An0n0m0us

Anyone use it?

I'm taking advantage of their 30 day free offer (£125 credit) however i've come across an immediate problem stopping me making use of it.

How do you assign static ips to the virtual machines that will remain if powered off and then powered back on again?

Only solutions i've seen are based on using the dhcp address you get when first booting up but they are useless for anyone that wants to have their servers powered off overnight and power them back on the next day (makes your credit go further).

urban

iTrader: (1)

It's really fiddly, but achievable.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/lalitesh_kum...-in-azure.aspx

Overall Azure is a great idea, but in reality its not that fast if speed is of high importance - very important to ERP systems
You can of course get the speed using SSD's, but it then becomes pretty expensive

An0n0m0us

Cheers, looks a total pain in the ar$e since i've been looking into it. However even if I leave mine on all month as i'm using basic tier bottom level servers they still won't blow my free credit so will try that and keep a close on the daily cost coming out of that credit.

XDevil666

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/lib.../dn630228.aspx


easy guide there mate

urban

iTrader: (1)

Same guide - its still a pain in the hole though.

Azure will be ok for mickey mouse stuff, but I think most ERP customers will want on premise.

XDevil666

yeah I agree, im trying to stay away from the whole virtual cloud stuff, seems great initially and it would make my life so much easier without worrying about hardware failure etc and responsibility from my hands.

But its giving someone else the keys to your kingdom if that makes sense and god forbid one of these virtual clouds got hacked, game would be over trying to explain that to the CEO lol

I have gone for the 365 platform as my email users are across multiple sites and the lines my exchange server are on are very very poor

I maybe should learn more about Azure virtualisation and learn more on Veem and VMware as im only using them for the basic's.

any of you guys care to breakdown a sales pitch to me on why I should consider looking more in to virtualization etc

urban

iTrader: (1)

Sales pitch - when you say virtualization, are you specifically talking about hosted, or VM's on premise?

An0n0m0us

Virtualisation is a god send and I love it. I've only used VMWare ESX 3 through to 5.5 so no idea with Microsoft's hyper-V (something else I need to find time to play with). It's great for provisioning new servers from templates through to redundancy and minimising down time not forgetting the huge decrease in hardware that has to be maintained. Snapshots can be a life saver if you want to test out a deployment without all the hassle of a restore from backup if something goes pear shaped.

I've found Azure slow but then it's publicly accessible via your home broadband connection and so hardly comparable to your normal hosted data centre.

urban

iTrader: (1)

We use hyper-v internally, most of our customers have vmware.
Huge decrease in hardware is totally right.
For example, when customers purchase an ERP solution, (depending on user count) we need 8 VM's with a total of approx 40 vCPU's and 200Gb vRAM

An0n0m0us

Thing is on the flip side the cost of a san isn't exactly cheap lol1: I use a virtual san at home with virtual esx servers running in vmware workstation and nested virtualisation works a treat.

hodgy0_2

BT do a WAN product that directly links to Azure, no need to go over the public Internet

ExpressRoute

http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/expressroute/

An0n0m0us

Nice. Have you been using Azure Hodgy?

J4CKO

iTrader: (1)

We spent a wad on it but have not really found a use for it, we extended the domain out via a VPN, not sure if its been permanently connected yet, I run the DB servers globally and we have plenty of on prem capacity, we are looking to move some development stuff on to it but its still early days, my opinion is that it has its place but it is just another tool in the box, not the answer to everything.

Fonzey

iTrader: (5)

We've currently got about 70 VM's of various sizes in Azure (approx. 250 on premise) and we're putting more and more up there.

I've got Powershell scripts for powering off/on VMs that are regularly up and down (training, testing, dev servers - etc) which include a quick one liner to assign its designated IP address back. As you've probably figured, it's not "real" DHCP - the servers are set to automatically assign but your VNET can do indefinite reservations of IP addresses.

Investing in ExpressRoute soon hopefully, which will be a 1gb leased line into our VNETs. Good stuff.

Fonzey

iTrader: (5)

Agree it's not "the" solution yet.

I set up a new company in the US last year and we still ended up with on-prem servers at the 5 sites purely for local domain services and stuff like that.

Windows 10 may be a big deal in this area, as apparently you'll be able to login to AzureAD which would basically mean you don't even need domain controllers any more... but how things like Group Policy work, who knows?!

urban

iTrader: (1)

They're really pushing virtualisation and browser based architecture in particular.

An0n0m0us

I played with it a bit more last night and created my own virtual network which might have helped in the first place Now got a couple of 2k8 dcs up and running and can play with adding a 2012 one etc. Liking it the more I use it.

Fonzey

iTrader: (5)

One wee tip to help your credit. Doing a start/shut down from the OS will not stop the meter rolling, nor will it release your ip addressing.

You need to stop the VM from the Azure console for that.

An0n0m0us

Thanks, yep been closing them from the browser as no point having them running overnight etc.

I think i'm doing OK, only spent 76p of my £125 so far