Tag - Azure Virtual Network

Tutorial: How to Setup Azure Virtual Network with Windows Server Essentials and a Hardware VPN Appliance

Most tutorials on Azure Virtual Network and site-to-site VPN rely on Windows Server's RRAS role to create a quick and dirty VPN connection for demonstration purposes. But in a real world production environment, this is hardly ever the case; the better option by far for reliability and simplified routing is...
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Azure Virtual Network: What is the difference between Policy-based and Route-based VPN?

You want to configure a Site-to-Site (S2S) VPN tunnel from an on-premises hardware VPN device, such as your firewall, and an Azure Virtual Network. For this, you require several objects in Azure. One of those is a "virtual network gateway"--which is basically just a software VPN appliance with a public...
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Tutorial: How to Setup a Site-to-Site VPN between an Azure Virtual Network and WatchGuard Firewall, part 2

In this article, we will cover how to configure a WatchGuard firewall for site-to-site VPN with an Azure Virtual Network. Prior to this, you will have already built your Azure Virtual Network and related objects, to enable the connection. See the previous article for details on how to do that. Note:...
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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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Bug with Essentials Integration for Azure Site Recovery

Awhile back, I had written a series on all the neat integrations available with Windows Server Essentials (or Essentials Experience, if installing it on top of Standard as a role).  You may have noticed that I never published an article regarding one of the most exciting features--integration with Azure Site...
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2016 Essentials Integration: Azure Virtual Network, part 2

In the previous post, we enabled the Windows Server Essentials integration with Azure Virtual Network, and configured a virtual network in the cloud with a Site-to-site VPN right from our Dashboard. While we wait for the connection to become active, we can deploy a virtual machine into that network. Step 5:...
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