Azure Virtual Network

2016 Essentials Integration: Azure Virtual Network, part 1

This is one of the new features I am most excited about in Windows Server 2016 Essentials Experience.  Today we are going to setup a connection to an Azure Virtual Network. With this technology, we have the ability to extend our on-premises server and domain infrastructure into the Microsoft Azure cloud, and run...
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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....
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Extend Your On-premises Network with Azure Virtual Network

One of my favorite use cases for Azure Virtual Networks and Azure Virtual Machines is to create a secondary (DR) site for a fraction of what it would cost to build your own co-location. With one of the smaller-sized basic or even standard tier VM's to act as a backup Domain Controller, the...
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A Crash Course in Azure VMs

So you got that Azure trial subscription and deployed your first virtual machine in just a few clicks--good for you! As you proceeded through the deployment, no doubt you would have been asked about stuff like deployment models, resource groups, locations, affinity groups, storage accounts, cloud services and more....
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Comparing Costs: Azure IaaS vs. On-Premises Server Hardware

Most people do not compare costs of running infrastructure in Azure to traditional on-premises deployments appropriately. To begin with, it is almost impossible to compare them apples-to-apples. For example: as soon as you deploy a VM in Azure, all of your data will be written into 3 different storage locations by default. If you select...
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