Three months ago on 7th of April Microsoft announce a new exam for security architects and introduce again the existing exams SC-200, SC-300, AZ-500 and MS-500. The article contains the new announcement of the new exam SC-100 to become Microsoft Cybersecurity Architect.
I took the Microsoft Cybersecurity Beta exam #SC100 and got yesterday the confirmation that I passed the exam. This is great news for me as it confirms that I am gaining a better and better knowledge in Azure Security topics.
In this article I will introduce the exam, how to get the Microsoft Cybersecurity Architect Expert award and which materials I used to prepare for the exam.
I’m excited to announce that we’re kicking off another Azure AMA on Azure Virtual Desktop Best Practices session – English Edition. The last session was delivered in German and we get a lots of Feedback to repat this in English. I’m really happy to announce that your wish comes true and Marcel and Patrick was also available for a 2nd session 🙂
Marcel and Patrick are two Azure MVPs and do a lot of work in the AVD community. Marcel is known as the brains behind the WVDAdmin and Project Hydra products, which are services to automate all things Azure Virtual Desktop. Patrick has also been active in the AVD community for many years with great sessions and insights about AVD and is the organizer of AVD TechFest together with Simon Binder.
I know it’s been a little quiet on new blog articles the last few months, but that’s due to other community topics I’m working on. One of my new projects is the Azure Ask my Anything Live format that I will be hosting with my team at Azure Bonn Live on YouTube and Linkedin. I’m excited to announce that we’re kicking off this year with an Azure AMA on Azure Virtual Desktop Best Practices, and we have the pleasure of welcoming Marcel Meurer and Patrick Koehler to this session. Marcel and Patrick are two Azure MVPs and do a lot of work in the AVD community. Marcel is known as the brains behind the WVDAdmin and Project Hydra products, which are services to automate all things Azure Virtual Desktop. Patrick has also been active in the AVD community for many years with great sessions and insights about AVD and is the organizer of AVD TechFest together with Simon Binder.
Azure AMA – Azure Virtual Desktop Best Practices will take place live on Youtube on February 14, 2022. You can register for this event via our Azure Bonn page. Please note that this is a live AMA session and we would love for you to join us live and bring your questions to the session. If you don’t have time this time, please use our Microsoft forms to submit your questions before the session starts. The session will be held in German, but you can also ask your questions in English.
In the last couple of days I try to optimize some Azure environments from security and cost perspective. One customer has a SQL Server Express installed inside an Azure VM. The backup was configured for the hole VM, but there is no need to backup the Datadisk which contains the SQL databases. In this article I will explain how you can reinstall the Azure Backup Windows Workload extension to fix the issue when the service account will not listed on the Azure SQL Server VM. This fix the issue only did you not find the service account in the SQL Server management studio. To add the account in the right way, please refer to the article from Wim Matthysen.
Summer is here and I hope many enjoy the time on vacation. In this article I would like to give a little preview on which community events you can find me in the 2nd half of 2021.
GeekSprech Podcast
I had the pleasure of visiting Eric Berg and Weimar on the 3rd weekend in July. We had a great time and talked a lot about the community, new projects and more. On Sunday, Eric and I had the idea to record a new GeekSpeak episode with the news about the Microsoft Inspire 2021. We had a lot of fun recording it and hope you do too. The podcast is in German.
German AVD UserGroup – Azure Files
Patrick Köhler and Marcel Meurer are the founder of the German Azure Virtual Desktop User Group. The host a monthly meetup with different topics around AVD. Both invited me to speak about Azure Files and is this the perfect profile store solution. I am really looking forward to the event and hope that I can give you a good overview about the different file store solutions in Azure.
Cloud Identity Summit 2021
In 2020 based on the initial idea of my best buddy Thomas Naunheim we started as Azure Bonn Team the Cloud Identity Summit 2020. The speaker lineup was awesome and the feedback was so great that we decided to repeat this in 2021. This year the Cloud Identity Summit will another virtual conference and take place at 30/09/2021. We hope you attend our 2nd edition. The agenda and the speaker will announce in August 2021.
CloudInspires Podcast
Thomas and I founded in June our own CloudInspires.me Podcast. Do not miss the latest two episodes (in German). We have so many great speaker on our timeline – stay tuned 🙂
AVD TechFest Fall 2021
I am very happy to speak for a 2nd time at the well organized AVD Techfest. This a free online conference with all topics related to Azure Virtual Desktop. There are so many sessions on the agenda, it’s worth taking a look if you work in the AVD space. I’ll be giving a session on Azure Files as an AVD profile storage solution, and diving into the different ways you can use the Azure Files solution for AVD. This means that I will introduce Azure Files and Azure NetApp Files and show in which scenarios some of these options are the better solution.
IT Tage Konferenz
One of the last conferences this year is the German IT Tage Konferenz in December. This is a really big conference running about 4 days with a wide range of topics. I had a pleasure to hold a session about Azure VM Best Practices.
Microsoft has changed the #AzureBastion minimum subnet size from /27 to /26. Installed #Azure Bastion are unaffected, but new deployments require the new subnet size. Please remember this. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/bastion/bastion-faq#subnet
When you create an Azure Bastion instance Microsoft creates in the backend an optimized Azure VM that runs all the processes they are needed for Azure Bastion. This Azure VM is called a Instance and had some limitations. In general when you deploy the Azure Bastion Basic SKU Microsoft deploys two instances which supports 20-24 concurrent sessions which means each instance support 10-12 sessions.
The Standard SKU allows you to specify the number of instances called as host scalling.
Please note that when using an Azure Bastion Standard SKU, the AzureBastionSubnet size should be increased to a subnet size of approximately /26 or larger.
Azure Bastion
Basic
Standard
Instances
2 Default
up to 50
Max. supported concurrent sessions
20-24
up to 500
Supported configuration
Azure Portal, Powershell, CLI
Only Azure Portal
Deploy an Azure Bastion Standard SKU
Only the Azure Portal allows to deploy an Azure Bastion Standard SKU with the host scalling feature, because the feature is in public preview.
The first of July starts with the new fiscal year for Microsoft and with some important informations for many people around the globe. This date marks the Renewal date for awarded Microsoft MVPs.
I am very honored and grateful to be recognized as an MVP in the Microsoft Azure category for the third year in a row. This makes me happy about many different reasons:
The Cloud usage grows in the last years rapidly, but in many customer environments we had servers and applications they can´t migrate to the cloud about different reasons. There are many reasons why applications can not migrated to the cloud e.g. data regulations, connections and latency challenges and more. On the other hand customers whish to use different cloud providers. In summary the hybrid cloud is one of the most use cases in many customer environments. Microsoft released Azure Arc as a solution for hybrid cloud environments. Azure Arc was announced as public preview at Ignite 2019 and going GA on Ignite 2020.
In this article I will cover how connect Windows VMs to Azure Arc.
Azure Arc in General
Azure Arc capabilities – Image from Microsoft Docs
Azure Arc is a solution to extend the Azure management capabilitites to services outside of Azure. This gives the possibilites to manage different services, in different environments from one central place with same capabilities across different services layers.
Microsoft release the first version for Server management and has since expanded the range of functions over Dataservices, Kubernetes and new since some days Azure applications.
The recording of the session is now available on Youtube. I have added the link at the end of the article.
I am glad to announce that I was invited as a speaker to the Cloudeight conference. This is the 3rd edition of this conference and the conference is grown to a really big conference with a lots of great speakers and sessions. The conference itself was founded by Drago Petrovic as a free community driven conference.
I am very exited to deliver a session on 7 tips you need to know to use Azure File Sync perfectly. Azure File Sync is a perfect service to sync file servers across enterprise boundaries through a central Azure Fileshare. In this session, I will share the best practices to use Azure File Sync perfectly based on my real-world experience. I will cover the following topics:
