on VMware ESXi 6.0

Posted in Virtualization

I already wrote some blog posts how you can enable SSH access for older VMware ESXi versions such as VMware ESXi 4.1, VMware ESXi 5.0, VMware ESXi 5.1 and VMware ESXi 5.5. This post now shows you how you can enable SSH on the VMware ESXi 6.0 host. As in the other versions this is pretty simple. By enabling SSH allows you to remote troubleshoot your VMware ESXi host and also coping files on your server.

On the Login screen of your VMware ESXi host press “F2”

It will ask you about username and password to login to the VMware ESXi server:

After the login go to the Troubleshooting Options on the System Customization page.

You can now enable SSH on your VMware ESXi 6.0 host. After you have enabled SSH you can connect to the ESXi host via your favorite SSH client.

If you want to enable SSH on your VMware ESXi host directly from the VMware vSphere Client you should have a look at the following post: Enable SSH on VMware ESXi 6.0 via VMware vSphere Client

If you are running Windows, you should also check out my blog post about how to install SSH on Windows 10 or SSH on Windows Server. I also blogged about how you can use SSH with PowerShell.

Nov242014November 24, 2014November 24, 20140 Commentby Thomas Maurer

Disaster Recovery using Azure Site Recovery

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

Nearly a year ago Microsoft released a Disaster Recovery solution called Hyper-V Recovery Manager. This was basically a hosted orchestration engine in Microsoft Azure which allowed you to orchestrate datacenter failovers using the in Hyper-V build in feature called Hyper-V Replica.

In 2014 Microsoft invested a lot of work and time to improve this service and in January 2014 HRM changed the name to Azure Site Recovery (ASR).

In January 2014 Microsoft announced GA of the Azure Site Recovery service which allowed you to use it for DR Orchestration between on-premises Hyper-V sites using Hyper-V Replica
In July 2014 Microsoft acquired a company called InMage and integrated DR Orchestration between on-premises VMware sites using the InMage solution.
In October 2014 Microsoft announced the GA for Azure Site Recovery DR Orchestration between Hyper-V on-premises and Microsoft Azure.

At TechEd Europe, Microsoft announced some new stuff coming in the next couple of months.

In November 2014 Microsoft will offer a public preview for Azure Site Recovery using SAN Replication. This allows you to use your existing SAN replication and orchestrate your DR with Microsoft Azure Site Recovery.
In 2015 Microsoft will allow you to use Azure Site Recovery to replicate your VMware and physical servers to Microsoft Azure.
With Update Rollup 4 for System Center 2012 R2 and Azure Pack, Microsoft integrated Azure Site Recovery as a plan or Add-on property for VM clouds. This allows service providers to offer Azure Site Recovery to customers as an option of a VM Cloud plan or Add-On.

This is just a quick overview about the possibilities you have with Azure Site Recovery. I will cover some advanced scenarios in with a series of blog posts in the next couple of weeks. Until then I would recommend you to watch the session with Michel Lüscher and me at System Center Universe Europe where we talked about the Azure Site Recovery solutions before the TechEd announcements.

Oct232014October 23, 2014October 23, 20140 Commentby Thomas Maurer

My sessions from System Center Universe Europe 2014 available on Channel9

Posted in Uncategorized

As I already posted I was presenting at System Center Universe Europe 2014 (SCU Europe) in Basel this year. Microsoft now made the recordings available on Channel9 and you can now watch them for free.

Disaster Recovery with Azure Site Recovery

Together with Michel Lüscher (Architect at Microsoft) I was showing how you can deploy a fully automated Disaster Recovery solution based on Microsoft Hyper-V Replica, System Center Virtual Machine Manager and Windows Azure Hyper-V Recovery Manager.

Software Defined Networking – Comparison of different solutions

Together with Walter Dey (Former Cisco Distinguished Engineer) I held the session about different SDN (Software Defined Networking) solutions on the market. This session will provide an overview about Software-Defined Networking and compare different solutions such as Microsoft Hyper-V Network Virtualization based on NVGRE and Cisco VXLAN and VMware NSX.

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