Long time no see 😀 My sincere apologies that I have been so quiet lately. Lots of things have been happening and trust me when I tell you I have been busy 🙂

Most of my time was pre-occupied with this little thing 😉

Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate

I have to say it was harder to obtain that I had originally anticipated, definitely not as hard as VCIX exams from VMware but still hard enough that I think those exams finally have merit and measure some skills are not just a format exercise that you just have to do every 2 years or so. I thoroughly enjoy preparing and then passing the exam. Well worth to give those new AZ exams a shot if you have not.

I doubt I will leave it at that as I want to get some more in the near future – watch this space 🙂

I am hoping to be posting on more regular basis and maybe some smaller blogs as I definitely have left it too long since last update ;-( Life does get in a way but equally maybe not every entry has got to be a “War and Peace” 😉 Though I have to say that I have other things going on – nothing to announce yet but very exciting for me things are happening behind the scenes 😉 Will share more when I am able 🙂

Azure Stack HCI

Cannot believe that it has been this long but at end of March we got the Azure Stack HCI announcement – I am sure that by now everybody wrote detailed explanation on what it is and me doing a deep dive on it would be pointless so if you want to read up on that go here and here.

My TLDR for this is as follows:

Nothing to do with Azure and nothing to do with Azure Stack; however, because it is so cheap to licence as it is basically just Windows 😉 and it can be as small as 2-node deployment – it can go places where Azure Stack cannot go and start you on your cloud/digital transformation journey. Especially if your end goal is Azure but you want hybrid and have some legacy stuff on VMware or Hyper-V – you can migrate to Azure Stack HCI and create hybrid solution leveraging some of the great PaaS offerings from Azure. It definitely has a place and can also be enhanced with Azure Stack deployments when deploying 4-node AZS cluster would be an overkill. Still the naming of it is a bit confusing to say the least as most people still do not understand the difference between Azure and Azure Stack – now they have to figure out that there is Azure Stack hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) as well… both AZSes are based on hyperconverged infrastructure using the same core technologies behind the scenes with Azure Stack using 2016 versions vs 2019 versions on Azure Stack HCI – which hopefully will change in the not so distant future. You can purchase AZS HCI from a plethora of vendors with more being introduced soon – little bird told me that Cisco will have something in that space sooner than we think 😉 Therefore, you will be left with selecting your favourite vendor and match it with your existing Azure Stack offering if that is what you want to be doing – the world is your oyster 😀 To recap, I am very happy that it was introduced but the naming of it leaves a lot to be desired 😉 What a way to confuse the market ;-D

Dell and VMware on Azure

Fresh off the press from the last few days we have a massive announcement that will have an impact on a lot of us. Dell decided that their VMware offering will be expanding to Azure after their very close ties and “marriage” with AWS they have decided that maybe since they sell Azure Stack and Azure Stack HCI (among many other things ;-)) it would be a good idea to partner with Microsoft and deliver a solution that a lot of people will be attracted to. Well played by Dell as I can see this getting a lot of traction in the near future.

You can read more about it in MSFT blog here (can somebody please fix VMware spelling throughout this blog? :-D) and check out their announcement on LinkedIn. To me this is huge news and I am hoping that this will spawn some Azure Stack related offspring soon, given that it would make sense for everyone involved 🙂

There is also VMware Solution on Azure by CloudSimple which Thomas Maurer wrote about here so check his blog out 🙂 I only wish that VMware came to us with this first but you cannot always be first 🙂 Still, massive news and very good news – a lot of people will now exhale a sigh of relief as they just might have found a solution they were looking for 🙂

Azure Stack 1904 Update

Literally being installed as I am typing this – new update to Azure Stack landed yesterday. Perhaps it does not bring any ground breaking features but to me it shows that thing are heading in the right direction to improve patch and update processes and overall stability of the platform.

All Azure Stack docs were moved to a different (and its own) repo and update pages themselves have also been split to Release Notes and Known Issues – there is a lot to read up on here and I highly recommend you checking it out 🙂 On top of that I have to say it is the best written release yet, no spelling mistakes, mostly coherent and comprehensive language – very impressive work as in the past it was a little bit of a hit and miss with those 😉 I am really liking some of the all so needed attention to detail by MSFT 🙂 Well done and thank you!

There is a lot I am liking here but I will single out a few of the interesting bits for me:

• “Improvements to the process of deleting offers, plans, quotas, and subscriptions. You can now successfully delete offers, quotas, plans, and subscriptions from the Administrator portal if the object you want to delete has no dependencies. For more information, see this article.”

I wonder what it really means as you could always do it but if customer had any resources left you would “break” your Stack – I am trying to get some clarification from MSFT but no answers as yet.

• “The Azure Stack Infrastructure consumes an additional 12 GB + (4 GB * Number of Azure Stack hosts) from the 1904 update onwards. This means that in a 4 node stamp there will be an additional capacity consumption of 28 GB (12 GB + 4 GB * 4) reflected in the capacity screen of the Azure Stack administrator portal. Your update to the 1904 release should succeed even if the additional memory consumption puts your Azure Stack stamp over capacity. If your Azure Stack stamp is over memory usage AFTER the update is completed, you will see an alert reflecting this state, with remediation steps to de-allocate some VMs.”

As much as it is needed I am a bit worried that eventually Stack will need 4-nodes just to sustain itself 😉  I get that we need those changes but it is just slightly alarming that we are creeping in more resource utilisation to just run the Stack with each consecutive upgrade.. ;-P

• Added a new capability to the Get-AzureStackLog cmdlet by incorporating an additional parameter, -OutputSASUri. You can now collect Azure Stack logs from your environment and store them in the specified Azure Storage blob container. For more information, see Azure Stack diagnostics.

I cannot wait to see how and if it works 🙂 simplification of getting logs out of the Stack was – and still is – an issue that needs addressing so if this works out – could be great 🙂

There are many more other good things there too – just read about them at your convenience 🙂

Happy Azure Stacking everyone 😀

Passwords… why should you stop being a silly goose

I am adding this here as I feel really passionate about people doing the right thing for the right reasons. In recent Forbes article – check it out here – we could read that Microsoft are finally removing password-expiration from their baseline policies. I was waiting for this for years… Forcing people to change their password every X days accomplished only two things:

1. Overhead for Internal IT because those who opted out from option 2 (see below) forgotten their passwords already and locked themselves out of their devices by next morning…
2. People putting passwords like Password123 or Spike1979 (dogs name and date of birth) – instead of using more complex secure passwords with multi-factor authentication.

Use MFA kids!!! You will never look back 🙂 I would highly encourage every single one of you IT Professionals; who are in charge of password policies at your workplace, to be looking at it and making the necessary changes to make the vast world of IT that much more secure.

Please help me make the world a better place!