Azure ASR for IaaS virtual machines

Microsoft this week announced the public preview of disaster recovery for Azure IaaS virtual machines (VMs) using Azure Site Recovery (ASR). You can now easily replicate and protect IaaS based applications running on Azure to a different Azure region of your choice within a geographical cluster without deploying any additional infrastructure components or software appliances in your subscription. This new capability, along with Azure Backup for IaaS virtual machines, allows you to create a comprehensive business continuity and disaster recovery strategy for all your IaaS based applications running on Azure. As you move production applications to the cloud, Azure natively…
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VMware Cloud Foundation

With the Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC), VMware laid out the vision for the architecture of the hybrid cloud. SDDC redefines the architecture and operational model of the data center, enabling IT to complete the transition to hybrid cloud and maximize its benefits. In an SDDC, compute, storage, and networking services are decoupled from underlying hardware infrastructure and abstracted into logical pools of resources that can be more flexibly provisioned and managed.   To accelerate the customer journey to SDDC, VMware has introduced VMware Cloud Foundation™, a new unified SDDC platform for the private and public cloud. Cloud Foundation brings together…
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Azure IP address 168.63.129.16

Have you ever wondered what this IP address is?  Well 168.63.129.16 is a virtual public IP address that is used to facilitate a communication channel to internal platform resources for the bring-your-own IP Virtual Network scenario.  Because the Azure platform allow customers to define any private or customer address space, this resource must be a unique public IP address.  It cannot be a private IP address as the address cannot be a duplicate of address space the customer defines.  This virtual public IP address facilitates the following things: Enables the VM Agent to communicating with the platform to signal it…
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Microsoft Azure Security

As we all know in this day and age our workloads are more likely to migrate to the cloud which I'm sure you all know has it's benefits and it's inherent downsides.  One discussion point on everyone's mind is always security (so it should be), just how secure is the cloud. One thing to bear in mind is that your time and approach to defining security principles should be no different to that of on-premises.  Having worked with Azure for a number years I just wanted to share some pertinent information around the security model specifically with Azure. The following…
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Taking the best out of Windows Azure Virtual Machines

Now that Windows Azure IaaS offerings are out and made GA a lot of new workloads can be enabled with Windows Azure. Workloads like, SQL Server, SharePoint, System Center 2012, Server Roles like AD, ADFS DNS and so on, and even Team Foundation Server. More of the supported list of server software that is currently supported in Windows Azure Virtual Machines can be found here. But knowing what we can leverage in the Cloud isn’t enough, every features has its tricks in order to take the best out of it. In this case in order to take the best performance…
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