User profile disks for RDP session hosts are VHD files used to store the users profile information so that it can roam with the user between session hosts. By default the UPD’s are mounted on the session hosts at login, and appear as symlinks under the C:\users folder so that applications can access them using standard profile paths, this all works fine without any setup required. There may...
Azure Batch VNet Connection
A recent update to Azure Batch added the ability to join a batch pool to a virtual network. By doing so it is possible for batch compute nodes to access resources inside a vNet (file servers, SQL servers etc.). vNet Requirements There are some limitations on the vNet configuration if you wish to do this: Only Cloud Services Configuration pools can be assigned a VNet. This is no longer the case...
Azure for the AWS user Part 1 : Identity
I’ve seen a few forum questions lately from AWS users who want to (or have to) use Azure and whilst there are a lot of similar services in either platform, the new user experience and terminology can be very confusing if your used to AWS. This article is the first in a series of posts that I’m hoping will help users coming from AWS get to grips with Azure. To be very clear, I’m...
Azure AD Domain Services – What it is and isn’t
The AAD DS team has released new features that mean some of the limitations in this article are no longer present. Be sure to read my update on this service to get the latest information. Azure AD has always been a little bit confusing to new users of Azure, the name implies it’s a cloud version of AD, but it quickly becomes clear to most that it very much is not. However, to add more...
Deleting an Azure AD Tenant
Earlier last week I had a need to delete an Azure AD tenant, and this turned out to be a much more difficult task than I had originally anticipated so I thought I would document the steps I went through in case others encounter the same problems. 1. Disable AD Sync If your syncing your on-prem AD up to Azure AD you need to disable this from inside the Azure Portal so that it disconnects your...
Ignite VM Update
At this weeks Ignite conference we’ve seen a number of new VM sizes either be announced or hinted at during the sessions. Here’s a quick update on the new machine types: H Series Designed for High Performance Computing (HPC), the H series VM’s are available in public preview in the South Central US region today and will be rolled out to other regions soon. The H series contain...
Excel Out of Disk or Memory when using Remote Desktop
I’ve been doing a lot of working lately with running Remote Desktop Service (RDS) in Azure and have been fairly frequent errors relating to Excel, one of the applications we are publishing. This error would manifest as an error when launching Excel which seemed to indicate that Excel had run out of memory or disk space. After investigating memory and disk usage to no avail, all looked fine...
Obtaining DSC Package Resource ProductID
The PowerShell DSC Package resource can be used to install (and uninstall) software from a machine using DSC. This is a great resource to get software installed, but it does have a slight complication, in that it requires a product ID for the package you are installing. It’s understandable why, it uses this to confirm that the particular version of the software is present, but it can be a...
//BUILD Azure IaaS Announcements
//Build (henceforth known as just Build) is Microsoft’s annual developer conference held last week in San Francisco. As you might expect there were a large amount of announcements, including a lot of Azure ones. Many of the Azure ones where IoT and Analytics focused but there were quite a few IaaS announcements that I am going to summarise here. I’m sure I have missed some, and I...
Retrieve Azure Storage Key in ARM Script
It’s quite a common occurence in an Azure Resource Manager template to be creating a storage account and then need the key for that storage account later in the script. For example I have a template that creates a storage account, then a website and then adds an application setting to that website with a connection string for storage. Previously to do this you could use the following syntax...
