Tag - Azure IaaS

When would I recommend Windows Virtual Desktop to a customer?

Call me crazy: I don't see the value in a Remote Desktop or Virtual Desktop experience for its own sake. The purpose of this kind of solution is to provide centralized management and remote access to specifically Windows-based applications. In short: Remove your dependency on Windows, and you've removed the...
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Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) vs. traditional RDS or VDI

I want to talk about Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) as the successor to on-prem deployments of Remote Desktop Services (RDS), and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). Many small and mid-sized businesses are already familiar with using Remote Desktop or similar (e.g. Citrix, VMware View, etc.). Usually this type of service was...
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Three Azure solutions to SMB problems: The first rule of Azure is you don’t sell Azure

Different MSP's out there embrace the cloud to more or less extent. Most providers are doing Office 365 nowadays, but Azure (or IaaS solutions like it) is still nebulous or even a little scary: Some providers feel threatened by services like Azure, because deploying and managing on-premises servers still makes...
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Tutorial: How to Setup a Site-to-Site VPN between an Azure Virtual Network and WatchGuard Firewall, part 1

Using a Site-to-Site VPN tunnel into an Azure Virtual Network is the most common way for small businesses to begin extending the capabilities of their local network, and leveraging additional compute power and availability features in the cloud. There are many reasons one might need to add new virtual machines to...
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Tutorial: How-to Setup Azure Site Recovery using Windows Server Essentials, Part 3: Failover

In part 1 of this series, we covered the pre-requisites for Azure Site Recovery using the Windows Server Essentials integration features. In part 2, we configured the Azure Virtual Network using the Essentials Dashboard plugin, and replicated our VM's. Now in this final part of the series, we are going...
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Tutorial: How-to Setup Azure Site Recovery using Windows Server Essentials, Part 2: Configuration

Windows Server Essentials (or the Essentials Experience role) can be leveraged to quickly provision a full Disaster Recovery site in the cloud, and replicate Virtual Machines from your on-premises Hyper-V server(s) to Azure. The built-in integrations that make this possible are Azure Virtual Network and Azure Site Recovery. Image credit: Alex...
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Tutorial: How-to Setup Azure Site Recovery using Windows Server Essentials, Part 1: Pre-requisites

Windows Server Essentials (or the Essentials Experience role) can be leveraged to quickly provision and enable a full Disaster Recovery site in the cloud using built-in Azure integration features. The solution is composed of two Azure products: Azure Virtual Network and Azure Site Recovery. I have previously written about our struggles...
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A tale of two solutions: Azure VMs vs. On-prem Server

I've been studying two different solutions to the same small business problem for a while now, and I think it is high time I finally published an article on it. I run into a fair number of clients who are interested in moving 100% of their services "to the cloud."...
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How to Use Azure as a DR Site

Hyper-V Replica (HVR) has been available since Windows Server 2012, bringing easy and affordable DR to the SMB space. Using HVR, virtual machines can be replicated over secure, higher-latency (but reliable) links across the Internet. However, until recently, many SMB's did not have a place to replicate to. Building a DR site requires...
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How to initiate a test failover to Azure Site Recovery

If you've been following along with this series, we have already: Extended our On-Premises Network to Azure Virtual Network Replicated Hyper-V Virtual Machines to an Azure Site Recovery Vault In this post we are going to perform a test fail-over of on-premises virtual machines to Azure. Since we have all the component...
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