Simplifying ADConnect Auth/Sync - On-Premises <-> Azure AD

In this post I will show you what is Azure AD Connect (AADC) and all the options to synchronize your on-premises environment to Azure Active Directory (AAD). This is very relevant because you need this configurations for Microsoft 365 (Office 365), so you can have all of your users, groups and/or devices synchronized in both directions. This is mandatory when we want to have objects with the same SID and same credentials in both environments. For instance, if one user reset or change his password in Azure AD, this new password is automatically synchronized to On-Premises Active Directory (Write-Back feature).

Azure AD Connect is required for all authentication/sync methods we will cover today:

• Password Hash Synchronization
• Pass-through Authentication (PTA)
• Active Directory Federation Services (2019)
• Additional Feature - Seamless Single Sign-On

Let's see the requirements and then all the authentication/sync methods functionalities in depth.

Automation Azure - Script to Change Virtual Machines Size ARM & ASM

In this post I'll show you how to resize automatically azure virtual machines.

Microsoft Azure offers some cheap low spec virtual machines. But as we all know, the prices can go up pretty quickly as the specs go up. But we need large VMs to support today’s modern day workloads. The downside is that most of these workloads are only present during business hours but you end up running and paying for these large VMs even during non-business hours and on weekends.

 

The solution here is to have an azure automation script that resizes the VMs to the lowest possible size during non-business hours and have another automation script to resize the VMs to their original size just before start of business.

 

Because Azure has two portals (for now..), I'll show you the scripts from both (since threre are many differences).

• Old Portal - Azure ASM (Azure Service Manager)
• New Portal - Azure ARM (Azure Resource Manager)

Let's see how to do it!

 

Migrate Azure Portal ASM to Resource Manager ARM - Powershell & MigAZ

Today I will show you how to migrate your Azure Service Management (ASM) virtual machines to the ARM (Azure Resource Manager) environment. In this new structure the IAAS service has become more complete and malleable in creation, you can create a virtual machine with two network cards and move that same network card to another machine without having to create everything again. This freedom of movement of resources between virtual machines has made the Azure administration service much easier.

 

So, let's Start!

 

Step-by-Step - Disaster Recovery From Hyper-V 2012 R2 to Azure - PART2

Hello guys, in the last PART of this article I prepared all the Hyper -V infrastructure and Azure for Disaster Recovery. In this part we will see how we test it in different ways

1. Testing Failover On-Premises to Azure;
2. Failover Planned On-Premises to Azure;
3. Failover Planned Azure to On-Premises;
4. Failover UnPlanned On-Premises to Azure;
5. Failover UnPlanned Azure to On-Premises.

Step-by-Step - Disaster Recovery From Hyper-V 2012 R2 to Azure - PART1

In the following two articles I will show you how to make a copy of virtual machines from Hyper-V to Azure and thus set up a Disaster Recovery with VM replication. How cool is that? :)

 

Requirements:

• Only for VMs in Windows Server 2008 R2 or higher;
• For this scenario it will be necessary a Virtual Machine with Virtual Machine Manager 2012 R2 installed (VMM) and Hyper-V 2012 R2;
• Node(s) in the Hyper-V and VMM must have access to the Internet (ports 80 and 443), so we can replicate information;
• You can create a Site-to-Site VPN for Azure DR so that there is communication between On-Premises and DR VMs (Optional);
• Like previuos point, you can create a Point-to-site network so that users can access Azure DR VMs (Optional);
• Geo-Redundant storage for VMs replicas.