Virtualization, Hybrid Cloud , GCP, Azure, AWS, Vmware, Hyper-V, M365, Data Protection and Veeam: October 2014

Wednesday, October 29, 2014

Microsoft Azure Datacenter IP Ranges

[Updated:- Oct 24,2014]

For some organization that highly secure and control IP address going Internet, these IP address range may come handy depend on which region of your Azure Subscription. Below ip range are subject to change on weekly basis.

Warning:- These ip ranges are subjected to change on every week Wednesday (Pacific time) . We strongly recommend that you get an updated list from here and update your firewall policy on weekly basis.

Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Shrink a Hyper-V Virtual Disk Before Upload To Azure

Currently we are busy on migrating an application to Microsoft Azure. Before that, customer has setup their application running on Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V. Most of the VMs are running Windows Server 2012 as the guest operating system and has different size of virtual disk. During the migration we found out we need to do some fix up before upload a virtual disk to Azure. Here is an example of an issue:

A virtual disk consists of 750GB of total size with multiple partition. Before upload a virtual disk to Azure, make sure

An operating system should be in 127 GB size
Data disk should not more than 1 TB size
Virtual disk must be VHD format

We need to split the partition into multiple virtual disk.

Step 1

Create a new virtual disk for E and F.
Copy content to designated new virtual disk

Step 2

Remove the partition from Disk 1

Step 3

Convert Disk 2 from vhdx to VHD
Convert Disk 3 from vhdx to VHD

By using Hyper-V Manager Console. Use Edit Disk Action

For C Drive, use disk management on the operating system to shrink the partition. Before that, remember to defrag first. Shrink it to less than 127GB.

Step 4

Turn of the virtual machine
Use Hyper-V Manager Console to Shrink the virtual disk. You can only shrink a virtual disk when it is in VHDX format.

It will reclaim the free hard disk space and reduce your virtual disk from 750GB to 120GB.

Verify by boot up the VM by using a new virtual disk.
If it is working fine, then you can sysprep it and use Hyper-V Manager Console to Convert to VHD (Use Edit Disk action)

That’s all for now and you can start to upload Disk 1, Disk 2 and Disk 3 to Azure.

Saturday, October 25, 2014

Azure Websites Walkthrough

We will walkthrough on host web application in the Azure websites services. Begin Azure websites by selecting one of the four tier:-

Comparison between different tier:-

Note:-

Free tier incurs no charges
Basic and Standard tier offer multiple instance size and scaling.
Standard tier offer auto scaling and allow you to create staging environment.

Backup features only available in Standard tier

You can upload custom web application or select from general purpose web application. Custom application support ASP.Net, Node.js, PHP and Python. You can select different version as well that suit your application.

To upload web application, you can use

Visual Studio
Visual Studio Online
Web Matrix
FTP
Command Line MSBuild
Team Foundation Server (TFS)
Git

During our testing, we use Visual Studio program to publish to Azure website. You are require to download the “publish profile”. Publish Profile includes deployment credential, database connection strings and details for web deploy and FTP deployment.

Example of websites in our test environment:-

Websites1 – Standard Tier with Staging environment and located in Southeast Asia.
Websites2 – Free Tier, located in East Asia.

Websites on Staging and Production environment can be swapped.

You can leverage on Traffic Manager to distribute request by

Performance - provide a rapid response to user requests from a web server close to their physical location.
Failover – increase availability by providing failover websites that take over in case the primary website has a problem.
Round Robin – to distribute traffic equally across a set of endpoint

Do take note that you cannot RDP access to the web server. You can use Azure SQL database or SQL server on a virtual machine to host an underlying database. If Azure websites is not suitable to hold your web application, you can setup Virtual Machine in Azure as an alternative.By setting up virtual machine, you will have full control over operating system and infrastructure. However, customer is responsible for system maintenance.

Wednesday, October 22, 2014

P2V Failed- Error Message “The namespace \\host.domain.com\root\microsoft\bits doesn’t exist on the server”

Scenario:-

Run Microsoft Virtual Machine Convertor 3.0 to perform P2V.
P2V failed.
Checked on mvmc.log found an error message ““The namespace \\host.domain.com\root\microsoft\bits doesn’t exist on the server”

Resolution:-

Make sure you’ve the following pre-requisite on the computer on which you want to run MVMC

Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2012, or Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 operating systems
Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 and .NET Framework 4 if you install MVMC on Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1
Microsoft .NET Framework 4.5 if you install MVMC on Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2012, or Windows 8.
Note Although MVMC installs on all of these versions, using the Windows PowerShell cmdlets that are released as part of MVMC requires Windows PowerShell Runtime 3.0, as the cmdlets function only on Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 and above or Windows 8.
Visual C++^® Redistributable for Visual Studio^® 2012 Update 1 . Download Update 4 from here.
Enable the Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) feature in Windows Server.

Enable Hyper-V on the destination host

Tuesday, October 21, 2014

Fix RDP Access Using VM Agent Access Extension on Azure VM

I’ve accidentally disable Remote Desktop on a virtual machine and now was unable to access VM via RDP. In order for me to RDP, we can fix the rdp access by using VM Agent Access Extension.To do so, open Windows Azure Powershell

Get-AzureVM

Note:- Identify VM and Services name

$labvm1 = get-azurevm –name lab-pwin10 –servicename lab-pwin10

To identify if the virtual machine has installed with VM Agent Extension, type

$labvm1.vm.ProvisionGuestAgent

The result should be “true” or you can view from dashboard

Set-AzureVMAccessExtension –vm $labvm1 | Update-AzureVM

The command ensure that RDP access is enabled and that the VM has a firewall rules that permit RDP access.

Finally restart virtual machine and that should do the trick and you will able to RDP into the VM

Saturday, October 18, 2014

Coming Soon Free Veeam Endpoint Backup

Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE is Veeam's new backup solution for Windows-based computers (desktops & laptops) running Windows 7 and higher as well as Windows Server 2008 and higher. It is a standalone product and is not part of Veeam Backup & Replication nor the Veeam Availability Suite.

Your can find more info here http://www.veeam.com/blog/announcing-veeam-endpoint-backup-free.html or pre-register for beta here http://go.veeam.com/endpoint

Tuesday, October 14, 2014

Microsoft P2V Tools– Microsoft Virtual Machine Convertor 3.0

In our previous post, we have talked about P2V tools and with VMM 2012 R2 removed the P2V features, we all in the pain especially for those people who always help customer to perform physical machine conversion.

Now worry less as Microsoft has just released a version of Microsoft Virtual Machine Convertor 3.0.

Quick Summary:-

Convert virtual machine and disk from Vmware Host to Hyper-V
Convert virtual machine and disk from Vmware Host to Microsoft Azure
Perform P2V – Physical to Virtual Machine Conversion

The supported guest operating system are:-

Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1
Windows Server 2012
Windows Server 2012 R2

Linux based guest operating system

Supported Vmware version:-

VMware vSphere 5.5,
VMware vSphere 5.1, and
VMware vSphere 4.1

Are you interested? , please download from here.

Saturday, October 4, 2014

Boot Windows 10 Technical Preview Using Virtual Disk

Yesterday we check out on how Windows 10 Technical Preview using Windows 8.1 Client Hyper-V. Everything was smooth and we tested our common use application in the virtual machine. So far so good during our testing. Next step is replace our current laptop with this new operating system. To avoid replace our existing operating system, we are going to boot Windows 10 Technical Preview by using concept called “Boot from VHD”.

Step 1

Sysprep existing virtual disk that we have created yesterday.

Step 2

Attach new VHD using Computer Management | Disk Management | Attach VHD

New virtual disk is using Drive G

Step 3

Open Command Prompt with Administrator right
Type “bcdboot G:\Windows”

Note:- Change your drive letter according to the one that has detected by your system

Type “ bcdedit /set {default} Description Windows 10 Client”

Finally, reboot your laptop and now you have a running “Windows 10 Technical Preview”. Do your test. if you unsatisfied with Windows 10 Technical Preview then you can revert back to your previous Windows 8.1 operating system.

Good luck on your testing….

Thursday, October 2, 2014

Test Windows 10 Technical Preview Using Windows 8.1 Client Hyper-V

Microsoft has just released Windows Technical Preview download bit. Well, do bear in mind that it is still preview version and tend to have some bug. Without format existing Windows, you can leverage on Windows 8.1 Client Hyper-V to create a virtual machine and test the product.

If you’re interest to test Windows 10 Technical Preview, just go to download the bits from Windows Insider Program (click here).

Here is some screenshot during our test.

Start Menu

Combination of Windows 7 and Windows 8/8.1 start menu.
Search is back and part of start menu,
Power option (shutdown, restart, log off) is just next to user account.
Pin to start & taskbar is still there and will appear on the right side of start menu

Multiple Desktop View (similar like Linux desktop)

Next cool features is we can create multiple task view and run different application on it

Well, that all for our short walkthrough on the product. Do take note that this bits will expire on 15 April 2015. So you got plenty time to play around with this product.

Check it out and let us know how do you like the next version of “Windows 10”. Now we need to put our pen down and continue playing next features such as “Snap Assist, ALT+ Tab, etc. Enjoy your testing.

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